Manliness and Feminism 3: Rise of the Machines
2011 28 Jan
New open thread on manliness and feminism. What will we do when we run out of Terminator flicks?
As Cessen says,
The manliness followup thread was a bit over 450 thousand words long.
The second followup thread is a bit under 200 thousand.
So, counted together as a single thread (as it should be), we’re at about 650 thousand words.
For comparison, the bible is a bit over 770 thousand words long.
If we yoink out the intra-thread quotations then these threads are probably a couple hundred thousand words shorter than 650. But still. This is a seriously epic thread. It should be preserved for posterity. It’s amazing what joint authorship can accomplish.
Previous posts in the manliness series:
* Questions I Want To Ask Entitled Cis Het Men, Part 1: Who Cares?
* Questions I Want to Ask Entitled Cis Het Men, Part 2: Men’s Rights
* Questions I Want to Ask Entitled Cis Het Men, Part 3: Space for Men
* Manliness and Feminism: The Followup
* Manliness and Feminism 2: Judgment Day
The above image is available in poster form from movieposter.com, or would be if they weren’t out of stock. Gotcha!
Tags: feminism, masculinity
Or that the ending will be something of an anticlimax?
Well, coming from one of those straight, white men, I think the notion of manliness as it’s traditionally contrived is absolute nonsense from the word go. There have been many times when I’ve wished I could simply make up a different gender title for myself and disown myself from the idea of being a “man.” It’s a worthless concept, and the idea of femininity is similarly worthless. Perhaps we could just try being humans for once, eh?
In an amazing example of synchronicity, one of my favorite men just sent me this:
http://www.badgerinternet.com/~bobkat/waterstone.html
It’s a review of “Terminator 2″ by … wait for it … David Foster Wallace. Sam, I await your analysis ;)
Woo hoo! I was quoted in an OP (sort of)!
Does this imply that by the time we’re done with Thread 4, “Salvation”, we’ll have solved all the problems of masculinity forever?
No more than likely we’ll just have to move on to a franchise that has more entries. You could take the ironic route and start with Saw….
“Does this imply that by the time we’re done with Thread 4, “Salvation”, we’ll have solved all the problems of masculinity forever?”
I doubt it. I actually started to get optimistic at one point, but then I got Motley’s latest ‘reply’ to me, and I realised that I probably isn’t worth the bother :-(
Ms.Thorn, I participate on MRA forums/blogs, and I have read all of your posts regarding heterosexual men and privilege. I do not usually like the label “MRA” or “ifeminist” and I generally use the label “pro-human” as it’s not a loaded term.
I do not agree with everything MRAs say, but I do believe that men are the targets of institutionalized misandry. And I also do believe is that women and men have some privileges that the other gender does not.
In my honest opinion, traditional masculinity heaps a lot of problems on men’s shoulders thanks to sexist assumptions about men. Just as traditional femininity heaps a lot of problems on women. This is all especially true if men and women do not themselves fit into a proscribed role.
Thank you for your time. In frith.
@Clarisse:
Follow them up with an Equilibrium post. Christian Bale’s quite useful as a segue — in fact, many of his films could be employed as effective metaphors in regard to this subject — and that incident on the set of Terminator Salvation would be a good cautionary tale, too.
Now, if we could actually get him involved in these threads… especially considering that he’s Steinem’s stepson. :)
@Zack:
Tricky issue, there, trying to determine the right constraints. Bond, of the (regrettably) now-closed Dear Diaspora, used to write about that quite a bit: the usefulness of those terms for the formation of identity, countered by their potential to trap.
Fine line.
Man, when I read the title I initially thought someone was going to talk about vibrators and if they threaten manliness. ah, well :)
Tim,
we’d totally lose *that* battle ;)
“Call him doctor ‘Orgasmatron’”
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-orside11feb11,0,79450.story
@Tim:
Nope, just Bathmates, Sexxxtrainers, cock rings and ED medications. All of which definitely relate. (Not to mention things like RealTouch.)
I mean, not only is it “Rise of the Machines,” just look at the image. If that doesn’t scream “don’t worry, hydraulics fail from time to time,” I don’t know what does.
Hahaha what battle? Go get one of those trojan vibrating ring things and everyone’s happy hahaha.
That’s kind of the point.
Using one of those vibrating rings because both people want to, and enjoy doing so — that’s one thing. But if you’re mechanizing yourself in order to sidestep the issue, then that’s not exactly a healthy resolution.
The mechanization and medicalization of sex has certainly been (and continues to be) a feminist concern; it’s no less related to issues of being masculine and/or male.
@Orgasmatron
Great, if we are already this far it is just a matter of time until humanity is making sex by plugging USB cords into each participants back of the head. Of course the political far right will try to ban the sale of hubs, so that all connections will be 1 on 1 and the exchange of bodily fluits will be considered gross and disgusting… Wait, am I stealing this from a movie ?
@Infra
What issue are you refering to ?
That mechanical applications are going to replace genuine sexual encounters ?
That sex is being perceived as something ‘technical’ and supplied with a manual, just like the nightstand Aspelund from Ikea (Step 1: Lube, Step 2: Insert, Step 3: Pound away) ?
Both of those issues, in different ways — the IkeaSex issue could be related to the SC, for example, especially when considering Piccus’ and Shade’s material. And the mechanical application issue would relate to things like RealDolls and UR3 vaginas, and programs like Ripened Peach’s “Sex Sim,” along with the fact that RealTouch devices key off of DVDs. There, we’d be moving into “uncanny valley” territory, and the connection to arguments regarding objectification should be readily apparent.
But I don’t think that it’s limited to those two. Considering things like semen volumizers and erection enhancers (herbal, pharmacological and physical), among other things — jelqing, pumps, “hardness factor” fitness and nutrition books — it’s possible to assert that male sexuality is often viewed, functionally and as a whole, as mechanical. As something not entirely organic, even, as evidenced by approaches to whole-body and extended orgasms, which often focus on prostate stimulation and ejaculation control rather than modifications of normative behaviors (and often regard normative male sexual response as being incompatible with, or compromising, those experiences).
That broader view is relevant to performance emphasis, IMO, and I’m not sure that that emphasis can be rightly understood without considering it.
To clarify:
I’m saying that the vibrator/manliness question is the tip of the iceberg, and that it might be an issue, not because of the existence of vibrators, but because of a preexisting mechanical view of male and/or masculine sexual function and experience. The existence and use of vibrators and more complex sex machines simply brings it into sharper relief, and the use of vibrating cock rings can be either a choice out of pleasure or a simplistic, and not necessarily healthy, approach to addressing that issue.
Infra,
“then that’s not exactly a healthy resolution.”
Well, it’s decidedly more healthy than not having sex at all, in my opinion.
“There, we’d be moving into “uncanny valley” territory, and the connection to arguments regarding objectification should be readily apparent.”
Really, the entire “objectification” argument is so problematic in itself that I can really only barely accept it in a sociology level gender discourse about media and things like “the male gaze”, but not with respect to shaming individual people’s sexualities for their fetishes or because they are reacting to someone else’s body in one way or another.
As for RealDolls, I cannot understand why anyone would wonder about “objectification” in that context. If anyone is interested, there’s an amazing British documentary about men who live with such dolls, called “guys and dolls”. I once attented a panel discussion with a distributor and a doll, and, really, those dolls don’t feel real at all.
Is it?
Genuine question. IME, not having sex is more beneficial than adding things to it for reasons like that (with the qualifier that the former is an intentional decision), especially when those reasons are applied over an extended period. I’m just wondering whether or not your experience speaks differently.
Regarding objectification: I’m not saying that those arguments are necessarily valid, only that there’s a connection. That can make those things problematic when they otherwise wouldn’t be.
(Sorry — the word “experience” should have been emphasized there. I’m curious as to whether your statement is based in experience or is an extrapolation from other things.)
Infra,
maybe we’d have to clarify the concept of “sex” first, in order to avoid misunderstandings. I do count masturbation as sex in this context… and I do believe that masturbation, including masturbation using whatever fetishized object, is generally healthier than refraining from sexual activity at all. As for experience, having been involuntarily celibate for quite a while, I’ve experimented with a couple of masturbatory aids, yet none of them actually added significantly to the experience that I could create using “my own hand(s)”.
I don’t generally consider masturbation to be a “second rate” sexual activity, and I do think there’s nothing wrong with masturbating in a relationship, although I suppose that in the latter case, a fetishization could become a problem for the emotional relationship and thus potentially also for the sexual relationship. But that’s a matter of two people working out their kinks, not a matter of general medical concern, in my opinion. So, in general, yes, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that kind of sexuality.
Sam,
Yeah, it does help to clarify things.
I’d say that there can be problems with using e.g. a vibrating ring in order to address issues of the “how do I compare to a vibrator?” type, or out of a concern for living up to expectations, but I have no issues at all as far as use of toys or tools go, when used for other reasons. (Some of the things that I mentioned, and others that I didn’t, I own; all solo and for my own use, aside from things that I employ for D/s. Contra your experience, though, I have found some of them to be more effective than manual stimulation. Some, better than body-body sex, as far as raw sensation is concerned.)
Can’t say that my female partners have necessarily taken a kind view of my owning them, though. The only ones who’ve had more positive reactions were bisexual, and had those reactions to the more realistically-designed toys.
Infra,
“Can’t say that my female partners have necessarily taken a kind view of my owning them, though.”
interesting, I only know one woman (who has a lot of issues with sexuality in general) who holds an “eww” view about sex toys. I’ve actually given a remote controlled egg vibrator as a birthday present to a female friend (I’m not sleeping with, and only partly as a joke…) after she had complained to me about “being bored in lectures” without being able to stimulate herself manually… Most women I talked to about such things admitted to using some sort of masturbatory aid themselves (10-15, maybe) and they generally seemed to like the idea of guys trying out stuff.
Sam,
That was the odd thing: they didn’t hold negative views about sex toys, and usually owned toys themselves. And with certain ones (like an Evolved Talon), they didn’t have a problem with it, unless they also had problems with that kind of play in general. But when it came to the others, like the Fleshlight sleeves and UR3 casts?
Very, very different reaction. Seems like the more realistic they were — which, to me, also meant the more organic and integrated the sensation was — the more of a negative reaction resulted.
Sex toys for males have a three negative stigmas if you will.
First: A man using a sex toy is seen as a man who can’t “get any”.
Secondly: Some male sex toys are for anal play and using them makes the man gay.
Thirdly: If a sex toy is a disembodied female part (like a fleshlight) it’s objectifying parts of the female body and is creepy/weird (http://feministing.com/2007/06/08/most_disturbing_thing_ever/) – if it’s not disembodied it’s even more creepy (see the numerous posts on RealDolls on feministing).
For a more balanced feminist comment on this see: http://rabbitwrite.com/exploring-sex-toys-for-men/
Good quote from the Rabbit Write entry:
It would help to clarify why there’s no direct equivalent to “slut” when it comes to men, too. I’m not sure that a sentiment like that could be effectively boiled down to a word or a phrase. It almost begs for a conceptual structure rather than a nugget of language.
Infra,
“Seems like the more realistic they were — which, to me, also meant the more organic and integrated the sensation was — the more of a negative reaction resulted.”
I noticed a while ago that when science fiction communities are utterly dominated by women, they’ve often gotten rid of the men (or were an all-female species to begin with), but when they’re dominated by men, women are often present in large numbers, but completely dehumanised. The Stepford Wives being the prime example, and incidentally, together with The Handmaid’s Tale, one of the few sci-fi works which deals specifically with women’s fears.
One book I read even had both, a matriarchy where men were only kept around as a necessity for breeding and the women were working on a way to make them superfluous, and a patriarchy where men and women lived together and the women were subservient to the men (and while author didn’t exactly portray the patriarchy as good, he made it clear that it was infinitely better and more natural than the matriarchy).
It seems to be a common perception that if a woman spends time with a man, she does so because she appreciates him as a person, because if she didn’t, she’d just cut him, and men in general, out of her life completely. Whereas men don’t need to have an inkling of respect or consideration for women as people in order to like having them around, especially for sex. So perhaps more men than women fear to be made superfluous, but more women than men fear to be dehumanised and replaced with something else.
Clarisse,
will do the Foster-Wallace analysis asap ;). Although I have to say that my knowledge of Terminator movies is limited… maybe something to correct beforehand.
Speaking of technology, now that you’re on your server, how about adding some formatting buttons to the comment form, say for easier quoting?
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/comment-form-quicktags
Tamen,
“First: A man using a sex toy is seen as a man who can’t “get any”.”
Yeah, but that’s, sadly, a very generic slur. It’s possibly more the opposite of “slut” than “creep”, although there probably is a certain overlap between “can’t get any” and “creep”. Not being seen as a guy “not getting any” by women and men is certainly one of the bigger concerns for most men, in my opinion, and, alas, usually a necessary requirement of “getting any”.
“Thirdly: If a sex toy is a disembodied female part (like a fleshlight) it’s objectifying parts of the female body and is creepy/weird…”
You mean objectifying like a… ahm… dildo?
AB,
“So perhaps more men than women fear to be made superfluous, but more women than men fear to be dehumanised and replaced with something else.”
But if your assumption is correct that women are not as interested in men as providers of sexuality as men are in women, why would they fear being replaced with something else? If that were the case wouldn’t being replaced with something else be convenient and power-enhancing? They could decide about spending time with men on their own – assumed non sexual – terms entirely if they (and men) still wanted to.
Sam,
“But if your assumption is correct that women are not as interested in men as providers of sexuality as men are in women, why would they fear being replaced with something else? If that were the case wouldn’t being replaced with something else be convenient and power-enhancing? They could decide about spending time with men on their own – assumed non sexual – terms entirely if they (and men) still wanted to.”
Sure, if they thought men wanted to. For a variety of reasons, women tend to like men, and admire them. Even the women who profess to hate men often really want their respect, but have given up getting it. Perhaps it’s because the cultural climate in most of our history have caused then majority of the people who really made an impact to be men, but for whatever reason, women are more likely to count men among their heroes and more likely to want to read/hear stories about men than vice versa.
We have a saying here (and I bet you do too) that women give sex to get love, and men give love to get sex. So much of women’s interaction with men is dominated by the feeling that sex is (a) necessary (evil) to even get treated like a person. Just look at what happened in the last thread when I suggested that most women didn’t want men to date them, they wanted men to not treat them like lesser beings just because they were female and sexually uninteresting, and Motley answered that this meant that women really wanted the privileges that came with being attractive to men.
So not being treated like a lesser being by men is a privilege for women, which they can only earn by being fuckable. Women either have cunts that men want their dicks in, or they’re just cunts who’re not worth even treating like a person. The idea that there is a possible form of interaction between the sexes which isn’t decided by the presence of a cunt is unthinkable to such people.
This is further underlined by how many men complain that women don’t want to fuck them after they’ve wasted their time being friendly, as if the idea of just being friendly towards a girl because you like her (in a non-sexual way) is completely alien, and the idea that the girl could have mistaken their friendliness for an actual friendship is ridiculous.
Sam:
Yeah, the disconnect (pun intended) some women have when it comes to this is quite staggering. One argument at Feministing was that dildos were different than the feet with a vagina thingy because they were smooth or had a knob (another pun) at the end of it, while the feet were “jagged” above the ancle which obviously meant that they were supposed to look like they’ve been chopped off Bobbit style (oops, wrong example – I meant ..ehh.. Google luckily couldn’t help me find an example of what I meant…).
AB,
“For a variety of reasons, women tend to like men, and admire them.”
you know, I can actually understand that, not everything men have done was horrible. They also invented the printing press and the lightbulb, came up with separation of powers and the steam machine, probably the most important historical reason for the discussion we’re having ;)
“We have a saying here (and I bet you do too) that women give sex to get love, and men give love to get sex. So much of women’s interaction with men is dominated by the feeling that sex is (a) necessary (evil) to even get treated like a person.”
Did you read any of the links I mentioned in my replies to you in the earlier thread? I really don’t know what your thing is, but as I have maintained before: to the extent that we can abolish the pleasure-provision imbalance you mention culturally, we should do it, to the extent that such an imbalance should be the consequence of innate/essential/biological/evolutionary causes, we can likely only state its existence and then wonder about how to deal with it (as in, say, patriarchy, which is logically based on sexual assumptions like the one you mention).
I don’t buy your assumption, and even though most available research seems to point to a stronger male sex drive, women do like sex, and not merely to make a guy watch Ally McBeal with her, also because it’s a pleasurable activity as such. To suggest otherwise is contradicting my and I suppose pretty much everyone’s reality.
I’m not sure what you are attempting to get at with the “lesser being” thing? Have you had a look at this thread?
http://notfrisco2.com/leones/?p=5803
Again, I don’t know what you refer to by being treated as a lesser being, but what you say does sound a bit like you’re trying to police male desire by saying that it should really be different from what it seems to be. Everyone has a right to be respected, also to have their sexual persona respected (for all the problems this poses in practice, of course), but apart from that, Motley is right. Being liked is a privilege, being respected is a right. If being liked comes with advantages that being respected doesn’t come with, and I think it’s pretty obvious that it does, then people will treat people they like “better”, and nothing can be done about that. Remember what you said about “how sexual attraction works” irrespective of social forces, that you cannot make yourself like certain bone structures?
“and the idea that the girl could have mistaken their friendliness for an actual friendship is ridiculous.”
No, the absurdity is that the categories are mixed up. I can totally be friends with a woman whether I desire her sexually or not. You can also have sex without being friends or lovers, or be totally in love and have sex. There are multiple dimensions to relationships. Usually, relations between heterosexual women and men will always have a potential sexual undercurrent. But let’s face it – if that weren’t there, it would also be disrespecting the other’s sexual persona. And in the end, aren’t men who are following the pattern you suggest not merely doing exactly what you suggested as standard procedure? They are offering emotional attachment for sexual access. So, well, if women are offering sexual access for emotional attachment, that’s because they have to in the current dysfunctional setup, but if men are complying with the same script it’s their fault?
Really?
Also, I’ve probably hurt more women by not having sex with them and still wanting to be friends when they were clearly sexually interested than the other way around. It seems not all women appreciate that setup as much as you do.
I think, on the subject of male sex toys, that concerning that “objectification of a female body part” is not truly correlated to the objectification of women, at least not in the lesser cases. The RealDolls and similar things certainly are — they’re meant to imitate a whole woman in the form of an object — but things like Fleshlights I think are really just an acknowledgement of how male genitals function, just as the design of vibrators and dildos are an acknowledgement of how female genitals function. Men need something to enter, and it just so happens that fleshlights are designed to satisfy that need far better than a hand can. And if you really want to avoid and “objectification” then they have the sleeves which are just a hole, with no visual design.
As for men who are scared to put things in their ass, this is just clearly homophobia taking hold. As Dan Savage would say, if you’re doing it and thinking about a woman, then it’s heterosexual. And if you’re doing it and thinking about a man, then it’s homosexual. Obviously I have no problem with either, but again, if you acknowledge the simple fact that men have a prostate and when you touch it it feels good (amazing in fact), such toys are simply designed to take advantage of the anatomy of male genitalia.
Overall, I think the best view one can have on sex toys is this: if it gets you off, it’s doing it’s job. And we can acknowledge the various versions of toys and the fact that some of them objectify women or men, or at least parts of them, and perhaps realize that it’s better to objectify them in a toy than objectify them in real life (unless of course that’s what they want in a sexual context). Sex is a puzzling, complex thing, and what gets people off is often completely unrelated to what they believe. I have a friend who loves the idea of being pseudo-raped, but she’s an immensely powerful, independent woman in her normal life, and she would never let a man treat her in everyday life how she’d let him treat her in bed. Likewise, plenty of domineering, asshole men who probably are relatively sexist in their everyday lives like to be tied up and bossed around and objectified by women when they have sex.
@Sam:
In general I feel like http://notfrisco2.com/leones/?p=5803 is a fairly reasonable take on things.
In particular, this quote resonates with me:
Although I do still think there are problematic reasons to reject people that ought to be examined and talked about. But, ultimately, if you don’t want to date/fuck/start-a-life-together with someone, that’s your prerogative.
@AB:
I wouldn’t argue against this, necessarily, but it’s worth considering that this relates to other common tropes in sci-fi: insect metaphor and atavism. And they’re hardly restricted to that genre (isn’t “queen bee” the current equivalent for “alpha male” in much current analysis?), so I’d just say that it’s a deeper issue than might initially suggest itself.
Isn’t this exactly what Rabbit White was getting at?
I’m not saying that there aren’t situations in which and people to which it applies, but I suspect that she was right that this is a stereotype that men can get painted with for reasons that might have little to do with its origin in experience.
@Tamen:
I didn’t follow up on other threads at Feministing, and it’s possible that things have changed due to the fact that it was an older post… but what strikes me about it is that a comparison was being made between dildos and a toy that was featured at Stockroom. Comparing vanilla toys and a fetish item featured at a store that specializes in BDSM equipment — that’s like comparing apples and sashimi, and saying that the difference is that apples are sweet.
So, yeah. Kind of a huge disconnect, there.
I’ve been having an interesting discussion about boundaries, manipulation, and compliance tactics at LessWrong.
@Zack:
Fleshlights are… a complicated subject.
It’s certainly true that they reflect how the male genitals function, and it’s certainly true that objectification can be avoided in most cases. (Not always, because certain sleeves are only available in, e.g., the Fleshlight Girls collection.) It’s also true that part of it, when it comes to sleeve design, is novelty.
But those explanations fall short when looking at the specific marketing for the Stamina Training Unit, or the popularity of the Lotus, Forbidden and Swallow textures (all of which are designed with realism in mind), or the discussions of DGS — “Death Grip Syndrome,” resulting from manual masturbation, and the recovery/increase of sensation as the result of using the sleeves — in the forums.
It’s when considering those elements that the objectification argument seems to be, at best, circumstantially accurate — something that also applies to the functionality one. There seem to be men who use Fleshlights for functional reasons, but there also seem to be a substantial number who use them to connect with and increase genuine, embodied experience. I’m inclined to think (and have concluded from my own experiences) that realistic designs can be, and often are, closely related to that second motivation.
And the Sexxxtrainer product takes that to an entirely different level. I’m not sure that it’s coincidental, or just a business issue, that it’s specifically designed to work with Fleshlight sleeves.
Sam,
you know, I can actually understand that, not everything men have done was horrible. They also invented the printing press and the lightbulb, came up with separation of powers and the steam machine, probably the most important historical reason for the discussion we’re having ;)
And they did so under conditions that explicitly prevented women from contributing. It makes for a very strong love/hate relationship. But in my experience, one thing women rarely do, is ignoring men’s humanity. Or rather, if they do, they have to actively work towards it, demonise men, remind themselves how violent men are, make catchy slogans about how little they need men, etc. For men, it comes a lot more naturally, because both sexes have grown up in a culture where the default human being is male.
I don’t buy your assumption, and even though most available research seems to point to a stronger male sex drive, women do like sex, and not merely to make a guy watch Ally McBeal with her, also because it’s a pleasurable activity as such. To suggest otherwise is contradicting my and I suppose pretty much everyone’s reality.
I didn’t assume anything, I said it was a common perception. I’m not really interested in the part where men feel they have to give something to get sex (since everybody else is already obsessing over that one), I’m interested in the part where women feel they have to give something to get love. I’ve found out that just about the biggest turn-off for me is when I start wondering what will happen if I say no, such as losing a friendship.
That’s why, for someone who usually prefers monogamous relationships and emotional intimacy, I get surprisingly turned on by male sluts (in lack of a better word), because they often view sex as more self-contained. I suspect that for some women, knowing that they could get their non-sexual emotional needs met on the side, would enable them to pursue sex for it’s own sake, not as means to an end.
I’m not sure what you are attempting to get at with the “lesser being” thing? Have you had a look at this thread?
If you don’t know where I’m going, is it too much to ask instead of assuming? By lesser being, I mean someone who’s not entitled to the same consideration you’d give a higher being, which in men’s case is usually other men, not women they’re attracted to. I’ve even said so earlier, in regards to why many women get along so well with gay men (hint: it’s definitely not that gays treat them more like they’re sexually attracted to them than straight men).
Again, I don’t know what you refer to by being treated as a lesser being, but what you say does sound a bit like you’re trying to police male desire by saying that it should really be different from what it seems to be.
No, I’m saying that men need to keep their male sexuality the hell away from women they’re not sexually attracted to. It’s not the “sex-object” category I mind, it’s the “failed sex-object” category that bothers me. Just replace that with the category of “person” and we’re good to go.
No, the absurdity is that the categories are mixed up.
Agreed. But what’s even more absurd is that most straight men who want something from women that they don’t demand of men (sex), feel completely entitled to whine about it on half the internet when they don’t get it, but women who want the exact same thing from both sexes (respect, consideration, humanity) are accused of demanding special privileges that men are not able to give, and of trying to control men’s sexuality.
There is an imbalance, but it’s not just in regards to sex. It’s in regards to respect, identification, power, money, friendship, etc. It’s what causes guys to assume that their friendship is so infinitely more precious, and girls’ friendships so infinitely worthless, that girls should be grateful to be allowed to prostitute themselves just for a taste of it, even if it’s fake.
And in the end, aren’t men who are following the pattern you suggest not merely doing exactly what you suggested as standard procedure? They are offering emotional attachment for sexual access. So, well, if women are offering sexual access for emotional attachment, that’s because they have to in the current dysfunctional setup, but if men are complying with the same script it’s their fault?
I didn’t say women were. Pretty much every time I’ve heard the “women give sex to get love, men give love to get sex” proverb said as if the speaker/writer believed in it, it’s been from men. Women usually despise it, and why shouldn’t they? It suggests that men are worth loving and being loved by, and women are not.
But the difference is that friendships are often mutual, in that both parties like the other and benefit from it, while unreciprocated sexual attraction is, by definition, not. Only the most cynical women will assume that the only reason a guy would ever act friendly towards them would be because he was faking it in the hopes of sex. Being only a half-cynic myself, I sometimes suspect it, but I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Think about it like this: You’re at a bar, and a woman starts hitting on you. Perhaps she’s not the most attractive woman, and if you had your pick she wouldn’t be your first choice, but still, it feels so good to be desired that you gladly go along. Your confidence soars because this woman think you’re hot, and you end up in bed together, and have a great time. Then, the very next morning, she turns to you and says “That’ll be 200$……. What? You didn’t honestly think I’d be attracted to a loser like you?”. That’s how it feels to have a guy pretend to be your friend for sex.
Hugh,
that is really an interesting and relevant discussion! Also quite interesting how it reveals common pattern of discussions about initiation.
@AB:
For me this is interesting because it is so far outside my experience. I grew up with lots of girls as friends, and still today a lot of my friends are women.
From my own interpretation, though, the “guy pretending to be your friend for sex” thing is a really demonized interpretation of the behavior. As if they’re trying to manipulate you into sex. This goes back to the whole Nice Guy(tm) thing, no?
I don’t recall who said this, but I think earlier in the thread (or maybe is was over at the Yes Means Yes blog) someone made the observation that this strategy is rather modus operandi for many girls/women: if you’re attracted to someone, you try to hang out with them a lot and be really nice to them in the hopes that they’ll notice you. But suddenly when guys do the same thing it’s a nasty, manipulative, dehumanizing behavior to get into women’s pants. Frankly, I don’t buy it.
I mean, yes, it would be a lot better to be really obviously flirtatious, or even just be really direct and tell them that you’re attracted to them. But these things don’t come easily to a lot of guys, and some guys have blocks against them (e.g. toxic sexuality image issues).
I can understand, of course, that it would hurt for someone to suddenly stop being your friend, and to find out that it was because their intentions with you had been romantic or sexual in nature. But I don’t buy that (most of) these guys are being intentionally manipulative or dehumanizing any more than girls/women that use similar tactics.
AB,
“But in my experience, one thing women rarely do, is ignoring men’s humanity.”
well, not just a few feminists do have a tendency to disregard male problems out of hand and talk about teh menz in a way that can easily make one feel less than human. And they have a tendency to justify those bad manners with the requirements of a social justice movement… but that’s just a sidenote.
What comes a lot more naturally for men?
I’m sorry, but that’s really like looking at one side of an equation and then wondering why you can’t solve it. It’s not either or, this can only be solved by working *together* not against one another.
Huh? Isn’t that what I’ve said all along but which (I had the impression) you adamantly denied by explaining that women aren’t interested in sex as such and only see it as a trading resource?
I’m sorry, but this -
- and this -
- is a bit contradictory. Either sexual attraction *is* a relevant variable, or its not.
Nah, women who want respect, consideration, humanity *and don’t confuse that with being sexually desired* have a perfectly valid point that every reasonable person should support and aren’t trying to control anyone. Again, looking at the contradictory quotes above, it seems you haven’t really made up your mind about which argument you are actually making.
Again, huh? People choose their friends because they have things in common or can enrich each other. And while that may produce an overlap between interests and gender in a gendered world, I’d say gender is rarely a determining element for friendships, even though there are gendered activities in friendships. I prefer going to the sauna or football with guys because sometimes it’s great to have a guy-only safe space. And my best female friend’s being a woman occasionally comes in handy when I’m asking her about other women. And we know we find each other sexually appealing, and still will not have sex (and did not even have sex when she wasn’t in a relationship – I believe it would not have been bad for our friendship, but neither of us would want to risk that).
So, while I believe that sexuality and emotional connection aren’t always entirely separable (biochemically), and friendship doesn’t need to be entirely de-sexualised, it usually is. And that’s why I don’t really understand your premise about the relative value of male vs. female friendships. You seem to say the same thing here -
- but everything else that you write appeary to contradict that statement, while I think it’s true. I can’t say your perception is less valid than mine, but yours doesn’t reflect my perception of the world around me at all.
I don’t think it’s a particularly good metaphor, but still – the problem seems to be that you’re looking male female relations as a value exchange (category mix-up) with different currencies (emotional vs sexual) but, at the same time, are extremely annoyed about that. Interestingly, again, you only seem to blame men for prostituting themselves for sex (wow… that’s an unusual use of ‘to prostitute oneself’), but not the women who are paying with sex. Again, I don’t see the world of female-male relations as bleak as you seem to see it, but even so, I don’t think you’re looking at the transaction in a particularly fair way…
@Hugh:
From the LW thread:
I totally relate to that. In fact, the first girl I ever asked out (and I did it in a very docile, low-pressure way) said yes even though she didn’t want to, because she was afraid of hurting my feelings.
This gave me a bit of a complex about asking women out after that. And it took me a long time to get over it.
AB,
oh, and btw – here’s a trailer for a film about a true story romance that developed out of your last scenario ($200 Dollars).
youtube.com/watch?v=6VjZSx6bjqk
Sam,
And they usually feel the need to justify it, such as talking about the menz.
Dehumanising the other sex. They don’t (always) do it by means of overt misogyny, but frequently by simply ignoring women (in non-sexual contexts). Generally, more women than men are interested stories about people not of their own sex, and look up to people not of their own sex. Look at lists of what the sexes read, and men’s will be filled with stories by, for, and about men, while women’s will be more mixed.
In male-dominated environments, much is made of women’s need to adapt and be “one of the guys”, but I’ve been told it’s extremely common in female-dominated environments, particularly workplaces, that men seek out other men to “get away from the henhouse”, and that it is considered totally understandable. Women adapt to men, not the other way around. Men are the norm, women the exception.
I focus on it because it’s been ignored. Every time I’ve tried to bring up that maybe there are non-sexual factors at work, the only answer I’ve gotten is “But penis in vagina!”.
I have said repeatedly that I don’t think women are uninterested in sex. But they often end up like that anyway, because sex becomes a duty. One of the biggest occupational hazards for prostitutes (at least according to the ones I’ve heard talking about it here) is frigidity. There is a real danger that when sex is no longer something you have for its own sake, your ability to feel sexually aroused gets diminished. It wont happen to everybody, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a factor.
What I’m saying is that it shouldn’t be a factor for people you’re not sexually attracted to. Perhaps it’s different for guys/you, but when I’m sexually attracted to someone, it’s going to have an effect on the way I treat them, but the people I’m not sexually attracted to are pretty much non-sexual to me. I don’t see young men as failed sex-objects just because I’m not sexually interested in them, I simply don’t see them as sex-objects in teh first place, any more than I’d think of a 5-year-old, a goat, or my mother as sex-objects. I can try to objectively judge their sexual attractiveness and whom it might appeal to, but my relationship with them is not dominated by any sexual feelings.
In my experience, this attitude is not quite as common for guys. Having experienced being both skinny and desirable, and gaining weight and wearing bulky clothes (during a depression), the difference with which you’re treated by guys is staggering. But the difference between the way you’re viewed as a girl, and the way guys view each other, is even more staggering.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s just because I, and other women, are inherently unlikeable and uninteresting, but after having made the same observations for years, I don’t think it’s always the case. I remember one quote from a girl in a technical (e.g. male-dominated) study observing “No one even snickered at my jokes, but they all laughed loudly when my boyfriend told the same ones”.
It’s hard to judge, but I can remember several instances where I’ve had guys repeat what I’ve said to much better effect. It could be my delivery, but often, it was a case of them saying to me that I’d gotten it wrong, only to repeat it themselves, in the same company, and get applauded for it a month or so later. From what I’ve heard, especially from girls who’re not physically attractive, getting taken seriously by guys can be extremely hard. Even if you have the same interests, and have lots of relevant things to say, it’s like it’s sexual attraction or nothing.
The people with the most negative view on fat people are men, and the fat people that are most subjected to these negative views are women. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think the idea that women’s purpose is to be sexually appealing is so prevalent that when they fail at that, the failure comes to overshadow everything else they are. Being sexually attractive should be a bonus, but more often than not, not being sexually attractive is a punishment, which often hit women harder.
I observed in my teenage years that many, if not most, of my female peers didn’t seem to be wearing make-up in order to make themselves pretty, they did it to avoid being ugly, because the punishment for that was too hard for them to deal with. Some of them would be embarrassed if they were seen without make-up on, be completely obsessed with hygiene, pack a bag filled with beauty products to go skiing, develop eating disorders etc., even if they weren’t actually that interested in sex to begin with.
If being sexually attractive was just a matter of being treated better than neutral for a start, I don’t think we’d have the same stereotypes of women having gay best friends (the same is definitely not true of men and lesbians), because heterosexual men would be seen as just as friendly, but with the added bonus of perhaps treating you even better because you’re hot. But they aren’t. I don’t know how much truth there is to it, but it is my impression that a lot of women feel that way, consciously or not.
I fail to see what’s so contrary. When I talk about lesser beings, I’m not talking about everyone a given man might not be sexually interested in, I’m talking about women he isn’t sexually interested in. That’s why my original quote, which both you and Motley have taken such pain to read in bad faith, mentioned being female and sexually uninteresting. I even placed female before sexually uninteresting because that’s the crux of it. Basically, I’d like for more guys to treat me as if I’m male. Or perhaps even better, treat me as if they’re gay. Don’t get me wrong, I have a many male friends, and several of them honestly like me and are interested in what I have to say, but getting to that point has been a pain in the ass.
Ideally yes. So when guys complain that being nice and doing friendly things haven’t gotten them any sex, they’re basically discounting her friendship.
Friendship should, ideally, be mutual. But considering how many times I’ve had to wonder if a guy was interested in my friendship or my vagina, and how many Nice Guy rants I’ve read about the injustice of not being rewarded for your (male) friendship with (female) sex, I’m not sure it always is.
And that’s sort of the point I made earlier. There is a perception, true or not, that most men want women, but don’t necessarily care for them, but that the reverse rarely happens. A woman will say “I don’t want anything that looks like a man, smells like a man, sounds like a man, feels like a man, or acts like a man in my life”, a man will say “I want something that looks like a woman, smells like a woman, sounds like a woman, and feels like a woman…. but preferably without any opinions or any real personality that isn’t defined by her submissiveness to me”.
So fembots and realistic sex toys are seen as more of a threat to women, because if men can replace women for sex, they’ll have no use for them and will start treating them like dirt, whereas sex toys for women doesn’t have as much of an impact because it’s a common perception that women’s regard for men is not tied to their sexuality. If women seek out men for love and friendship, no amount of sex toys are going to change that, and it can even be an advantage (if a woman learns to feel aroused mechanically, she might be able to bring that arousal into her personal relationship), but if men only seek out women for mechanical sex, sex toys for men are a direct threat.
And for umpteenth time, I’m not saying it’s an objective or unchangeable truth, but I have met enough men who subscribed to it to understand why a novel like The Stepford Wives (men replacing women with robots so they can get all they want from women without having to deal with their humanity) can be written, and why some women feel disgust and fear at the thought of sex toys for men, to a degree which few men seem to feel in the reverse.
For the record, although I agree with a lot of what AB is saying as usual, I do think that many men feel a weird amount of disgust and fear about vibrators and other sex toys. I’m tired of it, frankly. There is such an obvious solution — express a desire to be good in bed with your girlfriend, maybe even use vibrators on her yourself — not to mention get the fuck over yourself and stop expecting your penis to be a magic orgasmotron in accordance with patriarchal sexual mores that have nothing to do with female sexuality (ok, maybe this solution is not so obvious to most people). And of course, male fear of vibrators functions to limit women’s sexuality (just like male insecurity always seems to), and in fact women start limiting themselves out of fear of offending men (as usual), so of course you end up with situations where women are afraid to even ask or suggest to their boyfriends that vibrators might be awesome, because we mustn’t question the magical penis power. Or where women don’t even try vibrators because of fear of their man’s reaction. Or where women don’t even try vibrators that aren’t penis-shaped because why would I ever derive pleasure from something not penis-shaped?
well, that was an incoherent rant. you can see why I haven’t been commenting on this thread lately, I’m a bit overwhelmed ;)
but I did find this interesting set of posts from a dude whose whole blog theme is about “married game”:
http://www.marriedmansexlife.com/2010/04/monogamy-as-sexual-strategy-my-wife-was.html
http://www.marriedmansexlife.com/2010/02/whats-wifes-role-in-all-this.html
http://www.marriedmansexlife.com/2010/03/10-critical-things-in-how-to-choose.html
http://www.marriedmansexlife.com/2010/05/virginity-thing-revisited.html
also, here’s a fetlife thread on a recent book (there are no responses yet, and I’ll repost the OP so non-fet people can read it):
http://fetlife.com/groups/245/group_posts/1155559
I’m reading Peter Hemmen’s book “Faeries, Bears and Leathermen: Men in Community Queering the Masculine.”
Hemmens develops the notion that the concepts of effeminacy and male homosexuality have only been linked in relatively recent times, and then presents ethnographic accounts of the three subcultures listed in the title, investigating the relationship of each to hegemonic masculinity and ideas of effeminacy. The work is grounded in critical theory and gender studies, and, like many dissertations which have found publication outside the academy, is not an easy read.
I’m developing my own critique of the work, and would be interested in exchanges with other who have read it — and most of all, people who have read it and have some direct experience in one or more of the three subcultures.
@Cessen:
I always got along better with guys, but I’ve noticed that it can be hard to really fit into a group of them. You can’t really be one of the guys, but you also have to try to make sure you don’t exploit your position as the lone girl, and to make matters worse, sometimes the guys will be sexist, and you have to be aware of that too in order to call them out on it and make it change.
I’ve been in situations where girls who didn’t fit in the group at all, and whose behaviour was often unacceptable, were immediately welcomed by almost all the guys because they found her hot. Not only did it annoy me (as they were forcing me to accept these girls too), but I also couldn’t help wondering how much of my friendship with these guys were based on actual friendship, and how much was just my looks.
I’ve sometimes wondered aloud, after hearing the guys talk trash about a girl behind her back, how they were describing me when I wasn’t there. I was immediately assured that “yes, we talk about everyone behind their backs, including you, but never in that way. You’re not like her, you’re one of us”, and in this case I believe it. But there’s always the danger of being ‘that’ girl.
I haven’t experienced it much the other way around. I’ve seen guys be popular with girls because they were attractive, but it seemed the girls in question also liked said guys. A friend and I once called a guy to get him to come over with ice-cream and bacardi because we were both feeling down and needed some kissing and cuddling (especially since we were with a third friend and her boyfriend), but I think he was pretty clear on why we called him. Though I also liked him and we’ve been friends for a decade now.
The deal-breaker for me is if they complain about it when it doesn’t pay off. I think you either like the person enough to see their company as its own reward, or you have to confess that you’re using a cowardly and often inefficient tactic to get laid. Both are acceptable (up until the point where they start to rely on you – if you aren’t truly interested in being their friend at that point, and count on leaving them if you find someone better to have sex with, you shouldn’t deceive them into thinking they can count on you), but acting like you’re doing them a favour which they should pay back in sex is disgusting.
They don’t come easy to girls either.
I don’t think they’re intentional about it either, but that doesn’t mean it’s better. I guess if I heard girls complain that guys just wanted to be friends and that it was unfair for girls to waste so much time on friendship without getting sex in return, or if I met guys who’ve had completely platonic relationships with girls, only to find out the girls in question were only after sex, I would start believing it was reciprocal.
I’ve heard a lot about nice guys feeling betrayed because women are supposed to value friendship and guys who’re not too forward with their sexual interest (and when it doesn’t pay off, it must mean women are dishonest), but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a girl express a similar sentiment, that men were supposed to be most interested in girls who were friendly and not overtly sexual. So it seems to me like the guys are more prone to specifically using it as a strategy to get laid. But that’s just my experience.
It’s interesting because it seems that the sex toys women are most disgusted with and feel threatened by are the ones most similar to female body parts, but you appear to suggest that men are most disgusted and afraid of things that aren’t like male body-parts. It’s sort of related to my theory about what the sexes fear in their relationship to each other.
Interesting. He does have some good points, but the third post is exactly what I talked to Sam about. He basically says that men who want something other than T&A (such as emotional bonding and commitment) are in such short supply that they’re infinitely more valuable than women, and can afford to set extremely high standards, such as virginity and a very specific body-type (because there is clearly only one standard of beauty for women… I guess that’s where the PUA part comes in).
My interpretation of this has always been that it’s a matter of women feeling more sharply the pressure to please. Men and women are both horrible at actually realizing/articulating what they want, but “You should settle down with a nice young man” comes with more force than “You should settle down with a nice young lady.” And so men’s view of what women want has a bias towards niceness, whereas women’s view of what men want doesn’t. So men are given the impression that women value niceness more than they do, and are frustrated to come up against reality. (See also: “Women are all alike; every man is a person in his own way.”)
Of course, that interpretation is based on purely anecdotal evidence. (Weakening my claim for the first time I jump into the discussion! Hooray!)
@Clarisse:
Totally agree.
But surely you realize that this sounds an awful lot like telling women to “just get over” their irrational culturally ingrained insecurities, right? In reality, it’s not that easy. And it’s going to take sensitivity, education, and positive reinforcement to help these guys get over their issues. They’re human beings too, not magical creatures that have complete control over their emotions and insecurities. (Not that they don’t have a responsibility to work on their insecurities, insofar as they hurt other people. But the same goes for women. And I don’t think either men or women are going to be very good at that in a hostile, unsupportive environment.)
And, just to note, I’m speaking as a guy that has never had these issues to begin with (apparently I didn’t get the memo that size matters, and that my masculinity is dependent on the capabilities of my dick; though I did get plenty of other toxic memos).
Cessen, agreed.
AllSaintsDay, I have this funny feeling that I know you personally.
AB, He basically says that men who want something other than T&A (such as emotional bonding and commitment) are in such short supply that they’re infinitely more valuable than women, and can afford to set extremely high standards.
You know, (I don’t have time to be commenting, for serious, and so this comment won’t be hugely articulate, but I just had this thought that I have to get out there) … I’m starting to think that men who say this are at least as motivated by trying to “drive up their own value” as they are by trying to accurately portray the situation. Men who haven’t had a lot of sex outside marriage often seem very insecure and weird about it, I’ve noticed (based on a very limited sample) — probably some anxiety about stereotypes of manliness in there. So they compliment themselves and talk extensively about how awesome they are … partly in an attempt to make themselves feel better? I get the impression that dudes like this often resent “sluts” almost as much as they resent “players”. They’re like, “I played by all the so-called rules in an attempt to be a good man, so I better be entitled to something in return. It’s not sex, so it must be an unrealistically and stereotypically innocent/pure/yet sexy woman. And I’m not just going to insist that’s what I’m entitled to, I’m also going to make sure that all those slutty bitches out there know that I don’t want them.”
You know, in my original manliness series I quoted Mr. Not Into Gender Studies, and I’ve often thought that I should have included a longer quotation of what he said. Here’s the full quote:
there’s problems inherent in finding any sort of masculine agency through questioning the dominant masculinist paradigm, and furthermore it’s very tricky to avoid simply devolving into male entitlement. That’s the basic crux of the problem with the “Men’s Movement” assholes- none of them are addressing the underlying problems of masculinity. They’re just whining about not receiving the priviledges their cultural conditioning tells them to expect in exchange for brutalizing themselves.
emphasis mine.
@AllSaintsDay:
That this reminded me of Tolstoy’s famous line also reminded me of a bit by Oscar Wilde: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
Makes one think that all three, along with “women use sex to get love, men use love to get sex,” might be describing the same thing… and quite possibly the same thing that Clarisse just bolded in her quote above.
I think that some amount of complaining is okay. I’ve seen generic complaining of “Every time I find a woman I’m interested in sexually, I treat her well, but I always get rejected.” that I considered acceptable. (I’ve also seen it become constant or misogynistic, and thus become unacceptable.) Complaining about her, right there who did this? Not so much. Kind of like you should complain if 100 positions in 100 companies open to a gender-balanced applicant pool and 95 of the hires are men, but you can’t find a single company you can call definitely biased. (Well, you can look at past hiring practices, but the analogy breaks down here because “Although I do still think there are problematic reasons to reject people that ought to be examined and talked about. But, ultimately, if you don’t want to date/fuck/start-a-life-together with someone, that’s your prerogative.” HT to Cessen for phrasing that well earlier in the thread.)
Men are given the impression that women want nice guys. When they are nice guys and women don’t want them, they rightly feel deceived, and shouldn’t be told that any complaining at all is unwarranted. When they are Nice Guys and women don’t want them, they correctly feel deceived (‘correctly’ replacing ‘rightly’ because if you yourself are deceiving someone you lose a lot of right to complain about being deceived).
(Did I just post a reformulation of my above post? I feel like I did.)
AllSaintsDay, I have this funny feeling that I know you personally.
It’s possible, as I don’t know anything about you other than having lurked at this blog for a while, but it seems unlikely to me. The most personally revealing information I’ve provided has been my love of AK.
(Speaking of which…)
That this reminded me of Tolstoy’s famous line also reminded me of a bit by Oscar Wilde: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
References within references!
So… is that what a lot of dating is? Attempting to ascertain the humanity of one’s partner, through a black box and nerve induction?
Can’t go around maiming potential humans, though. That’s where a the current models fall short.
@AB:
I’ve experienced that quite often, actually. I honestly couldn’t count how many times I’ve heard something along the lines of “[something something] men [something]. You know how they are. Present company excepted, of course,” or “Yeah, but you’re not a guy that way.” But it’s happened often enough for me to pretend that I don’t speak English when those conversations start up.
It was especially common around women who didn’t express any sexual interest in me personally, but were talking about interest in other men, or with women with whom I’d been previously involved, but wasn’t anymore (even though we were still friends). When there was evident sexual interest — or a when a woman was present and the others knew that she was interested — it didn’t happen.
How does that fit in with what you’re arguing?
Clarisse:
I was one of those guys for quite some time, but the source of the meme in my case was female friends and older women that were trying to make me feel better. They were trying to highlight my positive traits to me, and claimed those traits were hard to come by in men.
I can’t, obviously, make any assertions about where other guys get that meme from. But in my case it was women.
I can relate to some of AB’s observations.
I see this all the time.
In my experience, looks create a “halo effect” that makes everything a woman does cuter, and everything she says more interesting.
It probably would take more work for a woman I’m not attracted to becoming friends with me… but I’m not sure it would take more work than a guy. Other guys may vary. Of course, given a random woman I’m not attracted to, and a random man, I’m probably slightly more likely to have more in common with the guy.
I think it’s common for many single men to put more effort into getting to know women who are conventionally attractive. Due to the need for men to initiate, and the lower likelihood that any woman will initiate with them, men must devote a certain amount of time and energy to finding potentially partners. This means that they must focus on women who meet their minimum attractiveness criteria.
@Infra:
Yeah, ditto, I’ve had similar experiences. And as far as my experiences go, this isn’t a phenomenon specific to women in men’s company at all. It happens the other way around too.
Ironically, I’ve only once seen this happen to a woman in a group of guys. But I’ve noticed it a lot when I’m in groups of women. So I think it might be a cognitive bias thing (noticing/remembering things more when they impact me). Or even just a selection bias of some kind (the friends I choose, etc.). We’re working in anecdotes here, after all.
@AB:
Of course. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.
So it’s actually the complaining that’s problematic, not the behavior itself? Because if that’s what you’re saying, then we’re in total agreement. But I think it’s important to be able to talk about the behavior and the complaining as separate things.
I don’t dispute that it’s inefficient. And in some cases guys just want sex, but certainly not all. (I wasn’t looking for just sex when I employed such tactics in the past, and I highly doubt it’s as ubiquitous as you seem to imply it is in these kinds of cases.)
But cowardly? Really? That’s really strong and shaming language. Are you going to apply that language to the aforementioned women and girls as well? They’re cowards, because they don’t make their interest plainly obvious?
To me this sounds like a harmful reinforcement of toxic masculine norms. And this actually seems like a great segue, because honestly this thread seems to be going in circles at times. We’ve gotten so caught up in the sexuality thing that we’re not looking at other issues. But this is a great one.
If a guy’s actions are affected by fear, he’s a coward. If a woman’s actions are affected by fear, she should be accommodated, or at least treated with understanding.
Not to mention how heavily “coward” and similar are used to police masculinity.
I see your point here.
But I also don’t think it’s so obvious to define or recognize the kind of dependence you’re talking about, especially if it comes on slowly.
And if I’m giving advice and/or emotional support to someone I’m interested in, it’s probably because I care about the human being in front of me, and because I would have to be an asshat to drop them and say, “Actually, I’m mostly just hanging out with you to see if things will work out with us romantically, and I feel it would be deceptive to give you any kind of support right now.”
But that doesn’t mean I’m going to stick around (or that I’m obligated to stick around) if it becomes obvious that I’m not going to get what I want out of the relationship.
Again with the sex. Yes, some guys are just out for sex. But a lot of guys aren’t. A lot of guys want the emotional intimacy and support, and all those other things too. But they also want the sex. They want the package deal.
But a lot of guys already have a lot of friendships, so they’re not necessarily going to stick around for someone that just wants to be friends. And I don’t think this particularly inappropriate. I mean, instantly cutting out, sure, that’s mean. But just kind of not spending much time together any more, and drifting apart…?
Moreover, if I’m really head-over-heels for someone, it can be really painful to stick around after it’s obvious that romance is off the table. I think there is a gross underestimation of how emotionally involved the guys in question can get.
@Cessen:
There’s also the question of how similar the forms of friendship are for men and women; there’s at least some research out there, such as Greif’s _Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships_, that suggests that there are significant differences, and even that they’re not always recognized as friendships by women. So in addition to the issue of how many friendships a person has, there’s also the issue of type, and its attendant valuation.
“Being friends,” in such a case, simply might not wholly translate.
It’s an issue that would relate to what you wrote about “gross underestimation:” different structures and expressions of friendship are sometimes seen as an absence of such (as noted by Greif), and the same can be said about emotions and emotional investment. There’s probably some linkage between the two.
Hmm… so, tentative arm-chair psychoanalysis of men with regards to sex toys.
I seem to recall Typhonblue way back when making a comment along the lines of, “Men are so afraid of not being needed, because they can’t imagine being wanted.” That really, really resonated with me at the time (and still does).
And it strikes me that the whole sex-toy (or just non-penis) insecurity may very well have some of its roots in that. And if that’s the case, then it all comes back–yet again–to toxic male sexuality.
But, again: arm-chair, tentative, etc. Not being a guy with these particular insecurities, my insight is limited.
The more I’m thinking about this, the more it’s making sense, and the more explanatory power it seems to have.
The whole sex-toy thing may comes across a lot like “I don’t need your penis” to many guys. And that could perhaps be really scary? And presuming that is the case (this is still tentative, armchair, etc.), this meshes with a lot of other things like freaking out about not being able to “get it up”.
The more I think about this, the more it seems like guys don’t actually own their own penises. The penis is portrayed as being more about female pleasure than male pleasure. It’s portrayed primarily as a tool that women need. Similar to how breasts are portrayed with relation to men. So if a guy doesn’t feel his penis is needed, suddenly it’s like, “OMG! What is it good for!? OMG!” And before we even start talking about factual inaccuracy, that attitude alone is totally messed up just for the attitude itself. The penis should be about male pleasure, not female pleasure.
It seems like it would go a long way to start saying, “I don’t need your penis. And I don’t need to need you penis. Because I want you. I want you, I want your valuable, delicious touch. Your penis is for you, not for me. And I love that. I love your penis because it brings you pleasure.”
Okay, so maybe that’s waxing on a bit weird. But presuming any of this has any bearing on reality, it seems like addressing male toxic sexuality and making the penis about men’s pleasure, would go a long way to helping some of these issues and insecurities. If a guy actually felt sexually wanted, and if he viewed his genitals as being for himself, not for his partner, then sex toys, sexual exploration, etc. would probably be a non-issue…?
Maybe I’m just spewing a bunch of BS. Dunno. But there it is.
Cessen wrote:
What strikes me about this is that fear seems to be something regularly discussed when it comes to a man’s reactions to other men, his reactions to women, and women’s reactions to him (the film _Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon_ deals with an underexamined aspect of that). But I haven’t heard it discussed much in the context of women’s reactions to other women.
I doubt that fear is absent in that last case, or even less prominent; FWIW, a number of the women that I know have specifically and often said that they prefer to be in men’s company because the dynamics are less caustic than they are between women, even if they can be brutal, and that would certainly indicate the existence of significant fear in that context. It just doesn’t seem to come up as a major subject for discussion. Not too often, anyway.
‘Course, I’m a bit of an outside observer when it comes to this subject. Due to my… neuroatypicality, it hasn’t been a personal issue. But I do have to wonder whether or not that has any connection to the fact that I’ve had no problems carving out and sustaining my own concepts of maleness, manhood and masculinity, too.
@Cessen:
“This is my rifle,
this is my gun,
this is for killing,
this is for fun.”
I don’t really think that the penis is regularly portrayed as a tool for women.
@DFL:
Fair enough. The penis is also (perhaps more often) portrayed as violent and violating. (Again, toxic male sexuality…)
Perhaps another way to put this: the penis is mostly portrayed in terms of it’s affect on other people.
Cessen:
So if a guy doesn’t feel his penis is needed, suddenly it’s like, “OMG! What is it good for!? OMG!”
(Dropping out of ShadowMode.)
And when that links into how sexual prowess is played up to be such a big part of being a man that could very well (and I think it does for a lot of men) become, “OMG! What is it good for!? OMG! What good am I for!?”.
DFL:
I don’t really think that the penis is regularly portrayed as a tool for women.
I have to disagree with that a bit. Consider how women are just presumed to “want the dick. not want but need the dick.” to the point where women who aren’t into penises (namely gay women) are seen as “wrong” for not being into them. Its like, “You don’t take pleasure in penises? What’s wrong with you?” Also think about how gay men are also seen as “wrong” for not being into women. Its like “You don’t use your penis with women? What’s wrong with you?” (Mind you what I say here is only a part of the overall core of homophobia.)
Mind you I think this simultaneously exists with what you say (which is why I disagree a bit and not totally).
Oh, holy crap, that’s even worse. Then when a guy feels his penis isn’t important to his partner’s pleasure, then what’s left over? This evil, violent thing.
(Still tentative, armchair…)
AllSaintsDay
Are they really? Because I could have sworn that western culture is currently seeped in “girls want bad boys” and “nice guys finish last”. Most of the guys who’re complaining are not actually expecting that being a nice guy is guaranteed to make them sexy, or even that it could, they’re demanding that it should. Because women are a reward for men’s behaviour, and if they start rewarding (i.e. fucking) the guys exhibiting the wrong behaviour, they’ll ultimately be responsible for it when they’re abused….. and of course, if they fuck the men exhibiting the right behaviour and still get abused, no one is going to believe them because nice guys can’t be abusers. No matter what, women are screwed.
And that’s not even mentioning that niceness as a sexual strategy is ultimately futile, because there’s a fundamental difference between niceness (and kindness/morality/unselfishness), and most other qualities one might look for in a mate. If you work out and get a toned body, it doesn’t matter if you did it in a attempt to to be sexually attractive, you still have a toned body, and that’s what you’re offering a potential sexual partner. If you make sure to keep yourself updated on current events, it doesn’t matter if you do it out of interest, or because it helps you become interesting to talk to, because whoever you’re courting will still get a partner able to contribute in most conversations. And if you play in a band purely to score, you still play in a band, and you’re still signalling to whoever you court that they’ll get a partner who plays in a band.
But if you don’t actually want to help other people, but are only acting nice because you want them to like you, what exactly are you saying with it? You’re definitely not signalling that you’re a good person, because then you wouldn’t simply be using niceness as a strategy to get something else. So you’re either what we call ‘behagesyg’ (pleasing-sick) here, a quality only considered positive in a dog, or you’re disingenuous. You can’t make yourself nice the same way you can make yourself more knowledgeable or more physically attractive, you can only fake it, because genuine niceness comes from a genuine desire to be nice.
Of course, some people will say that what separates niceness from actual kindness is exactly that niceness is a strategy to make people like you by being as inoffensive as possible, whereas kindness describes true altruism, and that definition does make it possible for people to make themselves nice. But I don’t believe that’s the definition usually used. I think that what most people who say that women want nice guys are saying, is that they prefer guys with strong morals, empathy, social skills, the energy necessary to exhibit altruistic behaviour, etc., and most self-described nice guys also seem to assume (often wrongly) that they’re in possession of said qualities.
The word ‘nice’ is problematic because it originally described a behaviour which is frequently negative, but since it’s used as a shorthand for ‘good person’ in everyday language, I don’t think most people really assumes that “girls like nice guys” means that women want guys who will not take a stand, who will pat bullies on the back to become popular, and never actually do anything kind without some sort of ulterior motive. So if you’re complaining that being nice (i.e. a good person) should get you laid, and blaming women for not fucking you, you’re actually not a nice person. At all.
And finally: So what if guys hear that women like nice guys, behave nicely, and still fail to get laid? I’ve also heard that men prefer blondes, but I have yet to hear anyone complain “I bleached my hair, and guys still don’t want to date me, they must have lied to me!”. Sexual attraction is based on more than one thing, and it’s perfectly possible that the women who rejected said nice guys were judging them on completely different criteria.
@AB:
Speaking from my own experience, and from the discussions that I’ve had about this with other men: we get both. That’s a substantial part of the problem, in that the context includes contradictory messages, each of which is portrayed as valid, while also portrayed as invalidating the other.
Actually, one of the oldest ethical traditions in Western culture — the Aristotelian approach — is based upon that precise idea: that one becomes good by doing good, essentially, in that actions contribute to disposition (hexeis). Or even that one simply cannot become good without doing good. But, as with the above, a contradictory message (that goodness cannot be faked, and is somehow inherent to character) is often simultaneously present — similar to the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional election — and that works to complicate the situation.
One not-uncommon result of that ends up being the pursuit of virtuous behavior without any commitment to, or belief in, the idea that it can actually result in virtue. Even the possibility of being good becomes subject to doubt; but not enough to be entirely dismissed.
The end effect is a noncommittal pantomime.
@Infra:
Actually, that’s something different. It’s people complaining about the other sex, which happens fairly often (though some, like your friends, have the decency to realise what they’re doing and try not to hurt the currently present members of the other sex).
What I’m talking about here is guys going to great lengths treating a girl well, sometimes even better than they treat guys, and yet turn out to have zero respect for her. They weren’t saying that I wasn’t a girl, they were saying that, unlike her, I had earned my place in the group and a was an actual friend, whereas she was just someone they put up with. Since their treatment of us was very similar (it differed mostly because our behaviours did), sometimes even better towards her than me, there was very little in their behaviour to back up the words.
What I find interesting is that it seemed like many of the guys actually enjoyed having her in the group, but still felt fine talking about how stupid and unreasonable she was behind her back. They didn’t seem to do it with guys as much. They’d talk about them, but never as viciously, and they wouldn’t treat guys they didn’t like with the same friendliness and helpfulness they showed her.
That’s what unnerved me so much. It’s one thing to see another person in a better light because you find them attractive, it’s something completely different to find them attractive, treat them like they’re attractive, but still believe that they’re insipid, annoying, and completely deserving of being slandered behind their back. And I do find that to be the case with guys sometimes, in fiction and in real life – they can want a girl without truly liking her, to a much greater extent and frequency than girls seem to do (openly at least).
@AB:
And that is precisely the kind of thing that I’m talking about, as well. (To clarify one point: when it came to the “not a guy that way” comments and such, it didn’t come off as invalidating me as a male qua male. It was more along the lines of “you’re not one of the ones that we’re talking about.”) It occurred to me, after posting the comment, that I hadn’t made the other parts explicit, but I figured that they could have been inferred from the closing words.
So I’m not at all arguing against what you’re describing. I’m just saying (as Xakudo did) that, even extended to those additional elements, it seems to be an aspect of general human behavior, not something that’s sex- or gender-specific.
Just to add one thing:
There was absolutely no impression that they did that to avoid causing hurt. It was much more along the lines of, say, “I really can’t stand gay guys. Except for [X], of course. But [X] doesn’t act like he’s gay.”
Which I’ve also heard, being someone who doesn’t just get involved with women. It wasn’t decency in that case, and it isn’t in this one, either.
@Cessen:
It’s more that the two are contradictory. If nice=kind as most people seem to assume, you can’t really be nice because you’re expecting a reward for it, because then it’s not niceness, it’s selfishness (which is completely legitimate as long as you’re not hurting anyone by it, but shouldn’t be confused with altruism). So women being blamed for not wanting nice guys is actually a pretty good indication that they do want nice guys, because if they wanted jerks, the complainers would be getting laid all the time.
Actually, I was referring to how I feel about myself when I want a cute guy to notice me, but don’t have the nerve to approach him. Perhaps I should have made it clear that, although this conversation began as being about men, the tactics in question are really quite universal, but I thought it would be obvious. It’s a bit like that Heartless Bitches quote. Even though HB are, if anything, harder on women, it was immediately taken as a shaming tactic used only against men.
Sorry, but sometimes a word like coward is just a word, not a part of some gigantic misandrist conspiracy. And if you feel it’s more acceptable to speak of a lack of traditionally male qualities as something negative, it might just be because our patriarchal forefathers defined almost every admirable character trait as being masculine in the first place.
I think you need to first and foremost be aware of it. Most personal relations are like sex to some degree (probably because sex is usually some kind of personal relation). If you only want a one-night-stand, but have reason to suspect your partner might want some closer personal commitment, you have a duty to make it clear to your partner what you’re after and what you’re offering. And if you want a long-term relationship, but have reason to suspect your partner is looking for casual sex with no commitments, you shouldn’t expect or demand anything more.
The same goes for other kinds of relationships. I have a limited amount of energy to make friends, and no need of lovers, so making me spend that energy on developing a relationship to you without making it clear that I’ll lose you the moment you get a girlfriend, or figure out that I wont be one for you, is hurting me. In the same way, if someone has a crush on you and you use it to make them do and buy stuff for you, with no intention of ever returning their affections, you need to inform that person that they have no chance for a romantic relationship.
And yes, these things can get confusing. Someone might think that a person doing them a favour is merely doing it as a friend, whereas the person doing the favour sees it as way of courting, which can end up with both parties feeling exploited. And sometimes it’s not the best idea to have a conversation about your intentions shortly after meeting someone. Perhaps you have a crush on someone, but want to get to know them better before deciding whether or not to act on it, and that’s perfectly legitimate.
But the main thing for me is that people acknowledge it. Many guys talk so much about ‘teases’ that I feel the need to make it clear that it goes both ways, because most men (and people in general) really don’t make their sexual intentions that obvious. While our culture expects people to get it, it wont always happen – there are a ton of jokes about women being invited into a man’s home to see his stamp collection, only to be dumbstruck when it turns out he actually wanted them to see his stamp collection, indicating that they expected something else, but there are girls who will assume that ‘stamp collection’ just means ‘stamp collection’ (and most come-ons are much subtler than that).
Infra:
Yeah, that’s interesting. I got both as well, and from different people, at different times. Or at least the focus was different, depending.
Putting media influences aside for a moment (they do matter, but not as much as people I know telling me things):
I got the “women want nice, sensitive, respectful men who treat them right” message primarily earlier in my life, and primarily from older women (I suspect in an attempt to mold me).
I got the “women go for bad boys” message later on in college, primarily from other men.
And there’s also the whole “but the nice guy wins out in the end, for the long-haul, even if women mess around with the bad boys first” thing. Which I think I’ve heard from just about everyone, since then. And it’s kind of a merging of the two messages.
@infra:
No, you misunderstand. They weren’t talking about girls, they were talking about her. As a person. They didn’t say I was different than other girls, they answered in the negative when I asked if they spoke that way about me when I wasn’t there. They weren’t generalising about women, they weren’t making claims about how women are, and while the way they treated her probably had everything to do with her sex (and theirs), none of them ever made a point of it. They just didn’t like her (and I fully understand that because I didn’t like her either), but many of them still made a point out of being gallant and genial to her face.
The situations have practically nothing to do with each other. If you want my opinion, the women you spoke to, while rude and possibly sexist, showed a level of self-insight and consideration unprecedented in almost all male social circles I’ve been in. I much prefer that sort of directness to what I’m usually confronted with.
@AB
I’ve also heard that men prefer blondes, but I have yet to hear anyone complain “I bleached my hair, and guys still don’t want to date me, they must have lied to me!”.
I’ve heard that and some effective equivalents. Not nearly as often, of course. It was at the level of complaining I’m saying is acceptable: “What the hell? I thought men liked blondes/tanned women/skinny women/women with big boobs.” and moving on, kind of like I find “What the hell is with all this trouble; I thought women liked nice guys?” acceptable so long as you move on.
And I do think men can be nice for the sake of being nice while still expecting it to pay off as far as women are concerned. The difference is in being nice because you think niceness is a good thing and expecting more dating success as a side benefit, and in acting nice for the sake of the dating success. (Analogy: I’m working out for the sake of health and capability, but I’d also like to look more attractive, and if I still look the same a year in as when I started, I’ll be pretty peeved but keep doing it because appearance wasn’t the ultimate goal I was going after.)
@AB:
Considering that you’re talking about a specific situation and I’m talking about a group of experiences, differences in the description are to be expected. That doesn’t change the fact that what you’re talking about, I’ve experienced, with women and with men. That includes the clarifications that you’ve made. I don’t see why that would be such an unlikely possibility to consider.
As I indicated above, the experiences weren’t that different from ones that were token-good-fag homophobic. That’s hardly an example of self-insight and consideration. It’s quite possible that they were unprecedented, in those terms, in comparison with the all-male social circles that you’ve been in, but that doesn’t change their blatantly stereotyped and prejudicial character.
Like I wrote, I’m not in any way challenging the validity of your experience. I don’t see why that same courtesy couldn’t be extended from your end.
AB said:
This claim relies on way too many linguistic presuppositions.
1. “Should”
Not all self-identified “nice guys” who complain about their lack of romantic success, or about women’s preferences, feel that women “should” behave differently. But even if they do, “should” can mean a bunch of things:
- The prescriptive “should”: this is the you are using. It would be fair to say that a guy using this sort of should about women’s choices is being entitled.
- The descriptive “should”: “it should rain tomorrow”. If it doesn’t, you might be confused or frustrated… but you aren’t mad at the weather or feel that you are “entitled” to rain. Plenty of guys have the exact same attitude towards women’s choices in men.
- The instrumental “should”: “you should do X if you want result Y.” A man might feel that women “should” make different choices in men not because of entitlement to fulfill his preferences, but in order to fulfill her preferences (or what he has been told to believe that her preferences are).
2. “Getting laid”. As others have observed, the complaints of self-identified “nice guys” are not merely about sex.
3. “Nice”
Your conceptualization is pretty close to mine:
In my view, what self-identified “nice guys” mean by “nice” is some combination of Agreeableness, altruism, empathy, ethics, and cooperativeness. As you point out, altruism is a tricky concept:
This is a false dichotomy of being nice to help other people, and being nice for some other end or reward. You can being doing both at the same time.
According to some definitions of “altruism,” it must be “unselfish.” Under that definition, are self-identified “nice guys” who engage in behavior that benefits women being “altruistic” or not?
I think it’s quite possible. Personally, when I identified as a “nice guy,” I would just suddenly get an urge to do helpful things for women I was attracted to. It felt instinctual, rather than goal-oriented. I wasn’t expecting that she should give me anything in return.
I do think that some self-identified “nice guys” engage in benevolent behavior towards women not just to help them, but also to attract them (because such behavior is believed to be attractive). If attracting her is partly a “selfish” motive, then is the behavior truly altruistic? That really depends on definition. By the definition of altruism used by biologists (“an organism is said to behave altruistically when its behaviour benefits other organisms, at a cost to itself”), that behavior is still altruistic.
It is possible for a man to be a “nice guy” in the sense of agreeableness, empathy, ethics, cooperativeness, and altruism (at least, under some definitions) who complains of lack of success with women… yet his complaint does not imply that he is “not actually nice” in that sense of “niceness.”
Are there some self-identified “nice guys” who complain about their lack of success with women in a way that contradicts one or more of the elements of “niceness”? Sure. But I think we should be careful to avoid making the fundamental attribution error when judging people complaining of romantic difficulties, because people of all genders are known to have trouble handling it gracefully… but that doesn’t necessarily make them bad people in general.
AB said:
I think you’ve got a valid beef, here. Even if most men wouldn’t do this, there is a nontrivial percentage who might (I’m not sure of the percentage of women who do this, but that’s a different question). I do think it’s a reasonable concern when investing time and energy in a friendship with a guy. Perhaps there are ways to test for genuine platonic compatibility and shared interests that will last (a) him getting a girlfriend, or (b) you rejecting him.
@AB:
This seems to hark back to the whole women-as-children thing.
It also reminds me, yet again, of something that Typhonblue said way back when. She mentioned something about women being denied the consequences of their actions, and how that is harmful to women’s personal growth. In this case, regardless of how a woman behaves (you vs this other woman), they are still treated deferentially. (Although, as you note, this also relates to physical attractiveness, to a degree.)
First, ditto to what Hugh said.
But also, you’re analyzing these guys like they are static, non-changing people. People aren’t static beings, and you can’t analyze them as if they are (well, you can, but it’s not useful). People can change and become embittered with experience (especially if they don’t attribute the causes of the experience properly). You have to think about them as being on a timeline.
For example, a guy that starts out as a genuine good guy, but that doesn’t know how to read interest cues from women or how to express interest himself, could very well become very frustrated and embittered over time. And that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a genuinely good guy when he had the experiences he later rants about.
Now, arguably, a person that is susceptible to frustration and subsequent embitterment–especially when coupled with self-serving bogus explanations–isn’t a “good person”. But, personally, I think that bar is pretty freakin’ high, and I doubt anyone on this thread would meet it (myself absolutely included).
Indeed. My apologies for mis-attributing that attitude to you. It is a common attitude, though.
Also note that “coward” is a pejorative, and one that AFAIK and IME is more typically applied to men.
Along with almost every negative, deplorable one (if we’re going to be hyperbolic…).
I agree with this, sure.
But it’s interesting, because I think a lot of the complaining Nice Guy(tm) types would agree as well, and actually view it as a vindication of their complaints. In fact, I suspect this is actually the heart of the Nice Gut(tm) complaint, but due to cultural conditioning and lacking eloquence (e.g. highlighting only the part that’s ‘missing’, rather than the parts that are already present) it often comes out as a complaint about lack of sex.
To be clear, I don’t think these guys are justified in their complaints (at least not with regard to individual women; I think there are valid complaints about cultural norms of masculine attractiveness, just as there are valid complaints about cultural norms for feminine attractiveness). If I wasn’t clear about that before, I apologize.
Honestly, it’s starting to sound to me like a lot (not all) of these Nice Guy(tm) situations are just big misunderstandings. The guy starts hanging out with the gal so he can get to know her so that he won’t be one of those “just going after her because of her looks” guys (or whatever other reason), and then the gal takes that as a signal of wanting to start a friendship and starts “relying” on the guy (as you put it), and the guy takes this “intimacy” as a positive sign that things might be going somewhere and sticks around, but eventually when it becomes clear that she just wants to be friends he gets frustrated and leaves.
And both people end up feeling hurt, because there was no explicit communication about intent from either side.
I think the guy is clearly in the wrong here about how he interprets the situation (just as any girl would be with the roles flipped). But given that he is misinterpreting, it’s easy to see how he could feel used and become frustrated and embittered over time.
AB,
Yeah, that’s clearly all “social justice” requires ;)
You’re kidding, right? Somone who hasn’t read Wollstonecraft and de Beauvoir alongside Kant and Plato is “dehumanizing women” instead of just not aware of female contributions to human knowledge? Seriously.
That depends on the environment. Try kindergarten teachers, or primary school teachers, etc, where male is decidedly not the norm. Now if you want to get into a discussion about why there’s a gender-based division of labour and a glass ceiling of some sort, that’s a totally valid discussion, but one consider as a cultural consequence of the more fundamental gender dynamics we’re trying to understand here.
While I would say that the shorthand is a bit unfair, I would maintain that this answer was given because it *is* the other side of the equation you’re not looking at.
I don’t understand your point, sorry. If women are also interested in sex as such and men are also interested in romantic interactions, and if the incompatibility is cultural (“end up like that”) then how is that different from what I’ve said way up in the thread?
OK, I think I’m getting closer to understanding what you’re trying to convey. Even though I personally had a lot of issues with my body, and more and more guys are getting that kind of problem, I do agree that appearing visually attractive is a “requirement” that falls disproportionally on women. I’m not sure the “fat”-shaming issues falls into the sexual shaming realm as much as it falls into the religious shaming realm (“gluttony”), altough I think I agree that fat women will suffer more from it than fat men, and that may well be related to the fact that they experience a sort of sexual invisibility that other women do not experience and which they will as such not only experience as painful (like men, for whom sexual invisibility is the default condition) but possibly also as some sort of individual failure on their own part.
Interestingly, I’ve had a discussion about something similar with my best female friend earlier today, when we talked about my sister’s body shape, her dating prospects and how my gaining 10kg after an injury last Summer really had no subjectively measurable effect on my ability to attract women. Interestingly, she maintained that it wouldn’t have any effect for women either, and I sort of made your argument ;)
Yes. To the extent that socially unskilled men are able to correct their behaviour and become more attractive to women, and women do not have that possibility because the male attraction is more visual than female attraction, then women who have not been lucky in the genetic lottery do have it worse… and if cultural norms add insult to injury by, however implicitly, suggesting it was their own fault, then that is something that needs to change.
What I’m not sure about is whether it’s possible to come up with an “objectified” measure of the “neutral” treatment you’d like, because whatever perception you will have of the way others treat you it will be inevitably be filtered by your current beliefs, interpretation schemes and confirmation bias. Maybe what you consider as the “failed sex object” treatment is seen as neutral/baseline nice behaviour by most other people. It’s really a scaling problem. You’re suggesting an ordinal scale but the behaviour probably can only be measured nominally.
“So when guys complain that being nice and doing friendly things haven’t gotten them any sex, they’re basically discounting her friendship.”
No, if they were merely pretending, then they’re discounting *THEIR OWN* friendhsip. It will still suck, of course.
Nonononono. That’s not what the whole nice guy friend thing is about. It’s about guys who probably already have trouble expressing themselves sexually who then hear and internalize sexual shaming and hear female statements about men only being interested in them sexually. Of course *they* still want sex but they figure that behaving asexually is a superior strategy for them in the “emotions vs. sex” paradigm who are then pissed off that being non-sexual doesn’t usually lead to sex.
“And that’s sort of the point I made earlier. There is a perception, true or not, that most men want women, but don’t necessarily care for them, but that the reverse rarely happens.”
Again – if your point is that women and men are pleasure incompatible and merely trading partners (as you mention again in your reply to AllSaintsDay (“Because women are a reward for men’s behaviour”), then this whole discussion seems sort of pointless, because then there’s nothing we can do about it by understanding each other better, in that case we should go to our respective corners and prepare for the next round…
Also – because it just happened and loosely relates to the “emotions for sex paradigm”, and because I’m rarely able to give dating advice to women ;): If you’re having a fun and flirty conversation with someone you *just* met who also thinks you’re having a fun and flirty conversation, and who just asked for your facebook contact info after you suggested getting coffee sometime, don’t tell your female friend too loudly that you’re trying to “sell yourself”, don’t immediately mention all your emotional baggage – how hard your last breakup was, that you are some sort of a clingy person (“… but also sexy!”) -, and *don’t* ever start talking about how desperate you are for a *real* relationship to a guy you met about 30 minutes ago unless you are also desperate to make said guy question if he should ever actually use your contact info… such (unintentional?) honesty may be considerate, on some level, but it’s probably not particularly helpful…
AB,
I feel like your point is less about the talk, and more about the allowing into the social circle. That is, you’re using the bad-mouthing as confirmation/evidence that the woman didn’t fit in the group, rather than holding it up as the behaviour in question.
Am I interpreting correctly?
If so, I think I’d agree that it seems to happen far more with women in mostly male groupings than the reverse.
Hey AB, bet you’ll like this one:
http://www.realadultsex.com/archives/2011/02/prison-rape-reform-heads-anyone-whos-ever-typed-men-get-raped-too-comments-feminist
Clarisse,
thanks, interesting link (had a brief look at the report)…
@Clarisse (from the linked article):
Heh heh. Indeed.
Thanks for the heads up, btw. Had no idea this existed.
@AB:
Thinking over it a bit, I should clarify what I wrote in #68: the part of your comment that I quoted was specifically what I observed in the treatment of attractive men (one of the most notable was one of the best singers at karaoke night), who would be treated extremely well when they were present but ripped to shreds, as far as comments about them as people were concerned, when they weren’t around. I didn’t ask whether or not they specifically talked about me that way when I wasn’t there, because that kind of thing generally doesn’t concern me; but when I asked if it was a regular thing, I was specifically singled out as an exception.
The way that I was treated in the group was usually in the same way, but sometimes not up to the same level of kindness, etc., as those men were. Those events were almost line for line like what you wrote in #67.
So, as I wrote, “that is precisely the kind of thing that I’m talking about, as well.”
The main difference, if there is one, seems to be that after the personal attacks wound up, they were rapidly (and almost always) accompanied by statements about men as a group.
… and, accordingly, the exception was phrased in terms of men as a group, too.
Which, I suspect, had to do with the assumption that I was with a group of women because I didn’t want to be, couldn’t be, or shouldn’t be, with a group of men. As if my being involved in the group signified some kind of loyalty had been given, and that going back into the general category “men” would be tantamount to a kind of betrayal.
In fact… once I started hanging out with larger groups of men, after that, I was excluded, and didn’t get back in.
@Hugh Ristik
You have a point there. I guess that for me, there’s very little separating that sort of advise from all the other moralising drivel about potential dangers you tend to hear as a girl. I think the myth of female frailty (http://hugoschwyzer.net/2009/02/09/one-mistake-will-not-ruin-your-life-thoughts-on-onesies-and-the-myth-of-female-frailty/) that Hugo Schwyzer talks about is often applied, and the message that comes across is “as a woman, getting a good man who will take of you and not abuse you should be your first priority – things like fun and passion are only affordable priorities if you’re male”.
And they usually don’t have them. Seriously, our culture is so obsessed with the idea that a guy who doesn’t get sex is just a victim of women’s bad taste that people will do everything to try to make unsuccessful guys appear sympathetic. Almost any guy can take on the label of Nice Guy as long as he’s sufficiently unattractive, but it’s almost impossible for guys who’re getting laid to be accepted as one.
This was the second link when I googled ‘nice guys bad boys’ (the first link promised magical tricks to attract hot women by not being nice): http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=5197531&page=1
Notice how their poster ‘stereotypical bad boy’ says that he’s honest to the girls he hook up with, and yet the article gleefully goes on about how guys like him are using deceit to get women. And like pretty much every article on the subject, they conflate things like extroversion and risk-taking with ‘dark traits’, despite said traits being the hallmark of most of the world’s humanitarian heroes.
When Clarisse talks about not demonising men who’re open about their sexual needs, people seem to be all up in arms about feminism, but feminism isn’t the main culprit in this. Men, PUAs, and MRAs are. Because they, like the article above, tend to conflate guys who’re interested deep, lasting monogamous relationships with guys who’re good people, and guys who just want sex with guys who’re bad people, and then use bogus studies to back up their claim, wilfully conflating “guys who’re specifically interested in many sexual partners and who’re outgoing and willing to take risks to get them, end up with more sexual partners than guys who mainly interacts with women on a platonic basis while hoping to attract the princess of their dreams” with “Guys with no morals or empathy are more successful with women because women like jerks”.
When people do that, it sends a very powerful signal: Women are not interested in casual sex because sex is not supposed to be enjoyed by women for its own sake, men who pursue women with the intent on engaging in casual sex are amoral bad boys (because sex is bad, at least for women), and women who have sex with the aforementioned bad boys are stupid twits who don’t know what’s good for them. If women are constantly told that the guy who honestly just wants to fuck them is being a bad boy who’re abusing them, how can they not end up viewing male sexuality as toxic?
That line helped me clarify something I’ve been trying to say for a while. I don’t think getting the urge to do nice things to the person you’re interested in marks you as nice. It marks you as someone who will go to certain lengths to please the object of your affection, but that’s about it. It’s not terribly impressive, and unless the woman is already attracted to you, it’s not even that flattering, because it just raises the question of how much she’s supposed to ‘allow’ you to do for her before you’re entitled to getting something back.
I once held a large birthday party for my friends and family, where I had invited primarily male friends. My father told me that during that party, he had walked up to the guys’ table and asked them if any of them would help him carry some cases of beer out from the basement. As he was speaking, one of my mother’s friends shouted to him to “put a name on”, i.e. to ask a specific guy instead of making a general inquiry, because young men would often shy away from helping if they could do so without directly saying no. I disagreed, and said that I could imagine several of my friends to be helpful, and I mentioned who those guys were.
My criteria for deciding this were the following: 1) The guy had to have enough initiative in him to step up by himself when he knew help was needed. 2) The guy had to be willing to help even if there was little prestige or chance to impress a girl in it (e.g. if a middle aged man asked him to help at a party with no girl in sight). And 3) The guy should help reliably, not just depending on whether or not he felt like it on a given day.
As I mentioned the guys who fitted those criteria, I realised those were all the guys who were either currently dating a girl, or frequently had sex, and I remarked “It’s amazing how being romantically involved with girls can make guys act that way”, to which my father answered “Or maybe they get romantically involved with girls because they act that way in the first place”. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), the group’s self-identified Nice Guy was not among the guys I predicted would help, but the resident Bad Boy was.
Regarding trashtalking in group
Are you sure the ingroup trash-talking is solely based on sexual attraction between men and women ?
I have heard my share of this and I am really tired of this, truth to be told. But I have always experienced this as some kind of ingroup vs outgroup instead of men vs women. Those groups are usually based on a common ground, be it that all members are nerds or man or students or co-workers. The trashtalking that starts sooner or later is then only directed outwards, towards people who are not members of this specific group.
Trashtalk is then directed towards a ‘common enemy’. A group of your co-workers might trashtalk the guys from the marketing department, the nerds trashtalk sports junkies and men trashtalk women.
And it seems to me, that this trashtalking serves some kind of bonding to the group, like, i don’t know, reverse peer pressure ? They may have something against a very specific kind of outgroup people, but they hold this grudge together as if shoving others from your group away makes the group stand better together. You know, just like howling wolves.
Regarding nice guys
I have heard nice guys complaining that they are not getting rewarded for their nice behaviour. But I have also heard nice guys complaining that others are getting rewarded for their not so nice behaviour.
And I think this is something that begs to differ, because there are men out there that display behaviour that is not only inappropriate but inherently harmful. I can give you an example. A couple of days ago 2 guys i know on an after-exam party introduced me to the ‘rule of three’.
The rule of three says that when you introduce yourself to a woman and she tells you to leave her alone that she doesn’t actually mean it until she said it three times.
Now, is this ‘nice’ behaviour ? No it isn’t.
Are these guys being ‘rewarded’ for their not so nice behavior ? Yes, they are.
Should they be rewarded for it ?
@Tim:
Personally: not necessarily between men and women, but I do think that this kind of two-facedness occurs more often when it involves someone considered sexually attractive. I’ve seen the same dynamics happen in gay, bi and lesbian circles; it’s just that with het dynamics, it’s been easier to spot.
With that in mind, I don’t think that it can be convincingly explained by ingroup/outgroup or common enemy dynamics. Those can be associated with it, certainly; but I don’t think that they’re necessarily involved.
@Cessen:
This definitely rings a bell with me. Though I’d say that women are also treated harshly in certain contexts, because they’re often perceived as less competent, and the good treatment they get in relation to their look is often deceptive. I’m reminded of a girl who was the most popular kid in primary school and ruled the class. Her name was Caroline, and she was actually a pretty cool person, but her status in the class made everybody want to be her friend.
The cycle in the class was as followed: Caroline would have a couple of girls as her current closets friends (perhaps one primary and one who tagged along), and frequently a couple of boys too, and they would decide who was a valid target for bullying, be they girls or boys. Then the friends would drift apart, Caroline would get a new posse, and the formerly popular girls would bitch about her behind her back, without daring an open rebellion, until she started hanging out with them again, etc., etc..
There were a few attempted rebellions, where the other girls got together and decided to freeze Caroline out and end her reign for good. They usually lasted a couple of hours after which the leaders of the rebellion could be seen socialising with Caroline themselves, vying for a share of her position. When Caroline and her parents moved to England for half a year, all people’s pent-up frustration with her took over and she became a valid target for all sorts of slander. When she came home, a new alpha had taken her place, but the two of them usually got along pretty well and she regained some of her former status (I’m not sure how much she was even aware she had lost it, though I’m told she had a rough time in England and that might have shaken her faith in herself).
I moved to a different school, but I later heard that the girls had gotten fed up with Caroline and made good of their former plans. At the age of 15, Caroline had to change school after the girls in the class had systematically bullied her for months, with the specific goal of breaking her down to get rid of her. And while she had certainly been a bully, I could help feeling sorry for her, because she’d only (ab)used a popularity which was thrust upon her, which almost anyone would have done, and she’d paid dearly for it without even knowing why.
I see the girl in my example as being somewhat similar. Some of the guys had a crush on her, the alpha took a shine to her, and thus, she gained a certain status. Because of that status, which had little to do with her as a person, she was treated a certain way which, again, had little to do with her as a person. But this had the side-effect if causing the guys who never liked her in the first place, the guys who got tired of her, and the guys who failed at getting on her good side, to all become doubly resentful towards her.
And because she had never really been respected in the group, even the guys who liked her had no issues when others talked about her stupidity and incompetence behind her back, except perhaps the guy who ended up dating her. She was never given any incentive to improve, or any clue about which direction she should improve in, and as her special status began to wane, all the pent-up resentment was slung in her face without her having any chance to deflect it.
When my mother (I sometime borrowed the lower floor in my parents’ house for movie nights, parties, and geekery, so they got to observe the group) remarked that she was like the group’s scapegoat, the one everybody felt entitled to pick on, I was quite surprised because I’d had this image of her as a spoiled princess, and I realised that for a long time, she had actually been treated pretty horribly. People talked down to her, got annoyed with her over things they’d never been (openly) bothered by before, ignored her, made fun of her, etc.. So she still got all the negative reactions her behaviour had called for, she just got them at a time when she had no chance of avoiding it or knowing what was happening.
This OKCupid article was posted in the earlier incarnation of this thread, but I think it deserves a second look in light of this discussion:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-mathematics-of-beauty/
@Cessen:
I think that, in order to come to the conclusion most Nice Guys come to, there must have been something wrong with their relationship to women in the first place. A behaviour motivated by self-loathing can still be sexist, and in this case, the notion of toxic male sexuality is also demeaning to women because it suggests that they’re somehow defiling themselves through sex. Women who choose to have casual sex with handsome and exiting men (like some men choose to to do with pretty and exiting women) are either poor victims to be pitied, or horrible abominations who’re directly to blame for men’s abusive behaviour.
That’s probably true, though with the exception of groups which consist mostly of men (such as soldiers), I don’t know how big the difference is. But I see no reason for why a girl who’s afraid of approaching a guy wouldn’t think of herself as a coward (“a person who shrinks from or avoids danger, pain, or difficulty”).
That’s pretty accurate. I just hear so much about women being teases, sending false signals, giving false hope, being dishonest about what they want, rewarding bad behaviour, etc., that I’m wondering how much attention is paid to the opposite, guys sending false signals (of platonic interest), giving false hope (of emotional intimacy), being dishonest about what they want (such as not owning up to their sexual interest), rewarding bad behaviour (by treating girls who play hard to get better), etc..
“As I mentioned the guys who fitted those criteria, I realised those were all the guys who were either currently dating a girl, or frequently had sex, and I remarked “It’s amazing how being romantically involved with girls can make guys act that way”, to which my father answered “Or maybe they get romantically involved with girls because they act that way in the first place”. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), the group’s self-identified Nice Guy was not among the guys I predicted would help, but the resident Bad Boy was.”
Sorry AB, but this anecdote sounds like you’re implying that romantically unsuccessful guys are bad persons. The nicest guy I know, a relative of mine, was remarkably romantically unsuccessful until he got married in his late 30s. The reason for his lack of success was certainly not that he pretended to be nice only to get laid. He is a rather introverted and extremely modest person, for example he never uses his academic accomplishments, he has a PhD, to impress other people. Added to this, he also doesn’t look very manly. I’m not sure if he would call himself a nice guy, but a lot of his behavior fits the criteria. But the difference is that he’s a genuinely nice guy, who’s nice to all people. As I mentioned, he’s married now to a rather non gender-typical woman and a devoted father of a small boy.
My question is how can you distinguish genuine niceness from fake niceness? I for one can’t. If niceness is a sign of weakness no matter what, PUAs like Rossy are right after all. I just read an excerpt of Rossies advice at the man boobz blog. Basically he’s saying men should behave like complete assholes to women they are attracted to. I don’t want this to be true, but perhaps he’s rudimentary right.
At the very least, it is a lot easier to not send false signals of platonic interest and false hope of emotional intimacy if you’re being a complete asshole.
“My question is how can you distinguish genuine niceness from fake niceness? I for one can’t.”
I’d say essentially the difference is how much it relies on external reward. If I act nice when I see benefit for me in it (in this conversation, sex or relationship), but not when my only possible reward is “because I like being nice,” it’s not genuine niceness. Even if that’s not a difference you can use to diagnose a real-world situation, it’s one we can apply to hypothetical “What if a guy does X for reason Y? Is he being nice or Nice?”
That said, I’d find it very strange for a genuinely nice person to not have a natural tendency to be even nicer to someone they’re attracted to.
@Thomas
I implied no such thing, and I don’t know where you got that idea. I put up some criteria, and remarked that guys who fitted those criteria seemed to have an easier time getting romantically involved with women. I never said those criteria were the one and only definition of a good person, or that everyone in the world who fitted them would be romantically involved, though I will say that they’re probably a good indication of a person’s successfulness in communicating their niceness to the world, as opposed to merely earning the label of Nice Guy (which is primarily done by being shy, indirect, and sexually unattractive).
It’s a bit like intelligence. I know quite a few guys with high IQs (it tends to come with being a geek), but several of them are not able to properly use it in conversations with others. They might be able to talk about some pretty complicated stuff, but they’re not able to make themselves understood. At best, they’ll come across as too intelligent for normal people to relate to (possibly making them feel inferior), but mostly, they’ll just come across as pretentious, boring, ignorant, and, ironically, stupid. And some of them actually are stupid (it’s entirely possible to have a talent for IQ tests without being smart), but believe their high IQ makes everything they say both interesting and correct, causing them to never improve.
If you’re not able to communicate your niceness, it’s like wearing a burqa. Even if you’re the most beautiful person underneath, it wont show. If you’re the type who, when noticing that everybody else is ignoring a person who needs help, will have to fight to break out of the group and draw attention to yourself by helping, and someone else ends up beating you to it, people are not going to see your struggles, they’re just going to see you not helping.
In terms of attraction, it doesn’t matter. I could be totally wrong in thinking that the Bad Boy is helpful and the Nice Guy is not, but the point is that the Bad Boy managed to give me the impression that he would be the type to help, and the Nice Guy didn’t. I have some criteria, and especially the parts about consistency and being helpful even when there’s no girl to impress have been very useful, but to be honest, I don’t really care that much any more.
I might be a woman, but I’m not a prostitute. I get romantically involved with guys for my sake, not anyone else’s. Making my sexuality into an obligation rather than something to be enjoyed almost left me frigid, and I’m not going to risk that again just because a bunch of Nice Guys feel entitled to my pussy. If a guy makes me feel good, here and now, then that’s enough. And if he doesn’t make me feel good, I don’t have any obligation to try and look behind any lack of social skills to figure out if he’s really a good person deep inside, because the fact of the matter is that I don’t feel good being with him.
If fake niceness works, then it works. If it doesn’t, then it doesn’t. I don’t have a duty to decide if it’s fake or real before being attracted to it, any more than you have a duty to figure out if a woman’s breasts are made of silicone before deciding if you’re supposed to want to touch them. Guys who manage to communicate to me (rightly or not, though I’ve become pretty apt at getting it right, especially where my male friends are concerned) that they’re helpful, supportive, trustworthy, etc., are much more likely to be sexually attractive to me. Guys who don’t manage this, regardless of whether they’re really nice inside, will usually have to look like models before I’ll give them a second look.
I have an obligation to not treat the guys I’m with like shit. I have an obligation to make sure I’m not pressuring them into something they don’t want, take advantage of them when they’re vulnerable, or making promises I don’t intend to keep, directly or through my actions. I have an obligation not to act like Rossy, not just for the sake of the guys, but because I’m better than that.
That’s the extent of it, and to be honest, it’s more than what most guys have done for me. I don’t have an obligation to try to figure out if the guys I’m with are worthy of me, and I don’t have an obligation to let myself get racked by guilt because guys who came across as unsympathetic to me might be really nice inside, unless I actually treated said guys like shit (and not having sex with them doesn’t count).
@Thomas:
Fake niceness tends to correlate with reactive and performative niceness, which goes to what AB’s been saying. Faking something has little purpose when there’s no audience around to see it (and, on top of that, the individual has to recognize that the audience is present, which they don’t always do). It isn’t easy to spot in any given instance, but it becomes evident through pattern. Certain triggers, certain circumstances, inconsistencies, etc.
My experience, anyway. YMMV.
“Making my sexuality into an obligation rather than something to be enjoyed almost left me frigid, and I’m not going to risk that again just because a bunch of Nice Guys feel entitled to my pussy.”
If someone feels entitled to sex with any one person, they’re dead wrong, and feeling entitled to there being sex available somewhere is less wrong, but still very wrong. But I think that a nontrivial portion of this issue is outside of those two.
From my experiences, there’s some variant of toxic male sexuality that produces what is essentially the opposite incorrectly inferred obligation. A man with good intentions is aware that a woman, whom he genuinely likes and is interested in sexually, is sick of men only being interested in her sexually, so he feels an obligation to suppress his interest. (Or he is aware that women in general tend to be sick of men always viewing them sexually, and never tries because whichever woman he’s thinking of has probably already had to fend off twenty billion advances that day, and he’d feel like shit if he added onto that.) As usual, feeling pressured to have sex is worse than feeling pressured to not have sex, but the latter is still something that needs to be gotten rid of.
Sam,
It’s better than the alternative “Sexism doesn’t exist any more, 95 of the 100 women here just happened to be a waste of space, and it’s certainly not that I’m prejudged in any way”.
Where did I say anything about that? I haven’t even read Wollstonecraft and de Beauvoir, I’m not an established feminist, remember? I’m talking about casually ignoring women’s viewpoints, talking over them, interrupting them, dismissing them, etc.
They might not be the norm, but they’re still often treated that way. I read a report on women in male-dominated workplaces (police officers, fire-fighters, soldiers) and men in female-dominated workplaces (kindergarten teachers, nurses), and there were some pretty clear contrasts. The women were expected to prove themselves, and were considered incompetent until proven otherwise. They often deliberately avoided seeking out other women in order to make a female support-network, because they feared it would be considered a failure to adapt on their part, and make them isolated from the men. But they were often met with admiration when people heard what they did for a living.
The men were assumed to be competent until proven otherwise. Whereas the women would often be told to stay away from certain areas because they weren’t good enough/ought to be protected, the men were frequently seen as a resource and asked to assist in areas where men were considered more skilled. They had no fear of forming networks, and their colleagues respected that they would need time off from ‘the henhouse’. But on the other hand, outsiders often looked down on them because of their jobs, and assumed they were only doing it temporarily.
My boyfriend used to work in a children’s institution, and he confirmed that men were pretty much immediately met with open arms there, and a male friend of mine who works at an old folks’ home uses the term ‘henhouse’ himself and talks openly about his need to distance himself from the women there, so I’ll wager that at least half of the report wasn’t completely inaccurate. While a lot of it is probably connected to status (the men are high-status individuals in low-status jobs, and the women are low-status individuals in high-status jobs), it still seems like people are more OK with a man standing out among women than vice-versa.
I think there are at least two sorts of fat-shaming for women. One is the shame over not being thin, which even healthy women are subjected to. It’s more frequently caused by other women than by men, and failing to live up to it doesn’t damage a woman’s sexual appeal (normal women might lack confidence compared to thin women, but this is made up for by many men tending to prefer curvier women). I’d say it’s mostly a moral (possibly religious) shaming, and strongly linked to a perceived lack of self-control. The other is the shame over actually being overweight, to the point where it’s starting to become less attractive to most men. It’s a mixture of sexual shaming, feeling inadequate, and being perceived as deformed and disgusting, and men are definitely the prime contributors to it.
Again you assume that sexism (against women) doesn’t exist, and that men aren’t treated any better or taken any more seriously in non-sexual contexts. That’s part of why I feel men are lucky sometimes, because people who’re sexist against them will usually be much more open about it, which means it can be talked about, whereas sexism against women will be something along the lines of “I’m not a sexist, I just think it’s obvious that men are inherently better at math, science, and logical thinking, just look at how most scientists are male…… How I know most scientists are not male because of sexism against women? Well, that would be idiotic, this is the 21st century, if a woman wants to become a scientist she has every opportunity, it’s not like anyone would assume she’s inherently less competent just because she’s a woman”.
I wasn’t suggesting that. I was suggesting that women’s role in society have been defined by their relationship to men, especially as objects of sexual desire (though motherhood is a big one too), and their worth as people has come to be defined by how well they perform their role in society, i.e. how sexy they are. Men have a bit of it too, but they’re not tied down quite as much, and their role in society is much bigger and more diverse.
Of course it would be hard, but it’s important to notice that the baseline is not neutrality. Men and women are not treated identically, period. It has been proven time and again that the same action will be ascribed a different meaning and quality depending on the sex of the person doing it. But if I was to ascribe values to it, I would say that, though exceptions exist, men’s baseline reaction to the average, sexually uninteresting woman (and to some extent, even women’s reaction to the average, sexually uninteresting woman) is numerically lower than their baseline reaction to the average, sexually uninteresting man, but that sexual appeal can add to that.
Perhaps discounting is the wrong word. Finding value might be a better expression. He’s assuming that his (pretense of) friendship has a higher value to her than her friendship has to him. And he’s right of course, but it still sucks.
I have said it repeatedly, I’m not talking about how women and men are, but how they’re perceived. When people complain about women’s alleged preference for bad boys over nice guys, there’s frequently an undertone of perceived injustice in it. An idea that since nice guys deserve women more, especially attractive women, more women should date nice guys. All I’m saying is that it’s hard to have a sexuality without strong selfish components, and that focussing on who you want is usually a much shorter path to horniness than focussing on who should have you.
When my nerd friends drool over Catwoman, they don’t stop to ask themselves if they’re encouraging bad behaviour. And when they hit on a woman because she looks confident, sexy, and out to get laid, they don’t worry about whether or not she’s a nice person unless she actually makes them uncomfortable. I think it would be great if women felt more free to do the same, and I believe that as long as they’re so often made to feel bad about their choices, that’s not likely to happen.
(I knew I couldn’t stay away too long.)
AB:
That’s part of why I feel men are lucky sometimes, because people who’re sexist against them will usually be much more open about it, which means it can be talked about,…
I can say that for myself I don’t feel the luck you speak of here. They might be more open about it but that rarely (in my experience at least) translate into making more accessible to conversation.
First off consider that there is a nontrivial number of people who will outright declare that there is no such thing as sexism against men (well more directly there is no such thing as female against male sexism). Getting past that you do have those that will (grudgingly) cop to “gender discrimination” against men and even then that might not get talked about much because it gets lost in the (and I’m thinking that whether this is intentional or not varies from person to person) storm of “women have it worse”. And from there you pretty much end up with the expectation that such things being regulated to the back burner so to speak.
AB,
just briefly. This -
“it still seems like people are more OK with a man standing out among women than vice-versa.”
- is, I think, very much related to whatever “essence” of masculinity there is. If you have a lot of time, check this very interesting article called “the origin of male dominance (on a radical feminist evolutionary scientist’s blog) -
http://www.reclusiveleftist.com/2006/05/07/the-origin-of-male-dominance
- and then a bit of conversation about it between a commenter named DanceDreaming and me in Clarisse’s manliness followup thread, between here
http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2009/12/09/manliness-and-feminism-the-followup/#comment-6643
and
http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2009/12/09/manliness-and-feminism-the-followup/#comment-6651
Tim:
I recall a female friend of mine back in college telling me that when a guy asks her out she always says no the first time, even if she’s interested. She said it was because she wants to make the guy work for it, or prove himself, or something like that. I remember being peeved at the time, but without being able to quite put my finger on why.
In retrospect (this was quite a long time ago), I wish I had said, “You do realize that you’re filtering out every single guy that respects ‘no’ for an answer, right?”
And to be clear, this was not some “bitchy” high-horse girl. She was actually a really good person that I was proud to call my friend. To the point that I was shocked that this is how she behaved when it came to dating.
Ironically, she came to me at some other point to complain about a guy that just wouldn’t leave her alone (not in a threatening way, just in an annoying-as-all-hell way). I was very sympathetic to her at the time, but in retrospect I probably should have been far less so.
@Xakudo:
Similar experiences, as well, though not of exactly the same kind.
One was with a woman that I’d met through a student ambassadorship program after high school, of which we were both members. We’d became intimate on three or four occasions, each of which would progress to a certain point, at which she’d say that she wanted to stop, and I’d stop. The next time, things would go a bit further, then she’d say that she wanted to stop, and I’d stop. She looked a bit upset after we’d stopped, each time, but didn’t tell me why until the last one.
“You give up too easily.”
We never interacted again after that.
@Xakudo and Infra
I really don’t know why people of both sides (I mean both the initiator and the reactor) feel the need to play games like this. Dating would be so much less frustating if people would just be straight forward.
@AB
People are not only more okay with men standing out, I would argue that it is at least partly of what men are supposed to and what the whole alpha male/masculinity thing is about. You are just one in a bunch of faceless dudes until you manage to stand out in a way that plays into old and false male stereotypes.
@AB
I agree with you, regarding communication of niceness. But it also worth noticing that successful communication of your niceness is just marketing. I have a friend, we were once best friends, but our friendship cooled down, significantly. He’s a very charming guy, fun to hang around with, popular with the ladies and with his buddies. I’ve helped him out several times, but never made a big fuss out of it or expected anything in return. When I moved to city were he was living I asked him if I could sleep two weeks at his apartment until my new apartment got free. He told me it’s fine, but the whole time I was staying with him I never felt really welcome. After that he used this favor as leverage in our friendship. Told everyone what a good person he is for letting me stay at his place and how he saved me from sleeping under the bridge. What he did not mention was that he spend half of his teenage years at my place, that I lent him money when he was totally broke, etc. For the people, who did not know the background story, I was beggar and he was a great, generous guy. Long story short, he’s very successful in communicating his niceness. But only after that incident I realized that he’s not really a friend I can count on.
All I’m saying is that it’s worth trying to look behind the curtain. I’m a rather superficial and judgmental person. When I reminisce I realize, that I often overlooked or misjudged good people, and only after I had to take some hits in my own life, I came to that conclusion.
Apart from that, I never suggested you should reward nice guys with sex. If you don’t feel attracted to them that’s totally fine. What bothers me about the whole nice guy discussion (not the discussion with you but rather the discussion on the gendersphere) is, that it feels like an attempt to police masculinity. The nice guy attempt to romance contains are great deal of feminine traits. Being passive, waiting till your love interest makes a move, etc. Usually, feminists point out that feminine traits in men are condemned, because of misogyny. For example, when the wimpy kid gets called a “faxxxx” in school. But with the whole nice guy narrative this is not the case, in spite of that it’s vastly popular. Maybe I’m misinterpreting the discussion, it’s just that I don’t know a single stereotypical nice guy, who manipulates women into having pity sex with him, in real life. But I know a couple shy, introverted guys, who only open up after you know them a little better and this goes for interaction with both men and women. A friend of mine from high school looks like a fashion model, he’s the tall, dark and handsome type, but was also very shy, especially around girls. His shyness was often mistaken for arrogance and there was also a rumor that he’s gay, because despite his exceptional good looks he never got a girlfriend. Of course shy guys are not good at picking up strange women. They want to get to know their potential partners first. When they feel safe they make a move, but often they need to be pushed out of their comfort zone, first.
BTW, there is also the opposite case, when women behave rather manly to initiate romance. I have a good female friend, who’s very forward and direct when it comes to romance and sex. She is sometimes downright inappropriate. For example she told me once how she hit very explicitly on her hot but married lecturer. The lecturer blushed and got bashful in front of the whole class. It didn’t even occur to her that her behavior was questionable. She has had a equally hard time finding a partner, because her directness was scaring away a lot of men.
On a personal note, I’m not invested in this topic, because I’m a nice guy, myself. I was rather a jerk in my past relationships, mainly to hide my own insecurities. I identify as a sexually submissive man and I hid this part of my sexuality for the whole time I’m sexual active. Only now in my mid 20s I’m coming to terms with my sexual orientation. I would prefer, if my partner takes the active role between the sheets. But the cultural norm dictates that this is my job and if I can’t live up to this ideal I lose my status as a “real man”. That’s why policing masculinity is a touchy topic for me.
This is a really interesting conversation and I tried to read all of it but I might of missed some. This is a ridiculously confusing topic for me. I used to think you could be friends with guys but all of those turned into sex and were really confusing.
I’ve had a lot of guys tell me, “Well you were smiling and talking to me, you lead me on and now you should have sex with me.”
I felt so bad the first time a guy said that, but then I internalized everything so much. I realized I just pressumed it would be rude to talk to a guy and not assume I should give sex. If you hang out with guys you should give them sex for male attention right? I mean male attention has a little something specialer than female attention because they want sex. But then it would be rude to get this special attention and not give sex, right?
I know, my life is weird LOL.
“Maybe I’m misinterpreting the discussion, it’s just that I don’t know a single stereotypical nice guy, who manipulates women into having pity sex with him, in real life”
Wow I just read this… really?
Huh. I guess that depends on how you define “manipulate”.
I had a guy say that I had smiled and talked to him and that I was manipulating him by laughing and if I wanted him to be my friend I had to have sex with him or he would walk out of the room right then and there.
Which isn’t technically manipulation, I mean, it’s perfectly reasonable to define what you’re looking for. I had no friends so I said ok.
I met a lot of guys like this and they seemed like nice people other than this. Then again I think I have the problem that if people talk to me and smile I think they must be nice.
That same guy told me “better to be the wolf than the sheep.”
@rox
I don’t doubt your experience and I’m sorry that you meet these guys when you needed a friend and they pressured you into sex. I have lived a rather sheltered life so far and I might be oblivious to these kind of guys. I’m just stating my experience, but I don’t want to deny yours. I apologize if I offended you.
@rox:
Yeah… that brings back memories of some people that I’d rather not have known.
A lot of it seems to depend upon who we’re around, or upon who seeks us out, if you know what I mean. Sometimes, we’re fortunate enough never to experience it; at other times, it’s all that we find.
Oh Thomas, I’m so not offended at all! Yeah that’s all I found. I was going through a rough spot with some health issues that made it very hard to have any friends at all. I reached a point where all my friends just left. I felt like maybe I had nothing to offer in friendship so that was all I had left to give.
But it is interesting how when I lost all of my friends those guys seemed to find me. And strangely I would think, “Maybe this person will really be my friend!” the first three times. I finally just decided if guys talked to me that’s what they were looking for so all the rest I can’t know what they were ACTUALLY looking for because by default I just had sex with them to be polite for talking to them. Some of them might have been really nice guys lol.
@rox:
I suspect that having E places people at an elevated risk for that kind of thing; I know that I was, before my previous neurologist advanced the diagnosis of TLE and put me on AEDs. Maybe it interferes with our warning signals. Or throws enough noise into them that they become far less reliable, to the point that we’re unable to recognize them for what they are.
You’re definitely not alone in what you experienced, though. It was a complicated and dramatic situation, but a woman I met after an out-of town concert had come to a very similar place: believing that men would expect sex as payment for helping her out, or being kind to her, something that (as our conversation went on) she certainly had reason to believe. So flirting and having sex had become a kind of automatic response. A way of getting help, and the expected compensation for it.
I know that she found it strange, if not threatening, that I’d helped her out but didn’t go toward anything sexual with her, especially since it was evident that I found her attractive; so if her experiences and feelings were anything like yours, I have some idea of how hard it can be to get past that. But I also know that the part of it that I know is a small one, and that it’s something very difficult to recover from.
Still… if her experiences and feelings were anything like yours, I also know that it’s possible to break through.
figleaf posted about PREA again:
http://www.realadultsex.com/archives/2011/02/prison-rape-reform-heads-anyone-whos-ever-typed-women-get-raped-comments-feminist-f
Not entirely sure what I think of all of it, but I’m linking to it because Clarisse already linked to the previous one.
Interesting. I hate CWA (they’re super sex-negative and super anti-BDSM for one thing). It’s always a little weird for me when feminist organizations that I vehemently disagree with are doing work I admire.
Hm, I think you must be the only (with the possible exception of CWA themselves) who calls CWA a feminist organization. Even Wendy McElroy calls them an “anti-feminist” organization.
Well, I don’t know what CWA calls themselves … (I prefer not to get caught up in the “policing the definition of feminism” wars …. Yes, this discussion could get fairly ridiculous pretty quickly, but let’s not get caught up in reductios ad absurdum.) If they’re doing anti-rape work then they’re at least a little bit feminist, in my book. But if I were writing an actual post or something and not a hasty comment, then I’d be more careful about how I described them.
@Clarisse:
This is interesting to me. I tend to think of “feminist” as an adopted label. So it feels a bit bizarre when I see the label placed on someone, or someone’s actions, who have not adopted the label. I think it is rarely intended this way, but it comes across as feminists trying to give feminism credit for activism it didn’t do.
In any case, from the CWA wikipedia article:
Apparently they also oppose LGBT rights, are pro-abstinence-only-education, etc. So I’m pretty sure they would never, ever identify as feminist. And I strongly suspect that most feminists would not accept them as such even if they did.
Cessen:
So it feels a bit bizarre when I see the label placed on someone, or someone’s actions, who have not adopted the label. I think it is rarely intended this way, but it comes across as feminists trying to give feminism credit for activism it didn’t do.
Not just bizarre but in some cases almost insulting. I’m sure that Clarrise doesn’t mean to sound so but I myself find it almost insulting when someone who does not claim the feminist label does or says something and some feminist comes along and calls it feminist. As if calling the words/actions feminist is a requirement for validity. Almost like co-opting. Like they are engaged in some sort of guerrilla marketing campaign just going around and trying label anything that might be considered good as feminist for the sake of trying to make feminist synonymous with good.
It strikes me as more an issue of some issues being dealt with — in a highly visible fashion — primarily by people with a feminist bent or identification, with people of opposing positions not often dealing with them. So addressing those issues can lead to a “de facto feminist” interpretation.
But I don’t think that this necessarily reflects a co-opting of those efforts by feminists, or even an issue of granting validity (though the second has a relationship to who is and isn’t considered to be an ally). It’s more a matter of underestimating the complexity and variability of positions not covered by that label, pro or con.
Cessen,
This is from a while back, but:
Re: the bolded part. From the context, I’m assuming you’re saying that neither are being intentionally manipulative or dehumanizing, rather than that both are (or that both are “arguably” doing so). Am I correct?
@ Danny–
I’m under the impression that when a feminist calls something feminist she means “This action is in accordance with the beliefs of mine that I call ‘feminist,’” rather than “Credit for these actions should go to my political movement.” I’ve seen something pretty similar from religious people–when someone calls a particular action “An example of good Christian charity,” I don’t think they’re really trying to appropriate it–they’re just voicing approval.
…Though I’ll admit there is kind of a patronizing tone to it, but they don’t (consciously) mean it “that way.”
@ Infra–
This is from a ways back, but I missed it at the time:
Are you assuming that the definition (or experience) of what a sociopath is or isn’t changes based on levels of poverty? (Hint: It doesn’t.) And it’s possible to still live a fantastically-sheltered life (in this case, one of zero experience with certain disorders) while being lower-class–even while being abused. (Most abusers aren’t sociopaths. The word “sociopath” doesn’t actually mean “bad person;” though it’s usually used that way on the internet, that’s not at all how I’m using it.)
I’m also more than a little curious about the psychometric testing to which you refer.
@ Tim–
I’ve thought this for quite a while–and I think (but am not entirely certain) that I’ve read something to this effect, somewhere, possibly more than once. I agree wholeheartedly–you see it both in social groups and larger, “tribal” organizations. (It’s really interesting, because it has a lot of permutations, but I’ve already derailed these threads enough times…)
What do you mean “should?”
@Motley:
No. I was responding to the statement about leading a sheltered life, and simply indicating that even from the little I’d disclosed, “fantastically sheltered” would be far from an apt description.
I’m aware of these points, and I also refrain from using those terms to describe anything unless there’s significant evidence to establish them. But it’s a point that anyone can take or leave as they will; all I’ll say is that the full complement of behavioral signs (including pyromania, animal mutilation and killing, etc.) were present, and the diagnosis has been strongly suggested in a clinical context on more than one occasion. Two individuals, immediate family, biological relation.
It dropped out of use later on, but the term that was initially used for one of them was malignant narcissist. She had a significantly reduced history of criminal behavior compared to the other.
Initial, strongly suggestive results on an MMPI (among other things, “elements of sociopathic personality disorder,” as it was phrased, resulting in my discharge from the military), strong confirmation on one factor of the PPI-R (inconclusive on the second) later on, combined with two decades of clinical treatment and review. It’s possible that the neuropsych assessment that included the PPI-R also included the PCL-R, based upon what I know of it. But if it did, I wasn’t directly informed. I was only told that the results were clinically significant, but not enough to meet the full diagnostic criteria.
So, like I wrote: partial, not full. That’s as much detail as I’m going to go into here.
@Motley:
Yes, you are correct.
Yeah, that comparison rings true to me. I’ve run across that kind of thing from christians as well, and it feels pretty much the same from my perspective.
It’s not that it’s a big deal. It’s just… irritating.
Motley:
…they’re just voicing approval.
You know I was at first going to reply to this with something to the effect of “as if their approval is desired or required”. But then I think to myself that maybe they simply don’t realize that despite their intentions they don’t realize how condescending they sound with their giving of approval sometimes. And then I think back to all the times I’ve seen feminists chime off with something like, “intent doesn’t matter” before going into how someone’s statement may have made them feel…
…Though I’ll admit there is kind of a patronizing tone to it, but they don’t (consciously) mean it “that way.”
Combined with their distaste with the whole “I’m not a feminist but….” thing I’m not so sure that they don’t mean it that way. Something like “See you just did something that’s feminists. So why don’t you just suck it up and claim the damn title already?”. Like they are more concerned that something is label feminist that whether its actually a good thing or not. A pretty weird PR campaign I tell ya.
If you see eye to eye with me on something cool. But don’t get so caught up in trying to call it feminist that you forget that there are actual non-feminists out there that actually do care about equality.
And remember how I was making a point about how these threads have become basically hostile-feeling to feminists?
Clarisse,
“And remember how I was making a point about how these threads have become basically hostile-feeling to feminists?”
Maybe. I remember some “heated” exchanges back in the followup thread. One was about “overreaching feminism”, and “discourse control”. I think we’ve all agreed a number of times that much of the thread’s value was a direct consequence of your ability to communicate and your willingness to listen to points of view you did not share. I’m not sure other feminists would have considered the thread less hostile back then, but then again, maybe your recent need for an “empathy break” is an indication that something has changed. But we’ve all managed to rescue the thread from similar situations before. We should do that again.
@Clarisse:
Not arguing against your larger point, here, but I do think that this particular issue has a much more substantial impact than is generally recognized. I eventually managed to sidestep it by taking the position of “If that’s how it’s going to be seen, fine, I’ll just continue to do the work on my own and not concern myself with it.” Regardless of whether that meant being seen as de facto feminist or as anti-feminist. But if I hadn’t done that, or hadn’t been able to?
I’d have become far, far more bitter toward feminism than I am now. Just as the result of speaking my own experiences.
In the past, actually, that’s how it was, and it only faded when I stopped caring about whether or not my positions were seen as feminist by individuals who self-identified as such, or by people who objected to feminism on these grounds or those. There is an element that verges toward absolutism, on both sides, and it often seems to run things into the ground when it otherwise could have easily been prevented.
It takes the middle ground, and turns it into no man’s land. Some people polarize; the others go silent.
Ok ok. In fairness, I shouldn’t drop in with just a complaint, and also I’ve been pretty behind on this thread, so I’ll try to write a real comment.
Firstly, in the “creep” thread [ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/01/02/men-dont-deserve-the-word-creep/ ] Motley challenged me to come up with some quotations from AB that I agree with, so here we go. Note: As always, I’ve liked a lot of points people have made, but since I’ve been specifically asked to point out some bits I liked about what AB has said, here they are:
(In response to when Sam said something about how reducing sexual scarcity for men might result in positive behavior changes, which I agree with:)
It’s not that I disagree with the result, but too many women are used to seeing themselves as sexual commodities, not as consumers, and this whole issue seems to revolve around making women more available for consumption. Honestly, it’s hard enough for women to figure out what they want themselves, putting a further duty on them is hardly going to achieve the desired result.
I know Sam wasn’t trying to say that we should approach the scarcity problem by pressuring women to put out — I agree with his ideas about how to approach the scarcity problem, in fact. But I also think that AB is correct that a lot of other commenters have stated or implied that women should be “more available for consumption”, and that’s messed up.
(In response to something humbition said about ritual stone-throwing matches between sides of feminists/non-feminists)
I know how that feels, it’s pretty much the definition of being a feminist. Are you too radical? Are you vocal enough about distancing yourself to feminists you may or may not have heard of? Are you a sexist man-hater? Do you only support feminism because you’re ugly and jealous? Are you just out to get preferential treatment? Do you work hard enough on rejecting each and every way in which you might be treated even slightly favourably because of your sex? Are you making too big a deal out of rejecting ways in which you’re treated favourably (such as by not wanting men to open doors for you, and thus being hysterical and giving feminism a bad reputation? Do you spend enough time on issues other than feminism? Are your priorities wrong? Are you alienating men?
As I said earlier, I didn’t much self-identify as feminist before, but if you’re female and say something regarding female equality, especially on American message boards, you’ll get labelled that way no matter what. The only exceptions are girls who make a point of being negative towards feminism, as way to deflect criticism in advance.
In my experience, feminist is a very effective slur, and people will react differently to it. Some people, like me, get rebellious and go “And what’s wrong with that exactly?” while others try to distance themselves from it, both of which are not going to win feminism any friends. It’s amazing how often the phrase “giving feminism a bad name” comes up, so I’m not surprised if many feminist sites almost ban it outright.
It’s a bit like being accused of having the body hair of an adult woman. If you reject the accusation as being completely irrelevant, you’re stuck having to give up discussing your actual point, in favour of trying to defend women’s right to have body hair (which, with the American squeamishness towards that subject, is almost like trying to defend people’s right not to shower, and will only get you labelled a freak). And if you actually start explaining that you do shave/wax, you’ve already lost.
AB also said:
When guys approach me to make me aware of just how terrible it is when girls don’t want them, I don’t become inclined to fuck them, I become inclined to give up dating altogether because rejecting someone is too painful, even without counting the times they try to back at you.
Yup.
And lastly, on the women-have-sex-for-emotional-commitment-thing:
There is an imbalance, but it’s not just in regards to sex. It’s in regards to respect, identification, power, money, friendship, etc. It’s what causes guys to assume that their friendship is so infinitely more precious, and girls’ friendships so infinitely worthless, that girls should be grateful to be allowed to prostitute themselves just for a taste of it, even if it’s fake.
OMG I love that last one so much.
Motley also asked some other questions that I want to acknowledge:
I’m curious how you think the two quotes [one about how abusive people will use whatever tool comes to hand as applied to a radical feminist, the other about how I'm concerned about how some of my writing on manliness has enabled bad attitudes from men] interact, particularly with regards to a couple questions: Do you think you’re obligated to refrain from providing tools for abusive people? How much difference do you think it makes–do you think Xakudo’s ex would not have abused him if she’d never been given that particular tool?
Good point. This actually makes me feel better about the masculinity writing I’ve done. Good job.
(I had written: it’s really messed up that the approach is so often to say “it’s women’s fault that they see me as creepy, how dare they”.)
If a man calls you a slut, whose fault is it? His, yours, nobody’s, or someone else’s? Or some combination of the above?* But you know this already. If a white person sees a black person as a threat, whose fault is it?
Ok, I think I have a better handle on this now: if the “creep” label is about boundary violations (which consensus seems to indicate it often, though not always, is), then it’s more legitimate for someone to call someone else a “creep” (because they’re trying to protect their own boundaries) than it is for someone to call someone else a “slut”. I still think the “creep” label is too vague to be useful, but I’m unwilling to condemn people who are trying to use mean words to describe other people who have specifically been doing stuff to them.
Finally, @rox: I totally sympathize.
Having gone back over a ton of comments for the past hour or more, I don’t feel like this thread is doing too badly. I was concerned, because AB got really upset in the Creep thread, so I felt like I should go over things more, but now I’m not so concerned. I do feel like we’re talking in circles around some things (WHAT THE HELL DOES POSITIVE MALE SEXUALITY LOOK LIKE ANYWAY!) but that’s been true from the start of this giant manliness series ….
If anyone wants to go meta for a moment, I’m curious to know whether anyone cares to summarize some of the impacts reading or participating in this thread has had on their thoughts.
Also I probably shouldn’t have called CWA feminist. That was dumb.
@Tim
There’s that too, but was referring to more to the attitude among co-workers. “Here is a man, let’s try to to adapt to having a man here, make room for his male needs, and make use of his male strengths” vs. “Here is someone who is not a man, let’s hope she can adjust and be normal like the rest of us”. People who consider themselves a niche are, in my experience, often aware that they have to adapt more to others than vice versa, whereas people who perceive themselves as normal are more used to not having to change behaviour and expecting others to adapt to them.
Many straight people habitually talk about sex and dating as if all people followed the equation man+woman=couple, even if they technically know that it doesn’t have to be the only way, but most queer folks seem to always have it in their mind that others could be heteronormative. And speaking of language, women also appear to use more gender neutral pronouns or refer to both sexes, whereas men tend to use male pronouns as default, which is a bit of the same.
So when a woman enters a male environment, the men are more likely to perceive that she is different from them, and see it as her responsibility to adapt, whereas when a man enters a female environment, the women are more likely to perceive that they are different from him and see it as their responsibility to take that difference into account. Again, in my experience and interpretation
Clarisse,
I’ve wondered for a while if it wouldn’t be useful to go back and try to topically cluster and then summarize the entire discussion for easiert consumption. After all, as someone mentioned recently, it’s apparently quite the book by now. For me, the discussion has both emotional and intellectual value. Emotionally, it’s really sort of the only place on the web where I feel that most people are willing to listen to both / all sides of the story and don’t come to the with answers disguised as questions – while at the same time everyone has their opinions and is willing to defend their merit. Intellectually, I think the main realizations were what I call the “Foster-Wallace-realizsation” about double binds and male sexual shaming, about feminist discourse hegemony, PUA and performative masculinity, the discussion with dance dreaming about patriarchy as affirmative action, the discussion with Clarisse about mistle toes, framing, and the interaction of yes-means-yes and no-means-no.
I think this thread was/is unique in the way that I felt/feel “at home” both intellectually and emotionally. Having a gender discussion that does accept the problems of initiatiors and doesn’t reject scarcity based arguments because they make it harder to make purely sociological arguments made me see a lot more things in the gender realm as “grass is greener” issues and let me see more aspects as nurture-based than I previously thought.
Feeling “safe” in the thread, if only anonymously, also allowed me to report personal experiences I felt are relevant to the subject matter, which, in turn, made me generally more aware of such issues in my daily interactions.
@Motley
Ah, I wrote that in a hurry and the formulation is a little off. What I meant is complaining about negative behaviour being reinforced by women. The argument is stupid because it assigns blame on the wrong side and is basically the NiceGuy complaint reversed. Forget about it.
@AB
I think I see your point this time. You basically mean that an archetype of something or someone is seen as the default.
People who fit this standard are oblivious to it at best, expect others to adapt at worst and usually take no or only meager steps toward accommodating people who don’t.
The people on the other side, those that are a part of a minority or a niche, however are very well aware of the differences and alternatives and try to adopt a stance that doesn’t put anyone at a disadvantage.
Is that what you mean ? Because if it is, I absolutely agree with you.
I can’t say if women use gender-neutral formulations more often or not, but thats mainly because I am German and the german language doesn’t leave much choice in what gender you use.
You might be able to ask if someone has a partner instead of asking if someone has a girl- or boyfriend, but the rest is pretty much gendered to begin with (even inanimate objects).
This is a helluva discussion, and I don’t have much to add jumping in at this point, especially since I’ve only just started reading the series. I just wanted to register my appreciation of these threads. I’m an undergraduate with an academic focus on gender issues and although I’m in the first semester of my senior year so far I’ve only discussed men and masculinity in classes as something of a corollary to women’s issues (trans/ intersex/ genderqueer issues are sadly and frustratingly invisible at this institution). Now that I’m taking a class expressly about ‘Men and Masculinities’ I’m struggling with the materials, not on an intellectual level but an emotional one. I go back and forth between ‘This is really important for me to learn’ and ‘Why do I have to be thinking about men again?’ I love that this series started at the same place and I’m finding it super helpful to read through.
@Clarisse:
I wouldn’t beat yourself up about it. ;-) Let’s call them MRA’s instead. :-P
First and foremost, discovering this thread allowed me to break out of a nasty self-destructive cycle I had gotten into with the feminist blogosphere at large, wherein it reinforced the whole “I’m ashamed to be a man”, “toxic male sexuality”, etc., etc., etc. The feminist blogosphere wasn’t the initial source of those feelings, but it sure cranked them up to 11. So, stumbling across this thread helped me break out of that, by helping me recognize that my issues were valid and important as well, and were worthy of discussion and empathy.
And in that respect, I suspect (though can’t be sure, since it’s conjecture that this might have happened otherwise) this thread may have also helped prevent me from eventually going full-on anti-feminist. Even still, I definitely have a latent (if not irrational) hostility to feminism based on my damaging experience in the feminist blogosphere. But finding a feminist space that was actually interested in accounting for my experiences and including my issues as a guy in the grand analysis was very healing, and possibly (possibly) fended off me just flat out saying “fuck you” to feminism. And, ultimately, this means I’m a lot more sympathetic to women’s issues than I might otherwise be.
Second, this thread has helped me a lot in recognizing and deconstructing a lot of my own issues as a guy. Toxic male sexuality and the issues surrounding that being the most talked about. But even ones we haven’t talked about much or at all (chivalrous attitudes, for example, and various other inappropriate expectations placed on me as a man), the thread got me into the habit of looking at my own issues and trying to deal with and deconstruct them. And this has had a very real and positive impact on my life. (And it’s an ongoing process.)
Third, the thread has given me a lot more sympathy for guys who deal with problems that I don’t have. Previously I tended to look at alpha-male types, and view them with contempt. But in recognizing my own issues as a guy, it’s given me a context for view other guy’s behavior in a more sympathetic light as well. And I think this is really important.
I think, also, that perhaps we’re focusing too much on a narrow set of issues (e.g. relating to sexuality). But perhaps that’s just because sex is so interesting. ;-)
In any case, I think it’s difficult to know what positive male sexuality would look like without first allowing it to develop in a culture that doesn’t demonize male sexuality. Which is to say, it’s difficult to do on our planet at the moment. Although perhaps within some sex-positive subcultures…? Dunno.
Welcome LoriA! :-)
Cessen:
And in that respect, I suspect (though can’t be sure, since it’s conjecture that this might have happened otherwise) this thread may have also helped prevent me from eventually going full-on anti-feminist. Even still, I definitely have a latent (if not irrational) hostility to feminism based on my damaging experience in the feminist blogosphere. But finding a feminist space that was actually interested in accounting for my experiences and including my issues as a guy in the grand analysis was very healing, and possibly (possibly) fended off me just flat out saying “fuck you” to feminism. And, ultimately, this means I’m a lot more sympathetic to women’s issues than I might otherwise be.
Yes yes. I must agree with this. Despite my recent shut down on gender (I’ll be posting about that later) this thread (and this blog overall) are part of the glimmer of hope that keeps me from going anti-feminist. Don’t get me wrong there are certainly some nasty people among feminism (and the words “asshole” and “jerk” could be pretty accurate descriptors of a lot of them and a lot of spaces) but it is reassuring to know that they aren’t all like that (despite my impression that the ones that aren’t like that seem to be in the minority or of the smallest voices). But goodness I’ll tell yea part of the reason I shut down was because I was closing in on that point.
I’m just glad to know that there are at least some feminist spaces that won’t dismiss me because I dare to think that my actual experience might conflict with what others are telling me my life is.
Sam:
I’ve wondered for a while if it wouldn’t be useful to go back and try to topically cluster and then summarize the entire discussion for easiert consumption.
Yeah I think some condensing might be a good idea. But damn what a task that would be…
@Danny:
So, in fairness to my point over in the “I know you’re smarter than me” thread, I think it’s important not to demonize the feminists that behave in asshole ways. Intent matters.
I think most feminists that come across as nasty, and mean, and assholish really aren’t. They’re just trying to be heard, and are mentally/emotionally calibrated to trolls and people who dismiss them without thinking, which leaves them ill-suited to respond to good faith but critical dialogue (see Sam and AB over in the creep thread, for example).
This doesn’t, of course, make their behavior or the effects of their behavior any different. But it’s the difference between crashing your parents car accidentally vs on purpose. ;-) I think some tolerance is in order. And I think demonizing them is inappropriate.
(Though I would never suggest that anyone is obligated to listen to/engage them as long as their behavior and style of rhetoric remains as it is.)
So, in fairness to my point over in the “I know you’re smarter than me” thread, I think it’s important not to demonize the feminists that behave in asshole ways. Intent matters.
Why yes Cessen I think you’re on to something.
That would certainly explain why I’m much more receptive the likes of Clarrise and AB (and other feminists here) than the ones at like say Feministe who I think exist only to complain and bitch about men sometimes.
@tim
Sort of. I think there’s an imbalance. I recall my group’s resident Nice Guy talking about how much he loved women, and it struck me that for a guy who loved women, he had very few of them in his life. He idolised his father but talked very little to or about his mother (except as a price for his father to win), and he had no sisters, but his brother was his best friend.
He hung out with a group of primarily male nerds. He recommended me a lot of books, all of them with male authors and male protagonists and I don’t recall seeing a single book with a female author/protagonist in his room. The shows he watched on TV were all filled with guys. His ‘love’ of girls consisted on making them the subjects of one-sided crushes, and then neglect them once he got a new interest.
I’m not saying he’s the model for all guys, but I have the feeling that it’s generally easier for a man to cut away most female influence in his life, and still feel like he’s complete and normal. Like women seek out men (and male spaces), but the reverse doesn’t happen as often. Except in relation to sex. It’s where the tables are turned, where men seek out women, vie for their acknowledgement, hinge on their every word, and give them their full attention (at least in theory). And I don’t think it’s healthy, but I also think it’s a mistake to look at it as an isolated phenomenon.
In my experience, girls and women often use sex, or rather, sexual desirability, to compensate for missing something else. I remember doing it myself in my youth, sometimes thinking I had great (non-sexual) chemistry with a guy, but fearing (perhaps with good reason) that he wouldn’t spend time with me unless I seemed sexually available, because I wouldn’t fit into his ‘friend’ category as a girl. I deliberately flirted, and then slowly toned it down until there was ‘only’ a platonic friendship left.
Some women are more aware and deliberate in their use of this, like a woman saying that since she couldn’t get the same respect and credibility as a man when she tried to sell people something, she would instead use her sex-appeal on (male) clients to compensate. This is also hurting women, because some of them come to see sex more as a performance, designed to elicit a certain response from men, rather than something to be enjoyed for its own sake, but in the end, I think at least part of it comes from compensating for a lack recognition in society and a feeling of inferiority.
Hmm, I don’t know if there has been any debate about gender neutral language in Germany, but from what I can remember of the German language, most titles and professions are considered masculine as the default, with the suffix ‘in’ used to communicate when it’s female, which in itself is telling. I could imagine some people who, when talking about an unknown teacher, would use the word(s) ‘Lehrer/Lehrerin’ or ‘Lehrer(in)’, instead of the officially gender-neutral (but effectively masculine) word ‘Lehrer’ to communicate that the teacher could be female as well as male, but with the way German grammar works, it would probably be too chunky.
Anyway, my experience comes mostly from English, and a bit of Danish, where this is less of an issue. Even the Danish word for boyfriend/girlfriend is gender neutral. From what I’ve heard, women tend to gravitate more towards a preference for gender-neutral language than men, and I haven’t watched them make quite as many assumptions about the femaleness of their audience as men on the maleness of theirs, just as I haven’t heard as many gays make assumptions about the homosexuality of their audience as straights do about the heterosexuality of theirs. But it’s all mainly observations.
Tim, AB,
re. Germany.
There have been a couple of attempts to create “gender inclusive” language in Germany/German. Today it’s sort of a requirement for any “progressive” institution to use the “Binnen-I” (interior-I), which actually sort of disappears the male form because adding the female suffix “In” (as in “LehrerIn” (teacher)) to address both male and female teachers. Gender activists now seem to believe that using underscores is even more politically correct (as in “Lehrer_in” as the underscore is supposed to include transpeople in some sense). To be honest, while I can understand the point about gender representation in the average person’s share of mind (that’s also what I think is the background of Clarisse’s current post about being/feeling shut up) many feminists who brought this matter up in the seventies had, they also *created* a problem and a division most people, including most women never had before. Particularly in German, where (take Mark Twain’s essay on the horrible German language) a lot of biologically gendered things are grammatically neutral – like “Mädchen” (girl). So by intrudicing tons of female forms instead of just broadening the social understanding of the previous default to logically include women they also sort of “created” the problem of male defaults which they then attempted to address by linguistic inventions that were often mostly ideological markers. By using the interior-I or not you were making a political statement. Just like someone using ze/hir in English is making a political statement.
There are certainly places where that is appropriate, but in my opinion, something that is used to separate oneself from others (a rallying variable) will probably not make it into the mainstream.
Exactly. So how do you suggest we (humans) deal with that imbalance?
AB:
This is interesting. And yes, I think there is some truth to that.
This also seems consistent with some of my experiences. I have had several flirty female friends in the past. In my case I think they kind of sabotaged themselves a little bit that way, because it made the friendship feel less authentic to me. But I can see how experience with other men with whom that is the only effective way to get attention could lead to that becoming a default strategy.
This is also interesting because it lends some credibility to some (some) of the Nice Guy(tm) complaints. I’m sure some guys feel misled by that.
Megapost !
@AB
I see your point and I agree that walking through live without female influence isn’t exactly a healthy and more than just a few unlucky exceptions. In fact I was there and I am currently trying hard to keep away from it. And while not especially rare, I would not go so far as to say that these guys deliberately choose to exclude women from her life. I would rather say that what you like to do, what your job is and what your hobbies determine how much female influence you have in your life. I don’t think i need to reinterate how imbalanced certain groups and subcultures are when it comes to gender and what the reasons for this are (hint: sexism).
I am currently matriculated at a university of sciences. As the name suggests the focus lies mainly on STEM stuff. That means computer science, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, food science and so on and so forth. Now we all know that these are disciplines that are rarely sought by women (for reason listed above). I started there together with 36 other students of which only 3 were female. today, three semesters later that numbers has shrunk to 12 in total with 1 woman remaining.
Now I can tell you that the majority of students there didn’t deliberately choose to enroll there because the womenfolk won’t bother them there. Truth be told I would rather have enrolled at a large university but I simply could not afford to live somewhere else.
If you now add in a few hobbies, and I mean almost anything remotely nerdy or geeky, in which a similar imbalance is prevalent (again, for the reason above) then you have pretty much achieved a life almost devoid of female influence. And again, without deliberately doing so as people don’t go around and pick their hobbies depending on how gender-balanced it is.
And trying to fix that is pretty hard since you aren’t able to single-handedly overturn society, or at least i am not, sadly. Pretty much the only thing you can do is picking up things you are not that into and doing that just to increase female influence in your life is nothing that gets recognised as honest behaviour easily.
re:German
Yeah I know about the gender inclusive ways to address people, but both the Binnen-I and the Lehrer/Lehrerin thing is something you might find in bureaucratic german, in politically correct newspapers and in speeches, but in everyday conversations these rarely pop up, simply because they sound very clunky. And truth be told, in my opinion they reek of political correctness and nothing else. I remember an equality-concerned writer (not necessarily identifying as feminist) suggesting to drop the female alternatives to male descriptions altogether and just use the male for everyone, like just using actor in english instead of actor and actress, but this provoked quite a backlash that argued that doing that would erase women out of the german language and accept male as the default gender. I actually think that this would be a good idea, simply because that is what people already do in everyday conversations. You don’t refer to a woman or a group of women with only female gendered words. It is far more realistic that you do it once during a conversation to pay someone respect or establish that an entity is female if it is relevant.
Oh and finally I can understand Mark Twains initial disdain for the german language.I don’t know if there are rules to determine the gender of an object but if there are, just memorising every word with the grammatical gender is probably still easier. i know a couple of brits who often complain how difficult it is to learn german (or french in one case). However, when I come across an english word that translates into several german words each with a slightly different meaning I can’t help but wonder if I loose a lot of meaning and sense when I translate stuff from german to english. I also wish there was something more polite then a simple ‘you’. I always fear I am being perceived as rude when I address a stranger or a professor with a simple you.
@Sam
That would depend on how men see it, which we haven’t talked a lot about. Do they feel obliged to give compliments to women which sour their relationship to them as people? Do they feel they have to hold back on affection and respect for women because giving it for free destroys their chance of getting sex?
Finding credible solutions is going to be nigh impossible unless we have some idea of both sides of the equation..
@AB:
Normal, maybe. But I’m not sure that “complete” accompanies that. By my observation, serious problems tend to emerge (as in regard to group behavior, issues of friendship, and issues of sex, relationships and children) once the idea of being complete, or the need to be so, is introduced. It doesn’t seem to be part of the baseline. In fact, I’m not sure that masculinity, as such, contains any real preparation or context for the idea.
That often seems to be a core component of masculinity, really, in the different forms that I’ve seen: a sentiment along the lines of “You’re incomplete, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s strength and potential in it. You just need to deal with it in the proper way.”
Hi all I haven’t read the thread properly yet but while I do, here is a post by Mark Simpson, on misandry.
He is my favourite writer on masculinities.
http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2011/02/09/misandry-the-acceptable-prejudice/
That’s really your favorite piece of writing on masculinity? It’s the most Oppression Olympics thing I’ve ever seen, with a healthy dose of sexism thrown in. QRG, I’m really surprised to see you cheering for a writer who includes sentences in his work like, “A new generation of ‘spice’ girls seem to be tiring of being ‘better than men’ – after all, so many are choosing to dress like street hookers these days.”
It’s not my favourite piece of writing its a piece of writing by my favourite writer on masculinity.
If you are really keen to get to grips with masculinities I can’t recommend Mark Simpson’s work enough. He is also very approachable.
@Clarisse – while there’s lots of language in that post that I hate – mostly revolving around the guiness book of oppression theme that the author seems to be pointing towards – a few of his points are valid.
I walked past a very popular teens and ‘tweens clothing store the other day and saw a range of girls clothing featuring phrases like ‘The stupid factory, where boys are made’ and ‘boys are stupid, throw rocks at them’, ‘Boys are smelly’, ‘I make boys feel bad because it’s fun’ and my personal favourite, an extra, extra small shirt with the caption ‘My Boyfriend is out of town tonight’
The store in question is a national chain, and a brief google search tells me that it’s actually an international line that has caused controversy in other places. I only looked through the door for a moment – but I saw maybe a dozen girls aged between (I guess) 8 and 18 looking at the shirts, laughing and trying them on. I can only imagine the response to a teens and tweens store carrying shirts with the same messages aimed in the other direction.
My largest issue with feminism as an ideal, is that it’s taken something I believe in very deeply – the idea that genders should be treated equally, and uses that noble and admirable idea as a stalking horse to promote single gender advancement.
Men’s rights advocates, who already have a much less provocative name than feminists – are already labelled in the same breath as PUA’s and douchebags in general – simply for believing that maybe there are some situations where misandry/gender disparity against men exist and should be advocated agains. Imagine how much more backlash would occur if those rights advocates were simply Masculinists – with an implict agenda of not only advocating the rights of men – but of promoting the interests of men over women in general.
I think I’ve sung this song here before – but I really will never understand how any genuinely ethical feminist can be a feminist, and not an egalitarian. Everything worthwhile that feminists are seeking can be summed up as equal rights – and everything awful that feminists are working against can be summed up as the exclusionary promotion of a single gender’s agenda.
But I do think we can all agree that oppression Olympics are generally offensive and stupid.
@Scootah I can’t speak for the author of the piece but I suspect he’d welcome everything you said (apart from the ‘oppression olympics’ which I don’t think he is trying to engage in-but he’d be prepared to argue that point I expect).
I certainly welcome your approach!
AB,
“That would depend on how men see it, which we haven’t talked a lot about. Do they feel obliged to give compliments to women which sour their relationship to them as people? Do they feel they have to hold back on affection and respect for women because giving it for free destroys their chance of getting sex?”
It would depend on how men see what? To men, apparently much more so than for women, being sexually desired *is* a sign of respect. To you, hearing “let’s just be friends” may be a sign of respect – someone who doesn’t want to sleep with you still wants to be your friend. Not so to most men who are likely feeling *disrespected* as men in that situation. Maybe some, or more, men feel that they have to hold back on affection because they need to exchange it for sex, as you stipulate. But what else are they supposed to do in the proposed situation? They have limited time and resources and need to trade them for the maximum available return. Assuming that sex is what they want, that seems like a reasonable strategy.
Again, I don’t think the situation is as bleak as you keep suggesting, but there certainly is an immbalance, there is a relative scarcity of female sexuality compared to male sexuality (and I’d say that this, and not the emotional/affection element is the starting point of the imbalance, because if there were no sexual imbalance, it wouldn’t be a factor for non-sexual interactions, which would not be the case the other way around).
And apart from helping men deal with their sexuality in a positive way and helping women to stop worrying about enjoying sex I don’t think there’s much we can do about it. Of course, removing those cultural obstacles for happiness would be a huge step forward, but there will likely always be an imbalance of some sort.
@AB & Tim
I think there’s also another dynamic at play: masculine norms tend more towards self-reliance and expecting that of others, while feminine norms tend more towards welcoming. I think that men would also spend less effort integrating a new, but somehow different man than women would spend effort integrating a new, but somehow different woman. But I don’t think that accounts for the entire difference. (No real point here, just a throwing-that-out sort of thing.)
@Clarisse
“If anyone wants to go meta for a moment, I’m curious to know whether anyone cares to summarize some of the impacts reading or participating in this thread has had on their thoughts.”
I’d kind of echo the sentiment that it seems a better place to actually getting anything figured out. There ought (IMO) to be a notion that everyone’s experience is equally valid (intrinsically), but women’s contributions are more valuable for determining the effects of men’s actions and the reasons for women’s actions while men’s contributions are more valuable for determining the effects of women’s actions and the reasons for men’s actions, but this is one of the few places I’ve found that even goes anywhere near that.
“I do feel like we’re talking in circles around some things (WHAT THE HELL DOES POSITIVE MALE SEXUALITY LOOK LIKE ANYWAY!)”
Well, we do still need to figure it out. :-) Okay, not need, but it’d be supremely helpful… I do feel like it ties in with some others’ responses where even if threads like this aren’t ideologically necessarily, they’re an extremely good thing practically, because it prevents men from going full-on antifeminist if they know that, at least somewhere, feminism isn’t immediately invalidating their experiences.
@Danny
“I’m just glad to know that there are at least some feminist spaces that won’t dismiss me because I dare to think that my actual experience might conflict with what others are telling me my life is.”
It is good to realize that this complaint was levelled at patriarchy by feminists first. (On the one side to know part of where they’re coming from, and on the other side to know that doing this is kind of hypocritical, depending on how Golden you think the privilege Hammer is.)
@Sam
To be blunt, I sometimes feel like a straight man has no more respect for the women he’s fucking than a man who’s into bestiality has for the sheep he’s fucking. A lot of porn are sold with words like ‘sluts’ or ‘hos’ in the title, and while there is a legitimate problem with finding flattering names for promiscuous women, those titles don’t exactly reek of respect.
For the record, I don’t mind humiliation fantasies (though I dislike when it’s done along gendered lines – seriously, I can read the most brutal rape fantasies, but when the rapist start sounding like an MRA, it just ruins the mood for me), but the question is how much is specific humiliation fantasies (that the customers recognise as such), how much the titles are just short for ‘women who like sex’, and how much of it is a general tendency to look down on promiscuous women and see women having sex at least partly as being degrading.
After all, it’s not like men never engage in slut-shaming, or get mad when their friends sexualise their female relatives or when they’re hit on by homosexuals. In fact, there are a butt-load of cultural artefacts still in effect about how disdainful men can be to women they have sex with, to the point where certain men (still) talk about raping each other (by sticking their penis inside, like they would with a woman) and making someone their ‘bitch’ as a way to dominate and humiliate them. Traditionally, I bet most of the men who looked down on prostitutes and used ‘whore’ as an insult would visit said prostitutes themselves when/if they had the means to do it.
I guess what’s good for the individual can be bad for the group. If men manage to raise their own cultural importance above that of women, it makes women eager for male validation, which they can get through sex. And in that cultural climate, holding back on that validation in order to get the maximum value for it does seem like the logical strategy for them.
The problem is that this tends to lead to three things in women (in my experience): playing the “I’m sexy so I can get away with almost anything” to an extent where it hurts their (women’s) personal growth, becoming bitter and resentful, and/or lacking sexual enthusiasm. None of which benefits men, or anyone else, in the long run.
The emotional/affection element is part of it. Because when women are (supposedly) looking for emotional commitment in the people they have sex with, it’s a way of showing of regard and affection, since people usually want emotional commitment from those they admire, trust, like, and otherwise care for, which makes a woman’s sexual attraction a sign of respect.
And if men have no emotional regard for their sexual partner, and furthermore aren’t even that picky, it’s hard to see sex as a compliment, especially when you can find 100 girls more pretty than you in a 5 minute google search, and even those girls aren’t very respected. So it becomes a matter of having the guy prove that he’s especially interested in you (such as by pursuing you), or ending up with a highly desirable (in the mainstream sense of the word) guy who could get anyone he wants. And that’s not very fun.
That’s the best I’ve got too, unfortunately.
I seem to be overlooking important stuff lately -
I don’t know, I’ve realized quite a bit.
I still don’t know what it *looks* like, but I think I’ve recently come close to what it feels like… first at a party at the end of last year, when a female friend complained about the lack of tall, manly guys, and I told her that’s just a mental proxy for I think she’s looking for. Then she asked what I thought she was actually looking for, and I said I’ll show you. I then grabbed her by the shoulders and softly but firmly moved her against the wall behind her, I moved closer keeping the eye contact. I stopped the demonstration at that point and she, being an old friend, was looking at me like she hadn’t ever before. I believe the key is in the touch. It’s a firm but soft touch coming from the confidence that she would never say no to this appreciation, but at the same time has a subtext signalling understanding of her body language, mental and emotional presence, and readiness to let go at any moment. About a week later, I demonstrated it to another female friend, and her reaction was similar.
Sadly, given that I’m still not entirely over the toxic male sexuality issues, I’m much better at doing this when I’m demonstrating it rather than “doing it” for personal “gain”, that’s Foster-Wallace biting me (and the girls) in the ass (that’s if they don’t escalate further at that point).
@Sam –
This is a personal dynamic/chemistry thing. The physical mechanics aren’t nearly as relevant as the chemistry and dynamic between the two people and way it all goes down. I do a quite similar thing involving some quite rough and aggressive physical mechanics – usually when demonstrating something about a kink dynamic – but sometimes just on a date, when I’ve read that the person I’m with might be receptive to that. I’ve used scuff of the neck/hair grabs, face slapping, choke holds, and lots of other rough body play to get what I think is the exact reaction that you’re talking about.
I’m guessing that with your friends, you’re not that kind of person usually. They don’t look at you and expect to see what they’re seeing during the demonstration. I know that I’m a jovial, chilled, cuddly teddy bear looking guy most of the time. It’s a dramatic shift from my default mode of interaction to agressive, dominant and sadistic.
That duality/dichotomy is a big part of what works about it. The other person is forced to discard their existing impressions and reassess who they’re looking at. It’s like a shared secret and it creates intimacy which you build even more with the touch element, especially when it’s unanticipated touch. It also puts you into the dominant role – and while I know that for many guys and girls, the dominant manly man thing doesn’t work and it has no inherent qualitative benefit over submissive or egalitarian man – there’s a lot of social programming and evolutionary expectation around attractive men being dominant. The 1950′s patriarch, James Bond, the outlaw biker, the dominant buck in a herd of mares – etc. To butcher a Dorothy Parker line, it’s not normal – but it is common.
Along with that intimate dominance, and the pushed boundaries, you visibly display interest, you display huge confidence and self assurance and you push all those primal buttons about the ingrained idea of what a ‘Man’ is.
You need to be either a very good actor, or very honestly displaying something of yourself – or the confidence and dominance and forced reinterpretation of perception all fall apart and you look like a weird jerk. And you need to read the person that you’re trying that sort of move on very well – or you’ll find that you either haven’t pushed hard enough and the boundaries weren’t shaken enough elicit a response, or you pushed to hard and your eyes are burning and your balls hurt. It’s a big gamble of a move.
I think there’s also a huge timing issue with this sort of thing. It’s not so much that there’s a ‘right’ time for this sort of gambit to work – as there are many, many wrong times when it will go horribly wrong.
Scootah,
hmm, I’m not sure I expressed sufficiently clearly what I tried to say – it wasn’t that much the effect in itself as the positive feeling it gave me with respect to my own sexuality, the feeling (as opposed to rationally knowing) that initiating and performing the leading part in the dance is not necessarily tied to “taking” (as per the Foster-Wallace reference I’m usually referring to. And I think the “meachnics” of the “sweet touch” are actually important – sure, not as important as chemistry between two people, but it’s an element that can add to it, too.
depends on what you mean by “that kind of person”. They are definitely seeing me as someone to turn to for advice on such matters, also someone they know has become quite “good with women”.
Exactly, but the self-assurance is only possible because of the subtextual display of “being in control” of oneself and the situation, being able to stop at any point. It is that part that allows the confidence in the first place, because it allows to handle the internalized notions about problematic ” taking” male sexuality. This is also why, I reckon, it is much easier for me to demonstrate this than to actually “do it”.
Sure, sadly, nothing that involves another person is ever error-proof.
- absolutely. With respect to the point of the interaction as such, but particularly – and I mentioned this when I added the “timing” factor to my creep taxonomy at some point in the last part of the manliness thread – I think there is a fine, but golden, line for the timing of the touch itself. Be too fast and you’re not giving enough space to react if it should not be appreciated, be too slow and you won’t be able to project the confidence. I still think “the mechanics” do matter quite a bit.
AllSaintsDay:
It is good to realize that this complaint was levelled at patriarchy by feminists first. (On the one side to know part of where they’re coming from, and on the other side to know that doing this is kind of hypocritical, depending on how Golden you think the privilege Hammer is.)
Which pisses me off even more considering how quick they are to do the same behavior. What’s the bloody point of recognizing they did it first when they pretty much grant themselves unlimited latitude to do the same thing to other people? So I know they’re being hypocritical. What good is it when they refuse to admit it themselves? Its almost like think that the fact that they leveled this complaint at the patriarchy first justifies them doing it to others.
This goes back to one of my main problems with a lot of feminists. They go on and on about how they knew this first or how they’ve always felt that but then they turn around and do the exact same thing and then twist reality and language in order to justify it or explain it away.
Scootah in regards to those shirts you saw at that store I recall a post over at Sociological Images talking about them (specifically the “Boys are stupid. Throw rocks at them.” one). I remember one of the commenters chiming in to say that there was definitely sexism at work…against girls. Yeah there are those that think the idea that telling girls its okay to hurt boys is only harmful to girls.
@Danny:
It highlights the fact that pursuing the argument too far makes it into a trap. That applies to feminists employing it, and it applies to employing it in reaction to feminism.
And that usually means: avoid it by treading lightly, or start gnawing through your own leg. The first one’s usually the better option.
@AB:
In regard to the second part: a lot of it is, but to point out something that has been argued by various sex worker bloggers, these are vastly outsold by features, one of the most notable examples being the Pirates duology. Without minimizing problems with the industry, and with the nature of the ad copy throughout, the nature of porn does tend to vary depending upon where you look (and what you look at).
In regard to the first: to what extent, do you think, does this affect or influence the remainder of your analysis?
I’m not sure that I’d be able to phrase that in a way that wouldn’t seem loaded to some degree, so I’ll just make it explicit that that’s a question to be taken as stated, nothing inferred or implied.
@Sam:
It was difficult to tell from how you wrote it, and even with the clarification later on. Did it feel healthy because it diverged from the leading-taking connection (i.e., because it didn’t match with stereotype), because of how the act felt in and of itself, or both? From where you are now, do you think that it would be possible to tell the difference?
I’d agree (or say, if this isn’t actually what you’re saying) that we’d probably have to start with how healthy male sexuality feels before moving on to how it looks, but I think that those questions would have to be resolved first.
Personally, I’m inclined toward that sort of interaction to begin with, but I’ve also had women tell me that they were comfortable with it when I did it, but not when other men did. IMO, the importance of that statement, as a general thing, couldn’t be emphasized too strongly. (I’m not convinced that it resolves to a matter of performance, timing, contrast, etc., though I wouldn’t rule those elements out.)
Maybe there’s some element of genetic determination in it, as Scootah suggested. But as I’ve seen suggested elsewhere (at FuturePundit, IIRC), even if that’s the case… it might also be the case that some people are more genetically determined than others. Which would mean that even a genetic basis wouldn’t work out to general applicability.
Infra,
Both, feeling the appreciation and feeling in control gave me a “leading-giving” feeling. As I mentioned in the later addendum, the being in control part is so important to me because of the internalized assumed male sexual sociopathy, the toxic touch stuff we talked about. Again, I guess that’s why it is easier to demonstrate than to do. But it’s really hard to disentangle that any further. I guess I’ll have to think more about that question.
“I’d agree (or say, if this isn’t actually what you’re saying) that we’d probably have to start with how healthy male sexuality feels before moving on to how it looks, but I think that those questions would have to be resolved first.”
It’s not exactly what I was trying to say, but I agree with it. I’m always saying that “there is no vocabulary for positive male sexuality, but maybe it’s not merely the vocabulary, it’s that the eperiences are missing in the dialogue. Talking about how it *feels* would also allow women to join the discussion on a more subjective level, which may reduce the occasionally adversarial nature of definitional battle about “what it looks like”.
Again, sure – everything has its time and place. Reading a person and an interaction is key in pretty much everything. But then again, even with respect to the “premature sexualisation” creepiness category, there is a lot in the touch. When I’ve told female friends the story about the guy at the party who got the “don’t touch me” reaction from every woman he said hello to, I’ve demonstrated what I believed his touch was like from seeing it briefly. It’s hard to describe but the word “creepy” in its original sense does come to mind. And when I demonstrated it on the girl’s arms, they sort of had a similar reaction to the one the girls at the party had to the guy’s touch.
There’s a reasonable chance that it is (https://www.genepartner.com/index.php/?language=en
), but it’s not a variable we can control. To put this differently, the “result” I got before and I get now are hardly the result of changed genetics.
AB,
“To be blunt, I sometimes feel like a straight man has no more respect for the women he’s fucking than a man who’s into bestiality has for the sheep he’s fucking.”
You did watch Night on Earth, didn’t you? ;) I’m not sure to which extent porn copy is really such a big problem, but I’ve never taken porn seriously to the degree some feminists do (and see it as inherently violent and degrading to women). All of these arguments require the removal of female agency in patriarchy, an argument that logically also removes the agency of all female feminists in patriarchy and is as such compltetely self-defeating. But sure, some men do some or all of the stuff you’re mentioning, but that doesn’t invalidate the argument I made about seing “being sexually desired” as a form of personal respect (for THEMselves, but I think also for women). But it also doesn’t mean they’re exempt from social pressures to slut shame etc.. I think as is apparent from modernizing societies, sexual politics and social mores is a very complex subject matter.
So how do we go about that? How does that masculinity look (and feel, as per the recent comments.)
@Sam:
I was attempting to get at something different, more along the lines of what happens with a perfume or a cologne. A person can choose one with the proper notes, and essences that aren’t synthetic, designed by a skilled and talented perfumer; they can store it properly, use it at the proper time, and wear the right amount. But if it doesn’t work with their body chemistry, it just isn’t going to smell right, no matter how precisely matched the other elements are.
And beyond that, the acuity of others’ sense of smell also varies. Which means that some might pick up on these matches or conflicts — these alterations of fragrance — while others do not.
So the “result” that you got might not have been due to changed genetics, but it might have been due to wearing a scent, so to speak, that wouldn’t necessarily have worked for others, even if they had done it in precisely the same way.
Infra,
“But if it doesn’t work with their body chemistry, it just isn’t going to smell right, no matter how precisely matched the other elements are.”
sure, people have different styles and not everything will work equally for everyone. But I suppose the ingredients for the individual recipe may well be quite similar.
Interestingly, I’ve recently seen a documentary about current state of reseach on sexuality, and it mentioned a study conducted at (I think) the neurobiology department of the University of Göttingen, Germany, that concluded that people cannot fool others with perfume. Apparently, whatever you choose if you think it smells good on you will amplify your *own* genetic fragrance and picking something that you don’t think smells good on you to cover up your own smell and trick that system will lead to olfactory confusion of the brain of any potential mate smelling it. Basically, stop giving fragrances as gifts ;) Can’t find the study online though.
The smelly stuff is really interesting. Particularly since the interaction of biological and cultural factors seems is sort of unknown. There clearly is an effect if women stop taking the pill, for example, but adopted children are more influenced by the genes of their adopted parents, not their biological ones. Humans are annoyingly complex creatures.
@Sam:
This one, maybe?
Yeah, the role that scent plays, or might play, in all of this is a fascinating subject, especially when considering Teresa Brennan’s work on the transmission of affect (laid out in the book of the same name). It’s also one that doesn’t get much attention, other than reference to the old T-shirt studies.
Smell, as a whole, tends to be an overlooked and undervalued sense. Its importance only comes to the fore when someone loses it.
(On a note more along the lines of analysis, this brings Süskind’s _Perfume_ to mind, too.)
Hmmmm, missed this thread and been distracted by other things. (Such as the furry community, which is actually quite interesting from a masculinity standpoint… not to mention somewhat likely to make most feminists’ heads explode on contact.) Still bugged by something about gender and kink not working the way it theoretically ought to, though.
AB: I think the thing you’re missing when you talk about how “dehumanising the other sex” comes more easily to men is that male-controlled society has never actually worked the way you think it does. See, women – particularly hypothetical ones – have always been used as a key arm of social control. More specifically, the idea of women as a class of vulnerable individuals that need to be protected by men at the price of their own safety and lives has a long history. For example, there’s a lot of propaganda from the US war of independence about how the English will come and rape American women unless men sign up to fight them. These male soldiers were and are dehumanised to the point of effectively being treated as replaceable parts. This idea is also spread by the treatment of male and female deaths in fiction.
#1 on the list of things most feminists don’t get about masculinity for some reason. Pops up in all sorts of interesting places, like “equal pay for equal work”.
@makomk:
I wouldn’t say that feminists don’t get this; I’ve seen this particular issue raised often, in fact, though it’s usually been in the context of a PHMT argument. I’m inclined to think that where the error creeps in is when it’s attributed to a purpose. In the end, when it comes to a greater or lesser degree of this stuff, there might not be any purpose at all.
Kind of like what Worth said in that character’s major scene in _Cube_:
“This may be hard for you to understand, but there is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It’s a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan. [...] I mean, somebody might have known sometime before they got fired or voted out or sold it, but if this place ever had a purpose, then it got miscommunicated, or lost in the shuffle. I mean, this is an accident. A forgotten, perpetual public works project.
[...]
You have to use it, or you admit it’s pointless.”
Infra,
yeah, that sounds pretty much like what the guy said on tv. Interestingly, about two weeks ago, I was at a party and a girl I had only met shortly before smelt my neck and said “you smell like my boyfriend” (who’s out of the country). I asked what perfume he used, and it was something entirely different… anecdotal evidence, of course, but still.
@Danny
“So I know they’re being hypocritical. What good is it when they refuse to admit it themselves? Its almost like think that the fact that they leveled this complaint at the patriarchy first justifies them doing it to others.”
I’m not saying you should be aware they’re being hypocritical. I’m saying you should be aware that they’re far more used than you to being silenced, and that’s what drives them, even if it’s driving them to the wrong place. To use Cessen’s metaphor, don’t blame them for wrecking the car on purpose if it was an accident.
@Infra
I think I’d more or less agree in that the source of error is what Hugh referred to above as the fundamental attribution error, i.e. viewing your own actions as situational while viewing others’ actions as dispositional. In this case, women’s actions are the result of unconscious behaviors learned while growing up in a patriarchal culture, while men’s actions are the result of directed intent towards keeping patriarchy intact. (It’s not the textbook idea of FAE, but I that’s where my “more or less” comes from.)
I might, however, say that the “men are disposable” trope is pretty high on the list of male problems which feminism downplays.
Also, apparently I have a different notion of what “positive male sexuality” means than the rest of the thread. Oops. :-(
@AllSaintsDay:
Yeah, we’re probably looking at FAE/correspondence bias. But that just suggests, to me, that the fundamental issue involved is the same one that remains unresolved with FAEs themselves: their cause.
I’d be inclined to think that the “just world” phenomenon comes heavily into play. If nothing else, what we’re looking at in feminist analysis (and related fields) is the occurrence of injustice, brutality, exploitation and death, taking into account the foci that particular studies have. If it turned out that these things often occurred, not because of an intent to maintain a structure, but because we no longer understand why we do what we do… who would want to accept that explanation? Who could deal with accepting it?
I’m not sure that I’d agree with “downplays,” but I’d definitely agree if that were rephrased as “doesn’t examine in depth,” possibly because it can’t, due to the nature of the framework. Which, I suspect, goes right back to the issue of the causes of FAEs.
You’re not going to leave it at that, are you? ;)
(Well, a variation of the just world phenomenon: that men suffer from the system because they support the system, and that the world would return to its naturally just state were those actions to be stopped, corrected and/or eliminated. The same kind of thing would come into play with criticisms of women who, directly or indirectly, support and enable patriarchy, as are applied to female subs and sex workers.)
@Infra
I usually tend to think of this coming into play in ways like the reasons attributed to men in male spaces saying “Women are stupid” and to women in female spaces saying “Men are stupid.” Without the FAE, you’d give roughly the same reason for both of those. I find less just-world there than, say, salience of the actor.
I think we disagree then; I definitely meant downplays. The feeling I tend to get is a bit of Oppression Olympics and the notion that it’s just not that big a deal if your gender role involves jumping to sacrifice your life if the other, better sex is in danger.
I was, because I merely was using a different definition, not mentioning an alternate view of what it should look like. I was thinking of the more recent conversations re Nice Guys (of either type) and nice guys, and viewing “sexuality” in the wider meaning of “How do we advise men to approach this whole dating/sexing thing such their efforts will be both positive and productive?”
But the way I phrased it, it does sound like I was holding out on y’all with actual opinions, doesn’t it?
@AllSaintsDay:
Different varieties or intensities of FAE, maybe? I see a lot of what you’re getting at here when it comes to more general, everyday gendered discussions (this being one of the reasons why I tend toward a position reliant on a notion of role incommensurability), with just-world influence building upon that in more formalized theory.
Probably a similar issue of context when it comes to downplaying, too.
AllSaintsDay:
I’m not saying you should be aware they’re being hypocritical. I’m saying you should be aware that they’re far more used than you to being silenced, and that’s what drives them, even if it’s driving them to the wrong place. To use Cessen’s metaphor, don’t blame them for wrecking the car on purpose if it was an accident.
The problem is that apparently its always an accident. They’re oh so silenced that when they do get that way they should never be called on it its just the silencing talking (see what I did there?). Now as a person that’s had my share of bad treatment at the hands of feminists and acting out of hand because of it I know it would be unfair to dog them at every single opportunity but constantly giving them a pass because they’re so silenced its unfair in its own right.
Sam,
It’s funny, because I haven’t watched Night on Earth, I don’t even know what it is. Was it something that was linked to from here that I missed?
And also, the porn thing wasn’t supposed to be the main example, it just ended up that way (one of the reasons I usually avoid sex-positive spaces). Seeing it as degrading for women to have sex is widespread in society, as is the notion that men don’t care about the women they have sex with. I mentioned several examples of it in my last post, even though people have chosen to focus on porn and feminists who aren’t present here instead.
That’s the problem, I doubt men will ever develop a positive model for masculinity. Make it masculine to be courageous and protective, and men will either start seeing themselves as more important than others (by virtue of being society’s protectors), or call it sexist that they’re supposed to put themselves on the line to defend someone else. Make it masculine to be confident and take the initiative, and men will either confuse it with being arrogant and in charge, or call it sexist that they’re not supposed to show weakness. I’ll wager the majority probably think both to some degree.
This is going to sound harsh, but pretty much all traditional masculine characteristics I’ve thought about seem to lead to one of three interpretations: Patriarchy (men as more independent and insisting on getting their way), women being seen as more valuable (men as putting themselves in harm’s way because they’d prefer it to a woman getting hurt), and/or the trait being seen as somewhat silly and unimportant (men as childish cavemen).
Interestingly enough, the most masculine of my male friends (physically bigger and more active, promiscuous, liking beer and weapons) tend to swing between the two latter, feeling very protective of women while still making a point of respecting them, and seeing many of their masculine endeavours as somewhat silly but enjoyable nonetheless, whereas the less masculine guys see themselves more as people first, men second, and don’t much care about masculinity, or femininity for that matter. Interestingly enough, both of these are considered misandric by men’s rights activists.
I don’t know if it’s different for femininity, but I think it is, because many traditionally feminine characteristics are supportive in nature, enabling the people who posses them to be helpful without placing themselves at risk or breeding resentment by directly dominating others. It can still be a pressure (which is why so many women would like to get rid of it), but it’s usually going to come across pretty positively to outsiders. The male equivalent of the nurturing women right now is the white knight, and the male equivalent of the empowered woman is a man who longs for the glory days before feminism. None of those are particularly positive.
I’m probably going to get flamed for this, bur since I’ve already disagreed with just about everyone here, and frequently been dog-piled by virtue of being the sole feminist commenter, I doubt things can get that much worse. So seeing as the link put up be QRG was pretty much solely about praising the book ‘Spreading Misandry’, I thought I’d link to the other side of it, a review of the first five chapters of the book. It’s very snarky and sarcastic, but it does have the advantage of actually going into details about it.
http://crimitism.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/my-christmas-present-arrives-early-lets-read-spreading-misandry-chapter-one/
http://crimitism.wordpress.com/2009/12/06/lets-read-spreading-misandry-chapter-two/
http://crimitism.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/lets-read-briefly-read-spreading-misandry-chapter-three/
http://crimitism.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/against-our-better-judgement-lets-read-spreading-misandry-chapter-four/
http://crimitism.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/i-hate-this-book/
@Danny
The problem is that you’re doing the exact same thing. You’re blaming feminists for not breaking a viscous cycle they didn’t start, while refusing to break it yourself on the count that you didn’t start it.
And with all due respect (because I really like talking to you), you also redefine fairness depending on what you agree with. When you and the people you agree with are offended by feminists and don’t feel welcome in their spaces, it’s because feminists are bad and hostile, but when feminists are offended by sites like Feminist Critics and don’t feel welcome there, it couldn’t possibly be because of anything FC did wrong.
RabbitWrite interviews a guy that was on the first season of The Pickup Artist:
http://rabbitwrite.com/i-made-out-with-a-dude-from-the-pick-up-artist-then-interviewed-him/
AB,
can’t reply right now, but I looked this Night on Earth clip up on youtube for you… enjoy.
youtube.com/watch?v=dCKxro6s7e8
AB:
You’re blaming feminists for not breaking a viscous cycle they didn’t start, while refusing to break it yourself on the count that you didn’t start it.
True. Which brings me back to the old stalemate that find myself at so so often. If only there was a way to get everyone to play nice at once eh?
And with all due respect (because I really like talking to you), you also redefine fairness depending on what you agree with. When you and the people you agree with are offended by feminists and don’t feel welcome in their spaces, it’s because feminists are bad and hostile, but when feminists are offended by sites like Feminist Critics and don’t feel welcome there, it couldn’t possibly be because of anything FC did wrong.
I appreciate the respect and respect to you as well. Although I still disagree with your implication that the folks at FC think they are immune to being wrong.
And actually I’ve worked my way to the point of discerning between not feeling welcome because of hostility (like say a good portion of the Feministe community) and places where I just don’t feel welcome because of differences in veiwpoints (like Takeback and figleaf). But about 2 years ago what you say there fit to a T. The last few weeks have just been so ugly they sent me back to the edge of a really dark place.
@AB
The site looks like what I’m usually used to. Using lies and nonsense to refute lies and nonsense. Even allowing for the fact that that poster is going to select the worst passages from the book, not a representative sample (and if readers don’t allow for that, it’s a failing on their part, not the writer’s), what the heck? Starting off with quotations on anti-semitism? “Few would declare, at least publicly, that racial segregation was a good thing”!? The few people I’ve seen who would declare that (They’re less prevalent in the South than elitist Northerners think, but they definitely exist) are very proud to declare that publicly. I hope to goodness that these people aren’t be cited as the good folks on their side. (I had some other things typed up about that, but I’m trying to keep a civil tongue.)
And there’s plenty more in the synopsis/commentary, rather than direct quotations, but I’m loathe to trust that because of statements like
“The evil in the world is committed by people who possess the power to inflict evil on others, effectively all whom are male.” Really? You don’t need to be in positions of power to to inflict evil. Sure, very few women have been able to inflict evil on the grand scale of only slightly more men. But your median (or even trimean) woman has about as much power to inflict evil as your median (or trimean) man.
And the big whopper is
“Stereotypical Things Men Do:
Do important things that make money and command respect.
Have fun.”
NO. This is wrong. No one can suggest that anyone with full mental capabilities has put any appreciable amount of effort into coming up with “stereotypical things men do” if their list ends with these two. Especially when their “stereotypical things women do” includes “Put up with men’s behaviour, no matter how idiotic or destructive.” Because here’s a stereotypical thing men do: they act in idiotic and destructive ways.
I’m still uncertain whether I should blame the book authors for poor communication on the “including that done by women they have deluded or intimidation,” or blame the blogger for misreading something whose intent was only less clear than it should have been. I mean, given the rest of what she’s quoted out of the book, I should probably allow for some sort of ridiculousness in the context that supports her interpretation even though I can’t possibly imagine what it would be.
@AllSaintsDay
That was the book, not the blogger.
Since you’ve just said yourself that few people declare it (“the few people I’ve seen…”), I fail to see what the issue is. What the blogger points out (imo), is that the authors seriously downplay the ideology of racial superiority behind apartheid in order to make the link to misandry seem more plausible.
That could have been formulated better, possible that the more power a person possesses, the more opportunity said person has to commit evil.
“Slightly more”? Perhaps if you measure in absolute numbers, but certainly not when compared to women. To take an area I know something about, Denmark has had 52 monarchs (possibly more, but the sources are vague), of which 2 were women, and one of those is our current queen who has no political power. Counting the monarchs who actually ruled, that’s 46 men and one woman, or just above 2%. Sure, few people got to be monarchs at all, but saying that this was “only slightly more men” is the equivalent of saying that a rich person in Europe whose wage is 30 times greater than a poor person’s is earning only slightly more money, because their wages are both ridiculously large compared to most people in third world country (whose wages are easily less than a 50th of that of the poor European).
Sort of. I think this quote sums it up better than the sarcastic list below it: “Men are stereotyped on television. I don’t like it when men are portrayed as idiot manchildren whose hands will fall off if they try to wash the dishes, but I also recognise that men benefit from it, because “not being expected to do the dishes” just means that… men can get away with not doing the dishes. Or the laundy, or the ironing, or the cooking, or anything vaguely domestic, provided there’s a woman around to do it for them. In comparison to stereotypes like “women are too emotional to handle tough jobs, so let’s not promote them and then use the fact they haven’t been promoted as an excuse to stop hiring them”, it’s not really in the same league.”
I’m not sure what you mean by that. The authors have been pretty clear that in (their interpretation of) current popular culture, men are held responsible for all evil and women for all good, that the only good men are ‘honorary women’ and women can’t do anything wrong. Also, the blogger is male.
After having read the first review of the book I must admit I was intrigued to read one from ‘the other side’. Not having read the actual book, I must admit that the quotes the author chose make the book sound really singlesided, fatalistic and black & whitetish.
I absolutely not think that men are solely responsible for everything that is wrong with this world, nor that all the women are born as innocent victims that either cannot commit wrongdoings or if they can, they are excused as rightfully reactions to various crimes comitted against them.
However, I think that going to the opposite extreme of the spectrum by simply reversing the aforementioned statement isn’t even the slightest bit better. Claiming that men are unfairly seen as universal scapegoats and saying that everybody blames men because it is simply more convenient then properly examining a problem is, in my opinion, just as much bullshit.
Please bear in mind that what I wrote is solely based on the quotes picked by the author over at crimitism as I have not (and probably will not) read the book.
Also, that author at crimitism is really annoying to read. I can’t believe a person feels the need to use that much snark than actual content in a text.
Tim:
Taking a quick gander at the links, the whole series feels more like she is venting to help her get through the book than any actual attempt at communication with others.
AB:
I think that’s the point. Conflating rich powerful men to men-at-large is the mistake he’s trying to point out. There is a tendency to view men as a contiguous, cooperating class, but that’s not really useful or reflective of the real world.
The vast majority of large positions of power are held by men, but only a tiny minority of men hold those positions.
That is interesting. I will have to think about this.
But I think a lot of gender stereotypes are double-edged swords. I wonder, for example, how much the “bumbling, aggressive, caveman idiot” stereotype of men may also play into the whole “disposable male” attitude of our culture. And “women are too fragile” I suspect also plays into protecting women from dangerous and/or undesirable jobs, not just safe and desirable ones.
So I suspect it is less easy to sort out than it seems at first glance, and engaging in oppression olympics therein is going to depend somewhat on which benefit/harm trade-offs we each personally consider nicer. And I think there is a strong “grass is greener on the other side” effect due to that. And all of this depends on our personal experiences in life (none of us are part of a monolith).
@Infra: the thing you’re missing is that there doesn’t need to be a conspiracy, or even any kind of intent on the part of feminists. All that’s required is not caring about what happens to men and treating it as an irrelevant distraction. Given that, it was pretty much inevitable that feminists would pick up this pre-existing method of social control based on gender roles, make use of it for their own ends, and treat it as something normal and unimportant. It’s simply the path of least resistance.
There is no neutral stance that can be taken when it comes to men’s rights, any more than there is for women’s rights. If you don’t care, you will almost certainly end up supporting the status quo.
‘She’ is male.
But the original subject was not whether or not all men were more powerful than all women (though I agree with the blogger that comparing the plight of a group whose members make up most of society’s elite to Jews and blacks under apartheid is pretty much saying “Yes, men do run the world, but… some of them don’t!”), it was whether or not they were held responsible for all evil. The point was the people who’re held responsible for evil are pretty much all people with power (monarchs, dictators, terrorist leaders etc., ), and almost all people with that kind of power are male. The ‘Axis of Evil’ that Bush talked about are all patriarchies, and so is pretty much every other tyranny on earth,
And the same goes for people who commit violent crimes. They’re not targeted for being men, they’re targeted for committing violent crimes, and the women who do the same are similarly targeted (though I admit people might be more prone to seeing them as insane because they’re more atypical). There are many biological and cultural reasons for it, but rarely has a genocide been ordered or carried out by women. Even the news almost always draw attention to it when a woman commits a crime, using phrases like “female robber/female perpetrator” to distinguish them from ‘normal’ criminals.
I’d say there are 3 aspects in this. The first is “My sex is better suited to this job than yours” and the second is “It’s the job of my sex to carry out this duty, your sex shouldn’t have to”, in their positive and negative forms (depending on which side you’re on). Expecting women to do the housework and men to fight in wars can be seen as both flattering and insulting to both (though I’ll risk the ire of people here and say that the latter actually has some practical basis).
But there is a third aspect which I believe the blogger hinted at: Some tasks are more prestigious than others and represent a better way to power. People who’ve been able to afford it have almost always hired servants to do the housework, and even those who haven’t have rarely made a sterling career out of doing dishes. On the other hand, many of the most powerful people in history can trace their success back to the military.
Maybe footsoldiers aren’t the most influential people (though footsoldiering can be a path to advancement and real power), but generals, admirals, captains and majors have made up a good part of the upper classes for centuries. Even regular soldiers have been forces to be reckoned with when they’re banded together, in a way housewives rarely have. Most tyrants have also been military leaders, and even in modern democracies a military background gives a lot of credibility (I’ve heard Americans say that they don’t think anyone without a military background should even be allowed to run for president).
So when women are deemed unfit for the military or the police, there’s more at stake than just “my sex is better at something than your sex” vs. “you should be spared the rigor of battle”, it’s literally about closing ways to political power and influence. On the other hand, I have rarely seen anyone whose political, financial, social, or religious standing has been hampered by them not knowing how to change a diaper, least of all men.
AB,
Well, men *are* the expendable sex. Simple function of reproductive biology. If there was only one man left to impregnate the community of women (or just barely enough to ensure sufficient genetic variance), the remaining women of the community would defend him/them with their lives, but given that the reproductive scarcity is usually the other way around, men are the expendable sex.
I gather you didn’t have a look at the link and the conversation I indicated above?
http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/01/28/manliness-and-feminism-3-rise-of-the-machines/#comment-10898
@AB:
“That was the book, not the blogger.”
Yep. I mentioned two instances of the book being ridiculous and two instances of the blog post being ridiculous because I want to underscore the point that both sides are being ridiculous.
‘“Slightly more”? Perhaps if you measure in absolute numbers, but certainly not when compared to women.’
Putting relatively correct but absolutely wrong numbers onto it, 99% of men don’t have that power, and 99.999999999% of women don’t have that power. Don’t assign the blame for evil onto either group as a whole.
“Sort of. I think this quote sums it up better than the sarcastic list below it:”
Sure. Like he did, I went and found where he said the most ridiculous things. The list is still very ridiculous and the blogger ought to be ashamed of acting like it isn’t.
“I’m not sure what you mean by that. The authors have been pretty clear that in (their interpretation of) current popular culture, men are held responsible for all evil and women for all good, that the only good men are ‘honorary women’ and women can’t do anything wrong.”
I meant that it seems pretty evident to me that the authors were saying “and when women do evil, it’s always attributed to men having deluded or intimidated them.” but they didn’t phrased it as well as they could. I’m not sure whether I ought to hold the blogger responsible for misreading that.
“Also, the blogger is male.”
Whoops. I was trying to avoid assuming, even though it would make far more sense than the assumptions he made, but I screwed up at the end. But a man wrote that list of “These are the only things ever stereotyped about men”? That’s even more ridiculous.
@Xakudo
“Taking a quick gander at the links, the whole series feels more like she is venting to help her get through the book than any actual attempt at communication with others.” Yep, more of a fisking than a review, except that books are too long to fisk.
‘And I think there is a strong “grass is greener on the other side” effect due to that.’
Agreed, so long as there’s no one actually thinking it’s greener on the women’s side. It’s just a question of how much greener the men’s side is (or really, pushing the analogy past its breaking point). There are lots of different issues; acting like it’s a 50/50 split and acting like it’s a 100/0 split are both wrong, to roughly the same degree.
@AB
Regarding powerful evil men. It’s worth noticing that men are not only almost exclusively held responsible for the evils in history, but also for the achievements. It was feminist historians, who pointed out that the role of women in history is systematically downplayed or even ignored. But this argument cuts both ways. You can’t acknowledged the achievements of women, but ignore their wrongdoings. Due to patriarchy women’s part in history is more subtle than men’s part, but I’m sure they had their hands in both good and bad.
Thanks for your posts about the Misandry piece I put up. I am afraid I couldn’t read the articles by the feminist critic of the book; like someone said it was a severe case of ‘frisking’ and I haven’t even read the book myself so I didn’t need to see it taken apart like that.
The discussion about ‘misandry’ in general is still going on at http://www.marksimpson.com if anyone is interested to read it. With some feminist men arguing against me, an ex-feminist woman!
Sam,
It did look at it and it was very interesting. I actually said something similar in an old debate about male power, though not quite as eloquent. But I’m not just talking in terms of expandability.
Evolutionary psychology (the part of it I find credible) state that the least investing sex is also most strongly subjected to sexual selection, and in the case of humans, this makes men, especially young men, more inclined towards risk-taking, which again means men have developed a body and mindset more suited for things like big game hunting and armed conflict than women. On average of course, with plenty of exceptions and room for individual adaptation.
Women are geared towards long-term survival (and survival of their offspring), while men are geared towards surviving dangerous situations here and now, which they often seek out themselves. And this has been culturally reinforced for centuries and gotten a big load of patriarchy added to it, leaving us with a masculinity that is almost entirely focussed on dominance and aggression.
The problem, as I said before, is that almost any display of traditional masculinity runs the risk of becoming a sacrifice men make (which is considered sexist both by men who feel pressure into it, but also because women are often the ones who benefit from it, which means men who don’t display those traits themselves often feel more cheated than the men making the actual sacrifice) or a way of dominating and oppressing women.
If you say confidence is manly, you’ll immediately be confronted with men (and women who sympathise) who find it unfair because they’re insecure and want to be manly despite of it, and with women (and men who sympathise) who find it unfair because confidence tend to go hand in hand with success in our society, and who want some part of that success themselves. And this is despite how confidence is a positive and admirable trait which doesn’t directly harm anyone else.
@makomk:
I’m not missing that. It’s simply a general application of the point I was making (which I do apply in a general way).
Where we differ is in terms of the motivation(s), which goes to the exchange that I had with AllSaintsDay about the causes of FAEs. I wouldn’t rule out what you brought up, especially in individual cases, but I don’t subscribe to it as a major, overall motivating force, either. IME, a lot of harm can be traced back, not to harmful intent, but to unforeseen consequences and good intentions.
As far as there being no neutral stance… so I hear. But that’s the kind of thing that I insist on verifying on my own, and positions that simply aren’t aligned with one side or the other are sometimes classed as neutral when they’re far from being so.
(should be “harmful intent or refusal to care,” there)
AB:
In comparison to stereotypes like “women are too emotional to handle tough jobs, so let’s not promote them and then use the fact they haven’t been promoted as an excuse to stop hiring them”, it’s not really in the same league.”
Even though this allows women to use their emotions to get out of doing tough jobs? And I’ve seen this happen at my own job in the past. In fact I’d say that probably a lot of guys that were/are doormats for women (I was such a doormat in college but “thankfully” only a small handful of women caught on and took advantage) have been on the receiving end of such treatment.
While I don’t think you intend to do so here it seems that when it comes to examining how stereotypes harm the genders the examination is done differently. It seems like people will look at the harms of stereotypes of one side and will look for anything that appears to be a benefit while refusing to do the same when looking at the other.
(And while this is only speculation I suspect this behavior ultimately fuels “_____ has it worse” arguments.)
…because “not being expected to do the dishes” just means that… men can get away with not doing the dishes…
While that is true there is a side to that that I don’t think is looked at very often (and loops back to what you said about women). Yes this does allow men to get away with not doing the dishes but this also gives rise to not allowing men to do dishes because “they’re stupid and will f it up”. Applying this to bigger things like child care (and I it shows a pretty serious problem that some folks don’t to acknowledge.
Danny:
If a tough job is the only job available which will pay you the money you need, being able to get hired for it is always an advantage. If we’re talking jobs within jobs, the right show of incompetence can be a benefit, but it can also easily backfire so I don’t know if encouraging people to do it is always going to be a benefit for them. (On a related note, how common is it for women to forbid/discourage their husbands from performing certain domestic duties?)
Anyway, I was talking more about whole fields, like the military, the police force, politics, business, science etc.. If people are perceived as being incompetent in areas linked to that field, they’re probably less likely to be hired overall.
Yes, but now you’re broadening it a lot, assuming people will consider men generally stupid for being incompetent in one area. If people receive the message that women are smart when it comes to housework (and I don’t even know about that, I’ve seen my share of commercials where a male science-guy/chef shows a woman how to cook or clean using his new product) and men are smart when it comes to careers and big decisions, they’re hardly going to use it to conclude that men are generally incompetent.
Men’s supposed lack of caretaking abilities does have the potential to be problematic for them, but on the other hand, men haven’t put a fraction of the work into becoming good caretakers that women have put into carving a space for themselves among the paid labourforce. (rant) It’s one of the things that annoys me the most when people claim it’s easier women to get their problems acknowledged. It’s easier for women to get acknowledged as a group complaining about something, but it seems easier for men to get their complaints heard (they just wont register as complaints but as the truth).
Here, the government has all but ordered the courts to give custody to an equal amount of women and men – not actually change the criteria they judge by, only to give men more custody using the same system of judgement, which will more or less result in the following: “If a husband had been responsible for as much of the child-rearing as the wife has here, and a wife so little as the husband has here, we’d be granting primary custody to the husband in no time, but since the situation is reversed, we’ll have to see if we can’t find an excuse to circumvent that and get the statistics the politicians and MRAs have demanded”.
Even when there is nothing to suggest that an unbiased court would actually grant equal custody, people are still saying it like it’s a fact. Women are still considered inherently less competent at/motivated for working outside the house (at least in areas granting money, power, or prestige) after having struggled to get accepted for 50+ years, but men are supposedly able to effortlessly acquire the skills and devotion to fulfil what has been women’s primary function for over 2000 years. (rant over)
So in a way, I’d say that men’s skill and motivation at being primary caretakers is actually accepted pretty well, perhaps because the areas of male competence have been considered harder, and areas of female competence are thus assumed to be easier.
I think we need a movement for fathers like feminism was for career women over 40 years ago, when the focus was not just on getting equal pay for women who were already doing the same work as men, but also to get them to work outside the house at all, work outside traditional female spheres, apply for promotion, not get caught up in housework at the cost of their career, and get an education to help them get their job.
AB:
Yes, but now you’re broadening it a lot, assuming people will consider men generally stupid for being incompetent in one area.
Broadened to child care in general or mimicing your specifying a certain act (like say changing a diaper) the assumption is still there.
If people receive the message that women are smart when it comes to housework (and I don’t even know about that, I’ve seen my share of commercials where a male science-guy/chef shows a woman how to cook or clean using his new product) and men are smart when it comes to careers and big decisions, they’re hardly going to use it to conclude that men are generally incompetent.
Tell that to the years of tv portrayals, commercials, and general conversation that goes on.
It’s one of the things that annoys me the most when people claim it’s easier women to get their problems acknowledged. It’s easier for women to get acknowledged as a group complaining about something, but it seems easier for men to get their complaints heard (they just wont register as complaints but as the truth).
What’s the value in having one’s complaints heard when they are almost constantly met with things like “suck it up”, “what kind of man you?”, “you’re just trying to protect your male privilege”, “you’re just trying hurt women”, “the real issue isn’t gender but its actually _____”, and the current hot phrase “man up” rather then being actually acknowledged? Like how earlier you were telling me while I wasn’t outright shutting you out I wasn’t fully acknowledging you?
“If a husband had been responsible for as much of the child-rearing as the wife has here, and a wife so little as the husband has here, we’d be granting primary custody to the husband in no time, but since the situation is reversed, we’ll have to see if we can’t find an excuse to circumvent that and get the statistics the politicians and MRAs have demanded”.
Not sure where “here” is for you but here in The States usually goes down as “We’ll give him some paltry amount of visitation but not really enforce it. Technically there are proper channels for him to complain about her restricting his visitation but we don’t care. However in the event that he misses the slightest bit of child support we will hunt him down like the deadbeat dad we want everyone to believe he is.” Over here MRAs and father’s advocates would just like to have the actual laws that are on the books (that are supposedly in place to make sure they get their court ordered visitation) enforced for a start. And there are actually those among them that support the idea of women getting into the external workforce because not only do they support her choice to do so but it also allows them to take a bigger role in their kids lives (the very thing that lots of politicians and feminists spend a lot of speeches, articles, and posts complaining about). But for some reason that’s still a radical notion. Oh and there are also those among them that would like to see the criteria changed from the current “Her gender her child her custody” sexist form of awarding custody.
Women are still considered inherently less competent at/motivated for working outside the house (at least in areas granting money, power, or prestige) after having struggled to get accepted for 50+ years, but men are supposedly able to effortlessly acquire the skills and devotion to fulfil what has been women’s primary function for over 2000 years.
No its not an effortless acquisition its a matter of getting their feet in the door. And ironically some of the people keeping them out are some of those women that have been struggling for oh so long. It seems to me that people think that these things (men being accepted inside the home and women being accepted outside the home) are two separate processes that are mutually exclusive and can be worked out one after the other. I think they would be best done at the same time myself.
So in a way, I’d say that men’s skill and motivation at being primary caretakers is actually accepted pretty well, perhaps because the areas of male competence have been considered harder, and areas of female competence are thus assumed to be easier.
Could this be something like how people take a man’s slightest effort at child care and treat like a natural and go nuts with the compliments? If so I can understand moms being pissed. In fact it pisses me off too because deep down inside those “compliments” are not so much “wow he’s so great at that” as “oooo look at him. he’s so stupid and incompetent but still thinks he’s actually able to do that. its so cute.” Reminds me of the use of “not bad….for a girl/woman” by men/boys when a woman/girl does something she “isn’t supposed to be doing”.
I think we need a movement for fathers like feminism was for career women over 40 years ago, when the focus was not just on getting equal pay for women who were already doing the same work as men, but also to get them to work outside the house at all, work outside traditional female spheres, apply for promotion, not get caught up in housework at the cost of their career, and get an education to help them get their job.
Agreed and I think that one is brewing. Its not like people just woke up on a specific date during the 1960s and BOOM feminism was just there versus not existing the night before. There’s people talking about how men shouldn’t feel compelled by their gender role to forsake family for career, to get boys on track in education, and working outside traditional male fields. But as I said its a hard road to get society at large to acknowledge that these are real problems.
AllSaintsDay:
I would tend to agree with that, yes. And I didn’t mean to insinuate it was 50/50. I was just pointing out that it is not nearly as one-sided as AB appeared to be suggesting.
AB,
Probably true, but as I understood the essay, it wasn’t so much about biology as it was about cultural reactions to balance male peripherality/expendability. Don’t know if you also looked at the comment section, but the discussion between the author and a guy called mandos is really interesting, and at some points they get to the point where they describe patriarchy as “affirmative action” for men… (this is, at the very least, an interesting angle to look at the phenomenon).
As I’ve said before, in my opinion, men have ingrained beliefs about their assumed potential sexual sociopathy that makes it hard for a lot of them to like themselves (as men), which, in turn, makes it hard for them to believe in a situation in which they could be *wanted* (particularly sexually), so they cling to a world in which they are *needed*.
Right, add to that sexual attraction (particularly what you say about it being not ‘politically correct’) and that’s basically the original question Clarisse asked in October 2009.
But confidence is something that starts *inside*. External factors like economic or sexual success may add to it, but at the core, confidence is a matter of a balanced personality. With respect to women seeing it as a sexually desirable trait in men beyond being an indicator of a balanced personality, I’d say it is mostly because it is an implied signal of having sexual choice, which, in turn, is signlling “quality”.
Danny:
This is another thing that bothers me. Something like this has been said by roughly all Americans I have ever talked about men and TV with. All of them have stated it like a fact and none of them have given any proof, or even felt they needed to explain themselves. That’s how much respect and sympathy men get, even though they’re obviously the group in society with the highest status (and the wealthiest), when they call themselves victims, people aren’t even asking for justification.
If you ask me, the importance of the bumbling sitcom-dad is overrated. Men are bigger stars than women in pretty much every form of entertainment, and that includes comedy. Roughly speaking, comedy is derived from flawed or unfortunate people, and that comes in two forms, the comedian making fun of people’s flaws and the comedian showing off his flaws in a humorous way. In stand-up, where the comedian is first and foremost telling about flaws (be they his or other’s), women are frequent targets. In fact, many American stand-up comedians are downright vicious in their mockery of women.
In sitcoms where the humour is derived from seeing people make mistakes, men are the ones making most of them, because if women did it, they would be the stars. Incidentally, the women that are considered to be the stars of a show are generally portrayed much more flawed, and when it happens, people tend to consider it a positive thing (for women).
So I’m really sceptic about if men are really treated that badly, especially because I watch a lot of American non-comedy TV and movies where men are portrayed far better than women, and where the women who’re meant to be ‘perfect’ are boring and seem to be there for men to fantasise about dating (this is also partly my theory as to why so many guys hate Twilight, the male love-interest is portrayed too similarly to a good deal of female characters/love-interests in stories for guys ;).
That mostly comes from feminists. Even though Americans are extremely familiar with, and sympathetic to, MRA issues (men get the short end of the stick in divorces, full stop. Comedy stars who portray themselves as flawed is a sexist conspiracy against men, full stop. Etc.), they don’t identify MRAs as a group, which I think is to the advantage of the movement. And a good deal of it is justified because a large part of the men’s rights movement is first and foremost anti-feminist.
Reading pretty much any MRA blog or watching any MRA youtube clip (and there are real gems in there) will land you a description of feminism as being the driving force behind misandry. I’ve been told that before feminism arbitrarily decided to make women afraid of men, women had no problem going out alone at night in the city, and before feminism got obsessed with blaming men for everything, people weren’t any more appalled when women and children were attacked than men. Those are some pretty big lies, and yet I have never met an actual MRA who admitted this.
‘Here’ is Denmark, where I believe we’ve gotten joint custody as the default, and the people who’ve spoken up haven’t been feminists, they’ve been (frequently male) children’s advocates saying that the focus on getting ‘justice’ (i.e. influence over children) for men have come to overshadow the needs of children. As for the laws being difficult to uphold, tell that to people (mostly women) with stalkers, rape victims, and people whose spouse has molested their children. The law might be on their side, but in practice, it’s too hard to uphold.
But most MRAs, and to be fair, most people, only focus on men not getting custody. And that’s a shame, because I’ll wager that at least 90% of what causes women to not make as much money as men happens before the question of wages even comes up, and 90% of what causes men to lose custody happens before the divorce, not after. Feminists aren’t always fair in their assessments, but at least they recognise that there’s more to it than “employer writes too small a check to employee”.
And we’ve not even begun on whether or not the judgements actually are that unfair for men. From what I’ve read (in the US), most men who apply for it get either full or joint custody more often than not, and women suffer more financial hardships in the wake of a divorce than men, and yet all I ever hear from Americans are claims about women taking men’s money and children. I’ve been told this is because the system is so unfair that most men don’t even dare to seek child-custody, and that in the case of a divorce, the female partner always gets the house and that’s why it seems like women don’t have as much money, because they all have big houses for themselves (even though not having to pay rent should actually give them more disposable income), but that have been unsubstantiated claims, and people never mentioned those issues until someone questions the default assumption that women get everything.
The father’s rights movement also contains a lot of traditional men, and traditional men are not an argument for granting more custody to fathers, quite the contrary. And it shows how much many of them wish they lived in the fifties, they are predictably overly concerned with authority and influence, and very little concerned with parenting and the welfare of children (except in the context of believing that male authority and influence is the most crucial thing for children in the world).
Except that the fathers’ rights movement is not generally concerned with getting men accepted in the home, they’re interested in men getting authority in the home, like the glorious fifties (hence why their main enemy is feminism, not social conservatism which many of them embrace), and men being allowed to take women’s children away regardless of how much effort they bothered to put into said children before the divorce.
No, it’s something like people knowing that men are rarely the ones spending most time parenting, especially not the parts of it that doesn’t deal with authority or playing, and yet believing that it’s possible in the span of 2 minutes for them to become so qualified at raising children that they should all have a shot at child custody regardless of much of a parent they were before. Whereas a woman who’ve been a homemaker for 15 years isn’t expected to be an asset for any profession in comparison to people who’ve spent 15 years working in said profession.
I think feminism has been dealing with it for a long time. In fact, one of the complaints I hear from men is that feminists said they wanted soft, feminine, nurturing men, and yet a lot of women are still attracted to the opposite, leading to men feeling betrayed. So while it didn’t manage to change women completely (though I think it’s quite easy to be both manly and nurturing), feminism was at least still ideologically attached to the idea that men shouldn’t have to act traditionally to be accepted.
The problem is that this movement, from anyone other than feminists, has only begun as an offshoot of the authority-movement. I believe that some 50-60 years ago, women didn’t even have the right to be considered as potential guardians for their own children in the case of a divorce, but strangely enough, that didn’t mean women weren’t still doing most of the actual parenting. And yet, when fathers’ rights activists choose to vilify something, it’s never the time where men had even less involvement with their children than now, because at that time, they still had the power.
I would like for them to start on the assumption that because women have been so intrinsically linked with the home, our culture lacks a model for fatherhood. Instead of identifying with the house patriarch of old, and clam that fatherhood has been vilified because that patriarch has lost most of his authority, they should consider that maybe he wasn’t that much of a father to begin with, and perhaps we should change the way we look at men right from the cradle, not wait until they’re in a battle with a woman and are about to lose.
Women have needed to find new models for womanhood (or alternatively, find forgotten old ones or make new interpretations of traditional archetypes) because the old ones didn’t work, often adapting traditionally masculine characteristics (and defend their right to do so and still be women). The father’s rights movement assumes we’ve always had a functional model for a father, and that its just a question of breeding new authority into it.
AB:
This is another thing that bothers me. Something like this has been said by roughly all Americans I have ever talked about men and TV with. All of them have stated it like a fact and none of them have given any proof, or even felt they needed to explain themselves. That’s how much respect and sympathy men get, even though they’re obviously the group in society with the highest status (and the wealthiest), when they call themselves victims, people aren’t even asking for justification.
Did you actually ask or did you just think for me and decided I (or any others) don’t need to explain it? There’s actually two reasons we aren’t being asked for justification but you seem only interested in the first (all that power and privilege that men “as a class” supposedly have). The second reason is because we get written off as whining because we share gender with some powerful guys at the top (as in “you’re men what do you have to complain about?” or my favorite “go talk to your fellow males.” as if this happens in a one gender vacuum).
Now as for explanation the state of tv itself is the proof. In the past dads like Cliff Huxtable and Carl Winslow were the butt of the joke at time but over all they were good dads/husbands. These days you Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin. As far as I’m concerned the olden days of Ricky Ricardo and Mr. Cleaver weren’t great then things were better during the days of Huxtable and Winslow but now they are going back downhill again.
Men are bigger stars than women in pretty much every form of entertainment, and that includes comedy.
Surely you don’t mean that the fame justifies the portrayals?
In fact, many American stand-up comedians are downright vicious in their mockery of women.
True. I don’t like that treatment anymore than I like most stand up comedy treatment of men. I think standup comedians are banking on the very prevalent notion that in order to get a laugh out of one group of people some other group of people must be insulted. Get the women to laugh by insulting men. Get the blacks to laugh by insulting whites. Get the gay people to laugh by insulting straights. Get the non Catholics to laugh by insulting the Catholics. And so on. While it does get laughs I think in the long run all it does is further drive a rift between the different groups of people. If we want to get serious about this we are all equal thing then it has be understood that no one arbitrary characteristic should be seen as fair game ammo to get laughs from people.
You can be as sceptic as you want but that doesn’t change the fact that there are negative portrayals of men and people don’t want to talk about them. And while I was talking mostly about comedy once you get outside that genre (tip: If you even want to pull a dramatic twist and show that a guy that you thought was good was really bad, just have a last minute revelation that he was an abusive dad/husband) things get better but are still nowhere near perfect. And no amount of “but women have it worse” is going to make it go away. That only means there’s more than one problem to tackle. I’m down for working on both but I’m not going to pretend one doesn’t exist. And neither should anyone else. And FTR I hate Twilight because I don’t like high school drama getting in the way of supernatural fiction (which explains why seasons 4 and 5 are my favorite of Buffy and why I like Angel more overall.)
And we’ve not even begun on whether or not the judgements actually are that unfair for men. From what I’ve read (in the US), most men who apply for it get either full or joint custody more often than not, and women suffer more financial hardships in the wake of a divorce than men, and yet all I ever hear from Americans are claims about women taking men’s money and children.
I’d like to know where you read that. All I ever hear is that men have it so great after divorce despite the ones that lament over not having time with their kids. And like I said before it seems like the problem is enforcement. Or how after the divorce the husband is always some six figure salary big wig that wipes his nose with $100 bills.
Except that the fathers’ rights movement is not generally concerned with getting men accepted in the home, they’re interested in men getting authority in the home, like the glorious fifties…
While there are some like that the idea that that’s what they’re all about is smoke (contributed by feminists as well as others no less). Probably from the same ones that will cry foul when someone makes similar claims about feminism (like they just want to get rid of all the men).
…and men being allowed to take women’s children away regardless of how much effort they bothered to put into said children before the divorce.
This is something I’ve found interesting. You have a couple that gets divorced and by the time the smoke clears dad is ordered to pay some sort of support while at the same time he is completely cut out of the kids lives by visitation and custody that is court ordered but ultimately left to the mom’s discretion. We are supposed to believe that its alright to make sure that its fair to only uphold certain parts of what the court orders…
No, it’s something like people knowing that men are rarely the ones spending most time parenting, especially not the parts of it that doesn’t deal with authority or playing, and yet believing that it’s possible in the span of 2 minutes for them to become so qualified at raising children that they should all have a shot at child custody regardless of much of a parent they were before.
A lot of them want their foot in the door so they can actually learn and do those things. The way things are now dads are in this nasty catch 22 where they told they are bad at parenting because they don’t spend enough time doing it (due to fulfilling their role as “the provider”) but when they actually do want to break out of that role and get into parenting they’re told they can’t do it because they haven’t spent enough time at it. But somehow no matter what its always their “choice” (however to imply that same “choice” to women about the workplace and THEN its unfair). Can’t have it both ways.
I think feminism has been dealing with it for a long time. In fact, one of the complaints I hear from men is that feminists said they wanted soft, feminine, nurturing men, and yet a lot of women are still attracted to the opposite, leading to men feeling betrayed. So while it didn’t manage to change women completely (though I think it’s quite easy to be both manly and nurturing),…
Dealing with it as a side project maybe. I think the reason it didn’t change women completely because it was only looking at changes in places where it was pretty clear women weren’t at fault. And furthermore I think feminism (at least in its current form) is not going to be the ultimate fix because of the attitudes that feminists hold towards men. Whether they want to admit it or not there is anti-male sentiment in that movement. No amount of reassurance that they aren’t the majority of movement is going make it disappear.
… feminism was at least still ideologically attached to the idea that men shouldn’t have to act traditionally to be accepted.
I think as a man it feels to me that that attachment is limited to how much it benefits women for men to not act traditionally. That’s not enough for men and I honestly don’t think the current state of feminism is the place where I can make myself whole. With all due respect to the guys that do identify with feminism I just feel that the way the movement and its members treats men is just not good enough. And I’m making my piece with that. If they don’t want to do it for me fine. They just don’t get to tell me they won’t do it for me but then claim they are the only ones looking out for my interests. But nonfemninists like me would have a much better go if it weren’t for the feminist assumption that any man that doesn’t look to feminism for the one true way is an enemy of women and progress.
…they should consider that maybe he wasn’t that much of a father to begin with…
There are men out there thinking about this. Problem is they get drowned out as woman haters.
The father’s rights movement assumes we’ve always had a functional model for a father, and that its just a question of breeding new authority into it.
No. They see that one of the biggest problems with the model of fatherhood is that its weak due to not being around. The first step to building up a model of fatherhood to get the dads and kids together more often.
Danny:
This is going to be a long post (your quotes alone took up a Word page after I’d shortened them), so I’ll split it in two. First part, about comedy.
I have asked. But most of the time, it’s treated as self-evident “See! Sexism against women doesn’t exist because Homer Simpson is a fool!”, rather than “The nature of this kind of ridicule coupled with the common prejudice that…..” etc..
(It’s not just about the top. If you look at the median man, he will make more money, have a higher status job, be taken more seriously in it and likely be considered more competent, be more likely to encounter people like similar to himself in important positions (which will give him a statistical advantage in terms of understanding), have his sex more represented in the media, etc. This affects the median, not just the top).
But you’re rarely, in my experience, accused of whining, at least not if you only express dislike or contempt for the phenomenon in a non-feminist space, instead of immediately painting men as victims. That’s one thing I find hard, whenever I express a dislike, it’s immediately attributed to the monolith known as ‘feminism’, and taken to mean I believe whatever I express a dislike of is personally responsible for everything bad happening to women.
I can’t just tell my geeky male friends that I’m annoyed over the stereotypical fantasy chainmail bikini and other skimpy female ‘armours’, without getting a lecture of the empowering nature of porn and freedom. But men who express a dislike of men being portrayed badly without being challenged are a dime a dozen.
TV has gotten meaner, and sometimes more absurd, but I’m not sure that’s directly linked to the downfall of men.
I mean that people get popular and famous in comedy mainly from playing losers and making asses of themselves. That’s usually the whole idea. Just because men are both the stars of genres that portray people badly and genres that portray people well, doesn’t mean that they’re oppressed, it just means more stories are about them in general, and they get to take centre stage. Not to mention that even many comedies also include male characters with more traditionally admirable traits, they just aren’t the ones people notice.
Furthermore, comedians themselves are often respected for what they do. The actor portraying an action hero is can be considered badass simply because the character he plays is, but a comedian is often respected and admired for playing characters that people don’t look up to. It’s considered an insult (though in many people’s mind, a well-earned one) to say that women can’t be funny. There was a kids’ award show on TV here in which the only woman to be nominated for idol of the year was a female comedian for “proving that girls can be funny too” as a little girl said. And the character she played in the satire show she was part of at the time blows every sitcom dad out of the water in terms of offensiveness.
Imo, and this is just what I’ve observed, the jokes about men seem to more often be ones that men are on board with themselves (such as how they’re always horny and only interested in women to fuck them), while jokes about women are more about the things men ridicule women with, perhaps because the comedians themselves are mostly male.
There are negative portrayals of everyone. The question is how prevalent these portrayals are, what they’re contrasted with, in which contexts they’re brought forth, and how they interact with each other and the outside world. I see women being admired and called rolemodels for playing the kind of roles that are supposedly oppressive against men (clueless, clumsy, out of touch with reality, mean, a drain on everyone around them), so I’ll need some more context for why it’s bad for men that they get to do it more often. And that’s just the top of the iceberg when it comes to analysing something like this.
No, but pointing out that something can be part of stereotype which overall seems to hurt women at least as much as men, if not more (such as the overall lack of female representation in the media), can be necessary to get the full picture.
Danny:
Part 2, MRAs and families.
http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/marriage-just-dont/
That was just the latest. Most of the time, it comes up in casual conversation so it’s harder to reference to directly. And I also see it in fiction a lot, especially light-hearted fiction which never bothers to explain why things are the way they are, counting on the audience to already get the stereotype. Of popular movies dealing with divorce and conflict, I recall Ms. Doubtfire, Liar Liar, and Intolerable Cruelty. In the first, the male protagonist’s wish to see his children is portrayed sympathetically and the family court as unfair.
In the second, the male protagonist starts off as a jerk (but contrasted with a very positive male role-model in his ex-wife’s new boyfriend) who neglects his son, but not only does he change and prove what a good father he is, the presence of a biological father in a child’s life is also stretched as absolutely crucial all the time during the movie, and the son is seen as suffering for lack of it, so I doubt a movie like this is going to give people the impression that a father who really wants to see his children is a bad thing.
In the third, women are portrayed as shameless gold-diggers who marry and divorce for money, ruining their formerly wealthy husbands completely while living in luxury themselves (though in all fairness, one case of the opposite, a woman living in poverty while her husband is rich, is briefly mentioned, but it doesn’t say whether or not she was wealthy before). When the male protagonist is tricked into marrying without a prenuptial agreement, he is not only forced to give away half his fortune, his wife is able to kick him out of his house that she lived in for a day, despite him being a lawyer and it making no sense, just because that’s how divorce supposedly works for men.
It’s something called the best interest of the child. As much as people want it to be, divorce is not a competition, least of all in the area of child custody. Judges are supposed to take the side of the child above everything else, and try to make sure the divorce changes as little as possible (unless a serious problem with the status quo can be proven), and to put it bluntly: If the post-divorce roles consisted of the wife doing the parenting and the husband providing money (often, but not always, more than the wife), the best option to keep it that way is to have the wife continue with the parenting, and the husband continue providing money.
That being said, as you’ve already mentioned, the court actually tend to support husbands in getting to see their children, it just doesn’t (taking your word for it here) spend the resources necessary to see it through. As someone who’s been stalked for years, I fully sympathise with courts failing to take action, but that’s not unique to men, and the suggestions of the father’s rights movement to just grant more and more custody to men wont solve that problem at all.
The problem is that, in the eyes of a court who has to deal in realities and is already overburdened, a parent who’s been proven to be adequate will almost always trump a parent of unknown capacities who might turn out be adequate if they got to practice. Before a divorce, sure. After a divorce, no way.
I’m not sure about that. They stretched how women needed to change a lot, it was just stretched a bit more as something women had been prevented from doing, and less as something they had never wanted to do, mainly because women actually did have less power than men (to put it in perspective, when The Second Sex was published, Simone de Beauvoir had only been allowed to vote for 4 years despite being 41 years old).
But they also encouraged women to do a lot of things formerly reserved for men and to avoid falling back on old negative patterns. Women have changed more than men for the last 50 (if not 100) years, doing lots of things they stayed away from before (hence why it’s now generally more acceptable for women to engage in traditionally masculine activities than vice versa), and a lot of it has been as a deliberate goal of the feminist movement.
That doesn’t matter, I’m not trying to convert you into feminism (I’m not even sure I am one myself, I just don’t hate it as much as most other people), I’m trying to make a point: The male equivalent of feminism is pretty new*, at least in terms of being a mainstream movement, so it’s useful to look back at how feminism handled it at the beginning, if for no other reason than comparison.
I actually think the men’s rights movement have learned a lot from feminism, but almost solely in terms of what to do and (more importantly) not do in order to get their points through. The problem is they haven’t done much thinking about what those points are, usually sticking to simplified statements about the evils of feminism.
Women were at least aware that they were doing something entirely new. They had to. I hear statements about how men aren’t allowed to be men any more all the time (with the implicit assumption that they used to), but I’ve recently realised that I have never even considered the possibility that there might have been a time in our recent (less than 2000 years ago) history in which women were allowed to be women.
It’s obvious to me that when someone’s lives revolve around someone else, to the extent women’s lives have revolved around men in the past, there can be little room for any ‘true’ independent nature to show. So women had to start almost from scratch, and copy men a lot, and a lot of us still have little clue about how to handle being female.
In contrast, the men’s movement is focussed on recent history, talking about things that men have lost, and blaming feminism for practically all of it. Many MRAs state directly that things were better before, and most of the rest at least make the implications. They’re focussed on power and control, traditional masculine qualities, even though a lot of what men are missing are the softer values (hence the contrast between the energy spent trying to beat women in court and talk about the importance of male rolemodels, vs. the time spent on how more boys should be encouraged to get jobs babysitting). And to repeat myself, I think that’s a mistake.
*The idea that men and masculinity is under attack is not new at all, and doesn’t necessarily correspond to female power. Plenty of men in heavily patriarchal societies have made similar remarks. But it’s a long time since we’ve had such an influential movements trying to take power away from women and giving it to men, rather than just upholding the status quo.
Really? That’s funny, because the American/Canadian guys I’ve talked to who’re the primary caretakers of their children have been feminists themselves, and were always received very well by feminists when they talked about their choice and their troubles.
And that step has nothing to do with child custody. In terms of father-child interaction, time spent after a divorce is, if not statistically insignificant, then at least only a small sub-set of parenting. People say that 50% of all marriages end in divorce. If we assume that couples with kids get divorced as the same rate as childless couples, that means half of all parent-child relationships are not affected by divorces at all.
Furthermore, kids if divorced parents were also raised by them before the divorce. I’ve experienced 3 divorces among my family/friends of the family, in 2 of them, the youngest kid(s) were teenagers and the oldest had already moved away from home, and in the last, the youngest child was around 10, but with 2 older ones around, that meant (assuming adulthood at 18) roughly 43 years of living with both their parents between them, and 11 years left before adulthood after the divorce, making the pre-divorce child-rearing the most important by far.
And finally, starting parenthood with the birth of one’s child (which, with very few exceptions, is before a divorce, not after) is extremely important. Firstly, the early years are considered by many experts to be the most defining. Secondly, the chance of you unwittingly becoming your kid’s buddy instead of their parent, or become a punishing force rather than benevolent one, is greatly diminished when interacting with infants who’re utterly dependant on you and too young to understand the concept of punishment. And finally, it’s a lot harder to get your foot in the door if you have to build a relationship from scratch at a time when children have already got a sense of who they are and whom they’re attached to.
the thing I notice about how long and in-depth these ‘manliness’ threads are is how much men seem to welcome the chance to talk and write about these issues.
This makes me think feminism and the world at large does not enable them to talk openly about their takes on gender relations.
I think Clarisse provides an excellent forum here, but in some senses her feminism and her insistence on ‘male privilege’ contradicts the very existence of this forum.
@QRG:
… and yet, productive discussion has happened here to a degree that is, in my experiences, unprecedented. That’s due in no small degree to Clarisse’s engagement, her involvement, and her character. I doubt that, without her, these discussions would have occurred to anywhere near the degree that they have, or that the more productive commenters here — some, many or all of them — would have gotten involved in a different case.
Clarisse’s sense of feminism doesn’t compromise this. Her sense of feminism is what makes this possible in the first place.
I, for one, thank her for that. And I know that I’m not alone in thinking so.
She’s taken a beating for her efforts, and she doesn’t deserve it. What she does deserve is a hell of a lot of respect.
I do respect her efforts here.
But I don’t see how they fit with her and feminists’ belief in ‘male privilege’.
That’s a conceptual point not a personal one at all.
AB:
…the best option to keep it that way is to have the wife continue with the parenting, and the husband continue providing money.
Even when the child her/himself wants to spend time with the dad and there is no proof that the dad is bad influence or is harmful to the child? Its amazing how the “best interests of the child” can become such a moving target.
As someone who’s been stalked for years, I fully sympathise with courts failing to take action, but that’s not unique to men, and the suggestions of the father’s rights movement to just grant more and more custody to men wont solve that problem at all
Its a good thing I never said it was unique to men. And even before saying to grant more custody most MRAs would just like the court to actually enforce the little bit they get already.
That doesn’t matter, I’m not trying to convert you into feminism (I’m not even sure I am one myself, I just don’t hate it as much as most other people), I’m trying to make a point: The male equivalent of feminism is pretty new*, at least in terms of being a mainstream movement, so it’s useful to look back at how feminism handled it at the beginning, if for no other reason than comparison.
I don’t get the feeling you’re trying to convert men (if I did I would have ended this interaction long before now) but I feel that recognizing where one can feel whole does matter (and while I’m sure you don’t mean it I have to say I like how you just brush that off as not mattering).
In contrast, the men’s movement is focussed on recent history, talking about things that men have lost, and blaming feminism for practically all of it.
You know while I agree there are certainly hateful MRAs that do blame feminism I think its getting to the point where people just use that as a smokescreen to write off someone at the slightest hint of being MRAs. Yes the hatred is there but there’s more going on than that.
Really? That’s funny, because the American/Canadian guys I’ve talked to who’re the primary caretakers of their children have been feminists themselves, and were always received very well by feminists when they talked about their choice and their troubles.
Varying mileage I suppose. If only that acceptance from feminists you speak of here could actually be generalized across the entire movement. But that can’t be done anymore than trying to generalize anti-male hatred across all of feminism.
And finally, starting parenthood with the birth of one’s child (which, with very few exceptions, is before a divorce, not after) is extremely important.
And that’s why there are those among them that actually do support the idea of dads being there in those early times (which was my meaning of that last section you quote, my apologies for confusion).
Did you know that here in The States some of the states in this country have registries where men have to actually sign up in order to assert their rights to paternity and failure to do means that said man automatically forfeits his parental rights (oh but that doesn’t mean he won’t still be held to child support responsibilities)? Yet these registries are rarely publicized? One thing that makes me a bit sad is that in this country where you often hear people complaining about men not “stepping up” (our dear president even chose Father’s Day of 2008 and 2009 to give this fancy speech about how bad fathers are) men that actually do are blocked at every opportunity possible to be those responsible dads that we are supposedly so short on. If men are so bad and we need to be better dads then why actively block the ones that are stepping up?
QRG:
I think Clarisse provides an excellent forum here, but in some senses her feminism and her insistence on ‘male privilege’ contradicts the very existence of this forum.
Nah I have to disagree with that. Believe me I’ve seen plenty of spaces where what you say here is true beyond any doubt. Clarisse is definitely not one those people who will turn her nose up and say, “the only reason you disagree with me is because you’re afraid of losing you male privilege. therefore you and your words are invalid.”
I wouldn’t go as far as the bold part of what Infra just said but her feminism does have a sense of fairness and decency that you just don’t find in a lot of other feminists.
But I will go this far with something Infra said:
She’s taken a beating for her efforts, and she doesn’t deserve it. What she does deserve is a hell of a lot of respect.
QRG:
But I don’t see how they fit with her and feminists’ belief in ‘male privilege’.
As a male the answer is pretty simple from my perspective. Unlike lots of other feminists Clarisse recognizes that “male privilege” is not the beginning, middle, and end of gender discourse. Its not like she’s churning out post after post about “what’s wrong with men” this or how “oppressive men are” that. She actually puts effort to understand where men are coming from rather than taking her own relatively limited experiences with men, drawing absolute and final conclusions, and then working from there.
Many (if not most) feminists: “I’ve experienced ___ from men. This means ____. They are wrong and hateful because ____.”
Clarrise: “I’ve experienced ____ from men. Does your experience differ? Let’s talk about how and why things happen and hopefully we can do something about it.”
A whole hell of a lot of feminists could learn from her.
@QRG, Infra
“I, for one, thank her for that. And I know that I’m not alone in thinking so. “
Absolutely, as far as I know this is the only feminist blog, which is reaching out to men (cis, straight ones). In my opinion this blog is a good example of treating potential allies with respect, even if they are not completely in line with feminism. The only alternative to talk about masculinity are the MRA’s sites. But the atmosphere there is usually very hostile and I don’t think it makes any sense to participate in a discussion, in which “mangina” is a common and accepted insult. (BTW, it’s interesting that QRG was a called something along the lines of a “penis worshiper” in the Feministe comments. This is exactly the same thing as calling someone a “mangina”, with genders reversed. I really think insults like this should be off limits in any discussion about gender.)
It’s a pity, that spaces like this hardly exist, all the more Clarisse deserves credit for making this discussion happen.
BTW, thanks QRG for the linking to Mark Simpson. His writing about masculinity is great. So far, I especially like his piece about the Bond movie.
Infra,
“[Clarisse has] taken a beating for her efforts, and she doesn’t deserve it. What she does deserve is a hell of a lot of respect.”
Very. Much. So.
QRG,
we’ve had the “privilege” discussion with Clarisse a couple of times, and it’s been, I think, illuminating for both sides. Just look at the older threads of the series and do an in page search for “privilege”. It’s been thoroughly discussed and as others have mentioned, Clarisse’s position is far from one-dimensional – as is that of most other commenters.
AB,
sure. Did you catch my last reply to you? It also works with respect to this aspect. If you look at the apparent mating structure (women looking for dominant men, and being the one’s with sexual choice during most of their fertile part of life), and assuming that they are revealing something that is not merely based on economic dependence or fashion, but to a significant degree on more fundamental social variables or even innate and thus ‘independent’ preferences, it’s easy to see which dimension at least significantly limits the speed of the adjustment/reinvention of both feminity and masculinity.
There is a limit to our ability to perform gender sexually but not in every other aspect of our lives – some are probably better at it than others, say BDSM oriented people, but for most of us, there are limits to playing gender.
For a mainstream version of performative masculinity, look no further than PUA. Their approch is “fake it til you make it”, but that’s only because they see the value in making it. If there were no inherent value in making it anymore, “faking it” (or, in feminist speak: performing gender for sexual attraction) would/could be “the real thing”. But I’m not sure we’re ever going to get to that point. And given your scepticism about the cultural malleability of sexual attraction, I believe you’ll agree on this.
Danny, Sam, Clarisse and everybody else I’ve engaged with here.
I appreciate this discussion very much. It has been challenging, enlightening, mostly civil, and I still have a lot more I want to say, clarify, and ask about. But I have realised that recently, this place, which was already not the most friendly environment for someone like me, has become impossible for me to enjoy any more.
There’s too much ideology, and it’s becoming too much of an anti-feminist echo-chamber. It’s a shame because sites where men and anti-feminists discuss masculinity and feminism alone are already extremely common, but I do not think my input will be appreciated by most posters here any more. I’m not good enough at shutting things out to be able to exclusively focus the lines of text I like here and only answer those, and even if I was, that would pretty much defeat the purpose of posting to begin with.
I’m not going to stick around just to vent my hostility at people. I’m certainly not going to keep up potentially hostile exchanges just to gain sympathy on some other message board where I’ll be telling people about how unreasonable people at Clarisse Thorn’s blog are and how badly I’ve been treated there. This place is too good to deserve the same treatment as Feministe has been getting.
I don’t count on winning any friends with this. I know that when I’m gone, my motivations will be made out to be something else, and what seems reasonable for a non-feminist tired of feminist spaces will suddenly be proof of how feminists can’t stand to have their viewpoints challenged. But I’ve always believed that once you were sure you would not change your mind, and that the other party wasn’t going to change theirs either, keeping up a conversation was usually pointless.
So I’m not writing this to start a debate about the tone among anti-feminists (I’ll be gone when that happens), I’m mainly writing this to illustrate how a feminist-friendly individual can be turned off non-feminist spaces, and what the difference is between many such individuals (like myself) and that of many of the people who claim to be turned off by the tone of feminist spaces: That I’m not going to stick around to troll you. So thank you once again for the time spent debating, it was fun while it lasted, and I hope to find some other space like this one was when I first started reading.
Hmm.
Firstly, AB, I really appreciate your contributions and I’m sorry you feel the need to vanish, but you’re welcome back if you ever feel like rejoining.
I agree that the tone of this conversation has become progressively more anti-feminist, which is something that has made it more difficult for me to deal with as a feminist, and has made me much less interested in a lot of the comments in general. (And has pushed me more towards more aggressive feminist positions, I think, though that effect has come from a few different experiences.)
While I am generally interested in masculinity, and it’s conceivable that I might have started something like the manliness series if I didn’t identify so strongly as feminist, I also might not have, and if I would have then it would have been in a very different form. In fact, some of the questions I asked originally had to do with how to make more men feel comfortable with the feminist movement, and that is a question that I still think is important, which is why — although I occasionally shut down lines of inquiry that are all about attacking feminist concepts — I do try to take critiques of feminism with an open mind when they come up.
But I am not and never intend to be an anti-feminist — quite the opposite, obviously — and I never wanted these to be outright anti-feminist threads, and I don’t want my blog to be just another place where anti-feminists can talk about anti-feminism.
Specifically, the manliness threads have a lot more to offer than just being critiques of feminism or feminist positions (or outright attacks on them), or rehashings of MRA concerns. There could be a lot more productive talk on masculinity and manliness that is getting lost in the shuffle because some people are so eager to attack feminism.
I’m not sure what to do about it. I’m tempted to do a “hard restart” of some kind, close comments on this thread, start the “Salvation” thread early and try re-posing most of my questions from the original manliness series.
Thoughts?
Also: I really appreciate the compliments from everyone. Thank you.
@AB
We only had a brief exchange and I’m very new to this discussion. But I want to say, that I appreciate your perspective and value your input. I would be very sorry, if you withdraw from this discussion, at all.
Clarisse,
I think, as I think I mentioned above, that the threads are too long now for argumentative consistency. I think a great thing would be to identify a handful of themes that came up (eg sexual shaming, scarcity, nice guys, feminist discourse hegemony, grass is greener, what makes a man (trans discussion), dominance requirements, dating scripts, pua – to name a few, off the top of my hat) and summarize them, pretty much like you’ve done it for your presentation for the talk in Chicago early in 2010. If we agree on topics and assign them, it should be possible to come up with nice summaries that could then be juxtaposed with the original questions, but also with questions that have come up along the way.
Well, I’m new to this thread. But from some postings I got the feeling that sometimes, some of the commenters were happy to deviate from the topic of masculinity and use this thread as an opportunity to finally be able to rant about anything related to feminism on a feminist blog.
So, if I may make a suggestion, it would be that, for the next iteration, commenters try harder to stay very close to the topic, which is masculinity.
(Also, referring people to old discussions with “we’ve talked about this before, read this other 1000-comments thread and then come back” isn’t really helpful.)
Thomas:
‘The only alternative to talk about masculinity are the MRA’s sites. ‘
That’s not true Thomas. You already have seen Mark Simpson’s site and I also write about/discuss masculinity with other people on my blog.
http://www.quietgirlriot.wordpress.com
I agree the debate on gender does get reduced to the binary of ‘feminist’ versus ‘MRA’ but there are a lot more nuanced writers/bloggers people.
I will do a post with some links and link it here.
@Clarisse
I really hope you don’t close down comments. There is a pattern emerging where whenever I go on ablog and talk about gender the comments get closed down! I will start to get a complex.
But I know it’s nothing to do with me. These discussions are very wide and a bit cumbersome. But I like the fact they are free-rolling. It gives people a chance to speak.
I like Sam’s idea a lot, though I don’t have a lot of time to actualize it myself. I also think it might help with the problem DFL noted, where people have trouble going back and reading the previous long and intimidating and complicated discussion.
I’d say that one possible way to approach it could be:
1) List themes.
2) Hunt down favorite comments along given themes.
3) Collect the themed group of comments and put them in a post, then encourage discussion along those lines.
If commenters want to do this, I think it could work really well. But it’s a lot of work. Simpler solutions might be better just because they’re less work. Or, Sam — if your idea was simpler than I think it is, feel free to say that and tell me why.
Clarisse,
yeah, pretty much what you said – except I thought of summarizing and linkes footnotes rather than this -
“3) Collect the themed group of comments and put them in a post, then encourage discussion along those lines.”
I suppose both are a possibility, your 3 will probably be less work, the summaries may be more accessible…
The usual stalemate eh? The people on different sides agree there a lot of problems on all sides that need to be addressed but somehow that gets lost.
If I could get specific here may I ask?
Clarisse:
I agree that the tone of this conversation has become progressively more anti-feminist, which is something that has made it more difficult for me to deal with as a feminist, and has made me much less interested in a lot of the comments in general. (And has pushed me more towards more aggressive feminist positions, I think, though that effect has come from a few different experiences.)
What exactly gave you the feeling that this conversation was becoming anti-feminist? (Because honestly I was feeling some hostility myself in my own exchange here with AB)?
Bear in mind I’m not asking so that I can try to disprove your feelings (I get too much of that myself). I’m asking in hopes that we can find some way that everyone can have a discussion where no one is feeling there is hostility being pointed at them.
There could be a lot more productive talk on masculinity and manliness that is getting lost in the shuffle because some people are so eager to attack feminism.
If you wish I think I may have something of an answer for why that happens.
Quoted for agreement.
Clarisse: it’s not just becoming more anti-feminist, it’s doing so in a particularly interesting and familiar way.
To be precise, for some really peculiar reason the discussion seems to be very closely following a pattern I’ve noticed previously in a lot of trans women’s experiences with feminism, and there’s absolutely no reason it should be. The general path is that they start off optimistic towards feminism, then discover that some feminists are determined to do things that hurt them. Then they discover the larger group of feminists who defend feminism’s reputation by trivialising this harm, and slowly realise that far more feminists object to them complaining about the problem than care about the problem itself. Then eventually this all reaches a tipping point – often via one particular catalysing incident – and they abandon feminism altogether as entirely unsalvagable.
Partly it might be that feminism as a whole has a systemic problem realising that it has systemic problems. That’s not the whole story, though; for example, feminism has a systemic racism problem, and yet that doesn’t work in the same way.
Anyway, it’s possible that you just had the good fortune to meet some men interested in doing something about masculinity before they reached an essentially inevitable “abandoning all hope in feminism” stage. Dunno, we’ll see, though I’ve long suspected such a thing may be happening. (I reached that stage recently for other reasons.)
First, let me put another co-sign to She’s taken a beating for her efforts, and she doesn’t deserve it. What she does deserve is a hell of a lot of respect.
via Danny:
“As a male the answer is pretty simple from my perspective. Unlike lots of other feminists Clarisse recognizes that “male privilege” is not the beginning, middle, and end of gender discourse.”
This is roughly what I meant when I said something about “how Golden you think the privilege Hammer is.” I realized I probably could have phrased that better, but the discussion had moved on by then. (FWIW, I was recalling my teacher referring to a particular idea as “the Big Hammer” when I typed that.)
@AB: Dangit. If I was part of making you feel like that, I apologize.
via Clarisse:
“I agree that the tone of this conversation has become progressively more anti-feminist, which is something that has made it more difficult for me to deal with as a feminist, and has made me much less interested in a lot of the comments in general.” If I’m doing that, feel free point it out to me. I’m not asking for anyone to give me a detailed criticism of my position, just a “Hey, you’re getting kinda off-track/antifeminist. Stop it.” This is my first time in a long while doing more than occasional commenting on any sort of feminist space and while I swear my intentions are good, I’m paranoid they aren’t coming off that way.
“In fact, some of the questions I asked originally had to do with how to make more men feel comfortable with the feminist movement,”
I think that part of the issue is that the biggest thing to do to make men more comfortable with the feminist movement is to let them have a voice which is sufficiently uncensored that they can say “Hey, I think this is wrong.” and be listened to.
@QRG
“There is a pattern emerging where whenever I go on ablog and talk about gender the comments get closed down! I will start to get a complex. But I know it’s nothing to do with me.”
To say on the other thread “Well when feminists go out in non-feminists spaces and get told that they’re wrong, they should realize it’s because feminism IS wrong.” and then say this here is very inconsistent. Don’t develop a complex; just have the willingness to examine what you’re doing and adjust it if necessary.
makomk,
this does not explain the course this (and the parallel) thread has taken in the last days.
I seriously doubt that any of the commenters had the kind of shift in their attitude towards feminism that you describe in just these few days.
I too need to co-sign my deep appreciation for Clarisse and for these threads. The opportunity to be honest in a deep way about these issues is a rare one, and I will be sorry to see it go, if it goes.
I am also sorry to see AB go, she is an honest, kind, and thoughtful person.
For cis het men, opposition to “feminism” as an entity, can be a lazy position that in my opinion does not further creative or interesting thought. (PC or automatic support to “feminist” positions is equally uncreative however, especially for feminist men who thereby privilege other people’s experiences, which they know less well, against their own, which they know intimately.)
In my experience, whenever I find that “feminism” seems to uphold a position I find wrong, I generally find that another feminist is on my side. I like that, and in real life I would probably wear the “this is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt — it plays with the minds, usually, of the people who would need to have their minds played with. Though I honor the experience of those who associate the word with some kind of hurt in their own lives.
But I try to be self-critical and fearless (particularly anonymously!) and to try to pursue truth and honesty at the expense of signaling (maybe I don’t always succeed). I get a lot out of looking at my life experience in new ways, and in understanding the experience of others who have had very different lives.
There is nothing, in my opinion, more important than to look at gender issues through the lens provided by the kind of honest discussion we have had here. I have no doubt, Clarisse, that it will in time make you all the more formidable as a feminist. I suspect it does so already, though it may take you a while to realize it.
AllSaintsDay:
I think that part of the issue is that the biggest thing to do to make men more comfortable with the feminist movement is to let them have a voice which is sufficiently uncensored that they can say “Hey, I think this is wrong.” and be listened to.
Yep. For some reason there are those who will treat slightest hint of “I see and agree where you’re going here but about this…” the same as “Oh shut up and go make me a sandwich!”.
Am I saying that men should have the leading voice in feminism? No. But what I am saying is that you can’t expect to make the world a better place by shutting people out of the conversation (not to be confused with safe spaces for venting and talking freely) based on a characteristic. (Cutting someone out because they are male and are more like the latter phrase about the sandwich makes sense but going nuclear because someone is male and questioning something does no one any good.)
@Danny
True, but I don’t want to get into that, except to mention that it does relate to getting more men to feel comfortable with feminism, and perhaps to discuss how it relates to getting more men to feel comfortable with feminism, because it feels like exactly the sort of derailing that’s being lamented.
That said
(a) If there’s a way to split up the “find salient topics/posts” work, I’ll volunteer for some of it. I’d like to do it both to help along what I think is a worthwhile discussion, and to get a better handle on what’s already been covered than I currently have, but graduate school kinda leaves me with too little time to do the whole thing.
(b) In the meantime, I know that “WHAT THE HELL DOES POSITIVE MALE SEXUALITY LOOK LIKE ANYWAY!” hasn’t been resolved. Discuss. ;-)
Well, I hate to say it, but antifeminism is justified for two reasons :
A. There exist things that feminists (who have not been disowned) have done that either been actively harmful to men and trans people or , at the least a mixed bag.
B. There exist policies and memes that mainstream feminism and its political activists currently support that they have to STOP right now.
But in practice the movement never calls out its own or disowns anyone (unless they get too friendly with those males)with rare exceptions here and there. And once they start doing something or get a law passed or something they never tweak it or critique it, let alone consider working on repeal no matter how much it seems to backfire.Add a dash of male shaming and trans denial and thats why this movement makes more enemies all the time.
Circular action aside I have to admit that splitting the work does sound like a decent idea. I’d be up for it.
@Clarence:
Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that you’re correct… why introduce it here?
Why take a discussion that has been, on the whole, extremely productive — one that has succeeded in starting a dialogue that others have not been able to achieve — and introduce something that has a track record of running it straight into the ground?
And it isn’t just a matter of the dialogue. As commenters have mentioned here and in the previous threads, it’s affected the ways in which they think about their interactions with others, and the ways in which they think about themselves. To introduce things that would sabotage what’s happening here doesn’t just affect a blog post.
It affects other people’s lives.
The people who’ve been engaged with this, who have contributed to it, who have benefited from it — they deserve better than that.
Quoted for agreement. Thank you, Infra!
Danny, I just wrote a short comment to QRG here [ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/02/08/%E2%80%9Ci-know-you%E2%80%99re-smarter-than-me%E2%80%9D-clarisse-thorn%E2%80%99s-feminist-ideology/#comment-16023 ] in which I tried to articulate some of it. I’ll try to find some more examples soon.
It’s not that I think feminism should be an off-limits topic in the manliness threads (I mean, they are called “manliness and feminism” and originally started with some questions along those lines), but it just seems like more and more thread time has gone to “what’s wrong with feminism” rather than “how do we talk about masculinity” or “what does masculinity mean” or whatever. Maybe it’s partly because AB was willing to engage on that level, maybe it’s partly because I’ve been writing more about feminism in general and my other posts sort of leak back into this thread since it’s all on the same blog, maybe I’m just more sensitive to it, maybe it’s the fault of the adversarial Terminator pic, I don’t know?
Anyway, I’m hoping that by approaching the problem in a more constructive way, like by Sam’s awesome themed thread idea, we can create a more direct focus. Does that make sense? Which would hopefully be, well, like I say, constructive. Sam had suggested these themes; I don’t know if anyone else has noticed any others?
+ sexual shaming
+ scarcity
+ nice guys ™
+ feminist discourse hegemony [uh oh]
+ grass is greener
+ what makes a man (trans discussion)
+ dominance requirements
+ dating scripts
+ pua
As far as I’m concerned, if anyone wants to “call” a theme, and then go hunting through thread archives for instances of that theme, you’re welcome to it.
Infra:
Maybe you see more progress here than I do.
Regardless, these are the things that those who call themselves “feminists” who wear that label with some kind of pride are going to have to deal with and face up to if they truly want to make their “movement” all they have had no hesitation claiming it is. There’s been way too much denial, way too much acceptance of hatred and bigotry, and way too much shaming of those who were, would, or could have been their allies had they made the slightest concessions to fairness, had they truly backed up their “many feminisms” spiel instead of doubling down in defence of even the most appalling statements or behavior, and had they in general shown the slightest inclination to do what they so readily demanded of others: that is, listen, “check your privilege”, and etc.
Here we have a thread on manliness and feminism, which is a contentious subject that many men and many feminists disagree on betwixt those of their same sex and betwixt each other. To imagine that such a thread could or even should evolve in a way that offends no feminists, no men, no one at all is unrealistic.
@Clarence:
It’s quite possible that I’ve seen more progress than you have. We’ve engaged with these threads in very different ways, and that’s precisely what I’m pointing out.
True, that would be unrealistic. It’s also something that no one, to my knowledge, has suggested could occur.
What I’m saying is that in circumstances like the one that we’re dealing with here, the introduction of certain arguments, valid or not, can result in only trivial gain, if any — and that, at a significant cost. Sure, a person gets to make their point, and maybe someone else might agree with them. But the discussion flounders, progress is undone, and there’s a flow of bad blood, which doesn’t only affect the current discussion, but also the potential for future attempts.
Personally, I don’t share your perspective, particularly as voiced; but let’s say that you have it right. That still wouldn’t weigh much against the idea that this is not the place or time to raise that argument, for the reasons given above.
Pro/con feminist arguments, especially when phrased in general terms, have resulted in little headway. Pursuing other subjects, such as those listed by Sam, has.
Why choose the course that has led nowhere, over the ones that have resulted in gains?
Infra:
There have been a precious few times when , after much blood was spilled on a contentious issue some genuine progress has seemed -to me at least – to have been made.
I know its another blog , but take the “Schroedingers Rapist” thread as an example. It may be simple, and it may be short, but I think one thing that was basically agreed upon by all concerned in that thread and most of the response threads was that men should learn to be more conscious of approaching in situations where a woman might feel isolated and trapped. There were plenty of disagreements -even among feminist women- about whether it was appropriate to approach someone who has headphones on in a train. There were no disagreements that I saw about approaching a woman late at night in an isolated area or on an otherwise empty street. There was something -maybe not enough to some people but still SOMETHING – that all could agree on and is useful and will (if spread) make women’s lives easier – that is , don’t approach a woman where she is isolated or has reason to be scared. This can be passed around to even the shyest most socially awkward guy without making him feel guilty for his sexuality, or without one having to worry about the ideology behind it.
So some net good came out of those conversations even though of course there was not 100 percent total agreement about the propriety of all approaches everywhere.
But far too often in these kind of threads and debates absolutely nothing is gained. Heck, AB already said her (his?) mind wasn’t going to change. At least when she or he left they left with dignity rather than disappearing in a poof of shaming language or being zapped by a ban hammer.
I think sam has a good idea, and I’m glad to see Clarisse is considering it. Maybe it will help: with a topic so wide-ranging its easy for just about anyone to eventually feel they are being attacked.
@Clarence:
I want to make sure that I’m reading you right. Are you suggesting, or implying, that changes in regard to these subjects are likeliest to occur as the result of escalated offense and conflict? Meaning that such an approach (if only with regard to on-line discussions) should be embraced?
Perhaps I’m phrasing it too bluntly. But certain parts of your comment do seem to suggest it.
(Regarding AB, her sex/gender should be readily apparent from her comments.)
The concern about reading you right is a genuine one, by the way, not an implication. It’s a matter of how things were phrased. I wouldn’t want to misinterpret it.
(Apologies for the serial posting.)
It’s in regard to this, for example. Do you mean that the progress was made because the discussion had reached the pitch that it had, or that, in spite of its reaching that pitch, some progress had resulted?
I’ve known people whose approaches to debate would fit into the second category, and some whose approaches would fit into the first.
I think one problem could be that the title of the thread suggests we have to think of manliness in relation to feminism at all.
I think sometimes it is good to look at manliness and masculinity through different lenses. This is why i love the work of Mark simpson so much. He takes masculinity as his central theme and investigates it from many different perspectives.
This is a discussion of ‘machismo’ and American culture:
http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/11/15/america-to-machismo-how-do-i-quit-you/
You know something, Infra?
I really , really don’t know.
I’d say that some people find themselves affected more by the more emotional debates and others seem to find logic and reason persuasive. But of course in reality, most debates don’t change anyone’s mind.
I personally, prefer the more civil debates at Feminist Critics, but that is just part of my personality.
I wasn’t intending to give any implication that the reason progress was made was because blood was shed, I wasn’t really thinking of what was useful for these conversations at all. I was just thinking aloud that despite the fact that the thread was very contentious (like any of a gadzillion thread concerning gender) somehow progress had been made so not all the conversations have ended in futility. Just 99.95 percent of them, it seems. But even if this one was to end that way, it’s went on much longer than most.
Clarisse,
the topics I listed in my comment were by no means meant to be exhaustive, they were just what came up when I mentally scanned the followup thread. There’s certainly more, like the whole “male gaze” discussion that took place in one of the side threads in the Summer. Or “rape culture, explicit consent and antioch”.
come on… you actually agreed that a discussion of masculinity as gender topic is (must be) held on the gender policy turf, on which feminism does have the discourse hegemony… which is, in this realm, not rarely creating a frustration for men that is not unsimilar to the one you mentioned in your recent feministe thread.
Since I believe that there is no other space to hold a productive discussion – except some hypothetical corner of the “Seduction Community” construed as male gender movement (you mentioned some remarkable similarties in approach to gender in your feministe post about puas) – my idea with that topic was more a description of the discoursive framework this discussion is held in, challenges, sticky points, and recurring conflicts (and how to avoid them).
Sam – I think you are wrong (and probably Clarisse is too). I think there are plenty of other spaces to discuss gender and masculinity apart from within feminism or within ‘MRA or Seduction Communities’.
I have been discussing masculinities on my own blog and that of others, including Mark Simpson http://www.marksimpson.com, Caroline Hagood at culture sandwich http://www.culturesandwich.com and more recently with Elise Moore at The Autobiography of A Soul http://autobiographyofasoul.blogspot.com/
These sites tend to be focussed on ‘culture’ and look at masculinities and femininities in the media, pop culture, pornography, advertising etc.I think those contexts give real meaning to the debates, and move away from this feminist v anti-feminist binary.
There’s loads of ways to look at masculinity.
@Clarisse:
I think there are a lot of topics we have yet to touch on with any real depth or at all. So yes, I like the “themed” idea too. It will help guide discussion, and hopefully can make things a little less circular and gain us some breadth in the discussion.
Here are some more ideas (they may be too narrow or broad for effective discussion, but just to get the ideas rolling/brainstorm):
- Male disposability / expectations of heroism&sacrifice / chivalry
- “man up!” male stoicism / male independence / etc.
- Positive and negative male stereotypes/portrayals in media (recently been watching some 90′s sitcoms, and it’s… interesting)
- Male roles in family
Also, these articles by Greta Christina might give some good ideas:
http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/147626/5_stupid%2C_unfair_and_sexist_things_expected_of_men/?page=entire
http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/147779/5_things_society_unfairly_expects_of_men?page=entire
@Sam –
come on… you actually agreed that a discussion of masculinity as gender topic is (must be) held on the gender policy turf, on which feminism does have the discourse hegemony… which is, in this realm, not rarely creating a frustration for men that is not unsimilar to the one you mentioned in your recent feministe thread.
Yes, I do agree, sorry. I didn’t mean the “uh oh” to be nasty or a shut-down, I was just saying it because I think the topic has potential to start a super harsh debate super fast. Sort of like throwing up my hands and being like, well, so be it.
Also, one thing that focusing new threads on themes might do (and collating old comments) is help avoid retreading old ground, which is happening more and more as new people get added into the conversation without reading the (admittedly extremely long and dense) previous comment threads.
QRG:
Sam – I think you are wrong (and probably Clarisse is too). I think there are plenty of other spaces to discuss gender and masculinity apart from within feminism or within ‘MRA or Seduction Communities’.
In deed there are. I’ve been talking about gender and masculinity on my own blog. While its more of a basic approach I by no means do feminists/MRAs/PUAs or any one side have some sort of corner on the gender discourse.
QRG,
“I think those contexts give real meaning to the debates, and move away from this feminist v anti-feminist binary.
There’s loads of ways to look at masculinity.”
Cool, I’ll check the links and will report back, but it’s a busy week…
Clarence:
Heck, AB already said her (his?) mind wasn’t going to change. At least when she or he left they left with dignity rather than disappearing in a poof of shaming language or being zapped by a ban hammer.
I’m honestly wondering about that dignity part. I’ve been reading what over what (seems to be) AB’s last comment for the last day or so. (Well more like I’ve been trying to come up with a response that wasn’t mean.) And no matter how hard I try it just feels like those last two paragraphs were the opposite of dignity. Telling us we’re gonna twist his/her words and calling our behavior trolling. On the real?
I’m sure she was trying to be civil but really?
(Did my comment get eaten?)
Clarence:
Heck, AB already said her (his?) mind wasn’t going to change. At least when she or he left they left with dignity rather than disappearing in a poof of shaming language or being zapped by a ban hammer.
I’m not so sure about that dignity part Clarence.
I’ve been milling over (what seems to be) her last comment trying to come up with a way to respond without getting mean about it. I was fine up until the last two paragraphs.
and
Call me what you will (and Clarrise if you must you can mod this away but I simply refused to let it go unsaid) but when I think of dignity I don’t think about telling people they are going to twist my words or call other people’s behavior trolling.
I’m sure AB was trying to civil (and he/she was for the vast majority of the time I was engaging) and I wish her/him luck in their future reading and discussion but that just didn’t come off as dignity to me.
Cessen I remember seeing those Greta Christina posts last year. I wasn’t fully on board with them (for reasons that I think may be pretty obvious now) but there was a lot of good stuff that was being said and needed to be said.
If anyone ever needed proof of the mainstreaming of male sexual shaming…
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/hard-core/8327/4/
I’m not actually sure what the author’s point is, but the takeaway is “men have always been pigs, they are pigs and they will always be pigs”. And those naive sex positive feminists just don’t get it. Women and men are too different to be compatible, sexually. And there’s nothing to be done about it, not even strict enforcement will work.
This –
http://www.alternet.org/sex/149625/the_antimale_antisex_falsehoods_that_rule_discussions_about_porn_and_sexuality
- helps a little, but the rebuttal seems a bit timid, dutifully informing the author of above piece that people are actually not all the same, that even men can be not pigs, and some women do like it rough. But the men are not all pigs-point is mostly addressed with a quote from “The Good Men Project”. A single quote against well ingrained beliefs and social myths. A myth that seems to be difficult for the author to a priori disagree with…
And no one ever mentions any recipe how a guy can feel good about his sexuality.
Ack. But it’s a good illustration of why this debate is badly needed.
Yes, but a young sex-positive feminist, the “Sexademic” has done a wonderful job of fisking the “Brutish Male Sexuality” trope in general.
http://sexademic.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/brutish-male-sexuality-part-2/ (and of course Part 1)
Humbition, thanks for that link. Very cool.
Interesting stuff.
One part of the AlterNet response to “Hard Core” was on point: “Had Vargas-Cooper stuck to sexuality in general without vilifying heterosexual male desire, the piece could have been a smart discussion of the difficulty of marrying political ideals to the complex, personal world of sex.”
Vargas-Cooper’s mention of Freud and “emotional ambivalence” opened up some decent space for exploration, and there are books out there that have explored that territory productively; Stephen Mitchell’s _Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance Over Time_ covered it quite well, as did Pommier’s _Erotic Anger: A User’s Manual_ (though neither are, strictly speaking, Freudian, and the second is somewhat obscure).
The question, to me, seems to be: why raise that issue, which in itself doesn’t suggest any gendered bias, only to direct it specifically toward male expressions?
Is the suggestion, there, that male psychology — not male sexuality, but male personhood as such — is flawed in a way that female psychology is not?
@Sam, interesting …. Tana Ganeva, who wrote the AlterNet article you linked, was the editor who worked with me on the “creep” article and the later initiation article. I’ve been trying to pitch an article to them about actual sexual scripts for men and women, but it looks like a no go.
@humbition, wow, my favorite part of that link is actually the comment where Sexademic gives a bunch of articles about women buying sex:
http://sexademic.wordpress.com/2011/01/05/brutish-male-sexuality-part-2/#comment-1003
It’s enough to make me wish I weren’t broke so I could go hire an escort :P
OK, so, if we are seriously going to start building out open threads on certain topics, anyone want to go for it? I figure, if anyone wants to select a theme (AllSaintsDay mentioned being interested) and then go hunt through comments on the various threads (or other articles outside the threads, I don’t care) and email me what they find in a text doc, I wouldn’t mind posting open threads along certain masculinity theme lines.
I posted one comment (which is awaiting moderation) on sexacademic where I point out that the consequences of women being unable to comprehend men saying no to sex is not limited to the woman feeling angry, undesired or resentful and then proceeding to snark about them or insult them with gender policing, but more importantly a higher risk for the man to be raped (where I define non-consenting/coerced sex as rape).
As progress is made and women are allowed to be more sexually assertive then it follows that the risk of them commiting rape or sexual assault increases.
Two ways to counter this is to dispell the myth that men always want sex (and the corollary that men’s consent thus is implied) in the minds of men so men can freely communicate non-consent without being gender-policed and most importantly to dispell this myth from the mind of women. In short; women need to be told that they need to obtain consent and in clear text being taught what failure to do so really is – hint: he didn’t get lucky!
There has been much talk about PUA and the difficulties for men to get sex and relationships. Let’s not forget the flip-side which is much more serious than most like to think.
Yeah, male prostitution and female customers. Another thing that no-one thinks exists, or that it at most only exists as rare occurences. This is illustated in an article where some have done a study and interviewed 240 female tourists in Negril, Jamaica. One third disclosed that they’ve had sex with locals and 60% of them disclosed that there were some “economical elements” involved in the liaisons. None of them considered the liaisons as a client-prostitute relationship. In fact they framed it as “helping the men and the local economy by giving them money and gifts”.
The researchers had this view of this disconnect:
-source: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/11/1057783358449.html
This illustrates that black men are hit with a racist double whammy on the “men always want sex” trope. Men are animals and black men even more so seems to be the underlying assumption.
Another contributing factor is of course the public mindset that only men are johns.
Yeah, sex tourism by white women in African or African-American countries has reached the level of a stereotype among some locals in heavy-tourism countries, from what I understand. There was a bit about this in a novel I recently reviewed called “The Memory of Love”, which is set in Sierra Leone.
And yet in Los Vegas, Nevada, and in the counties nearby where the Bunny Ranch and other such businesses exist there are no “all male ” brothels, and last I heard there were all of two male gigolos and they partly had to rely on sexually servicing men as well in order to make a living. This is another one of those things that I don’t believe is distributed equally among the sexes. High libido women might go for it, older aging women (cougars) might go for it, but I don’t think your average teen to thirty something woman has any interest in buying sex from a male whatsoever.
@Clarisse:
I’m seriously tempted to front the cash just so you can write about the experience.
I went back through the threads like I promised Danny I would. Here are some thoughts:
I really don’t want to seem like I’m picking on QRG, who often says things I agree with and think are valuable. But she’s a useful example here. QRG has decided she doesn’t want to try to “be nicer”, which is okay by me. There are things she says that I like, but she’s been called out before, by sex-positive people who are much less calm than I am, for being difficult to talk to. I don’t want this to become a giant flamewar, and she’s known for starting those, which is why I took such a hard line with her so quickly on the Feminist Ideology thread here [ http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/02/08/%E2%80%9Ci-know-you%E2%80%99re-smarter-than-me%E2%80%9D-clarisse-thorn%E2%80%99s-feminist-ideology/#comment-16079 ]
Deciding that you just won’t be nice isn’t a good way to approach discourse, in my book.
But like I said, I don’t want feminism to be off-limits, partly because that would be silly and partly because (as Clarence notes) there’s just no way to make this thread totally inoffensive. What I don’t like, though, is the feeling that if a feminist point comes up, the conversation will immediately become focused on anti-feminism. I also don’t want there to be a lot of tossed-off snide comments — one example is one of QRG’s comments on the Ideology thread, where the entire content of her response to someone else was “maybe feminists have a hard time because feminism doesn’t stand up to scrutiny”. That’s not even critique, it’s just snippiness.
Some strategies for not seeming hostile to feminism (my thoughts, anyway). Feel free to argue with me on these ;)
* Not centering arguments on anti-feminism … if feminism comes up as an aspect of what’s wrong with a issue, then making it clear that feminism is just one aspect, and not everything bad
* Saying “some feminists do X” instead of “feminists do X”
* Not making assertions about things feminists do (or any identity group, really) if there isn’t a source available
How’s that? And yes, Danny, if you want to go more into ideas about why you think this happens, feel free ….
@Cessen — HAHAHA. You know, when I was first getting into SM, and involved with a dude who wasn’t a great partner for me, I remember telling a friend that I wasn’t sure where else I could go to do SM. My friend’s response: “I will buy you a dom rather than have you involved with Richard.” I never took him up on it. But do note that one of the “women who buy sex” articles included a woman who didn’t feel that she could get her SM fix elsewhere.
I really like those three strategies, Clarisse. In fact I consciously practice them.
Though I have started to comment on QRG’s blog. And something I said on a very different topic seems oddly relevant. So, to quote myself,
“If you build a theory of what people are doing right, and then build on it — rather than a theory of what they are doing wrong, and how they must change everything — we might have a chance.”
So … does pointing out when people are pointing out places where others are doing things wrong count as pointing out when people are doing things wrong?
Somewhat relevant: Michel Houellebecq in his novel Platform (which I’ve read a long time ago and only vaguely remember) explores female sex tourism and contends that male and female sex tourism reflects a profound disharmony between the sexes in the tourist’s home countries, such as a “dating war” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_sex_tourism)
Clarence: It probably are fewer female johns than men, but I think the real reason you don’t find an all male brothel catering female customers in Nevada is the stigma attached to paying for sex. It is seen as something bad men do.
So women don’t go to a brothel, they go on a “romance” holiday, because that is “different”:
-source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/women-who-travel-for-sex-sun-sea-and-gigolos-407202.html
This article had an interesting commentary:
A comment to that article answered shows that that is jun inconceivable to many:
Nice.
Tamen:
Yes, I thought of female sexual shaming as one reason that women might not admit paying for sex. Since they are the “pursued” sex, the ones that due to genetics, age, weight, or temperment do not get chased might be ashamed to say they paid for sex. So there is some under-reporting. Nonetheless, the vast majority of women, esp. younger women do not have to pay for sex as it is something they can get merely by offering it to all but the most disireable or jaded of men, who would be the only ones who might turn the average 16 to 40 woman down. I wonder if any of you people have ever read an interview with a male gigolo before. It’s a far different world than that of female prostitutes rather streetwalkers, brothel workers, or high-end escorts.
There seem to be conflicting accounts as to whether most of the clients of male prostitutes are males or females, only in a few countries used for “sexual tourism” is the experience generally admitted by all to be generally a female and male experience.
Based on the studies I’ve seen as groups men and women are different, and thus I believe far fewer percentages of women are interested in male prostitutes than men who are interested in female prostitutes. I will say that I think the female sexual heirarchy does help suppress some of the real desires. Meanwhile, even if I had a sculpted body, a career as an escort would be denied me in the sense that I have no interest in gay sex whatsoever.
From a review of Jackson Katz’s “Tough Guise”:
http://hope.journ.wwu.edu/tpilgrim/j190/toughguise.vidsum.html
The end of the review poses some potential solutions to the problem of violent masculinity, implying that these solutions come from Katz’s film, and one of them is “girls and women must show they value men who reject the tough guise.” It’s an interestingly Hugh-Ristik-style critique coming from someone like Katz …. The other two are the usual stuff though:
1) Katz says we must change the “cultural environment” (ala George Gerbner in “Killing Screens”) — to begin, men must have the “courage” to work with women and speak out. They need to see a more honest portrayal of male vulnerability. Then, they can also join with others — such as in gay/straight alliances — but change must happen on a personal and institutional level (media are institutions, along with the typical ones like schools, etc.).
2) Girls and women must show they value men who reject the tough guise.
3) People must work to break the media controlled by rich, white men who control the existing stories — and include MORE STORIES about men as humans not trapped by the guise.
I’m sorry I failed to properly edit my previous comment. It’s one of the most grammatically poor posts I’ve ever put up and I’m ashamed of it. I probably should write these posts in word and then splice them over.
In terms of women buying sex, I agree that women do in practice buy sex less, and I would suspect that there is some truth to what Tamen pointed to, about a gendered difference in how women vs. men treat the people they have sex with for money. I’m not saying that an economic exchange by women should be seen as less of an economic exchange — and yes, there can be some weird behavior from women who see sex workers the same way there is from men who see sex workers (one of my male sex worker friends once told me a story about how he saw a female client and she became so obsessed with him, stalker-ish, etc that he had to just stop seeing her ever or even replying to her messages — a story that is more typically heard from female sex workers who see men). But at the same time, I would be really surprised if a large percentage of women who buy sex expressed the same lack of emotion and contempt towards male sex workers that many men express towards female sex workers. I haven’t heard stories like that from anyone I know, and it seems to me that the way female vs. male sexuality is acculturated would work against it.
I had a conversation with my mother about this last night, and she made the (admittedly standard feminist but still good) point that women make less money than men in general, and that overweight or unattractive women typically make dramatically less money (there are all kinds of studies on this if you Google). If overweight or otherwise unattractive women earned at the same rates men do, I bet we’d see a lot more high-end male sex work.
(quick edit to second paragraph for clarity)
I can delete the old comment if you post a new version, Clarence. I’ve been meaning to find a decent preview/edit wordpress plugin, but although I’ve looked a couple times quickly, I haven’t found any that seemed really good (recs welcome).
Triple post! I think my next-to-last comment could lead to argument about the gendered wage gap, so I just wanted to try and stave that off a little bit by noting that while there are critiques to be made of some arguments about the wage gap, as far as I know, it is widely accepted that women are just extremely underrepresented among the especially wealthy people who would be able to drop a lot of cash on a high-end escort, and that unattractive women are just plain making less money.
Thanks for the offer Clarisse, but so far I think the post might be understandable, so I suppose it should be let stand.
Far as it goes, I think I remember an argument Typhonblue had with someone about about whether fatness hits a man or woman’s pocket more. I really don’t remember many details, I think we’d all agree that unless its a job that requires public presentation that nobody should suffer any discrimination about how they look.
Increasingly I’m skeptical of any gendered claims like that without studies (that I can actually read the methodology of) to back it up. It’s too easy for cultural tropes to influence our thinking and people’s reporting behavior. Especially for behind-closed-doors type stuff like this.
Having said that, I recall a male acquaintance of mine a few years ago (no longer in contact with him) that actually had a stripper stalk him. At the time, since I was sorely lacking female attention, I said to him, “Dude, that’s so awesome.” And this look came over his face, and he said, “No. No, it’s really, really not.”
@Clarence:
Doesn’t this feed directly back into what Cessen quoted at #246, and what Tamen wrote at #249?
Two events are still burned into my mind when it comes to that… one of which involved a woman openly bragging about committing partner rape on a married man, essentially because, since no healthy man in his right man would turn down an offer of sex from an attractive, younger woman, she had every right to get him too drunk to remember — and take it from him anyway.
(“right man” should be “right mind”)
Clarisse:
There could be a lot more productive talk on masculinity and manliness that is getting lost in the shuffle because some people are so eager to attack feminism.
Me:
If you wish I think I may have something of an answer for why that happens.
Clarisse:
How’s that? And yes, Danny, if you want to go more into ideas about why you think this happens, feel free ….
Okay. Here goes.
I think that masculinity and manliness talk would go a lot more productive if it wasn’t for feminists attacking those of us who are not feminist.
And while I don’t (always) mean attack in the traditional sense of actually attacking words I’m still talking words that come off as an attack. Over at figleaf’s place a week or so ago on a post about the Pepsi Super Bowl ad I mentioned about how it gave the impression that men deserve to be hit. You know what figleaf responded with? “I think those ads really sum up for me why I think men need to stop distracting themselves with tales of mythical man-hating feminists and start paying attention to the *incredibly obvious* man-hating *non* feminists. It cost Pepsi $3,000,000.00 every time one of those ads ran during the Superbowl. Even without counting repeats a minor brand of a major U.S. corporation paid $15,000,000 to broadcast their intense misogyny all over the airwaves.
Feminsts get really frustrated when men don’t wise up. Anti-feminists spend millions of dollars trying to keep men stupid. People ask why I prefer feminism. That’s why.”
1. I think he’s about the only feminist that actually talked about the misandry of that ad. Oh plenty of feminists talked about it but nearly every single one of them kept of strictly on race like they refuse to acknowledge the treatment of that man.
2. But after that we are supposed to think its feminists that are the ones that are trying to help men? I point out mainstream harm of men and he tries to plug feminism with it despite the first point I made?
3. Another reason I don’t react to well to feminism is because it seems like some feminists go out of their way to co-opt anything that sounds positive and then act like they invented. Again its like they are more interested in the credit for the good action than the good action itself.
In my exchange with AB there were a few times where she/he pretty much ran the strategy of presenting some evidence of his/her point and then trying to use that evidence to try to disprove the existence of the phenomenon I was pointing out. This is not the first time I’ve seen this and I’ve sure as hell seen it from feminists as well.
In short if feminists didn’t seem like they were more interested in getting the credit for conversation than making sure the conversation happens they might not get attacked so much.
Just as you don’t like the dismissive tone that feminists get the dismissive tone that feminists give is no better. In a post about a month or two ago at a big feminist blog I dared to challenge the idea that the only difference between men who rape and men who don’t is that the one who don’t just haven’t done it yet. Oh and I also challenged the idea that its okay for a woman to generalize all men based on their own experiences. That was probably my very last time trying to talk to the folks there and don’t think for a second that those mods actually intervened (no you actually have to show hatred towards women to warrant that it seems).
That is also another reason I didn’t react to AB’s constant assertion that Feminist Critics was just an unproductive den for bitching about feminism. The folks at FC still know what respect for a difference of opinion is.
All I’m saying is that the next time feminists want to throw their hands up crying about why men aren’t receptive to feminism they might want to look in the mirror.
Okay, Danny. I’ll try to avoid co-opting things that might not ID as feminist if you’ll try to avoid attacking feminism. Does that work?
Tamen:
Clarence: It probably are fewer female johns than men, but I think the real reason you don’t find an all male brothel catering female customers in Nevada is the stigma attached to paying for sex. It is seen as something bad men do.
That and the generic stigma that men are so overcome with lust that they will do anything to get sex, even pay for it, whereas women are not supposed to want sex, even if they actually do.
But what you say Tamen does shed light on something that I think is often overlooked. People like to think that men are “free” to be sexual beings. I don’t think its that rosey. When it comes to sex its not like women are trapped in a restrictive script about sex and men are free to do as they please. I think they are both trapped in scripts. If it wasn’t for that script it actually would be seen as okay for men to pay for sex.
I agree to your terms Clarisse but let me say that I’m sorry for going a bit long and ranty on that response. That’s just s sore spot that festered for a long time.
Okay so it sounds like a lot of the people here want to get back to the basics of what these threads were once about.
@Clarisse:
Ha ha. You know, it’s funny, because that basically comes down to, “No giving feminism primary credit for anything, good or bad.”
But despite the humor (maybe I’m the only one that finds that funny), I think it’s actually a decent ground rule. I suspect few issues that men face today, or their solutions, are primarily due to feminism. So such a rule would, if anything, push us to identify more of the causes. So, it’s useful beyond just keeping things civil.
Of course, in cases where feminism may actually be a primary cause of something (good or bad), and if that is relevant, it would be unfortunate to completely skirt around that. But I’m presuming most of these ground rules can be broken if necessary. Ultimately, it comes down to good faith.
But yeah, I like this as a ground rule.
Infra,
I believe that may be the case – when men were considered to be intellectually superior to women, it was possible to treat their sexuality as a side effect. But since that superiority argument is pretty much dead (except, possibly, for the question of autists, geniuses, idiots and the question of the standard deviation of male vs female intelligence – Simon Baron Cohen, etc.), what mainly separates men from women is sexual psychology. So I suppose it’s not too far fetched to see an indentification of those two.
Clarisse,
Too bad. Did you talk after she wrote that reply? Because, even though my impression was that her reply was more dutiful than heartfelt, she does seem interested in exploring that dynamic… Did you get round to reading the paper about the script expectations I once sent you?
As for the sex work matter -
I’m not sure it’s mostly unattractive men who earn well who are using sexual services. I believe that the motivation to purchase sexual services can be as diverse as the motivation to offer them. But I do believe that, at the core of it, there is a difference that, culurally mediated in numerous ways, represents the relative scarcity of (male desire compatible) female sexuality.
Again, I totally believe that we could reduce the imbalance by getting rid of cultural artefacts that keep the emotions for sex trade alive. But the root cause of this imbalance is very likely marginally different reproductive strategies that result in different sexual strategies, which are then culturally amplified (more or less).
Humbition, thanks for linking to that blog!
Loved it.
Clarisse, did you find this
http://sexademic.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/confessions-of-a-pua-super-girl/
among her popular posts? She’s also some kind of PUA chaser ;) I have a hunch the two of you should meet up to discuss wing girl strategies ;)
As for Jason Katz -
does he actually say that? Interesting. And he’s not getting torn apart by feminists for both dragging them into a nice guy debate and appearing to police female desire?
I’m a bit too busy to start with the summary thing this week, but if no one else wants to start with those, I’ll go ahead with Scarcity and Sexual Shaming.
Oh, and as for comment previews -
have a look at these plugins.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ajax-comment-preview
http://austinmatzko.com/wordpress-plugins/comments-preview
As well you should be. The only way I can make sense of things is to figure that when someone makes assertions about how people act in a gendered way that all they’re talking about is the stereotypes they hold + confirmation bias. Which is a pain, because it ends up in conversations being all over the place. Measurements are best, otherwise I just assume that the bulk of the population of men and women are identical, although the outliers can be really different.
How people treat prostitutes might be pretty gendered though, because hiring a prostitute already makes you an outlier (moreso for women than men, but only 10-15% of men under 40 have ever hired a prostitute, and this is skewing downwards with time pretty fast, as I understand it.) Add confirmation bias, maybe some other bias (like relative visibility of men who visit prostitutes and hate women, versus those who’re excessively lonely?), and it’s not unbelievable.
@Cessen — I suspect few issues that men face today, or their solutions, are primarily due to feminism. So such a rule would, if anything, push us to identify more of the causes. So, it’s useful beyond just keeping things civil.
Yeah, I was thinking that same thing but hadn’t quite articulated it. Facilitation theory is fun!
@Sam — Did you get round to reading the paper about the script expectations I once sent you?
Uh, I think I skimmed it, but it’s been a while. I’ll look for it again. What was the title? not just so I can find it, but also so others can look it up.
I’m not sure it’s mostly unattractive men who earn well who are using sexual services. I believe that the motivation to purchase sexual services can be as diverse as the motivation to offer them.
Sure, I completely agree. And I would further add that I do strongly suspect that the primary reasons women don’t buy sex are the ones others have already stated, the fact that women don’t have the same encouragement/assumptions around how we enjoy our sexuality that men do. But I do think that having trouble getting sex in other ways (or, perhaps, the specific kind of sex a person wants, as exemplified by people who hire BDSM sex workers but don’t do BDSM in their “real” relationships) is very high on the list of motivations for buying sex, which means that resources comes into it for sure.
She’s also some kind of PUA chaser ;) I have a hunch the two of you should meet up to discuss wing girl strategies ;)
Wow! She’s even got the “confessions” title. That’s amazing. You’re right, I SHOULD talk to her …. also I better get this article written before she steals my thunder :P but I’ve got so much on my plate right now and I just can’t write as fast as I need to …..
I applied the Ajax plugin. I was hoping to use a live preview widget though, like the one Susan Walsh uses. Maybe I’ll just email her, but I’m not sure she built her own site. Edit capability would also be awesome.
@Brian, Cessen — Sure, but there’s still something to be said for anecdotal evidence coming from someone who actually talks to sex workers, you know?
BTW, I’ve been trying to find a male escort who usually sees women. It is very hard. No one I know — including Serpent Libertine, who runs the Chicago chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project — knows any. I do know a couple of straight/bi male sex workers, but they don’t usually see women, they usually see couples and/or do porn and/or are “gay for pay”.
ALSO Danny: Thanks for the apology. I’m glad you got that off your chest.
ALSO Sam: Sweet, I can’t wait to see what you collate.
Clarisse:
Did you mean to direct that at Brian and myself, or did I miss something Cessen wrote?
Yeah sorry. Xakudo, not Cessen. Too many comments.
BTW, I’ve been trying to find a male escort who usually sees women. It is very hard. No one I know — including Serpent Libertine, who runs the Chicago chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project — knows any. I do know a couple of straight/bi male sex workers, but they don’t usually see women, they usually see couples and/or do porn and/or are “gay for pay”.
Thank for admitting there may be something to what I am saying.
Sure … if I’d known there was any question whether I agreed, I’d have done it sooner ;)
@Clarisse:
Have you tried this one?
Most of the editable comment plugins seem to be for older versions of WP, but this one might be worth looking into.
(Question I tried to post a comment here a day or two ago but it never showed up. Any idea what happened?)
Unfortunately Clarisse its not coming off my chest that easily. If nothing else this is the third major example of my belief that larger feminist blogs are becoming (some are already) echo chambering wastes of time. I’ll take you, April (ethecofem), and DaisyDeadhead any day of the week over Feministing, Shakesville, and the brains behind Feministe.
They don’t seem to have any “Cowboys” in Chicago, but there is this: http://www.cowboys4angels.com/new-york/employment.html
They say they cater to only female clients.
They say they don’t sell sex, however they demand a full STD test with a follow-up check every 3 months from employees.
In Chicago a guy named Armand Chase advertise as a male courtesan. He doesn’t sell sex, but companionships. However, he is “happy to protect my client’s identity by calling on your behalf and reserving a room at a hotel of your choice for our date.” Among the services he offers is a 3 hour “sensual rendezvous”.
Another one is Alex S. Logan who even have a blog.
Although he on his site quotes Boston, New York and Toronto as bases he got at least one glowing endorsement from a client in Chicago: http://conciergedumonde.com/forum/index.php?topic=449.msg5416#msg5416
They all are expensive and they all don’t sell sex, although as mr. Logan says on his blog: “…most longer engagements take the form of a normal date – say dinner and then some after dinner fun.”
Or you could try the straight male escorts who explicitly say they cater to women on this page: http://www.sexyescortads.com/cities/male/chicago_escorts/
All in <5 minutes on Google…
I posted a comment with links to some male straight escorts catering the Chicago market and areas “nearby”. I guess they didn’t go through the spam filter because of the links and their nature.
I’ll try to just post one of them – or rather his blog: http://alexslogan.wordpress.com/
He got his base in Boston, Toronto and New York, but one escort rating/endorsment site has a review of him from a client in Chicago. He says he doesn’t sell “services”, but the dates usually includes dinner and some after dinner fun. I assume this very indirect way of describing the services provided are for legal reasons.
Thanks for the live preview plugin! Awesome. The editable comments plugin doesn’t seem to work though, alas.
Sorry about the comments in spam. I currently get literally hundreds of spam comments per day, so I’ve given up on checking them. I was able to find Tamen’s after fishing through 600 comments on nude videos of Alicia Keyes and Beyoncé (literally, 600), but I didn’t see Danny’s. If you guys email me at the same time that you try to post a comment and it doesn’t go through, I should be able to find it, but if it’s a while later … well … it’s just a lot to fish through. Not linking to a lot of things in one comment is a good strategy for avoiding being spam-filtered.
It’s kind of amazing that it never even occurred to me to look for a male escort on the interwebs.
It’s easy to fall prey for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias#Biased_search_for_information
The easiest way to avoid it to assume that everything imaginable exists on the internet, aka rule 34 when applied to pornography.
:)
@Clarisse:
For the spam problem: you might want to look into the http:BL plugin, which is pretty light but also includes some security benefits. I’ve been using it on WP 3.x without any problems. It requires a Project Honey Pot API access key, but that’s free for registration, similar to how things are with Akismet.
(The related plugin from abuse.ch might be one to look into as well, if security issues or referer spam are a concern for you. I haven’t used it, though, as I do most of that filtering at the server level.)
You can use the search feature on the spam section of the comments if you know who’s comments you are looking for.
PR Stunt? Feminist activism? Male shaming? None? All of the above? 2m views in two days or so.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq0JcQ1dOwU
Apart from the Heisenberg problem of not knowing what exactly the people, including the women in the clip, are looking at, possibly a not-so-well-hidden-camera, what’s the point? Is there a point?
Having been gone a while, I’m skipping back a little:
@ Infra–
That’s fine… as you may have suspected, I was mostly asking to see if you knew that “sociopath” isn’t actually the term for the diagnosis.
Though now you’ve demonstrated that you know enough to know that it’s ridiculous to characterize these threads as “partially sociopathic,” to which I was objecting originally… but it’s been long enough that there’s probably no point continuing along that line.
@ Clarisse, re: Sam’s
Heh. “Empathy break.” If you really do take a break from empathy, and are looking for ways to amuse yourself during–let me know, I can provide some pointers ;)
For a little while there, I was a bit concerned you’d taken the opposite meaning, and that we’d therefore have to have a (boring) conversation about what a “tool” is….
Think about the situations in which a guy feels it appropriate to call someone a “slut.” (Given that calling somebody a slut seems to be one of the very few culturally-approved ways for a guy to turn down what he perceives to be an unwanted sexual advance from a woman.)
Apropos of nothing in particular, I’ll second (Third? Fifth? Twentieth?) Infra’s
Though I am perhaps not the most well-qualified creature to determine what someone “deserves,” of course.
I don’t say too many complimentary things on here, especially lately. It seems to be a common Internet phenomenon–when we read something we agree with, we silently nod along, but when we disagree with something, then we just have to chime in. Pity.
On that note, Makomk,
This doesn’t quite match my personal experience, obviously, but now that you mention it, it’s really striking how often I’ve seen this pattern repeated–and you’re right, it does replicate itself in this thread. Hmm.
Or, as we say in my country, “Sam.”
@ QRG,
I think the title isn’t suggesting that we have to, just that the author, a feminist, is doing so.
@ Clarisse,
(Here’s where I make some ironic comment about “intent doesn’t matter” with regards to people feeling shut-down… :p )
…It’s enough to make me wish I weren’t quite so concerned with keeping the Motley (“out”) persona separate from my real-life (definitely not “out,” except to a few close friends) persona. Or that I was more confident there was a convenient way of passing money untraceably and anonymously. Alas: yet another entry in the “Experiments I’ll never get to do” file. ‘Cause the ensuing blog post would no doubt be hilarious.
Man, I wish I could volunteer for this–but I’m not sure when I’ll be back around. Being Motley is surprisingly effort-intensive, in a way, and life has been a bit too busy lately for me to keep up with the project. If this (well, either of those, but I don’t expect the former will) changes, I’ll go for it.
Re: Katz:
In what way is this statement different from the ones with which you, AB, and so many other feminists so thoroughly disagree? Isn’t this basically Nice Guy-ism?
If not, how so?
“More typically” meaning what? Given how few male sex workers are involved primarily with women, what percentage of the sample group does that guy represent, and what percentage of female sex workers have the same experience?
My own personal experience (not as a sex worker, though there are some similarities) so far indicates that obsessive, stalker-ish behavior isn’t particularly uncommon among women, though it’s usually taken as “cute,” pitiful, and harmless, rather than threatening.
Can you try to avoid attacking men as a group? It seems like Danny’s not getting a very good deal–particularly as I’m not at all confident that you (or I) can come up with a single trait that all men have in common… and that seems like a really essential first step before attacking a group.
Out of curiosity, were they all different videos? If so, Ms. Keyes and Ms. Knowles must be very busy women. Also, probably by now somewhat chilly.
@Motley:
Yeah, it’s probably time to bring that to a close. I’ll just add, before doing so, that there was some miscommunication there: I didn’t mean to characterize the discussions that way, but to say that, as related to my… configuration, as it were, following those lines works as a hormetic/mithridatic process for me, and is a (necessary) sustenance tactic in that way. I relate to them in a certain way because of certain things; but that doesn’t mean that the things that I relate to in that way, on their own, reflect those things.
Hopefully that clarifies.
Why sexual shaming is bad, all around.
http://www.charlieglickman.com/2011/02/the-pain-of-rejection-and-shame
Motley:
Can you try to avoid attacking men as a group? It seems like Danny’s not getting a very good deal–particularly as…
Actually the part of that proposition that I was biting my tongue on was that AB was pretty much allowed to “attack” MRAs (in the same manner that I was “attacking” feminists) free of consequence. And (for third time since both of my first two tries have been lost in the ether) I still say that AB’s final comment was condescension bordering on self fulfilling prophecy.
Actually that should be, “free of mention” rather than “free of consequence”.
I approved Danny’s lost comments after HR gave the search tip a while back. They’re #244 and #245.
I have been avoiding attacking men as a group. If you have something specific to call me out on, do that.
Please stop talking about AB. You’ve all said your piece and she’s not here to continue the conversation.
If you have suggestions for better facilitation rules, please feel free to post them. For my part, I’m getting frustrated by the fact that the comments on my blog, which is after all a feminist blog, are widely perceived as a hostile environment by feminists. I suppose I could just expect all the feminists to comment on my Feministe posts, and never comment here, end of story. I’d rather have a more fertile cross-talk here though, if at all possible.
@Motley, Think about the situations in which a guy feels it appropriate to call someone a “slut.”
Direct quote from a dude: “If she doesn’t give me her phone number, I think I’m allowed to call her a slut.” (picture also the indignant tone this was delivered in …)
It’s primarily a way of shaming women who have a lot of sex, but secondarily a generic female insult (which in itself is fucked up by the way). I guess I can think of situations in which a dude would call a girl a slut because his boundaries had been violated (e.g., a girlfriend who cheats on him), in which case I’d cut him more slack that the average person who uses the word — but that’s not all or even most situations I’ve encountered.
In what way is this statement different from the ones with which you, AB, and so many other feminists so thoroughly disagree? Isn’t this basically Nice Guy-ism? If not, how so?
Right, that’s why I thought it was interesting. I think what (Katz would say) differentiates it from Nice Guy-ism is that it doesn’t place all the blame/burden on women, which is exactly what Nice Guys do. In fairness though, it’s not clear that Katz actually says this, it’s just one of the things that someone who was discussing his video claims Katz says.
My own personal experience (not as a sex worker, though there are some similarities) so far indicates that obsessive, stalker-ish behavior isn’t particularly uncommon among women, though it’s usually taken as “cute,” pitiful, and harmless, rather than threatening.
I’m not saying this is definitely true, but doesn’t it seem possible that this is at least partly because women who get obsessive and stalker-ish are much less likely to actually inflict life-endangering physical violence on the object of their affections than dudes who do the same thing?
I’ve definitely seen guys who were obsessed with women who were read as cute, pitiful and harmless rather than stalker-ish, too. I think it’s more about how threatening a person seems in general, with women more likely to be seen as unthreatening.
@Clarisse:
Meaning that she doesn’t give the phone number for the asking, or that she doesn’t give the phone number after there’s already been some heavy, mutual flirting, intimacy or sexual contact involved?
If it’s the second, I’d see that as more of a response to the perception of being used (in which case it’s somewhat similar to cheating), but if it’s the first… in the social circles that I run in, that kind of thing can get a guy blacklisted from the group.
‘Course, in those circles, as well as in my usual hangouts, it’s also far more common to hear “slut” as an insult being delivered (usually in a backstabbing way) by one woman toward another than it is to hear it come from a man. I suspect that that’s why the men don’t use it much: it involves them in social politics and power struggles, and they generally try to avoid that entanglement.
That’s the thing that’s puzzled me about the issue of “slut:” the way that it’s described, in the context of most discussions of slut-shaming, isn’t remotely how it operates in the social circles I know. Nor does it match the experiences of the women I know who’ve been branded by the word. Maybe, in that context, it just doesn’t have the same kind of use.
Well, grad school did come and eat me for a while. I’ll see if I can’t go through and get a topic thread done…the problem being that splitting it like that doesn’t cut the work too much, since I still have to go through all of all the previous threads.
via Motley:
“Can you try to avoid attacking men as a group? It seems like Danny’s not getting a very good deal–particularly as I’m not at all confident that you (or I) can come up with a single trait that all men have in common… and that seems like a really essential first step before attacking a group.”
I agree. It seems to me the most important thing to not stall the conversation is to take the three things (or at the very least the last two) you said to not do re feminism, and ask that they also not get done re men:
* Saying “some men do X” instead of “men do X”
* Not making assertions about things men do if there isn’t a source available
And often men aren’t the only thing wrong with an issue either, e.g. just like we shouldn’t place all the blame/burden of the Nice Guy issue on women, we shouldn’t place it all on men. (There’s also the fact that there are at least two moderately distinct Nice Guy phenomena that often get conflated.)
@Clarisse:
“If you have suggestions for better facilitation rules, please feel free to post them. ”
I do like the idea of “Don’t pile on someone with questions.” I feel like AB, independent of hostility, was just getting engaged from all sides.
“I’d rather have a more fertile cross-talk here though, if at all possible.”
I have my own version of why I think the derailing/attacking happens, which is different from Danny’s explanation in #271. (But I feel like it could derail the thread, and/or be seen as an attack.)
Same here. In my experience “slut” is almost exclusively an intra-female insult. In fact, almost all of the sexual shaming of women I have actually witnessed in person comes from other women. Guys do not seem to care.
However, a couple of points:
1. Different groups of people behave differently. And anecdotes are just that: anecdotes.
2. Even if most sexual shaming of women does come from other women, it is still not something we should just consider a “women’s problem” that they should sort out themselves. That is getting into “most violence again men is committed by men, so it is men’s problem” territory. Women are no more self-victimizing than men are just because it comes from other people of the same gender. I would much rather sort the world into “assholes” and “non-assholes” than “women” and “men”. All of us non-assholes should stick up for each other.
@Xakudo:
No argument on that first part… but things can get a bit iffy with the second. Sometimes, until someone with the proper resources and recognized credentials comes along and decides to do a formal study, anecdotes are all that we have — and in cases like those, pointing out the fact that anecdotal evidence is “just that: anecdotal,” can end up silencing or marginalizing the group instead of making people mindful of the limitations of that kind of evidence. (And the same thing goes with describing a person or group as an outlier.)
No studies, or few of them, so the evidence is mostly anecdotal; and since the evidence is mostly anecdotal, there’s no solid cause for doing studies. Catch-22.
Just mentioning that because, in previous discussions I’ve had on this kind of subject, it’s been, as a rule, overlooked.
On point 2: agreed.
For what it’s worth my anecdotes fall in line with Infra’s and Xakudo’s. I’ve previously had several heated discussion with female friends over why the number of previous partners a woman have had does not matter to me. They invariable thought it should.
I also agree on point 2. It’s too simplistic to treat sexism like slut-shaming, victim-blaming etc. as something that only occurs across the genders. So in order to fight this one needs to have all aboard. A misogynist slut-shaming mother will probably raise a misogynist son or daughter just like a misogynist slut-shaming father will probably raise a misogynist slut-shaming son or daughter.
That’s why it irks me when some feminists tend either don’t talk about intra-female sexism or talks about it as something women “have” to do to or are forced to do to survive in the patriarchy.
Sole focus on arguments that a woman slut shames another woman because she need to protect herself from men (due to the myth of male weakness – that men can’t control themselves when around a sexual attractive female), that female jurors on rape trial often are far more condemning of the victim due to outfit and behaviour than male jurors because it is paramaount for these female jurors to distance themselves from possible being a victim (I don’t dress that way so it couldn’t happen to me), the fact that Amnesty found just about parity between men and women when it came to assign some responsibility to rape victims based on their outfits and behaviour (flirty etc.) without any mention at all that these (to the extent they are valid) are all mental constraints in western societies and that they can be and should be overcome only perpetuates the problem.
You guys will be glad to know that Thomas MacAulay Millar specifically asked me to distribute this:
I’m currently writing a chapter for Jaclyn Friedman’s upcoming workbook, “What You Really Really Want”. What I’m writing is designed so that the reader of the book can hand the chapter to a man — not necessarily a partner, but a friend or a family member — who needs to get a baseline handle on this stuff, and say, “read this.” I need workshop participants who are representative of that group. That guy is probably someone who wants to be helpful, but not somebody who has already done a lot of reading, joined organizations opposing violence against women, etc. I’m looking for 101-level guys, and neither committed feminist men nor committed antifeminist men.
The current schedule is that I’ll get a draft out to workshop participants on the 5th, and do the workshop teleconference on the 12th of March.
I don’t know if any of you guys consider yourselves 101-level, but I’m hoping there are at least a few dudes on this thread who are not committed antifeminists :P Feel free to drop me at email at [ clarisse.thorn at gmail ] if you want to get in touch with him.
Infra:
I intended them to be a single connected point. Especially when we are making broad generalizations about western culture, anecdotes from one (or even several) self-selected person(s) only tell us about their particular sub-culture that they have been exposed to.
It is similar to (though less extreme than) how people in Canada and people in Sudan have very different experiences. And if they fail to recognize that then they are likely to have very heated and counterproductive arguments about society and culture, or at least develop a very confused view of the world.
But yes, of course, anecdotes are very useful and should not be ignored.
@Clarisse:
Would you want that passed on? I’m not sure if I’m 101-level at this point (and I have next to no idea where my beliefs fall on a feminist/antifeminist spectrum) but I feel like I know a bunch people who fit that description to a t.
Yeah definitely, pass it on.
Clarisse,
I think your info above is lacking some info about what Thomas is looking for (this is quoted from the YMY post about the matter) -
As for myself, I don’t think I’n on a 101 level, but more importantly, while I appreciate the general idea of YMY (and possibly even the book/chapter this is about), Thomas focus on male violence as main identifying feature of masculinity, as well as his violent rethoric and approach to discussions on YMY (he himself considered himself an asshole and uninclined to actually discuss (as opposed to you, actually)) doesn’t make me particularly inclined to debate with him on his turf and on his terms. Add to that the end of anonymity aspect.
So, while I’m not interested in having a workshop discussion with him, I think Jaclyn Friedman has raised a number of interesting points last year, particularly about male behaviour on dates with feminists and “her sluthood, herself” (I’m occasionally in the situation to have to defend a friend’s sister, whom I don’t even know against accusations of sluthood from her own sister, and it’s because of something pretty similar to what Jaclyn wrote about in that post). So I would be willing to read the chapter and comment on it without participating in any workshop. Should he or she be interested in that, feel free to pass on my email.
@Xakudo:
And what I was pointing out is that, if anecdotes are all that the particular subculture (or social segment) has, then the usual view of anecdotal evidence (as unreliable, etc.) significantly undermines their ability to tell us anything. They can still speak, but the impact is blunted, or entirely turned aside.
To echo Feyerabend, the ways in which we frame knowledge not only work to determine whether or not something is true, but also determine whether or not something can be even potentially true.
As that relates to the point here: when a group has only, or mostly, anecdotal evidence, and anecdotal evidence is devalued — “just that: anecdotes” — then the group is effectively excluded from the discourse from the start. (Not that I’m saying that this is what you intended. Just that it’s how I’ve seen the pairing of the two play out.) It isn’t just that different experiences, contexts, et. al. need to be recognized; it’s that these differences also extend to the kind of evidence that a group is able to present.
Which relates to two of the questions that Clarisse asked in the “I Know You’re Smarter Than Me” 2 post, about the point at which anecdotes establish a pattern, and about when something becomes representative of that pattern. If anecdotes are all that a group has, but they’re valued in the usual way (which is to say, devalued in comparison with more solid forms of evidence) — wouldn’t that, at least potentially, compromise our ability to identify patterns that do, in fact, exist?
Where this becomes especially important, in my view, is in regard to subcultures and intersectional analyses — the less extreme cases, compared to your example of Canada and Sudan. If such patterns exist, in such contexts, then this raises the possibility that hegemony might not be as hegemonic as it appears to be.
And that’s something that would have consequences for larger bodies of theory — ones that could be entirely overlooked if anecdotes were viewed, as a rule, in the usual way.
Infra:
I am pretty sure we are in agreement. Anecdotal evidence has weaknesses (the biggest being various selection biases and subsequent over/under-generalization, which is what I was intending to get at), but also has the strength that it is often more readily available than “hard” data.
Anecdotes are also far, far better at helping others empathize with a problem, because it takes it out of the theoretical and makes it concrete and attached to real people. This is especially true if they are presented in a raw, unprocessed, “here it is, take from it what you will” way.
In no way am I suggesting that anecdotal evidence should be ignored. Otherwise this whole thread would be pointless. On the contrary, I think both anecdotal evidence and this thread are extremely valuable, for a variety of reasons and purposes.
It is simply important to have a healthy degree of skepticism (not in the being contrary or refusing to make reasonable conjecture sense) about how far we can generalize from it.
@Xakudo:
Well, I’d say that we’re somewhat in agreement. We’re probably talking about different aspects of the thing. I’m not saying that the issue is one of ignoring or refusing to admit anecdotal evidence, and I’m not suggesting that you take that position; nor am I saying that anecdotal evidence has strengths or weaknesses that aren’t considered. It’s an issue of how that kind of evidence is weighed, according to what’s available.
Specifically, this:
When it comes to the issues that have been discussed in these threads, how far can we generalize from them, and how would we know when we’ve crossed that limit?
If what we have is primarily anecdotal, do — or should — those standards change? What would justify that change, if it occurred?
One example of how this plays out is in regard to my own experience as a female-on-male rape victim, and in regard to that of a friend who was a victim of female-on-female rape. In both of our cases, we’ve met the response that, as bad as our experiences might have been, the evidence for their prevalence is mostly anecdotal, whereas that for male-on-female rape is statistical; because of that, male-on-female rape has to take priority in terms of research, support, etc. But one of the reasons why the evidence is primarily anecdotal — especially in the case of female-on-female rape — is because not much research has been done.
So it seems to me that unless the relative valuation of anecdotal evidence were shifted to account for that, that kind of situation would persist. That’s the point that I’m getting at.
To bring this around to the earlier issue: if this can happen with rape, it’s likely that it also occurs with sexual shaming. Can we make much progress, then, unless we change how we view and value the anecdotes that we have at hand?
Sorry Sam, I didn’t mean to leave out any information. Was unaware of the YMY post.
Infra:
I guess I see it similarly as p values in frequentest statistics. There is the data, and then there is the certainty of its precision. And these are two separate variables.
I do think that hard data has more precision (or, at least, its precision can be evaluated due to openly described methodology) than anecdotal evidence.
But it does not follow, then, that anecdotal evidence should be taken less seriously in the sense that you seem to be suggesting. My reaction to anecdotal evidence is not “this is less important than ‘hard’ evidence”. My reaction is, “damn, we need to do some research, because this sounds important to get solid data on.” And in the mean time, it is of course totally 100% reasonable to work from anecdotal evidence. But it’s good to keep in mind the p value, so to speak.
I just found two interesting links about sexual scarcity on feministe –
this article on slate -
http://www.slate.com/id/2286240/pagenum/2
and a comment about it that appeared in the village voice -
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/02/men_only_want_s.php
This is sort of addressing the sex drive/emotions for sex exchange realm that Clarisse tried to argue about on that female dating blog (whose name I have forgotten).
This is what I said over at feministe in reply to Jill’s brief remark about the articles.
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/02/28/monday-reads-3/#comment-352540
Thomas Millar replied to my post at feministe and linked to this quite interesting article summarizing new research -
http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/casual-sex-men-women-not-so-different-after-all-28451/
Reading the Feministe thread now. Yeah, I was excited by that link from Thomas too, and especially by how it provides evidence for an argument I’ve been making for ages!
Clarisse,
yeah, very interesting link.
As for the comment, I’m sorry I apparently can’t express what irks me about the “probably right”. I feel it’s some sort of argumentative “have your blank slate cake, and eat it, too” that I find unfair. You say -
“Women are taught that we have a lot more to fear from men, especially when it comes to sexual situations, than men are taught they have to fear from women.”
- paraphrasing Jill’s argument about *learnt* fear as cause of the assumed/reported lack of female sexual spontaneity, and in itself, that’s a fair enough argument. But then she also says that this being afraid is not merely a cultural artefact, but “probably correct” – thus implying that there is something correct about the prejudices and attributed dangers that originally lead to the cultural “teaching women to fear men”.
I’m essentially reading it as saying that “female desire is not inherently different from men’s and we’d have all kinds of spontaneous sex if we weren’t taught about the bad boys”, but as opposed to our desires, that are shaped by culture, “men are probably like that, so we have to be careful”. And I don’t think that’s a fair argumentative approach.
Sam — that makes sense and is very clear — you might consider posting it on the Feministe thread. If you do then I’ll cross-post this response:
I think Jill is right that a guy who approaches a woman in daylight, in public, offering sex in a straightforward manner, is likely to be a guy who is either performing a dare (or a study), or who is very unusual and possibly dangerous. I don’t think this because I believe men are inherently dangerous, though, I think it because a man who does that is breaking social mores and boundaries so dramatically, it’s a good indicator that his future behavior would be very hard to predict and possibly dangerous. No one who is trying to follow social norms, or who is not willing to make other people uncomfortable, or who is not mentally disabled in a way I am not qualified to supervise, would do something like that.
I should perhaps stipulate that I do think it’s entirely possible for a man to approach a woman in broad daylight, in public, and ask her out on a date, in a non-threatening and non-invasive and non-irritating manner, assuming that the woman is not actively signaling that she don’t want to be approached (e.g., wearing headphones). I think it’s somewhat difficult, though (despite the fact that some pickup artists choose to specialize in “day game” :P). And I don’t think that directly suggesting to a total stranger that you want to have sex with them, in any environment but a sex club, is going to be a useful strategy in such an approach. (And perhaps I should note that there are plenty of sex clubs where that wouldn’t be acceptable either!)
NM, I just cross-posted it.
Clarisse,
as I’ve said in the feministe thread, my main concern in this case was the argumentative eclecticism and what I think it implies about her position in the context of the study/the abstract scarcity aspect (the price of sex) rathter than the usefulness of approaching people directly for sex.
So – again – I wasn’t really talkin about “day game”.
“I think it’s somewhat difficult, though (despite the fact that some pickup artists choose to specialize in “day game” :P).”
Since you mention it… Ever seen this? Was the first Seduction Community documentary I’ve seen a while ago (UK channel 4 “seduction school”) – check out a couple of minutes about 3:45 in, when the guy cannot bring himself to say hello for 8 minutes. When I first saw this I sent it to a friend, and she said she couldn’t watch it entirely, she said it was too painful for her to see him suffer…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a51DipqHFeo
I’ve also seen this “daygame” video once… It’s a little out there, but I like the guy’s energy (he reminds me of Paul Rudd) think it shows how much of this is actually interactive standup comedy for an audience of one… (or: performative masculinity).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dyXtUcavP4
@Sam: Can’t remember if I’ve said this before, but Thomas is actually one of the reason’s there’s something seriously bugging me about the role gender plays in all this, and why it seems like the commonly-held ideas are questionable. I mean, he’s admitted that he’s not actually able to say “no” to sex, and I think may he have mentioned being forced into sex he didn’t want in previous relationships, and he’s seen some people’s reactions to women raping men… and yet, everything he does is still focused on what women need. I’m not meaning to pick on him in particular, because I’m pretty sure he’s very far indeed from being unique in this way. Something’s badly wrong with society’s idea of gender, and with feminist solutions to it too.
Infra: not just that, but anecdotal experiences of male-on-female rape, and other anecdotes in which men are the aggressors and women the victims do seem to be more widely accepted – particularly in feminist circles – and treated as representative of a bigger problem. In fact, in most of the feminist communities I’ve come across, treating women’s anecdotes as just anecdotes makes you a misogynist. This seems to have been true even before any statistics were available.
Clarisse: and a woman approaching a man in the street and offering sex isn’t breaking social mores and boundaries? Or when a women does it, does this somehow become a good kind of boundary-pushing behaviour? (In fact, it’s so far outside of social norms, I wouldn’t have the slightest clue how to react.)
-
Also, saw an unrelated blog post linked from, I think, here that kinda helped to pin down what exactly bugs me about gender in BDSM and the common viewpoints on it. Can’t find the link and will have to think a bit more though.
Makomk, my point was that if Person A is trained to fear Person B, and Person B does something really unexpected, then Person A will be likely to run away very fast. If Person A is trained to see Person B as harmless, and Person B does something really unexpected, then Person A will be curious and entertained. That’s the difference between a dude breaking those social norms so sharply, and a woman.
If I’m startled by a bunny rabbit, I laugh. If I’m startled by a velociraptor, I scream and run away. Even if the bunny rabbit and velociraptor have exactly the same personality and are doing the same things, it won’t matter as much as my previous ideas about what bunny rabbits and velociraptors do.
From the article Thomas linked:
Well… that is their loss, for the women that pass me up. ;-)
But joking aside, that does make sense.
Although insofar as this is due to male behavior, I doubt that in most cases it is the result of men not caring about their partner’s pleasure, since the inability to “satisfy” your partner is a major blow to masculinity. (Of course not all men will get that memo, but–anecdotally–based on the men that I have talked to, it seems pretty pervasive.)
I also doubt this is the only significant factor. Sexual shaming of women, lack of value placed on the male body in its own right compared to the female body, etc. all seem like factors with a lot of explanatory power as well. And how much each factor affects any given woman will vary from individual to individual.
Thomas of ymy has looked in more detail at the paper that was reported in the link above. I haven’t read the entire post, as it’s carnival over here and that requires a lot of offline attention ;), so just one noteworthy quote that I think (at first sight) seems to confirm the “male touch is (culturally) less valuable” hypothesis.
“In sum, both men and women agreed that the male proposers are less desirable than female proposers on dimensions of relevance to sexual encounters.”
http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/gender-differences-and-casual-sex-the-new-research
And just to compliment Thomas when honor is due – I’ve now read the entire analysis of the paper (though not the paper itself) and I think it’s a very interesting post. I suppose the paper itself will become widely debated, as did the original study about the matter, so I guess this is really recommended reading…
Yeah, I’ve read the post at Yes Means Yes and a few other posts about that paper. It doesn’t disprove hypergamy (which is more a long term strategy for women), and it’s not foolproof. I suppose Roissy or someone will be around to deconstruct it soon, I really have no interest in doing so. I spent tons of time on the Heritage Foundation paper and the Teachman studies that showed that higher sexual partner count for women is more correlated with divorce than it is for men; that took lots of study and shopping it around various places. I think I’ll set this one out awhile.
Here is my initial response to the Conley study.
One of the major problems that came up for me with the Conley study is that two things about being “good in bed” didn’t seem to be addressed: first, what that means, practically speaking; and second, what the difference might be, if any, between a capable sexual partner and an average and/or acceptable one.
Along with the issue of lowered/raised expectations and an individual’s base of sexual experiences, this goes to one of Xakudo’s points. If the focus is on one’s own orgasm, and orgasm is considered to be central, we’d see a likely difference in expectations of sexual satisfaction. But if being able to satisfy one’s partner is factored in, and the response of one’s partner is a part of being “good in bed,” then things get much more complex. For example: one of the perceptions involved might have been that a woman who makes that kind of direct proposal to a man might do so, in part, because they’re easily orgasmic, or because orgasm isn’t a primary issue for them (both of which, following stereotype, could explain why they’re willing to make a proposal that goes strongly against gendered expectations). In such a case, the proposal would reflect a situation in which concerns over sexual performance would be reduced, leading to increased acceptance on the part of het men.
The other major problem that came up for me is that, although the study found differences in the perception of danger with regard to the CHSP scenario, it didn’t look at more naturalistic proposals (as mentioned in the comments at YMY). One of the possibilities that this leaves open is that men might find the CHSP scenario, in a het context, less dangerous than women do because they find naturalistic proposals to be more dangerous than women do. Which goes to issues of touch, escalation, etc. — some of the elements that are minimized in the context of the kind of proposal examined.
More questions than answers, really.
More new research. This one’s about the question of how expensive a dinner and movie have to be to make women feel they owe sex in return (yes, it’s a bit more complicated, but not much).
http://bigthink.com/ideas/31546
Hugh, from your response to YMY:
I think that observation bears repeating. It is not so much women’s responses that are special, but rather heterosexual men’s.
This suggests, perhaps, that heterosexual men overvalue women as sexual partners. Which would agree with some observations of how male sexuality is policed (virgin shaming, “always up for sex”, etc.), and perhaps also suggests a kind of desperation on heterosexual men’s part? Those are my hypotheses, at least.
It’s also worth noting that the Conley study’s ability to critique the results of the CHSP is highly debatable in one respect: the CHSP not only involved behavior that was unusual, and in violation of social norms, but also involved a face-to-face encounter with that behavior. The Conley study’s use of questionnaires thus allowed for the construction of explanations for the behavior that likely wouldn’t have been available in the original CHSP scenario, due to both time factors and the (possibly unnerving) presence of the individual whose actions needed to be explained. Among other things.
If nothing else, the Conley study eliminates physiological arousal — including surprise and the possible/likely need for rapid response, which is especially relevant when considering things like excitation-transfer theory — from the equation. So it’s an open question, I think, as to whether or not the two studies are actually examining similar things, the similar questions and similar results notwithstanding.
It’s kind of like shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater: when it’s by an actor as a part of the play, it doesn’t have the same effect as when it comes from someone in the audience. Here, though, it would be a matter of an individual placing themselves into the position of an actor, in the first case, so it would be more like being in the play, and responding in character, than watching it.
Which, if the idea isn’t completely wrongheaded, opens up the possibility that what Conley measured was the action of a psychological structure that mimics a set of contextually-influenced physiological responses: something that wasn’t evolutionarily selected (as is suggested by Pleasure Theory), but that serves to provide and produce a consistent set of baseline behaviors, thus making our own sexual behavior easier to explain.
Which is to say, one of the ways in which normativity works, even without overt enforcement.
Happy International Women’s Day, Clarisse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkp4t5NYzVM
(and yes, I know that some of the claims made in the video are potentially controversial. But it’s mood video, so I don’t think it’s necessary to take it apart because of that.)
I hate watching videos, but I watched that one for you, Sam. I kind of wish they’d done more crazy shit with James Bond being female … that’d be good marketing. Is today International Women’s Day? There are too many fauxlidays ….
More on the elusive beta distinction:
http://pua4ltr.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/the-paradox-of-beta-ization/
Clarisse,
yeah, the beta thing really is elusive.
But since you link to that post, I believe the phenomenon described in the post is probably the most frequent reason for long-term relationship break-ups in my social environment. Of course, not all relationships break up and not all because of this effect, but it’s still the most frequent cause, in my opinion.
And the storyline is always the same – the women start insisting on being right / getting their will on some stuff the guys usually don’t care about trying to see to which extent they will bend to keep the relationship peace, then gradually expand the realm of testing to things the guys do care about, to see to which extent they will let themselves be pushed without putting their foot down (of course, if they do, the price is usually a fight) and once they cross a certain line indicating loss of some specific male dominance indicators, they become visibly less interested in the relationship.
I’ve described this mechanism to a woman I met three weeks ago when we talked about why her marriage ended (yeah, I’m good at getting people talk to me about those things after meeting them…) and she actually said, “yes, totally, I was dominance testing him the entire last year.” I have a very close male friend who’s in that situation now and while I totally like his girlfriend (and think she’s a great friend, too) I believe being her boyfriend goes along with emotional terror of the dominance testing kind.
As the concepts of alpha and beta are indeed so elusive, I doubt the underlying reasoning of the post is particularly persuasive theoretically, but I do believe that dysfunctional testing for dominance markers is something a lot of women do. However, as opposed to the author’s recommendation, I’m not willing to accept that as annoying, acceptable, manageable female evolutionary impulse. Whether or not it is, I don’t care. It’s bad behaviour and a woman who would test my male dominance when it’s about rug-colours, clothes, or deciding which movies to see, is probably not one for me. Also, I guess not letting her know about her responsibility is kind of beta ;)
What do you think? Should the guys in the situation accept that game and accomodate it by playing along and “dominate her” knowing that’s what will keep her happy even though the immediate reaction is likely the opposite of the intended long term result? I recommended to my friend in the situation to evaluate what he actually gets out of the relationship except for occasional sex (once a month or so) and emotional turmoil and annoyance and suggested that he may have to find a a dominance marker for her to accept if he does want to keep her as a girlfriend. Tricky.
Um, frankly, Sam, I thought the hypothesis of the post was interesting only inasmuch as it reveals more about what “beta” and “alpha” is viewed as. I also think that a non-negligible portion of the time when PUAs insist that women are “testing for dominance”, those women are just trying to voice their needs or get their feelings understood in the relationship.
To quote an email from AnneBonney that I’ll probably end up citing extensively in Confessions:
I know that a lot of the conclusions reached by some PUA about female psychology is just completely alien to actually being a woman. For example, there’s the concept of the “shit test”, that a woman will give a contradictory response or put up an obstacle for a man interested in her just to give him shit, to test “what kind of man” he really is. I heard that and immediately thought that was bull, but after noodling it for a while, I came to believe that yeah, some women probably do this and a lot more probably do it unconsciously. But the PUA concepts around the shit test, how to respond and why women do it (often surrounded with talk of proving oneself “alpha”, which I fucking hate) seemed actually counter-productive and really infantilizing to me. While it may or may not be an actual aspect of man/woman interaction, it also became a broad umbrella for a lot of things that were just women trying to assert themselves: insisting on condoms, wanting to understand commitment status, even the much-discussed “last minute resistance” to sex all became lumped as shit tests, instead of honest communication on the part of women. Having been on the other side of these situations, I could see that and had lived that, but it was much harder to convince men that this wasn’t always one of the weird social programming techniques we’re taught somewhere along the line to becoming women. It was and continues to be something I struggled with.
And another question – this one about the bigthink.com link I posted yesterday. If a sufficiently pricy dinner/date will lead women to believe they “owe” sexual favours of some kind, this will likely also lead to them expecting some sort of move on the part of the man, since they see his paying for the dinner/date as investment. Thus, should a man *not* make a move at the end of date he paid for (an expensive date he paid for) do the women *also* feel rejected?
I guess that all this, including the Conley research, suggests that clearly communicated social patterns could, despite their expression limiting effects, could actually be helping people experience more expressional freedom, because if communicative patterns (say, first date > he pays, good night kiss, second date > split > French kiss, third date > she pays, sex) are clearly understood, they will allow people to react and adjust their expectations accordingly.
I’ll also add that as a woman, my primary intersection with all this stuff about “shit tests” is men who decide that I’m “testing for dominance” or whatever when I’m actually trying to figure out what the fuck is going on in their heads, or legitimately don’t care where we eat dinner, or make a joke, or otherwise have a communicative relationship. One memorable boyfriend (the same one who consistently called me “manipulative” when I attempted to analyze what was going on in social situations, btw, and actually the same one who refused to go down on me for years) insisted that I was testing him to see how good a boyfriend he could be when I was actually doing things like asking him to spend more time with me.
While there may be women who display this behavior a lot in legitimate “testing” ways that have nothing to do with actually trying to get what they want out of the relationship, I am not equipped to give advice on how to deal with those women.
Clarisse,
“I also think that a non-negligible portion of the time when PUAs insist that women are “testing for dominance”, those women are just trying to voice their needs or get their feelings understood in the relationship.”
perfectly possible. And I don’t think that’s contradictory – what’s needed is some idea of when it’s one or the other, or even both and how to react to one or the other or to both.
Again, I didn’t try to discuss the hyptheses of the post but just that, reading it, I read about a phenomenon I could completely relate to as a friend (not a boyfriend) – and as opposed to the things like condom use or last minute resistance mentioned in the quote, I’m talking about stuff like imposing furniture, clothes, style, etc., picking fights with the family and friends to make him choose between them and her… Again, I don’t know what the reasons for this are, there are probably any number, but that, to me, as a guy, this kind of behaviour often appears to be dominance testing and it’s a game I don’t appreciate, least of all in a relationship in which people should be supporting each other emotionally instead of annoying each other.
I just find it really difficult to believe that the behavior you’re describing is actually so one-sided or “testy” in practice, at least not most of the time. I’m not friends with your friends, but it seems like an incredibly uncharitable reading of what else might be going on in that situation. What does “imposing furniture” mean, for example? If two people live together, and the woman cares about what the apartment looks like, does that become an “imposition”? If I go to an event with my boyfriend, and the clothing he’s wearing wouldn’t work at the event at all, then am I obligated to shut up rather than ask him to change? (By the way, in the past when this has happened, I’ve either just not invited him because I knew I couldn’t rely on him to look reasonable, or I’ve said nothing about his clothes and put up with the subsequent social difficulties — and communicating with him directly about his clothes would surely have been better, except that I was so scared of being the “domineering” woman who’s “trying to change” him that I elected not to.)
FWIW, a snippet of a conversation that I had with a woman at a fundraiser a couple of days ago, on the subject of testing and flirtatious behavior:
“I used to think that it’s just submissive, playing up to guys and stuff. But that’s before I actually tried it. It’s power. Now, I do it intentionally. And I use it a lot.”
(Emphasis hers.)
Every woman goes through the “it’s power!” phase. And then you realize what the costs of that so-called “power” are.
I wouldn’t deny that that can happen. However, I should add that this wasn’t a recent development for her, and I later overheard her (in a conversation with some other women of similar age, which was mid to late thirties) describing herself as a chauvinist and laying out her standards on what a man had to do to qualify as a man (with which the other women agreed).
So it might be a bit premature, I think, to characterize it as a phase. It might be more accurate to say that it can be, sometimes, the root of more destructive behaviors. For some women, the price to be paid might be too high; for others, the power might be the point that makes it worth it, in the same way that abusers come to value control.
Well, okay. Maybe “phase” is a bad way to put it. I just don’t like to let those sort of anecdotes go without noting that there are serious pitfalls, the same way you guys don’t let anecdotes about male power go without noting that there are serious pitfalls.
@Hugh Ristik: I had a curious dream about being propositioned by cute guys last night, and I suspect the discussion of gender and sexual propositions was responsible – your comments in particular. Would write a more serious response, but still haven’t quite pinned down the issues at play.
@Clarisse: yeah, my point is that the boundary-pushing seems to be a total red herring in terms of why women would react badly to men propositioning them for sex. It appears to be less about that and more about a deep gender-based assumption that men are fundamentally unsafe and women safe. To borrow your metaphor, we all assume that (cis) men are velociraptors and (cis) women are bunny rabbits, no matter how they’re actually behaving.
[ Trigger warning ]
This has the advantage that it explains a whole bunch of other stuff too. For example, domestic violence prevention works exactly the same way. In particular, there was a lovely case here in the UK where the mother of two young kids broke into their estranged father’s house and took up residence, and was behaving otherwise eratically. The police were called and promptly made sure the father stayed away under threat of arrest, because obviously his gender meant he was the only potential danger. She used this opportunity to carry out the brutal, pre-meditated murder of both kids. There were plenty of warning signs, but obviously no-one could’ve forseen this because bunnies don’t do that no matter how they’re acting!
(There have probably been other cases like this. I remember this one because it happened at around the same time as I read someone arguing in the comments of a feminist blog that for the sake of the children’s safety men must always be assumed dangerous and kept away when domestic violence or child abuse is suspected. Apparently, it was just male entitlement that caused anyone to think differently.)
Usual disclaimer that this is probably only valid for cis men and women applies.
First, I agree with the statement that ‘I also think that a non-negligible portion of the time when PUAs insist that women are “testing for dominance”, those women are just trying to voice their needs or get their feelings understood in the relationship.’ and moreover I think that part of the effect comes from the testing being something that could plausibly be something the woman needs. Which, unfortunately, precludes (if the “testers” are sufficiently competent) Sam’s notion of a way to tell when it’s one or the other. The idea that “I’m going to claim that I need this, even though I don’t, to see how far he’ll bend.” has a different flavor if it’s something you clearly don’t actually need.
My anecdotal experience is also that a lot of the desirability of casual sex stuff stems from something like what Infra said as “what the difference might be, if any, between a capable sexual partner and an average and/or acceptable one.” I see the notion of “making sure he/she’s good enough in bed” to be far less prevalent in het men than anyone else. Where I see it most often, in advice to het women, is something like “You need to make sure he’s worth your time.” I’ve never received advice even close to that (in the casual sex context, anyway).
Also, “More questions than answers, really.”—doesn’t all good research do this?
“I know that a lot of the conclusions reached by some PUA about female psychology is just completely alien to actually being a woman.”
It’s really more on the topic of the Ideology posts, but this notion feels very familiar, in the context of “I know that a lot of the conclusions reached by some feminists about male psychology is just completely alien to actually being a man.” And the reasons behind it likewise: women’s actions aren’t nearly as based in “provoking reaction X in men” as PUAs think they are, and men’s actions aren’t nearly as based in “provoking reaction X in women” as feminists think they are.
Okay, I know I had more reactions to post, but I can’t remember them. It’s Mardi Gras and I’m drinking, so I’m going to blame that. (After a quick proofread of this post, I’ve now remembered that one involved a connection between Sam’s comment #336 and a link Hugh made to a conversation about how what one woman perceives as respecting boundaries/communicating well will come off to another as treating her like a porcelain doll/being unconfident, but I can’t remember what the actual comment I had was.)
Clarisse,
well, usually, I only get one side of the story in addition to my own impression of what’s going on, so, sure, there’s a certain one-sidedness. But *if* the pattern is a problem for the relationship, it tends to hold regardless of whether I’m friends with the male or the female partner in such a relationship. Of course, usual disclaimer, anecdotal evidence.
As for imposing furniture and clothing, I’m not talking about people living together with respect to that aspect, and this friend’s girlfriend actually told me about she thinks she can’t show him off to her friends. But it wasn’t about clean or orderly clothes, it was about imposition of style and brands, it was about telling him about what she wants and later *resenting him for doing it* (she once indirectly even admitted that to me as an outsider). Another female friend managed to model her husband into a puppy. Everyone believed that was a cool thing for both of their personalities until she lost interest and started looking for “real men” again. When I mentioned the pattern to her, she accepted the similarity to her case, but said “it was all different”, which, of course, is possible – it’s anecdotal evidence, after all.
I don’t know, I don’t think it’s that the women want to use their power in a malicious way, although that obviously is a possibility. To the extent that I did I found that, when the behaviour was suggested, my female friends were able to see the dysfunctionality of this tendency. I doubt it is always conscious, and I really don’t know what specific thing they are looking for, but whatever the actual subconscious desire, it does appear to present as a desire/demand for the guy to impose himself, or perform some classic “masculine” gesture. That’s why I said that I don’t think this phenomenon is incompatible with the respective women expressing their wishes about a relationship – it’s probably just that – but it’s happening in a code that is difficult to analyse and react to.
Totally. Again, I believe that those of my female friends whom I talked to about this are rationallly in complete agreement. But I also suppose this is one of the things where complete up front and honest communication doesn’t cut it for the people who want this kind of thing: if they are looking for genuine masculine dominance then talking about it beforehand will not be the same.
Actually, that’s something I have been wondering about for a while. If dominance is (apparently) such an important aspect of the masculine performance, and if dominance in the BDSM world is communicated and performative and still *perceived* as sufficiently similar to the “real” thing, wouldn’t you, Clarisse, be in a perfect position to explain to women who are looking for this how to deal with ex-ante clarifications/better communication, and to guys how to do perform dominance in a way that appears “real” even it has been prenegotiated by equals?
I don’t think that it’s necessarily malicious. More what I was getting at is that the sense of power might offset the costs of the behavior, especially in terms of self-image, much as focusing on the moral aspects of control (e.g., stability) could offset the results of how a person views themselves in engaging in immoral and destructive acts of abuse in order to achieve it.
Even when I’ve encountered — or been involved with — women who have employed this in a destructive way, most of them still seemed to believe that what they were doing was fundamentally good, in one way or another. Or, failing that: necessary.
It’s just that this seems to require constructed justifications, such as helping men to become better men, protecting the value of true or traditional manhood, making sure that he still cares for her and is willing to accommodate her needs, even if there aren’t any pressing ones to express… and so on. In that way, the act is made moral, even if that motivation wasn’t originally there.
If dominance is (apparently) such an important aspect of the masculine performance, and if dominance in the BDSM world is communicated and performative and still *perceived* as sufficiently similar to the “real” thing, wouldn’t you, Clarisse, be in a perfect position to explain to women who are looking for this how to deal with ex-ante clarifications/better communication, and to guys how to do perform dominance in a way that appears “real” even it has been prenegotiated by equals?
I’ve thought this before (I think I explicitly mentioned it on the original manliness megathread once or twice). I’m not sure, though. It would require people to acknowledge that a performance is going on, which I don’t think most people are willing to do. I’m good at giving advice to people who want to communicate about their relationships and want to set up a power dynamic in a limited way, but not to people who insist that power dynamics should be “real” or are “inherent”.
Clarisse,
“It would require people to acknowledge that a performance is going on, which I don’t think most people are willing to do.”
Hmm. I mean, and please, correct me if I’m getting this entirely wrong – you weren’t looking for something to be performed when you realized what kind of sexuality you’re into, you were looking for something that would have a specific effect on you. You were looking for a “real thing”, in a way – right? And if the “real thing” wasn’t actually the performance aspect (which could be, I don’t know) then wouldn’t you have decided at some point that “the enacted real thing” has the same (or a close enough) effect for you as the non-enacted real thing, but also a huge amount of advantages compared to the huge amount of disadvantages of the other? Don’t you think that more people would be interested in that deal if they knew it was available?
Or, and this is probably stretching things a quite a bit (but then again, goes back to the learning from extraordinary lovers bit), but *maybe* *some* sort of desire for power play / “BDSM” is indeed inherent in most of us, yet only those with more specific and extreme desires in that respect find ways to deal with them explicitly, label them differently, the rest (the majority) being left with the crude “standard script” and unspecific emotional communication like in the cases described here. What if most of such emotionally problematic behaviour were “weak” cases of “submissiveness” that could be dealt with by, I don’t know, occasionally suddenly pushing her against a wall and kissing her (to use a common theme as example)?
I would like to note that according to Roissy’s Dating Market Value Test For Women, my IQ is so high that I lose points on my market value. I don’t know if I should be offended or laughing. Right now I’ve settled for laughing. Also, I’m not sure how to measure the value of the hair on my body, since he doesn’t even have a point value for unshaven. I subtracted two points on the assumption that that’s what he would do, although I might have underestimated. (I appear to be a greater beta, btw.)
Sam, I agree with what you’re saying. I’ve certainly tossed around the “weak cases of submissiveness” theory in my head a lot. I guess the problem is, I’m not sure how to convince people that what they’re looking for can be performed in a way that feels real within consensual/egalitarian boundaries. I had a hard enough time with it as a hardcore submissive masochist — I can only imagine how hard it is to wrap one’s head around that concept when you can convince yourself that you’re “within the norm” and can find what you want easily without taking any difficult steps.
Clarisse,
that looks like one of those facebook tests that are well known for their scientific value.
According to Roissy’s Dating Market Value Test for men I should be faring far less well than I am since I do have a tendency to excuse myself when I have to go to the bathroom in the middle of talking to a girl.
Where do you find this stuff? Maybe you could post a list of the least and the most useful PUA sites you’ve found during your research at some point ;)
I think Roissy’s fatal flaw is that smart people date each other.
Clarisse, a way to relate to the concept of “shit test” is to watch guys in macho cultures (e.g. frat boys) hanging out with each other. The communication is highly status-based and often looks like they are “testing” each other.
Once you see certain groups of men testing each other, then it shouldn’t be a big leap to imagine certain groups of women testing men, also. I would hypothesize that people who care about macho-ness (e.g. other macho men, and women who are attracted to macho-ness in men) tend to test for it.
Of course, none of that means that the PUA account of “shit tests” is completely accurate, and I think that PUAs are often paranoid and wrong about “shit tests.” “Shit test” lumps together a bunch of conceptually-distinct behaviors (e.g. “request that she wants me refuse”, “request that she doesn’t consciously want me to refuse but she would be more happy/attracted if I refused”, “request that she wants me to fulfill and will respond well to me fulfilling it”).
However, I suspect that I tend to date a demographic of women who gives less testing, whatever that is. In my experience, these factors seem to predict behavior that looks like testing:
- Being more feminine (e.g. more like women on the dimensions where men and women differ), but also more extraverted. For a crude model, there seem to be two main flavors of feminine: sweet, and fiery. Fiery women test a lot, sweet ones rarely do. Less feminine women such as nerdy women are wired differently, and test less, kind of like the sweet women. Yet whereas sweet women often lack assertiveness, nerdy women may be more assertive, which may look like the dominance games played by fiery women, even though they are fundamentally different.
- Being of a culture other than white middle-class Western culture
I suspect this is true. But women are not a monolith. I would also suggest that the psychology of some women is also alien to other women. For example, I think the psychology of mainstream heterosexual women is alien to many feminist and/or nerdy women. All I can say is that there is something going on with this testing business, and I’m not satisfied with either the PUA account or the feminist dismissal of it.
By the way, there’s a whole new nice guy debate going on…
http://hugoschwyzer.net/2011/03/05/nice-guys-redux
I haven’t read through all the latest posts, but I thought I’d respond to this from Clarisse:
I agree that most women do not do these things as “tests”. And I think the women that do are probably dysfunctional in some way (as one example, “high conflict” individuals who actually seek out things to argue/fight about). Such women and men certainly exist. But I do not think they are the majority in either population. But since many (most?) of them probably cycle through relationships, they impact multiple people, making it seem like more of a common thing, because so many people will have one of those stories. (It is similar, mathematically, to how 1 in 6 women have been raped, and yet, despite that, far fewer than 1 in 6 men are rapists.)
I do think, however, that even outside of high-conflict individuals, there is a cultural mis-match (in an overlapping bell curves kind of way) between what women consider discussion/argument-worthy in a relationship and what men do. So I think it is likely that many relationships do follow a pattern similar to what Sam and the “betaization” article described, but just not for the reasons asserted. The woman will bring up an issue that the man does not consider important, or at least not important enough to warrant an argument, and so he will simply acquiesce to her. But that acquiescence (when common) then makes her feel like he is not invested in her or the relationship. Which is not actually the case, because from his perspective the act of acquiescing is an investment in her and the relationship, to keep the peace, to maintain stability and predictability in the relationship.
And on and on and on, nasty toxic dynamics results… blechk.
makomk:
I think this is the flip side of “oh, that’s just how women are”. The thing is, a lot of these “crazy” behaviors actually are not normal (in my experience, anyway), and most women do not do them, and they should not be tolerated, and they should be treated as warning signs of a toxic and/or dangerous person.
The critiques of “that’s just how women are” type notions usually focus around how it harms women, but it also hurts men because it teaches men these behaviors are somehow the price of admission or something (which is total BS), and so they put up with a lot of toxic harmful shit from these few toxic women (who, as I mentioned before, can affect a lot of men over time).
As another example, I was hanging out at a coffee shop, and a woman there was speaking about how she every once in a while she just has to throw a tantrum at her husband. I did not say anything, but I was thinking to myself, “No, you do not have to. You are an adult. And how would you react if your husband just ‘had to’ throw a tantrum at you every once in a while?”
And another example: a friend of mine was dating a girl I will call Sharon. They took a “break” in the relationship, and he made out with another girl during that break. It turned out that Sharon did not view the “break” in quite the same way as him, and viewed his actions as cheating. It was a misunderstanding, and one that I can totally understand her feeling hurt over. But her response was to come over to his house, scream at him, throw things at him, break some of his stuff, paranoid-ly search the house for the girl he had made out with, fuming and crying the whole time. Another friend of mine was there at the time as well, and he said the whole thing was extremely frightening.
(And the irony? My friend continued dating her after this.)
So these toxic women do exist. But like their toxic male counterparts, they are not the majority. They just end up impacting a lot of people.
This was a multi-blog extravaganza beginning with a post by Miguel at emporiasexus, and including a kind of blog-standard takedown at Pandagon, as well as discussion on ethecofem and FC. Maybe it’s wishful thinking but I felt that the passion on this issue was winding down in the Pandagon comments, compared to years of yore. The Pandagon commenters were even occasionally nice to the commenter “recall” who posted as an inexperienced virgin male. Amanda Marcotte herself was full of venom (and misreading) though.
Occasionally commenters would actually, in an almost unprecedented way, come up with extremely constructive things to say. Highlights included lynet in the original discussion at emporiasexus, and Lynn Gazis-Sax at Hugo’s.
I’m now being requoted at Hugo’s. About why this whole “nice-guy-TM” thing is particularly an epic fail from the anti-gender-enforcement POV.
And yes, I have discussed with infra in the past why there is a nice-guy-TM style of true misogyny that in some ways is more venomous than even other misogynies, and how this comes about. The problem is more that we want to stop it in its embryonic stages, but the typical blogfeminist approach, rather than impeding it, seems to provide it with MiracleGro.
Some of the MRA discussion which has entered into especially the last couple of days at a couple of these sites, really seems to be coming from another planet. But if we had had some of the compassionate analysis from feminists eight years ago that we are beginning to get now, I think that sort of weird paranoid fantasy version of things would have less traction, today.
humbition:
Some of the MRA discussion which has entered into especially the last couple of days at a couple of these sites, really seems to be coming from another planet. But if we had had some of the compassionate analysis from feminists eight years ago that we are beginning to get now, I think that sort of weird paranoid fantasy version of things would have less traction, today.
I’ve been wondering if all of this is a sign of some major event. Like a massive step forward in gender relations or something. I mean for as much as don’t care for MRAs or feminists I think they both have a lot right and when properly refined and on a united front would awesome.
(BTW has anyone been reading the MRA discussions over at GoodMenProject this week?)
Xakudo,
ok – but if so, why would she escalate this to aspects that do appear to mostly be about dominance testing (like the picking his clothes clothes stuff) when all she wants is a signal of committment that she can understand?
I’m wondering about our (humans’) general ability to deal rationally with that kind of stuff. Maybe that’s also the explanation for the question I asked above: When we’re getting insecure we need reassurance, and if possible on a physical level. So in that case, or in the “throw a tantrum” it may not necessarily be about power games but about the (subconscious) desire to “get the emotional juices flowing”. If nothing else, a fight definitely tends to involve people. Maybe there’s some sort of parallel to the problem of “did we fall in love because our dopamine/noradrenaline/phenylethylamine levels are high, or do are they high because we’ve fallen in love”.
humbition,
yeah, I’ve just now read her post. I don’t know what her thing is, she just seems preemptively aggressive and unfair.
And for some reason, my last reply is in moderation again…
Sorry Sam, I really have no idea why that keeps happening.
Sam:
In your friend’s case, based on what you have said, I would suspect that there is something more going on. But I am curious if cases that extreme are common in your circle of friends. Possibly it is simply that the people I know and typically spend time with are not part of the subculture(s) where such things are common…?
I mean, my experience dating the radfem woman was certainly beyond what I think can be reasonably explained by the dynamic I described (at least on its own). But most situations I have encountered can.
Well, the tantrum example was specifically meant to illustrate that some women’s behavior cannot be appropriately explained by the dynamic I described. Although, admittedly, she could well have been exaggerating in her description of her own behavior. (As an aside: even so, her describing it that way helps set a precedent that “that’s just how women are” and that tantrums are normal, acceptable, and to be expected from women. Which, again, harms both women and men.) But Sharon clearly did throw a tantrum, and a frightening and powerful one at that. And I certainly do not think her behavior can be appropriately explained by the dynamic I described.
But, having said all that, I do think there is a lot of explanatory power to the “get the emotional juices flowing” theory. Especially if the acquiescing by the man is interpreted as emotional distance/lack of investment by the woman, I can imagine some women (and men, in the flip situation) may subconsciously use conflict to try to create some emotion between them, even if it is negative emotion.
Or, rather, perhaps the woman gets angry about the (what she perceives as) emotional distance/lacking investment, but for whatever reason (not recognizing where her anger is coming from, or not feeling like she can express it directly, or not feeling like her anger is appropriate and thus attempts to suppress it but fails to deal with it, etc.) it comes out in other ways, in conflicts of her creation/magnification.
Dunno. Since you sound like you encounter this sort of thing semi-frequently, I would be really curious if you could ask the women who exhibit these sorts of behaviors about what is going on from their perspective. See if any of these explanations seem to click.
HughRistic deconstructs the Conley study here:
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2011/03/11/gender-differences-accepting-casual-sex-proposals-noh/#more-2494
Xakudo,
I’ll try to ask when it comes up again with a female friend. I can’t really ask my male friends’ girlfriends about this.
Xakudo,
wow, that was faster than I expected. Female friend called to have dinner, wanted to talk about something she thought she had found out about women and men. She’s going to a bad after-break-up phase with a guy she was with for a long time (and who’s psychologically not dealing well with the break-up, which is taking a toll on her, too) and is trying to “get back in the game”. So after being disappointed by some random (non sexual) encounters recently, she decided to buy “the rules” and was totally excited about her discovery…
So, while talking about the pros and cons of this kind of self-help and “structured” dating scripts, when she mentioned she needs a guy “who will, occasionally, put a foot down”, I asked about the testing for dominance vs testing for emotional investment aspect in her previous relationship. While she said that she never consciously tested anything, she also said that, in retrospect, it sounds pretty much like what happened, even though it may have beeen unconscious, and it’s impossible to discern whether one aspect or the other was more important.
Also, I haven’t read “the rules”, but after hearing what she told me about it earlier, I had the impression that the focus is not improving people/social skills or a woman’s confidence, but about creating, if you will, compliance testing. There seems to be a similarity to pickup with respect to the assumption of mating scripts (but really, that’s pretty common in general, I suppose), but I had the impression that, while “the game” seemed to try to uncover the underlying mechanisms of certain social dynamics and attempting to prepare people (mostly guys) for a world without exceeding social mediation of mating interactions, “the rules” seems to be more about surface level replication of previously socially imposed mating structures.
Of course, my impression could be entirely wrong, and is only based on this one conversation… would love to hear from people who have read the book. Did you read it in the course of your pickup research, Clarisse?
@Sam:
That’s my impression of The Rules as well, though I’d say that most of the simpler pickup material is on the same level. The book that’s more similar to the theory products (for lack of a better term) would be “The Technique of the Love Affair,” written by Doris Langley Moore and originally published, anonymously, in the late 1920s. Which, parenthetically, had this at the end of its first chapter:
Saccharissa: I cannot promise to share your point of view, but I should much like to hear this guilefulness described in detail.
Cypria: Very well, I shall have it all set down for you, and you may read it from whatever point of view you please — either to be instructed or amused. But do not let it fall into the hands of any of your men friends, for that would be a disloyalty to your sex. If men gain possession of women’s weapons they will turn them into shields for themselves.
The Rules frustrates and irritates me too much to read it for long, but I’ve read parts of it. I agree that it’s less flexible or in-depth than The Game, but in fairness, The Game benefits from an entire seduction community working out principles. I’ve probably linked to this before, but the feminist writer Kate Harding has a hilarious takedown of The Rules:
http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/feature/2009/11/17/rules_dating_advice
Clarisse,
well, I guess the existence of whole community is an interstesting aspect in its own right… I wonder if that’s a consequence of stereotypical female dating problems being much more in the focus of mainstream media – take SATC, or example. I remember thinking early in the last decade that it would be time for someone to address these questions for men, and, well, someone did – but given stereotypical ideas about men, I suppose it needed to start in a subculture rather than in the mainstream.
After reading the 35 rules on wikipedia, I’m glad I gave “the game” to my sister, although I doubt she ever used it “productively” ;). I think I agree with a couple (self-evident ones?), though – Be a “Creature” Unlike Any Other (being a unique person, that’s a good idea), Don’t Stare at Men or Talk Too Much (depending what that’s supposed to mean), Don’t Tell Him What to Do (although not in the sense of “mentoring” ;)), Don’t Expect a Man to Change or Try to Change Him (“I love you, you’re perfect, now change! is a fun musical, but a bad rule to live by), Don’t Open Up Too Fast (sharing vulnerabilities needs to be paced, of course), Be Honest but Mysterious (honest, is generally good, mysterious is always intriguing), Love Only Those Who Love You (will not always work, but does seem like a healthy idea), Be Easy to Live With (seems a bit oxymoronic given all the other rules, but still – good idea.
That’s a funny essay by Kate Harding. I’m wondering if I should send it to my friend, though, because I think it’s a good thing she’s thinking about this stuff at all again. I think she was a bit disappointed yesterday that I didn’t think she had found the answer to all mating questions with that book and told her that such books are potentially useful, but only if one keeps a certain intellectual and emotional distance and doesn’t start interpreting everything through the angle presented, which is quite possible, given the ambiguities of human behaviour. She agreed in theory, but I have a hunch it will take a while for her to see, and I think she will use the rules. I may recommend Leil Lowndes “How to make anyone fall in love with you” to her, if no one here has a better suggestion – the title’s there to sell, the book is actually quite good, in my opinion. (Although I’m totally gonna check out the book Infra mentions, which also reminded me that I totatlly forgot to read Kierkegaard’s “The Seducer’s Diary”)
Interestingly, given the approach she takes in the essay, I’d say that Kate Harding should love “The Game”, because Neill Strauss explains all the techniques and then tells the reader how sticking to the script had almost killed his relationship with Lisa – that knowing the rules also requires understanding their limitations.
Also, of course – http://xkcd.com/800 ;)
Depending upon what kind of material you’re looking to suggest, one to look at would be M. Drury’s “Advice to a Young Wife from an Old Mistress.” Don’t be mislead by the title, though. More than anything else, it’s a philosophical (don’t be misled by that, either) treatise on relationships and love in general.
It’s a good counterpoint to books that focus on technique, and that’s especially the case when it comes to books like The Rules — because, IMO, one of the main messages that TR sends is, “Bad relationships suck, being alone sucks, and getting dumped sucks. The Rules can suck, too, but in the end, they’ll save you a lot of pain.”
Books like “Advice” are good for pointing out healthier ways of avoiding it.
Sure … I wouldn’t argue that The Rules totally suck. And I’ve thought a lot about how to set a better standard — I’m not sure how to teach women better boundaries, honestly. (Or, in PUA parlance, how to teach women to act like HSE girls naturally do.) As Kate Harding says, the argument in favor of The Rules has always been that it encourages women to stand up for what they want. This is also the argument in favor of The Game, but the argument against The Game is the same too — that it’s embedded in a matrix of fucked up assumptions and toxic sexism. The Game is better than The Rules, but not by that much.
I moved the pickup-relevant comments to my new Ethical Pickup Artistry thread.
@Sam
I’m going to repeat myself from the post that was moved to the Pickup thread, since this comment was more about relationships than seduction: I think especially the case of women slowly starting to dominate a relationship, and perhaps simultaneously losing interest in their partner, can be just as well explained by the difference in how men and women tend to perceive power.
Women, from what I’ve read and observed, have a rather fluent concept of power, with hierarchies often changing rapidly depending on the situation, whereas men tend towards the more rigid concept that an alpha is an alpha is an alpha. The constant negotiations that often take place among women are one of the main reasons I often find socialising with them difficult, I’m just surprised so many men think women are doing it especially for them.
AB:
Fluent, or fluid? Fluent in… the language of power, maybe? Just trying clarify. I assumed it was a typo before, but you have written it that way twice now.
Xakudo:
Funny, I automatically read it as “fluid”.
AB repeatedly said that she is not a native speaker of English, so I’d assume that it was a mistake and that she meant “fluid”.
Of course. I am not attempting to hold her to any standard here (I make enough mistakes myself, and I speak english natively). I am simply trying to get explicit clarification, just in case.
I meant fluid. I don’t know why it turned into fluent in my head :)
This is a response to a post in the Ethical Pick-Up Artistry, which I felt was more appropriate for this thread. The original post is here: http://clarissethorn.com/blog/2011/03/23/ethical-pick-up-artistry/#comment-40299
@Sam:
Only because feminists are among the few people who can discuss gender in an enlightened way. But there are plenty of social conservatives, MRAs, and general sexists who also frequently discuss gender, and a good deal of the people coming onto feminist sites are aware of that (especially since they frequently belong to one or more of those groups).
Actually, I think it’s a testament to how anti-feminist society is that people feel entitled to call societies like the Scandinavian ‘largely feminist’. One would need extremely patriarchal norms to be the standard before societies like ours would be considered feminist in comparison. Fortunately (or not) our norms are that patriarchal, so anything which differs is immediately labelled feminist. I could cite a bunch of studies and point to the very real unequal representation of women in positions of authority, but I don’t think that would illustrate the point.
In fact, having read a short story on an MRA site about a dystopian future in which women had begun dominating men under the guise of being victims, but where practically all positions of authority were still held by men (the examples of oppression were things like a male restaurant owner having to change the décor because it was deemed offensive by women, and the male president discovering the secret feminazi plan of world domination and immediately putting women in their place and saving humanity), I’ve come to notice how often we assume male power as a matter of course (even in non-MRA sci-fi, women almost always have the exact same role as the time the book was written, as if the writer couldn’t conceive of it ever changing), with female power being defined mostly by how much a woman can influence the way a man uses his power.
And with so much power/privilege/influence being considered a neutral, natural part of being male, female power/privilege/influence is immediately noticeable, and often almost seen as more considerable because of it. In regards to feminist discourse, this is even worse, because women are often attributed this great amount of power and control (without getting most of it in real life), such as in the case of PUAs, which leaves them open to socially accepted take-downs.
To be more concrete, there has recently been three program series on various Danish national TV-channels about providing a counter to the (perceived) power-imbalance between men and women. The first is titled “Help! My wife is pissed off!” and consists of a bunch of men talking about male problems while being funny/sexist. One of the episodes was about how women dominated the home, with man after man bemoaning the lack of large speakers in the living room, because their tyrannical wives were only interested in making the home look neat, as opposed to the functional men who just wanted their music to sound good.
I would have considered it a fair complaint (though the real question is why these men are in marriages affording them that little influence), but then one of them gave an example of a man who owned some huge dark brown speakers, which ended up being painted white when he got married. Despite how this seemed an excellent compromise (the husband got his sound, the wife her look), the man telling about it considered the husband to be henpecked. In fact, as the program continued, it became more and more clear that what the men were really interested in wasn’t interior decorating, but power.
They talked about what defined the home of an alpha-male, and what proved men to be under the control of their wives, much more than their actual tastes and wishes. It wasn’t so much that they felt bad about living in houses that didn’t reflect their taste, but more that they felt that they, by virtue of having a penis, were owed a certain amount of power, and that any area in which a woman had more influence than them (even if they had more influence in others), was an affront to their manhood. The series was so popular it got a second season (“Help! My wife is (still) pissed off!”).
The second program is actually about interior decorating, with a group of men visiting couples in which the wife/girlfriend has been the only one to decorate the home, and redecorate it more according to his tastes. Not a bad concept in itself, but the title is “Lord in (their) own house”, subtitled “The men take back the power”. Pretty self-explanatory, and again, the focus is not on how a person who happens to be male has avoided taking an interest in how his house looks, or prioritised his wife’s wishes over his own, and ended up in an unsatisfactory situation because of it, but more on how men used to have all this power, and then women took some of it and that’s bad (no word on why men should have a monopoly the power they now ‘take back’ in the first place).
The third, “What the bride doesn’t know”, subtitled “More power to the man”, is about couples who’re about to get married, in which the woman has taken control over planning the wedding. The idea is to give the couple some money for the party, on the condition that the woman moves out of the house and stays away while the man arranges the wedding.
Again, not a bad concept per se (except for how gendered it is, and how some of the participants come to feel truly upset), but like everything else, it just has to be framed in that “To have a penis means to have power, men who don’t have power in all aspects of their life (even those they aren’t interested in) are victims who need help to regain their manhood”-way. The program follows the man as he makes the preparations, and in one instance, even put signs on the screen saying “Wimp!” or “Real man!” depending on whether the man took his future wife’s wishes into account or went against them. Ha fucking Ha.
Yeah, totally feminist mainstream.
There are plenty of other places, they’re just not feminist. A large amount of the people who most eagerly criticise feminism are aware of that.
I don’t really see any de-facto feminist discourse hegemony. Sometimes people use feminist expressions because feminists were the only ones to find words to describe certain concepts, but usually, feminism is either contrasted with the norm or seen as an oppressive aspect of ‘the system’.
I’m not saying everyone has a right to be crazy, just that it’s often useful to see certain comments in context. In terms of feminism, that means the context of people finding themselves attacked or ridiculed for expressing feminist viewpoints even in spaces that are explicitly feminist, while simultaneously being told they don’t have the right to complain because of a de-facto feminist discourse hegemony.
@Danny:
I suspect the current situation might change if people stopped bugging feminists so much in the same way I think a lot of countries would have been better off in terms of democracy and human rights if the western world hadn’t tried to ignorantly police them so much. Not only because a lot of the interferences have been selfish and ignorant, but also because a common enemy is one of the most powerful ways to prevent change. People will back up their local tyrant solely because at least he’s not an arrogant, ignorant, over-privileged foreigner telling them how to run their lives. The most successful social revolutions have been those coming from the bottom, not the outside.
I don’t think leaving people alone will always succeed (MRAs are usually left more alone than feminists, especially in their own or mainstream spaces, and they don’t appear to have become less hostile because of it), but I’ve generally had a lot of luck talking to feminists, even in areas where we don’t see completely eye to eye, because I’ve been one of them (a foreigner to most Americans in terms of nationality, but still a non-traditional woman who felt considered tenets of femininity an unjust burden). But in mixed situations, I still find myself either allying fully with the feminists (because the opposition is that much worse), or alienating them because I was seen as being on the side of the enemy.
I don’t object to the term ‘people of colour’ because I think it’s irrelevant what non-white people think about the way they’re being talked about, or because I think language doesn’t matter, but rather because I think the term itself is all sorts of problematic, for all races. But I seriously doubt I’d be able to get that across (much less get a civil debate going) in the midst of anti-feminists complaining about the PC-Police and hypersensitive females, so me making that statement in any of those contexts will just make feminists feel even more backed up in a corner. Not to mention that most of them aren’t interested in having every conversation turned into a question about language.
I think it’s great that we can have semi-neutral spaces to discuss our differences (and discover our similarities) peacefully in, but I don’t think it’s any use to pretend that most places are that neutral, or demand that they all should be.
AB,
“Only because feminists are among the few people who can discuss gender in an enlightened way.”
yes, that’s sort of my point… wouldn’t it be great if there were some other’s, too? And social conservatives who are unaware of social realities certainly exist, but they’re not part of any real discourse, in my opinion, they merely count as voters.
Well, well I’m not an expert on Scandinavia, but as far as I am aware, Norway, for example, has mandatory 40% quota for women on corporate boards. Iceland is prohibiting strip clubs based on feminist arguments, and the Swedish radical feminist model for dealing with prostitution is already old news. Affirmative action for women is most prominent in European law, Germany is about to get a 30% quota for all senior management positions in larger companies. I don’t know what your definition of mainstream is, but when a radical feminist scholar becomes a constitutional judge, as it recently happened, with conservative support in the Parliamentary appointment committee, her ideas are certainly within the mainstream – *even if that mainstream doesn’t consider itself “feminist”*.
And that’s what I was referring to – while nobody really cared about what feminists talked about back in the seventies and eighties, now everyone does, because (and, possibly, the US may be different from the rest of “the West” in that respect) the “women are equals”-idea has become basically unquestioned. Now we’re really only dealing with the practical consequences and debating what’s equivalent in situations where equal logically doesn’t cut it.
I’m not sure that’s generally assumed, but I do believe that this – I call it the “sex class indirect power”-hypothesis – is what motivated a lot of radical feminist social analysis. They bought into the female sexual power bit so much that they needed to taint heterosexual sexuality in their attempt to gain direct rather than indirect power. Hence the “feminist sex wars”.
As for the “power games people play” you mention – reality tv really hasn’t that much to do with “reality” ;) except if you look at the meta level. So are we looking at social requirements forming people’s expectation? Or are we looking at people’s expectations forming social requirements? The old sociological dilemma. Remember what I wrote above (or is it now in the other thread?) and the ensuing discussion about women seemingly looking and testing for dominance in relations? Sort of fits the picture, here, too, in a way.
Because of the “sex class indirect power”-hypothesis? Assumed sexual scarcity even in a relationship duopoly? I don’t know.
like where?
AB:
I have to admit my first thought was that you were making the often made plea that leaving the poor innocent feminists alone would make things better for everyone. After leaning back a bit I get a clear picture of why. Frankly put feminists don’t have all the bases covered and while people who are pointing out their flaws could be better about it (namely some MRAs) simply leaving feminists be is not the fix some may think it is.
Its good to see you’ve had such luck with them but I have not. And honestly I think a big part of your luck was that, despite being nonAmerican, you’re still a woman. No being a woman isn’t always an autopass (and I’ll bet Clarisse can testify to that and nonwhite women and gay women and transgender women can probably do the same) and being a man isn’t always an autodeny (just check the likes of Hugo Schwyzer). However in the eyes of a lot of feminists at the end of the day I’m just a man, or that common enemy you mentioned above.
Now despite what the marketing material says there are a good number of feminists that see my gender as grounds for dismissing anything I say and any experiences I live (and the insights I draw from them). I can certainly understand and respect the need for feminists to have their spaces but at the same time these folks are trying to change the world. Frankly I can agree with a lot of what they say, unfortunately the parts that I disagree with them on are very major, relationship shattering even.
So does that mean that I should just close up shop and let them go unchallenged just because I may irritate them sometimes (which is odd considering that whey they irritate me there is almost never any attempt to go past “you’re just whining about your privilege”)? Or act as if feminism is some perfect entity that is 100% right on all topics? Going nuts on them doesn’t work, respectful disagreement doesn’t work, ????
Its like I’m going through phases with them but now I’m at a point where I don’t know where to go next. All I can say is that the next step is not Acceptance because there is no way I’m going to accept the flaws I see in that movement. Maybe once they are addressed (even if not fixed at least being able to bring them up without getting attacked) that will come but for now, no way.
@Sam:
Unfortunately, you don’t get to decide what the real discourse is. Many people debate gender. The majority of said people are not feminist. If none of those people are able to hold an enlightened discourse, it says more about them than about feminism.
Just a nitpick – Iceland is not part of Scandinavia, as Scandinavians and Nordics see it. Traditionally, Scandinavia is Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, or less often, Sweden, Norway, and Finland (known as Fenno-Scandinavia). Iceland, Finland, Greenland, Åland, and the Faroe Islands are part of the Nordic countries, together with Scandinavia.
Anyway, this reminds me of a wikipedia entry about sexism in India, which had been edited by what appears to be an MRA, and was edited away a while later. It started with “Sexism against men is rampant in India….” and continued to list all the various attempts to combat sexism in India, like requiring universities to accept a certain % of women, and giving women in some areas special busses that men weren’t allowed on, while still allowing the women to ride regular busses. Seeing it all lined up like that was quite overwhelming, and there could be no doubt that if someone, like you, sees affirmative action towards women as feminist or anti-male, India would be among the biggest feminist strongholds in the world.
I don’t subscribe to this point of view, so I can’t share your conclusions. Women are still under-represented in politics, economics, sports, science, religion, and any part of the media that isn’t focussed on arousing straight males. That there is even a need of quotas is proof of that. Also, there are plenty of initiatives made to favour men over women, they’re just not given the name attention (let alone international attention) because unlike feminist initiatives, they don’t stand out as much.
Plenty of people cared about what feminists talked about at the time, at least here. It was a much bigger movement than it is now, though the decision of Danish feminists to consider themselves part of the workers movement probably had something to do with that. Many of the things feminists did (like bra burning) are considered more ridiculous now than it was then. Even John Lennon made a song titled Woman Is the Nigger of the World, and you don’t get much more mainstream in the 70s than John Lennon. (Alice Cooper, btw, also had a song around the same time called Only Women Bleed).
I’ve heard it said too many times to believe it’s not widespread at the least. Not to mention that almost all men I’ve heard complain about discrimination and female dominance have done so in the context of sexual relationships.
Reality TV has a lot to do with reality, though not always in the most direct fashion. In this case, the programs are taking advantage of an age-old stereotype about tyrannical wives and henpecked husbands, which I can assure is not only alive and well, but also gaining momentum.
I doubt it. A lot of men already know it’s not real, and considering that many of the men in the program were alpha-males, I’m pretty sure they know it too. Most likely, they just don’t care enough, or haven’t been aware enough, which is what usually happens. Plus, it seems a lot of men are quite into the whole “Help! I’m so henpecked!”-thing, to the point where they try to get to you assume that role even when you don’t want to.
Everywhere else where gender is discussed. I see anti-feminist articles and books about gender all the time, it’s not like feminism has a monopoly on that subject. Sure, if you don’t want to read blogs about how feminism has gone too far, how men aren’t allowed to be men any more, how women are screwing themselves over by selling out (sexually) instead of waiting for their true love, how women need to depend even more on men in order to cater to the masculine ego, or how mail-order brides are the way to go, it might be a bit harder to find. But just because you don’t like most alternatives to feminism doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
@Danny:
Frankly put, leaving feminists to define feminism would be a step up from what we have now.
I haven’t experienced a lot of this. I’ve seen women (including myself) be met with just as much hostility as men, sometimes even more. But then again, I haven’t debated a lot of feminism in feminist spaces, so that might be why we differ. I also don’t see the racial issue in quite the same way, since the last major fallout I had with a group of online feminists was when I told them in private that I didn’t think the way they behaved, especially towards a certain white male, was acceptable, let alone constructive, and the feminist who took the most offence was black.
I tend to leave most feminist sites alone for much the same reasons I leave MRA sites alone and didn’t answer the comments you made about me here while I was away for a month. The chances of achieving anything constructive are just too small. I still debate individual disagreements in non-feminist, and some feminist, spaces, but I try to stick with that individual disagreement, rather than making it into a debate about feminism as a whole. I try not to see feminism as a monolith, and I’ve found that it has increased my chances of debating constructively with feminists and non-feminists alike.
I pretty much agree with the observations AB is making in #381 and #382.
However, there still is something to be said for this from Danny “However in the eyes of a lot of feminists at the end of the day I’m just a man, or that common enemy you mentioned above.” I wouldn’t say it’s a majority of feminist women online, and honestly, I have experienced much less of this kind of instant rejection in person amongst feminist women. But I’m quite certain that some of the women on Feministe, Manboobz, F-Word, and Feministing and a few other places where I have commented simply see my name, and are ready to blast anything I have to offer.
But how much of that is about the construction of being online? I made a point yesterday on Manboobz that personal attacks and insults directed at a male commenter over there were a poor strategy. That one female commenter wanted dude to shut up, and from what I have seen, when people are insulted online, they tend to just spew more and more. Maybe in person, a well timed “stop being an asshole” drops a jaw, but online, given the lack of physical connection, eye contact, etc. – it totally fails. Anyway, that comment was responded to by one woman basically calling me a concern troll, and another calling me an asshole faux ally. Can that happen in person? Sure. But I also believe that the lack of interpersonal connection, shared experiences, and the rest make it easier for people to justify banishing all dissenting voices. The few MRA sites I have been to really aren’t much better in the opposite direction (i.e. women’s voices are suspect from the get go for some male commenters.)
Unfortunately, as well, I think that many people gravitate to the lowest common denominator behavior. There are probably thousands of blogs by feminists of different backgrounds and theoretical views. But where do a lot of folks go? To the sites where people are slamming each other, where MRA trolls are stirring up shit, where women are giving other women virtual fist bumps for dogpiling on some dude. Even though we’re dying for intelligent, thoughtful discussion, enough of us can’t seem to step away from the love of the train wreck. And thus, things stagnate and the status quo mostly remains, while people who could be allies bash it out again and again.
What happens online impacts how we interact in the flesh. So, to the extent that conversations like these on Clarisse’s site can continue, we’ll all maybe be better off in the long run.
AB,
you’re reading me wrong again (I think). The mainstreaming of feminsit thought is not in the fact that there’s not yet complete equality/equivalence, but that hardly anyone would attempt to argue against the need to rectify the situation. We may talk about why women aren’t represented equally on certain levels and to which extent legal measures can be used to change it, or should be used to attempt to change it, and what the consequences thereof may be, but really can’t recall anyone making a serious argument about how it’s better if women don’t get access to leadership positions. I’m sure those people exist, but they aren’t particularly vocal, in my opinion.
I just don’t see that *everywhere*, as mentioned above. If you exclude the lunatics in all camps, what remains as mainstream discourse about sexuality is heavily feminist/sociological. There’s a bit of scientific discussion that’s not explicitly feminist, but when it comes to *social discourse*, I really don’t see anything but feminist discourse in these matters. But as my perception of the mainstream as feminist implies, maybe we’re defining feminist differently, which would explain the different perceptions.
AB:
Sure they can define it but defining it themselves (through their words and actions) doesn’t mean they are immune to criticism by virtue of being feminists.
Not a bad idea and I try to do the same. But I’ve noticed that gets difficult when it comes to one of biggest pet peeves I have about feminists. When it comes to intolerable behavior (or at least it would intolerable if done to anyone else) I find it odd that a lot of feminists seem to be more forgiving depending on the whos of the situation rather than the whats, whys, and hows. This selective tolerance flies in the face of the constant bombardment of the “feminism is about helping all people” type messages. Yeah the waters get murky but I want to know why they seem to be unable to hold themselves to the standards they seem to have no problem imposing on other people.
I don’t see it as a monolith either (because if I did I wouldn’t be here). And you are right it does lead to more constructive conversation…but its not always that simple depending on the subject.
nathan:
Funny you mention those blogs. Despite that type of treatment they are constantly referenced and linked by other feminist blogs with nearly no mention of that type of behavior. And for an “outsider” to bring it up is apparently a serious taboo.
@nathan:
I believe it’s more nuanced than that. As I said before, I have seen plenty of female posters being met with the same hostility, and I disagree slightly with Danny that black feminists are especially marginalised (I almost always try to avoid race questions, and plenty of other issues, because I don’t count on getting positive results, as a white, middle-class, well-educated woman).
I also think language and tone has a lot to do with it. I spent most of my youth surrounded by guys, and had to learn how to carve out a space for myself in a clique of geeky male roleplayers without just being ‘the girl’, and what I found out was that this affected my whole way of socialising. When I started studying, I suddenly had to learn to socialise with women again. Being in an all female study group was extremely hard, and I ended up getting frustrated with the girls, and insulting them without trying.
I realised that I had acquired a very male communication style, and without an actual male body (one of the differences I’ve observed in regards to male and female groups is that female groups tend to cut guys more slack, while male groups tend to expect girls to prove themselves) to make up for it, it lead to numerous conflicts. I don’t find it unlikely that even among posters with gender-neutral names, a male communication style will not be received that well in largely female spaces, and vice versa.
I don’t mean to insult you, but the real question to me is why are you at Manboobz in the first place? I just made the mistake of going into Feminist Critics, and after calling them a spoiled, entitled echo-chamber to the screen, I immediately decided not to go there any more than necessary. I know that stuff like that is only going to make me feel powerless and frustrated, so I don’t go there.
It’s not just about sparing yourself a lot of grief, but also about doing your best to ensure a good debate when it matters. Seriously, there’s no way in Hell I’d be able to muster even a fraction of the understanding, empathy, and civility (all of which I know is already lacking) I do now, if I spent my time commenting in places that did nothing but frustrate me. I once said that part of what made me (somewhat) able to communicate with certain non-feminists was that I wasn’t into a lot of feminist jargon and theories, but the biggest reason by far is that I don’t spend my time on MRA blogs.
I’ve done my research, I get the gist of it, I have a suitable amount of horror stories, but besides that, I just don’t bother, and I’m constantly puzzled by the obsession many non-feminists seem to have with feminist spaces, and their almost masochistic drive towards provoking angry responses in them. And every time I have to debate them, it’s always “feminists did this, feminists did that”, which is one of the main reasons I’m such a staunch anti-anti-feminist. It just seems like such a waste.
I’m probably biased, but a lot of MRA differs from most feminism by being very gender existentialist – e.g. men aren’t allowed to be men/masculinity is marginalised. The theory is that there is a fundamental, universal, inborn gender difference between men and women, and that women are trying to oppress men by favouring the feminine and forcing men to become like women. Feminists, on the other hand, tend to distinguish between social status rather than biology (hence the whole “know your privilege” meme), which opens up for a little more flexibility.
I’ve found that I’m able to communicate fairly well with individuals from low-status groups by focussing on my experiences in areas where I belong to a low-status group too. It doesn’t have to be the same, I just have to give it some thought, and transfer my feelings in one area to another person’s situation in another area, and while not perfect, I have a fair shot at getting them to see me as someone who knows where they’re coming from. But no matter how much I try with MRAs, I can’t do the same, because they’re convinced I’ve got a vagina in my brain, and that sort of difference can only be overcome by me blindly accepting that a penis-brain is both inherently good, and completely beyond me.
Well, this goes back to what I said before about non-feminists’ choice of feminist spaces. I can’t give you an answer for it. Manboobz seems to do a bit of the same, not by confronting people he’ll never see eye-to-eye with in their own spaces, but by seeking them out in order to report on them from his space. It’s a step up, but still not always very constructive. Also, not communicating in person is all sorts of problematic.
I completely agree.
@Sam:
Actually, plenty of people argue that there’s no need to rectify the situation because a) the situation will rectify itself eventually, and/or b) the situation is a result of women’s own choices/abilities (or lack of same), not sexism. Not to mention that the majority of people who see no need to rectify the situation simply aren’t active in those discussions, so you don’t see them as much.
But just because a good deal of people recognise the existence of sexism against women it doesn’t make society feminist. A good deal of people also recognise the existence of sexism against men. One of my first posts here was an illustration of the lengths women had to go through to explain how unequal pay was a problem, in contrast to how easy it has been for men to just say “fathers get less child custody than mothers solely because of sexist judges”, even though it’s demonstratively false.
This is what I’m talking about. Even though there is no factual basis for claiming that even a small fraction of discrimination and prejudices are expressed by such direct statements (e.g. “it’s better if women don’t get access to leadership positions”), you nonetheless see a lack (if not an absence) of such statements as proof that society is feminist. Again, you’re using an extremely patriarchal background as the norm, which of course makes current society seem feminist in comparison.
A lot of the scientific discourse is sociological. When a study shows that both men and women value appearance higher than wealth in a partner, but that women value wealth comparatively higher, and appearance comparatively lower, than men, and the mainstream article covering the study says “Men go for looks, women for money” (which has happened), it’s a result of a lot of mainstream society being anti-feminist, not proof that science is one of the last bastions of non-feminist objectivity.
There are plenty of places to go to for non-feminist discourse. There are books like The War Against Boys and Spreading Misandry. Sexist/anti-feminist articles in a variety of newspapers and magazines. There’s the whole child custody discourse which is profoundly anti-feminist. There are plenty of gender issues in which men and women (on average) differ, where the male view takes precedence (such as stalking and harassment). There’s the whole line of “women are relationship bullies/men aren’t allowed to be men” discourse, which is getting more and more prevalent. The reason you don’t see them is largely because they’re too normal to be worthy of notice.
I define feminist as being interested in/working towards equality for women. Since almost everyone today claims to be in favour of legal equality between the sexes, you can call it feminist if you want, but for reasons I’ve already covered, I have to disagree.
@Danny:
I’ve usually found it to be the other way around, with people and arguments being brushed aside because they’re feminist.
Again, I’ve seen plenty of unacceptable behaviour towards feminists, which few non-feminists ever calls out. Perhaps it’s as simple as people standing with their own.
Then you’re not discussing issues, you’re discussing feminists. I could say the exact same thing about anti-feminists, but as I said to Nathan, I try to avoid those rather than making it a big issue, hence why my main grievances are about trends in mainstream culture and experiences I’ve had in places where I didn’t seek them out. I don’t expect good treatment where I’m not welcome, I’m not welcome in places like Feminist Critics, and so I stay away. It was part of why I didn’t feel I could post here any more for a while, and I’m having an increasingly hard time understanding people who don’t do the same.
AB – one thing to know is that I have basically considered myself a feminist for a good fifteen years now. I don’t consider myself an outsider, and in the past, I have been involved in plenty of feminist-based social/political action work. So, although my philosophical views are much more diverse than adhering to a single school of thought, I don’t view myself as a lurker with an agenda to take shots in feminist spaces. More often than not, I simply agree with the argument being presented, and don’t reply. And I’m actually not a prolific commenter on most of those sites I listed – but when I do comment, it tends to be an unpleasant outcome.
You ask why I was on Manboobz. Well, I just found his site from a thread on Feministe. Unfortunately, the same kind of dynamics seem to occur there to some degree – although maybe in a less intense way. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to keep heading over there or not. With Feministe, where much more of my commenting in feminist spaces has occurred, I guess you might say I went through a period of being perplexed. After all this time identifying with feminist thought, and being involved with grassroots work informed by that thought, it was surprising to be received in such a hostile way. It caused me to examine how I was writing comments, and to look more closely at the ways internet interactions occur.
If I were heading into a place where I knew my views were fairly different from those being expressed, I’d expect a challenge. The MRA dudes aren’t gonna like what I have to say the majority of the time for example. Most of the political websites I have commented on didn’t like my views because I’m not aligned with any political party, and tend to disagree with major party views on most issues. But I guess has been somewhat surprising to experience such thumpings in places where I considered myself on board with most of the views being expressed. And it really makes me wonder how possible any major social change movement will be in the near future, given how much fighting and division there is amongst fairly like-minded folks.
You mention communication style. What’s interesting – and I have been told this by women and other men – is that I have a mixed approach in commenting. I’m just as likely to present personal narratives, emotional appeals, and openness to other views as I am to present factual, dispassionate, reasoned out arguments. Sometimes with both in the same comment. In fact, a fair number of my comments over at Feministe have been similarly worded as comments by women on the same thread. And a few times, women have made the exact same point, almost word for word, as I have, with much less angst driven at them.
I totally agree with you that women can and do receive plenty of hostility on these sites. After I made that comment yesterday, I thought – “you know, what I really mean is this. Women might get the same backlash in the long run, but they usually get a pass in the beginning.”
I haven’t had much luck doing this on the sites I listed above. In fact, it’s almost felt like the way you describe your experiences with MRA sites. So, while I’d agree that feminist theories tend to be more sociological and social status focused, I do think that there’s still a biological lens being employed by some percentage of it’s members.
I will say, though, that it was through those sites that I found places like this. And I find myself less driven to make comments in those places because I have better outlets – like here – to discuss the issues.
Sam – I think the mainstreaming of feminism has been very selective, and mostly restricted to conservative narratives. Consider Naomi Wolf – one of the American public’s popular feminists. Her recent wholesale rejection of the rape claims being made again Julian Assange fit a pattern of offering elements of feminism, while working to maintain a lions share of the status quo. Now, I still have no idea if the charges against Assange are true or not, but I take them seriously, as a man who was sexually assaulted in the past, and who has seen the ways womens’ (and mens’) stories about rape and assault are repeatedly diminished and discounted. Wolf has little to say about the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy are linked. She makes appeals to reclaim a “real patriotism,” which are basically partisan shots at the Republican Party of recent decades. She uses the language of the right to describe her views on abortion, suggesting that abortion shouldn’t be illegal, but is a form of “homicide.” The point being that Wolf’s feminism isn’t going to radically change American social structures – and so, it’s acceptable. And I’d argue that at least in the U.S. – it’s feminism that looks like hers that has entered the mainstream.
@nathan:
My apologies. It seems many people who strongly criticise feminism are interested in gender issues, often disagree with feminism, but also considers it the only ‘legitimate’ form of gender discourse, resulting in them leaving non-feminists whom they disagree with (like MRAs) alone, and spending most of their time combating feminism instead. I thought you might be that type, but you’re obviously not. I can relate to what you experience, I simply don’t expect anything better in the current situation.
I’ve experienced some of the same, with men (and women with certain sexual credentials) being taken more seriously, so I wont rule out that the opposite could take place in feminist spaces. I haven’t experienced it personally, but it does make a certain sense that a woman wont immediately be seen as an outsider trying to tell women how to feel.
I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same thing here. I’m mainly talking about agreeing and relating by virtue of similar experiences.
This reminds me of another trend I’ve seen often, feminists trying to win acceptance by distancing themselves to other feminists. Or getting non-feminist credentials by being appropriately sexy (which is probably why Beyonce can get away with as much as she does).
AB:
Its happens both ways. Varying mileage and all that.
I’m sure you have. But the difference for me (and I’m in no way trying to say that I have the defining thought on this) is that I don’t so as many non-feminists constantly declaring that they are the ones fighting for the rights of all people. Yes I criticize feminists quite a bit but I’m not doing while declaring that people should turn their backs on feminism because I’m the one that’s really helping people. In fact I don’t want anyone to turn their back on feminism (because a lot of good has come from that movement), but at the same time that doesn’t mean the members of that movement should get a free pass on their negative behavior.
Fair enough. But that doesn’t make it invalid. If we are all in this (as in all people across all of humanity) together then just think that something like that is worth talking about. Sure I could just sit over on my blog and just spend my day digging up stuff to complain about on a certain group of people (like manboobz) but that doesn’t help in the long run because that’s poisonous (and I know this from experience but I think its worth noting that when I was doing that the MRAs weren’t exactly flooding in while manboobz is apparently the best thing since sliced bread). Sure I could just bottle my inquiries up and never address them but that doesn’t help in the long run (I also know this from experience). Pretty much leaves me with trying to bring them up (which is rarely successful but its better than the other two).
Because we all just can’t sit in our own vacuums?
I can’t speak for all non-feminists but for me its a matter of finding a space where you actually have a shot in hell of being heard. You’ve basically written off Feminist Critics (which I think you’re wrong for but that’s another story and ultimately your choice). While I am pretty critical of feminism there’s a reason why I comment here and Ethecofem but refuse to comment at Feministe and Shakesville ever again and have concluded that Feministing isn’t worth the effort of registration. I think I’ve said this before (but its worth saying again) but here people are disagreeing with me (and very importantly doing it in a civil manner) while at those other blogs I’m branded a hater of women for not being a feminist or a privilege whiner for not acting like my live is as easy and grand as they tell me it is because I’m a man. As much as I would like to speak in those larger spaces (and I find it interesting that those spaces are among the largest and most famous and are so tolerant of each other’s venom) I know through trial and error that its just not worth it.
@Danny:
I also think feminism is catching more flak than other movements for not focusing equally on everybody. I’ve seen several people say that merely having a gynocentric name is oppressive.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here.
Because it was no longer about communicating, and more about finding stuff to get angry about. QuietRiotGirl (since me leaving didn’t stop people from talking about me, I guess it’s OK to use as an example) illustrates this quite well.
She posts on Feministe only to argue that all feminism is all sorts of bad, admits that she’s just posting in order to oppose it, more or less auditioning for men to come and discuss the wrongness of feminism with her, derailing the thread there as a result, and then go over here to say how “it speaks volumes that the same post has been dealt with so differently in two different spaces”, and later blames the culture of Feminste, even though her (and other anti-feminists’) participation had a huge influence on how that thread developed.
On February 9th she states “I have stopped trying to talk to the folk at Feministe”. The very same day she leaves 15 posts at Feministe (possibly more, I was only checking one thread), several of them after she’d allegedly stopped trying to talk to people there, and more in the following days. She then uses the reactions from the folk she’s not trying to talk to as ammunition against feminism here, complains that people have called her a troll, and continues her conversation about why Feministe/feminism sucks with Nathan from the same site.
And the reactions here were largely neutral or even positive, like Clarence praising her and offering sympathy (as well as praising MRA sites for not moderating like feminist sites, as if the behaviour of the opposing sides had nothing to do with it).
When confronted with something like that (and similar occurrences), it’s hard to find a way to react properly, but one thing is certain, and that is that talking in such an environment is out of the question, since there’s a pretty big chance the person in question has given up trying to communicate with you, and is just posting stuff to provoke you into writing something s/he can later use against feminism. And besides, since humans tend to place the most blame on the most visible target, every flamewar in relation to a feminist topic seems to end up reflecting badly on feminism, regardless of who the main flamers are, so it’s kind of like arguing with idiots or wrestle with pigs, you’ll be hurting yourself just by being there.
I personally have a huge problem with the sort of behaviour QRG exhibited. It has nothing to do with my own feminism, or lack thereof, and everything to do with my personal ethics when it comes to communication. Seeing the amount of non-productive shit feminists are expected to put up with even on their own sites, and seeing how they’re mocked when they (often understandably) react negatively towards said shit, goes against the way I was brought up to treat others. Seeing how accepted it is for people to claim their hostility to feminism is justified by feminists throwing some of the same shit (which they were expected to put up with) back, just makes me grit my teeth.
I know I wont get anything out of posting in a place where that kind of behaviour is accepted, let alone praised. My own frustration would make me non-productive, in the same way the vast majority of non-feminist posters on feminist sites are utterly non-productive (at least if their goal was communication with feminists, which it usually isn’t).
Personally, with a few exceptions, I think feminist spaces deserve to be left to people who, feminist or not, are at least not negatively disposed towards it – just like I think religious spaces deserve to be left to people who, regardless of faith, at least believe the religion in question has some merit, and atheist spaces deserve to be left to people who are prepared to discuss the world through a non-religious perspective. And if this place is for people whom I mainly want to scream at (which it was at the time), I think I owe it to Clarisse to leave to to them, at least until the conditions change. Because I don’t know if it actually makes anything better, but the alternative would definitely be making things worse.
Honesty, I respect your position, but I don’t see why trial and error is necessary. Most places are pretty obvious after you’ve read a few threads.
AB – I got sucked into that whole thing with QRG, thinking that she was just another minority opinion getting thrashed at Feministe. I also agreed with her general assessment of the environment on Feministe, so I thought that perhaps she might be someone I could have an actual dialogue with. However, after reading her blog for a bit, it became obvious that she enjoys the rush of being oppositional and pissing people off, especially anyone writing about feminism. I did call out on her blog two of her comments from the Feministe thread, saying that those particular comments were overly provocative, and did nothing for the conversation. And I also made my views clear that I believe there are multiple feminisms, and that I disagreed with her blanket assertions.
In the end, though, it was an error on my part to have continued defending QRG, and I can understand the anger that was directed at me on that particular Feministe thread. I would never knowingly defend such behavior because it radically goes against my ethics, and is especially troubling online, where people can run about anonymously, destroying conversations at will.
Danny, I like your point about moving beyond places where you’re just another echo, and trying to dialogue with people who you may have some disagreements with. Whenever I find a place where civil discussions can occur where people are actually coming from different angles, I feel a bit of hope for us all.
AB:
While the flak may go far sometimes I think its worth bearing in mind that members of that movement often bill themselves as THE people who are fighting for everyone. Now I agree that that doesn’t necessitate equal focus on all groups but I do think that that claim at least comes with a bare minimum of not actively harming certain groups. There are plenty of them that don’t meet that bare minimum.
I’m sorry that stuff happens and grits your teeth (that’s a bad habit I have too). On the other hand considering the shit I’ve put up with even when trying to discuss in good faith, just to have it defended by moderators who supposedly want everyone to be civil I find myself having a hard time feeling too sorry for them. And as someone who has been told that the only reason I critique feminists and feminism is because I don’t understand it and pretty much seeing it as an accepted dodge I can kind of see where you’re coming from.
You know a few years ago I would have fallen into that “not negatively disposed towards it” bunch. But my disposition was turned not by angry MRAs, not by “patriarchal forces”, not by the supposed smearing of feminism by the media. No it happened at the hands of feminists themselves. Right now I’m trying to neutralize said disposition but its a hard road.
The trial and error was back when I just starting pay attention to gender discourse. Now that I have done that trial and error (and gotten a bit wiser) you are right its not necessary. Which is how I pretty much know that there are feminist spaces out there that are just too hostile to even bother.
But another reason for the trial and error was wishful thinking. As in yeah I was treated unfairly at Feministe on one post but maybe if I try to be more civil on this thread I’ll see that I was being out of line on that last one. Because as they say I just don’t understand what feminists and feminism are all about. But no I draw a line at being told that I am a privileged whiner for disagreeing with the belief that the only difference between men who rape and men who don’t is that the men who haven’t are just for their chance to do it or that the belief that its okay to assume the worst faith in all men based on personal experiences with some men.
I’ll second Danny on the issue of moderators jumping in and supporting poor behavior on the part of other commenters. In my view, it’s really those running the blogs that set the tone.
When moderators are selective in their ethics, allow their favorite commenters to continually attack those they disagree with personally, and sometimes even “join the fun” themselves, they basically make any grand statements about commenting ethics worthless.
When moderators are quick to cut off dogpiling and personal attacks, and do their best to engage commenters in a fair way, discussions tend to be more possible. (Shit still happens sometimes, but not nearly as often as when moderation is sloppy and partial.)
@nathan:
I think I understand how that is. I once incidentally made friends with some radical feminists even though I knew what they were about. We just happened to agree in some areas, and I thought “why not?”, but I ended up finding myself on a side in a conflict I didn’t intend to get involved in. I didn’t consider that just because I thought some of the things they said had merit, it didn’t mean it wasn’t just a provocatively phrased as the stuff I’d been turned off by, so it wouldn’t be plausible for people who didn’t see eye-to-eye with them to not feel attacked, and with good reason.
I thought what happened at Feminste was very obvious from the start. But then again, I’ve had differences experiences. In this case, I knew I was about to get involved in a flamewar, so I withdrew instead. But I don’t blame you for defending, it’s my first instinct too when I see someone like that on the other side :-)
@Danny:
I think it’s something of a chicken and egg situation. Feminists are accused of being oppressive by being gynocentric, and answer back that their ideology is one of equality for all people. Or feminists proclaim to be about equality for all people, and get extra flak for failing to live up to it. I’ve seen more feminists care about other issues, such as racism and homophobia, than practically anyone else (not to mention I learned terms like ableism, ageism, and kyriachy from feminists, whereas MRAs gave me the terms feminazi and mangina), but I don’t know how much of it is because of the simple fact that a movement for women only is considered much less legitimate.
Ad that’s why I try to leave these places alone as much as possible. But I find it interesting that all the trouble with Feministe seemed to increase traffic here. For all people are looking for civilised debate, we’re nonetheless drawn towards conflict.
AB:
I’ve been thinking about the whole gynocentric things lately and I’m thinking that gynocentric (my understanding of it is one that focuses almost entirely on women) in and of itself is not that oppressive or even that exclusionary. The problem comes in when, for the sake of getting more attention/help/etc. for women, they actively deny the experiences and harms of other people. Which could explain…
…how I’ve seen feminists engage in racism and homophobia that is very easily on par (if not worse than) that of the very people they claim to be fighting against. To me I was already aware of things like ableism, ageism, and the sort. Feminists just put a label to it. Funny fact, it was an MRA that convinced me to stop using the word femininazi. But its feminists that have taken actual useful terms like privilege, oppression, and the various -isms and evolved (or devolved) them into shaming language and insults.
And “…the simple fact that a movement for women only is considered much less legitimate.” is almost ironic considering that so many members of that movement have taken it upon themselves to declare that MRAs have no business saying anything just because they are men and have all the power. That’s not to be confused with critiquing them over their rage and anger, no I’m literally talking about saying that things like oppression of men, sexism against men, and discrimination against men do not happen therefore they are only about wanting the “right to rape and beat women” (an exact quote from a feminist posting on MRAs a few years ago at Shakesville, where of course it went unchallenged by the locals). So apparently feminists are the ones that are fighting for equality for all people as well as being the ones that decide who is deserving of equality. Now that’s not to say they are all like that but there’s enough of them that it comes off as hypocrisy to be told that feminists are the ones that are being treated unfairly when they’re just so perfectly innocent and have done nothing wrong (because its apparently feminists are a monolith when it comes to positive generalizations).
Ad that’s why I try to leave these places alone as much as possible. But I find it interesting that all the trouble with Feministe seemed to increase traffic here. For all people are looking for civilised debate, we’re nonetheless drawn towards conflict.
Oh yeah I try to leave them be for the most part but the reason I still try to make some attempt to engage is so that at the end of the day I’m not just declaring them hostile zones of hatred without even trying (which is the crux of the “you haven’t talked to any actual feminists, you’re just making generalizations” argument). Now that I’ve actually tried that excuse (because it sure as hell isn’t an argument) is invalid. My disdain for feminists and parts of feminism are not figments of my imagination, projection, or unfair bias against feminists. No I think lowly of them because they treated me like shit (which is why I almost laugh when I hear them turn around and whine about the “unfair” negative stigma that afflicts their precious movement).
As for the increase in traffic based on the trouble at Feministe it actually makes perfect sense. People have tried talking to folks at that site and got burned for (the most part) no good reason so we looked for a place where we could civilly air out our grievances. Muck like Feminist Critics.
@Danny:
I have seen people say multiple times that a movement focussing on women, instead of being for general equality (whether that’s general gender equality or just general equality depends on the speaker), is per definition discriminatory and oppressive. But I only see this in regards to women, no one seem to mind it when other people do it. It wouldn’t occur to anyone to accuse an organisation helping people with diabetes of being unjust because it didn’t focus equally on curing cancer.
Though thinking about it, I have seen this attitude in regards to similar issue, the difference in focus between breast cancer and prostrate cancer, which incidentally is also a gender issue.
Calling someone out for bigotry will always be seen as shaming. Asking feminists to never make anyone feel uncomfortable or attacked is basically just another way of asking them to stop. Not to dismiss your experiences being called out for a behaviour that you likely didn’t exhibit, but I find this whole line of reason to be very problematic, almost like the race card.
In mainstream culture, a movement for women is definitely not considered very legitimate, or there wouldn’t be all those claims about gynocentrism being oppressive and wrong. That you’ve been masochisticly arguing with feminists in closed spaces for years doesn’t change that.
I see no reason to insist on talking when there’s such amble opportunity to listen.
Except that it very quickly turned the mood here much closer to that of Feministe (which is understandable since the same people were involved), and after things calmed down, the interest here died again. One would think that if new people came here from Feministe looking for civil debate, they would have stayed, and if people from here tried at Feministe first, that’s pretty telling too.
AB:
While I can see where you would think its wrong I think its worth noting that unlike most other movements feminists regularly declare that they are the movement that is fighting for the rights of all people. Add that to the contradicting words and actions of some of the its members and that’s were you get that treatment. You don’t get to claim that you are fighting for equality for all people and then go back on that claim.
In fact here is an example. When’s the last time you’ve heard a person that was trying to raise awareness of diabetes say they were fighting for all diseases then turn around actively deny the damage that cancer does?
And there is the rub. I’m not asking them not to make me feel uncomfortable or make me feel like I’m being attacked I’m asking them to stop attacking me and trying to make me feel uncomfortable for the sake of shutting me up or making themselves feel better. You may find it problematic but I think it needs to be addressed. I don’t see much hope in achieving the ideal world when people passing off shame as calling out.
Well maybe if the ones that were oppressive and wrong weren’t those complaints would quiet down and then the illegitimate naysayers would be shown for the shams they are. But with the say it stands now any type of critique of them is nearly automatically dismissed as illegitimate naysaying.
Because the world isn’t going to become a better place for all people if only certain people are allowed to talk while everyone else is only allowed to listen. Listening certainly has its place but if we expect to fix everything then its going to take more than a single group doing all the talking. Which sets up a nice little loop of listening to them speak unfairly of men, I speak up, I get shouted down, I go off to complain, and I’m told that I really don’t anything about them and I should try actually listening to and talking to them.
Eh I’ll give you that (would explain why the traffic at Feminist Critics isn’t all they great either I supposed). Although I don’t think the mood got so close to mirroring Feministe (because frankly that would have run me off).
@Danny:
That’s irrelevant. The statement was that a movement for gender-equality which focussed on women was per definition wrong, only a movement focussed equally on all people would be right. Please think back on what I wrote in post 397 about the chicken and egg situation instead of continuing to rage against feminism, and tell me why you’re so convinced that feminists started to argue that they were in favour of equality for all people before being accused of the opposite.
Also, I have heard people trying to raise awareness of a cause argue against taking other problems seriously. Initiatives against domestic violence (against women), crisis centres (for women), and breast cancer awareness have all been attacked before.
And as I’ve already said, everybody feel the same way. You’re not special, feminism is not special, no one is special in that regard. The way you feel people are trying to make you shut up is likely the exact same way as feminists feel when they’re called ugly prudes or accused of being manhaters, shamed into being quiet. Except that, as you pointed out yourselves, the words feminists use are at least fairly useful (unlike ugly, prude, and manhater), even though they can be applied incorrectly.
The issue you raise is bigger than that though. If you, rather than telling all those feminists you keep seeking out that their accusations are wrong, tell them that they’re using words like privilege and sexism to shame people, you make it all about words instead. When you start to object being called privileged and sexist, not because you disagree with the assessment, but because you disagree with the words being used to shame, what exactly are you leaving as the alternative?
When people oppose slut-shaming, it means one of two things, a) don’t call anyone a slut, or b) don’t use slut as a dirty word. What do you propose we do about all those bad things that nobody else want to be called either? Forbid people to use the word sexism? Tell them to not use it like it was a bad thing? And for the record, feminists are far form the only people who call others sexist and oppressive.
The complaints that a movement focussed on women is wrong would die out? Are women really so much worse than men that they deserve to be collectively punished by not being allowed to make movements for themselves when everybody else is? Or are you saying that women are so much better than men that their failure to collectively act like angels is reason enough to punish them in a way nobody else is?
Also, I find it pretty telling that while you seem ardent about minimising the significance that hate, harassment, and ridicule have on feminists, you’re basically illustrating how significant it is. I’m perfectly willing to acknowledge that a lot of feminists were probably overly suspicious and dismissive of you, but every time I’ve mentioned that said feminists are probably also the targets of a lot of undue attacks, making it hard for them to take in actual constructive criticism, you’ve answered along the lines of “feminists probably brought all those attacks on themselves and they could just start behaving”. And you’re representing the moderate non-feminists.
You’re derailing, this wasn’t about not talking, it was about engaging in constructive dialogue in places suited for it, instead of going into other people’s spaces just to pick a fight and get offended. Your own arguments for engaging them in post 398 was that then you couldn’t be accused of not trying. Or in other words, you go to a hostile feminist space, engage people there, start a flamewar, get a lot of bad experiences, leave, and then say “now that I’ve tried, it has become OK for me to slam feminism”. Is there any logical reason you couldn’t just have concluded that by reading the site to find out what it’s about and how the members communicate?
Not talk, just listen would be nice. For instance, when feminists say they want their own spaces, listen. There are sites like this one that welcomes other views, and then there are sites where feminists would like to share thoughts and experiences with people who’re more like themselves, instead of being drowned out (which tends to happen if they allow unmoderated comments).
Is it really that much to ask that you listen/read first, find out where your perspective is welcome, and then post there and leave the other places alone? You can still read and badmouth it all you want, but at least have the courtesy to let the people you have such contempt for fuck up by themselves, rather than from being under pressure from you.
That depends on what you think constitutes an ugly mood. For me, the ugliest thing about Feminste was QRG and all the guys who were obviously just there to pick a fight so they could agitate the other posters into either saying something ugly or be accepting of it when other people did, so they could go somewhere else and tell the people they were really trying to communicate with “Look at what the feminists did!”.
I have no idea how it would have turned out if those posters hadn’t been there, but my experience tells me that the few times one can manage to get feminists alone and communicate that they’re not under attack, many of them are quite reasonable and open to criticism, all things considered. Though I also don’t seek them out on sites where they spend most of their time arguing with MRAs.
But speaking of people being drawn towards conflict, I noticed that the pick-up thread has been picking up speed after a PUA/MRA showed up and demanded that Clarisse justified herself to him. And this thread is only active because the two of us are arguing, and it’ll probably start getting more active if we aimed to get more people offended. Conflict breads activity.
Also, on a slightly related note, in post 362 on that thread, said poster starts arguing against what seems to be accusations about objectifying women, even though said accusations have not, to my knowledge, even been made yet. It’s similar to when Clarence started arguing as if I’d talked about rape-culture and accused me of wanting to use the corrective power of the state to force men to comply, when QRG talked as if everybody had ganged up on her after two people had disagreed with her on Feministe, and when (mainly) guys routinely accuse people who’re less than enthusiastic about sexualisation of women of being in favour of censorship.
It’s probably my biggest issue with the way people, especially Americans, deal with feminism. They don’t argue issues, they argue feminism, and rather than addressing what’s said, they find some feminist buzz-word they object to, and then start railing against it even in contexts where no one has used it. You do it too some in ways (I hope you see this as the kind of constructive criticism you want feminists to take in), rather than addressing my specific questions or issues, you seem to sometimes just keep going back to the wrongness of feminists.
AB:
I will call out people I see as abusive or hateful. Whether they are MRA’s, feminists, or anything else really.
You identify as “feminist”. I’m not going to let you own the label but not the blame for what feminism has had done in its name until I see you start critiquing feminism. Then you could rightfully claim that not all feminism is the same. I’ve yet to see you disagree with a single thing feminism has done.
Meanwhile the future falsely accused at Yale, Harvard, etc. do not thank you.
http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/2011/04/yale-latest-school-to-comply-with-title.html#more
This is directly attributable to a movement that calls itself feminist. Do you think perhaps, this might be a mistaken policy?
See, here’s the thing. An example is the seduction community. The most fair minded of feminists (well, except for the few who identify as egalitarian feminists but most of you wouldn’t count them)such as Clarisse are able to acknowledge a problem, see that men have devised a solution, and try to find ways to align that solution with feminism, rather than to deny the problem, or to destroy the solution in a bit of “my sex takes all” bit of sexual warfare. More props to her.
But you can’t get into a discussion of what is problematic about any of feminisms purported solutions on the vast majority of so-called feminist boards. Now without being accused of all kinds of things.
That’s problematic.
AB:
Sure you can argue that perhaps when I started to cross paths with feminists it was in the portion of the chicken/egg loop there they claim to be fighting for the equality for all people. I’m not sure which came first but the fact of the matter is they make the claim and its not just “get extra flak for failing to live up to it” but that they make the claim and then directly contradict it. So all that “flak” isn’t the result of dogpiling on them unfairly. But overall it would be nice if they would either stop making such claims or actually live up to them or if the people that heaped on them unfairly would let up or whatever else to break that loop.
And I would agree that such claims are wrong. Trying to raise awareness for the things you mention in and of themselves is not the same as not taking other issues seriously. But just as the things you list there there are people who argue that the very act of trying to help male DV victims actively harms women. For some of the same reasons that you’ve probably heard.
The alternative would be that they properly assess the behavior or person in question or at least use words that actually fit the assessments they are applied to. Take parenting. Women are expected, nearly required, to be knowledgeable about caring for children and men are expected to not, nearly forbidden, to be knowledgeable about caring for children. Both have ups, both have downs, both are loaded with unfair expectations with some small measure of “advantage”. I agree that men who don’t want kids and women who do want kids gain from these beliefs. But we are expected to believe that in this equation only men are privileged and that while men are harmed by these expectation its not sexist against them (because they are men and the supposedly the definition of sexism is that it can only be against females)?
If anything use the word properly rather than the self serving definition they choose to use.
Well for the record its a good thing I never said they are.
No I’m saying that when they fail on the claims they make they should not get a free pass on it, especially when they directly contradict it. If we were talking about a politician that regularly claimed to be an ally of women while supporting anti-abortion measures one of the biggest pieces of evidence would be the fact that they claim to be pro woman yet time and time again they support anti-woman measures. Now I’m not trying to say that the they deserve to be punished more harshly than others (in fact I really don’t think I’m trying to say they should be punished). I am trying to say that they don’t deserve to get a free pass on behavior that they themselves would have no problem calling out if someone else did it.
Oh have I now?
“While the flak may go far sometimes…”
Agreeing that it goes too far.
“I’m sorry that stuff happens and grits your teeth (that’s a bad habit I have too). ”
Apologizing for the unfair treatment you went through.
“Well maybe if the ones that were oppressive and wrong weren’t those complaints would quiet down and then the illegitimate naysayers would be shown for the shams they are.”
Straight up saying that they get unfair flak.
No. I’m not trying to bait people into flaming so I can get ammo for my own complaining later. I actually hoped that “maybe if I’m more civil it will go better” for a while. As I’ve said before this was before I came to notice that I can pretty much assess whether or not I’ll be welcome. However civility is not always the requirement.
But neverminding that, based on your logic if I were just looking for something to complain about I would have cut bait and ran from here long before now and I probably would not have been asked to be a contributor at Ethecofem. I would like to get something constructive going (because once again if I were just looking for ammo to fuel my fire I would have stopped coming here because firstly you and most of the folks here won’t put up with that and secondly I’m pretty sure Clarisse won’t put up with it).
That’s a skill I’ve picked up over time. And even that doesn’t always prepare you for what lies beneath.
Oh yes I do that and in the past there were times when I’d come across spaces that said they had no problem with disagreeing views as long as they were civil. One thing I’ve learned is often that’s bullshit. Again that’s something I’ve had to learn over time. Listen and read and decide when the civility was legit and when it was bullshit. Still a relatively new lesson to me. There’s a lot more bullshit out there than a lot of people are willing to acknowledge (just as there is more civility out there than a lot are willing to acknowledge).
Sure I can pay that courtesy. Just don’t claim you’re welcome to civil differing views and then go ape shit when when a civil differing view comes along. I agree that I shouldn’t just go around causing trouble but if you invite me in and then get pissed when you find out I don’t tow the line then that’s not my fault. And it sure isn’t proof that I “don’t know what feminism is about”. But as for letting them fuck up by themselves vs. pressure from me I take that to mean not doing it in their spaces?
I think that happens because that behavior (or what have you) that I critique for the most part seems to go largely unchecked by others among them. Not too different when someone critiques corporations. They notice a bad behavior and call it out and in not seeing other corporations not saying/doing anything about it next thing you know you have people who will rant on about how “corporations are”. And many thanks for not just writing off all my criticisms as just attacking feminists.
This is long enough.
@Clarence:
That’s all well and good, as long as you call them out for stuff they actually say. You have yet to produce an example of me saying that I want to use the corrective power of the state, or mentioning rape-culture, so those accusations sound to me like you’re running on auto-pilot, rehearsing the same arguments you use against everybody you’re angry at and deem feminist, because you know it’s more likely to be effective.
Actually, I have repeatedly stretched how I’m not a feminist by choice, but that, without knowing anything about American feminism (including waves, Andrea Dworkin, privilege, rape-culture, the works), I was still assumed on American message boards to be part of that movement, and accused of having been educated on a US college to be part of a feminist hive-mind, and how this treatment affected me immensely. The last label I used about myself was anti-anti-feminist, which is not the same. I don’t want to ‘own’ any label, in fact, my main issues debating on American sites is how people wont stop slapping labels on me, and how so many of them turn everything into a discussion about feminism instead of addressing the actual topic.
I’ve seen a girl explain her anti-feminism by telling about how guys used accusations of feminism as a way of attacking her when she spoke her mind about gender issues, and how she’d concluded that those guys must have had a reason for it, so the sole fault must be on feminism for giving people like her a bad name. I’ve seen similar claims from other American girls. I decided to go the other way, and hold the people who actually attacked me responsible instead. I guess that means I’m a feminist, in that my views are similar enough for the label to fit, but that doesn’t mean I have to take responsibility for anything but my own actions (just like the people who accused me of feminism are responsible for theirs).
Believe me, if I could get non-feminists to stop calling me a feminist, I would be thrilled, and if you’d read my posts with anything resembling an open mind, you would have noticed how I’ve often remarked that labelling someone a feminist is an extremely effective debating tactic (if you just want your opponent to look bad) because of the stigma associated with that movement. I have no interest identifying as feminist when discussing anything with non-feminists, because it only hurts communication and increases the chance that they’ll ignore me and resort to ad hominen attacks.
First off, you’re not ‘letting’ me do anything, you’re slapping a negative label on me and try to use it to hold me responsible for a bunch of stuff that you (being American and more active in the feminist-related blogsphere than I am) have probably had more influence on than me. If you want to label me a feminist, you’re welcome to it, and if you want me not to be a feminist, then I’ll concede to you that I’m not. I don’t care much for labels, and I don’t need one to rightfully claim that feminism is not all the same.
Second, why should I spend my time as one of the only female, feminist-friendly, non-American posters on this board repeating the same criticisms of feminism as the non-feminist/anti-feminist American male posters do? Should I also spend my time with feminists repeating all the bad stuff they say about people like you? I like this place because it’s neither an echo-chamber or a fighting-zone, but you’ve repeatedly attempted to turn it into the latter when I have refused to help turn it into the former.
I have agreed, several times even, with people complaining about bad behaviour exhibited by feminists – as I pointed out to Danny, I have agreed more with him in these last couple of posts than he has with me. In my latest response on Hugo Schwyzer’s blog (here: http://hugoschwyzer.net/2011/04/12/more-on-rings-at-gmp/#comment-581334 ) I express disagreement with him, because I can do so without being hateful towards him, and that’s something a site like that benefits from.
I’ll disagree with feminists when they say something I disagree with, and I’ll agree with people bringing up bad things some feminists have done when I agree that said things a) happened, and b) were bad. But don’t expect me to be the one to bring up all the bad stuff feminists have done, because I’m much less acquainted with that type of feminism than you and Danny are.
I give my perspective on what’s brought up by people here, but I’m not American enough, feminist enough, or anti-feminist enough to know much about what kind of stuff I’m supposed to bring up, so I leave it to people who’re better suited for it. And since I don’t see you bringing up example after example of what you think feminism has done right, I think my choices about what I post about are good enough as they are. And right now, that includes the decision to give the other perspective because I’m in a much better position to do so than practically anyone else here.
Yes, and in my very first post to Clarisse (asking the very question that made me make an account here, because I’ve not found the answer anywhere) I talked about my issues dealing with masculism/men’s rights, and whether there was a masculist equivalent of her blog. Apparently there isn’t. You see, every issue you have with feminism, I have with most men who profess to care about equal rights for men. But I don’t have people like Clarisse on the other side, to address my concerns from a male, non-feminist, and yet respectful and sympathetic way, understanding that feminism is a response to real problems, and trying to align that with his own concerns for male rights.
And part of what increasingly frustrates me about what happens here, is that there are so many people who’re eager to attack feminism (and associate me with it for a nice little round of guilt by association, despite how I obviously associate less with the feminists I’m being lumped into category with than most people here), but so little willingness to even consider how it feels to be on the receiving end of the kind of shit they’re dishing out themselves. And then claim to be the ones not receiving enough sympathy afterwards.
Wow! Feminists are people! I had no idea….
Not as problematic as you make it out to be. It’s not like you see many other movements (least of all anti-feminists and the men’s rights movement) routinely exhibiting the kind of tolerance you demand of feminism, and it’s not like you don’t have other opportunities to discuss your issues.
Besides, I’m not that interested in discussing feminism, and I suspect most feminists aren’t either. And yet, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a debate on a feminist sites frequented by non-feminists that didn’t turn into a debate about feminism as a whole/aspects of feminism that were largely irrelevant to the subject at hand. In fact, I don’t even think I’ve seen such a debate in which the visiting non-feminists didn’t already have a beef with feminism and were looking for a way to take it out on the people there. I suspect feminists often go to feminist sites at least partly to be free of that kind of thing.
So honestly, that feminists make feminist sites in order to discuss issues relevant to feminism with other feminists and feminist-friendly people, rather than for receiving accusations from anti-feminists who come into the sites to demand that they justify themselves to them, is not problematic, it’s natural. And it should be obvious. You don’t mean to tell me that if I were to visit the website of the American democratic party, I would find it filled with democrats apologising to visiting republicans for everything bad ever done by a democrat, or trying to justify their choice to be democrats to visiting republicans.
Commenting at FC has seemed to be quieter in some ways than it was in the past, Danny, so I can certainly see why you got that impression, but the fact is traffic at FC has never been stronger. This year, we’ve been getting double the average daily page views we were getting two years ago.
Now, if I hadn’t been carefully tracking FC traffic for the past six months or so, I would never have guessed that this was the case. I read somewhere just recently that Internet traffic and commenting aren’t necessarily correlated, and I can vouch for that. I wonder if that might throw some of the assumptions about conflict generating interest into question. It might be that conflict just generates passion among the participants but doesn’t necessarily stimulate more interest among people who aren’t directly involved with whatever the bone of contention is.
I think there’s some merit to what you’re saying here, AB, but I would extend the analogy a little farther to illustrate the problem. It’s not just that the Democrats in power are shooing away Republicans because they’re not Democrats, they’re also giving the cold shoulder to ‘Ned Lamont’* Democrats and telling them they’re not real Democrats.
If the name’s unfamiliar to you, Ned Lamont was a more liberal Democrat who tried to unseat Joe Lieberman.
@Danny:
Except they still seem to get accused of being gynocentric like it’s a bad thing. I’ve seen in on American message boards, and as recent as a week ago a Danish anthropologist said on TV that women were at fault for making everything about gender, because men were more interested in actual problems (doubly ironic considering what the father’s rights movement have done here, but it seems that as long as we don’t expect that kind of behaviour from men, they can get away with it more easily). So it obviously still happens.
This I agree with, but I find many of the studies used to asses the number of male and female DV victims to be highly problematic. I don’t have the time to give lengthy explanations right now, but I’ve often seen them used to dismiss the experiences and concerns of women.
That’s not my impression of what feminists use privilege to mean. From what I can tell, it’s more about being the norm (which men definitely are) than anything else. The same with sexism, it has to be institutional. I don’t use the words like that myself, but I unlike you, I don’t see the discrepancy between being privileged and disadvantaged, I just see it in terms of social status. For instance, the nobles of old had numerous problems, from unhealthy habits (corsets, poisonous make-up, unhealthy food) to extreme social restrictions, and yet, it still makes sense to talk about them as privileged, powerful, and/or having high status, even if they weren’t always better off because of it.
If you look at traditional parenting, it’s actually very similar, with women taking on the role of wet-nurse (commoner) and men the role of noble parent. The women would so most of the work feeding, cleaning, and caring, but the children would belong to the men, who got to make all the decisions for them. I actually think the right to come under consideration as guardian for their own children after a divorce was among the last equal rights for women to achieve.
In that way, it makes sense to not see the roles as comparative (equally unfair in different ways), but rather as an unequal relationship in which the man is afforded higher status and influence. It’s interesting to note that women were the first to rebel against their gender role, and when they did, they wanted very much to have a slice of what the men were having, and when they started to get it, many men objected on the grounds that they (women) weren’t good enough, hadn’t made enough sacrifices to deserve it, had abandoned their own duties, and would end up ruining society.
But now that men have started to systematically object too, they don’t want what women have, they want more of what they (men) used to have and what they feel they have lost when women started to get parts of it too. There is a huge, and extremely aggressive, movement to give fathers more control and authority over their children, and make those children belong more to their fathers (which is a traditional male area), but the lobbying for more male parental leave (a traditional female area) is almost non-existent in comparison.
I think men miss out on a lot in regards to gender roles, but I think a lot of what they miss out on is often not as obvious, because the gender roles were designed with men in mind, meaning that most parts are immediately appealing to them. Hence we get a lot of “men aren’t allowed to be men any more” and not quite as many “men should be allowed to be feminine”, especially not from men themselves (which is the main reason I have such a hard time relating to most parts of the men’s movement, despite supporting men’s rights). So while I wouldn’t say that men and women aren’t both hurt by current gender-roles, I still think there’s a fundamental imbalance that needs to be taken into account.
Different words can mean different things in different contexts, especially within philosophy. American feminists (among others) have their own philosophy and a lot of philosophical concepts. That you or I can disagree with them doesn’t mean they’re used incorrectly in a feminist context. Then again, sometimes I think they are, but it’s a bit more specific for me. For instance, I wouldn’t want to argue against the notion that (according to feminist philosophy) I’m privileged for being white and heterosexual, but I would object if a view I felt was legitimate was dismissed because people thought I was just letting my privilege blind me. Does that make sense?
Actually, the pro-woman politician could easily claim that they were just protecting women from making a terrible mistake (the church in Brazil objected to a 9 year old getting an abortion after being sexually molested, and claimed that she had been pressured into it by doctors with an agenda). But that aside, I get where you’re coming from, I just don’t think there’s the same disconnect between being for equality for all and working to benefit women, since many people would argue that getting equality for women would benefit society as a whole.
I don’t think you’re deliberately baiting, but saying that you had to engage these people so you could say you tried is somewhat problematic. I think people are sometimes drawn to arguing with those they, if thinking about it, would/should know they have no chance of seeing eye to eye with. Feminists spaces probably account for around 0.2% of the internet, so if the bad experience of many non-feminists come mainly from seeking out feminist spaces themselves, I’d say it’s at least better than getting the majority of your bad experiences in places where you didn’t seek it out.
I didn’t say you were just looking for something to complain about, I’m just continuously baffled by how many attacks on feminism on this site I’ve seen come from people who sought out conflicts. Some of them are very obvious (i.e. “I’ve given up trying communicate with the folks at Feministe” – makes 15 posts at Feministe – “Look at what those people at Feministe are saying to me”), and others just seem pointless. I’ll probably never get it.
Perhaps it’s my tendency to over-analyse everything before attempting to engage in it, but I can’t wrap my head around how that’s something to be learned after the age of 10. But if that’s how it was for you, then that’s how it was for you, and probably quite a few others.
I think it depends on how the site approaches it. If I went to a site called ‘online bible-study’ which said that differing views were welcome, I’d still wager that being negatively inclined towards Christianity wouldn’t make me welcome, even if I was civil about it. Most sites seem to distinguish between differing views within the subject of the site, and differing views against the subject of the site.
To give a nerdy example, in case you’re unaware of it, when Dungeons & Dragons got upgraded from its 3rd (or actually 3.5) edition to its 4th edition, a lot of nerd-rage ensued. It very quickly went from numerous topics arising about which edition was the best, to 3.5 fans coming into every discussion involving 4E (even those completely unrelated to the validity of the edition, such as “which 4E class is the strongest?”) to talk about what a lousy game 4E was, and how it had ruined D&D. It created a lot of bad blood, because most 4E players just wanted to be left alone to talk about their game with their fellow gamers, and were tired of every subject getting turned into an edition war.
It also had the unfortunate side-effect of making 4E players frustrated and defensive. This meant that it took a long time before issues with 4E that affected actual 4E players (rather than gamers who’d never played the game, or given up on it quickly) started to get addressed, and every time they did, there were always a lot of angry fans seeing it as an attack. I don’t play 4E myself (I tried it several times and realised I preferred 3.5), but I can see where the fans are coming from when they get defensive about their edition. Many 4E players are still open to disagreements and people pointing out issues with the game, they just aren’t interested in people who think the game itself is the issue.
I can’t remember who said that Feministe was pretty tolerant of different kinds of feminism, just not of criticisms from non-feminists, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve also heard that the feminist who claimed the women pressing rape charges against Julian Assange were lying has been criticised by other feminists. And perhaps they see that as welcoming differing views, in the same way many 4E players see “weapon expertise is a feat tax” as a differing view and “4E is more like WoW than D&D” as an undue attack, even though both are criticisms of the game.
Pretty much. When you engage in a discussion somewhere, you have an influence on the tone there. The mood at many feminist sites might be ugly, but many of those sites are also regularly visited by people who come there mainly to attack feminism, and it’s further enhanced by how feminism is treated in mainstream culture, so laying the sole blame on feminists is, imo, pretty unfair. I also know from experience that if someone is making general attacks against a view that I’m sympathetic towards, even if I have individual disagreements with others holding similar views, I’m much less inclined to call out people who make attacks against views which I find less sympathetic, even if those attacks can be unfair, because I’ll be focussed on defending myself. I suspect it’s a very human thing to do.
I can only speak for myself, but I’m personally more inclined to criticise feminism and feminists if they’re not under attack from others. As I said to Clarence, I mainly debate the views I debate here because I’m one of the few people having said views. I find myself in a similar situation with a feminists, but there always seem to be so many more people expressing even stronger disagreement, so I often stay away in the same way I stayed away from many 4E discussions, because the chances of having a civil debate were almost zero.
Assuming you’re not being sarcastic, you’re welcome. I like that you’re honestly angry.
AB:
Most of your reply to me can be replied to succinctly, so that is what I will do.
A. I acknowledge you do not consider yourself a feminist. I did not know this based on the few threads from you I have read both here , on Feministe, and on FC. It’s hard to tell anti-anti-feminists from feminists sometimes esp.w hen they share some of their views. Of course *I* share some feminist views, and I’d definitely be classed as either egalitarian feminist or anti-feminist by the majority of blog and activist feminists. In any case, I have no idea what anti-anti-feminist means, unless it’s that you disagree there is any reason to be bothered at all by the effects feminist activism has had on the western world.
B. As Danny pointed out, Feminism, as a movement, claims to be about equality between the sexes.
Can we say “bait and switch”?
C. When you refuse to listen to complaints from one sex or the other do not be surprised if, when that sex (note I did not say “gender”, I am very careful to parse my use of that term)starts to fight for their issues they no longer take your interests into consideration.
Unlike Clarisse I don’t think the majority of mainstream feminist sites operate in good faith when it comes to arguments.
@Clarence:
Could you please give some examples of those threads on Feministe and FC? Because I remember checking out those sites, but I don’t recall making accounts there. Perhaps it’s someone else with the same initials?
It means I believe anti-feminism has become its own ideology, independent of actual feminism, and is used to shame and stigmatize (primarily) women who point out discrimination or speak about gender issues, by ascribing a certain feminist agenda to them whether they’re feminists or not.
I don’t recall refusing to listen either. But I have been honest from the start here that I have some trouble relating to men’s rights, as they’re presented by many of the men who appear most dedicated to them, especially the way many seem to suggest they had no problems until feminism.
AB:
Yes it does and I don’t recall saying such unfair treatment didn’t happen.
So I suppose that a common dismisssal tactic that feminists used against MRAs is to accuse them of trying to make it “all about teh menz” would make it triple irony? So supposedly men aren’t expected to do anything but when they do they are attacked for it (and just like what happens to feminists some of it is fair and some of it is not).
Oh I’m sure it happens as you say. I’m just saying that its not as one sided as folks (on either side) try to make it out to be.
Even when its about the norm suddenly the script flips when that norm benefits women.
Sure I’m all for talking about it being institutional. Problem is that just like above its used in a black and white “when its men its institutional, when its women its not” manner. Based on their logic the fact that fathers are mistreated in family court is not institutional (despite it being something that is actively upheld by the forces at work in society) but when mothers are mistreated by family courts suddenly its institutional. The difference seems to only be a gender check. Its like they aren’t looking at the the hows, whys, and whats of the situation before making judgement. They just look at the who and make conclusions.
The discrepancy (or at least mine) is as I say above its not terms but the assessments they use to apply those terms.
And according to their assessment method they will draw a strict line saying that noble men had class and gender privilege and that women only had class privilege. Like let’s take the king and queen. I’ll be the first to agree that it was an unfair burden on queens to be treated like their only “job” was to produce an heir and failure to complete that job was not a good thing to say the least. But there aren’t that many people that will acknowledge that the king was under pressure to produce an heir as well. Again failure to produce one was a sign of weakness in a time where even perceived weakness was a chance to make a move for the throne. No all you hear is, “he had so much power.” I’m not trying to say that that mitigated away the status and privilege he had but I do wonder why people will do just that for the queen.
I actually think the right to come under consideration as guardian for their own children after a divorce was among the last equal rights for women to achieve.
And look at how far the pendulum has swung (in the States at least) in that relatively short time. Consider now that in some states men have to register with the state to affirm their right to paternity. Consider how its actually possible for a woman to decide at that she doesn’t want the father in the child’s life (regardless of his level of prenatal participation), whisk away to give the child up, and poof he’s out of the child’s life. Consider how when such a adoption happens and the dad does have a fighting chance in court. Similar to how abortion clinics that are actually against abortion will lead women along until its too late to abort the courts have no problem dragging a case on until the child has been with the adoptive family for so long that it would be “too traumatic” to rip the child away.
Its not always a matter of getting power and control (or hurting mom like feminsts like to claim). There is a regular stream of commentary about how men need to step this and man up that. Yet when men are stepping up and manning up (like those men I mentioned in the last paragraph) all of a sudden all those people who were calling for manning up and stepping up are nowhere to be heard. Which again back to the contradictions I mention. Claim they are fighting for equality for all people, call out the men who do wrong then ignore the men who are doing right (and I don’t mean just “don’t praise them for doing what they are supposed to do” but as in actively ignore those men while complaining that no men are manning or stepping up).
Yes and that’s what I’m talking about. Yes there are times when my being male is privileged. But that does not mean that being female means one is never privileged or as you say being male does not mean that my view points are automatically wrong and thus dismissed. And that is precisely what some feminists do.
Common ground. Being for equality for all and being pro-woman are not mutually exclusive. Just as being pro-man doesn’t automatically mean you hate women.
But there’s more to it than that. You see there are a lot of people who came to criticize feminists and feminism not because they were already looking for a target but because we saw that they were saying good stuff and wanted to join the conversation.
But that does not justify attacking civil non-feminists unprovoked. Its like its a matter of them having it worse therefore they should get the greenlight on nasty behavior.
Eh. I’m baffled how it seems that that feminists think that if everyone would just leave feminists alone all hostilities would magically disappear. No you don’t seem to be that way but that sure does sound like the common “solution”. Let them sit in their vacuums and change the entire world to their liking because to question them is to attack them.
Simple the difference between the internet and live interaction. I’ll admit that I wasn’t as good at reading hostility online when I first started looking at forums a few years ago. And also bear in mind the forming of thoughts and opinions over time. What you may think is not hostile with one frame of mind you may find to be very hostile once your mindset changes.
And if you weren’t negatively inclined towards it?
I’d be curious to cross paths with this person too considering that Feministe has a pretty good track record (in my book at least but I bet I’m not the only one) of the very bait and switch behavior I speak of.
As for your D&D example. What you say is true that those 3.5 fans got rowdy and were unfair to the 4.0 fans. But to go with that analogy there’s a difference between wanting to be left alone and wanting to change the world to your liking and shutting out anyone that doesn’t agree with you. I don’t suppose there were any 4.0 fans that would claim they just wanted the best for all D&D fans and then actively dismiss the opinions of any and all 3.5 fans for simply being 3.5 fans?
Just as unfair as dismissing all critiques as unwarranted attacks by people looking for a fight. We’ve danced around this quite a bit and I think we can agree that when it comes to how feminists and feminism are criticized some of it is fair and some of it is unfair.
I can understand that. That’s a part of why when it comes to debating feminists in feminists spaces I usually only focus my attention on a few rather than going at the entire bunch. Which is why the conversation here is so likeable. For the most part its just you, myself, and Clarence. And even in my horror stories on feminist sites most of the time things are fine until someone (sometimes not even the person I was talking to) starts attacking me. Which really gets problematic (in my opinion) when their attacks go unchecked by the mods and other people, seeing chance to get in a free cheap shot, pile on. Until the mod comes in, defends the feminist attackers, insults me, and either bans me or closes the thread. Well that’s how it used to be. Now I just cut bait and bail at the first hint of hostility, because I know that the hostility will be accepted (if not defended and joined in on) by the mods. (But at the end of the day in their eyes when I take these experiences and form conclusions I’m the one that’s being unfair to poor innocent feminists that have never done a thing wrong.)
No no sarcasm on that. Damn shame you don’t identify as feminist. You’d do them a lot of good.
Actually, default mother custody , at least for children before the age of 5 in the US goes back over 100 years. It was called the “tender years” doctrine.
Default father custody started to go at least in the US in the late 19th century and was pretty much gone by the early 20th century. AB would be advised to look up a guy called Belfort Bax.
Clarence, I have no problem with you mentioning that things are, or have been, different in your country. But please do not presume to correct me on the grounds that I did not use the USA, or England, as my default example. That’s the stuff anti-Americanism is made of. Thank you.
I have seen Belfort Bax’s works (assuming his first name was Ernest) briefly mentioned before. I have always found it peculiar that a) even in a time that is acknowledged as patriarchal and oppressive to women, feminism was treated much like it is today, contrasting the notion that if feminists didn’t make unreasonable demands or fight fictive battles, people would be much more friendly towards them, and b) that people today still refer to works opposing the right of women to vote, as proof that feminism is out to take away the liberties of others.
However, if you think I need to read what he wrote about fatherhood specifically, in order to counter some argument I never made, you will have to be more helpful in providing me with links to it, as most descriptions of him only mention his general anti-feminism, and I’m not inclined to wade through his collective works trying to figure out what you want me to see.
Speaking of links and concrete examples, I’m still waiting to get some from you in regards to both post 407, and the earlier statement about my belief in rape-culture and state control. You have made very specific claims about me, most of which I have found completely alien, as well as deeply insulting. I take that very seriously, because I value the option to speak for myself without being saddled with ad hominem attacks and false assumptions, but I am perfectly willing to consider that maybe I’ve forgotten something, or some post of mine have come across differently to you than I intended, which I’d be eager to address.
But until you give me the opportunity to confront the charges, by showing me and others what you refer to, I have no way of defending myself, and I can’t shake off the feeling, as I said earlier, that you’re running on auto-pilot, justifying your dislike of me by lumping me in with various negative stereotypes you hold about feminism. Until you become more specific in where you’ve gotten the ideas about me you have, I do not consider it realistic that we will be able to have anything resembling a civil debate, so I hope you will address this before you start finding new ways to disagree with me.
@Danny:
No you didn’t, but you tend to see attacks on feminism in light of what feminists have done to others, so I’m just pointing out that it’s also feasible to see the attacks by feminists in light of what has been done to feminism by others.
No, it goes back to what I said about how I’ve observed some behaviours (such as sexual aggression in women and petty jealousy in men) go almost unchecked because our culture haven’t provided any framework for how to interpret or react to said behaviour, so most people just pretend it doesn’t happen, or make it into something else.
Men talk about gender all the time, but since we associate gender issues (and gender itself) with women, it doesn’t register as them complaining about it or fighting for their own sex. That’s why, even with blatant examples of men turning something into an ideological gender issue (such as child custody), and several programs on national TV here addressing men’s gender role, the anthropologist still make the claim “Men don’t try to make things all about (their) gender like women do, they just deal with the issues at hand” as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
I’ve said it before, the way society (not the bubble of feminist sites you seem to be talking about) deals with men’s and women’s issues is really striking. Everybody knows about feminism, and especially in America, it’s frequently used as a slur. Feminists are ridiculed in mainstream culture and people often try to call their opponents out as feminists in order to discredit them. Being a feminist (or just a woman talking about gender issues from a non-MRA view) means you’ll probably get attacked more for what people think of feminism than for what you say, and a lot of feminist issues are hindered mostly by the fact that they’re labelled feminist.
In contrast, it’s become common for men and boys to talk about how hard it is for them to be male. I’ve seen so many male objections to the bumbling sitcom dad for portraying men badly that I’ve lost count. Claims of how women are really more violent than men have increased. The issue of false rape charges (against men) frequently takes up more space than the issue of rape. Rants against sex-negativity are often framed as defending men. Different standards for women (such as lower physical demands) are frequently criticised. There’s talk about a ‘boy’s crisis’ in schools, and it is portrayed as endlessly problematic that more women than men get bachelors degrees. It is assumed as a fact that men are ruined and women made rich by divorcing, even though the statistics point to greater poverty among divorced women and less among divorced men. People talk about ‘the PC-police’ when sexist (and homophobic) slurs are opposed. And there’s the father’s rights issue.
And yet, the only place these things are ever categorised as being part of a movement (rather than men addressing actual issues instead of making everything about gender like women do), is among feminists. It seems everybody and their grandfather knows about Andrea Dworkin and can quote some highly abstract out-of-context piece of her writing which is supposed to equate sex with rape, but they’re stunned when they hear about the concept of a men’s movement. Never mind that the majority of the issues they mention have become popularised by MRAs, and that it’s quite easy to find MRA quotes that blow Dworkin out of the water in terms of sexism, because few people know about it, or care. It’s just as unfair as women not being called out on sexually aggressive behaviour because they’re not perceived as a threat (more unfair actually, since the latter at least have some biological basis).
For me, it’s not so much about who has it worse, or whether or not women really do commit that much violence, but more about the methods of testing. I’d argue that certain forms of physical force are not actually bad in themselves. I’ve observed guys in my surroundings punch or wrestle with each other in a way that is more a form of socialisation than anything else. I’ve often been unsure of how to participate as a girl, especially since many of the guys don’t respond in kind, and I’m probably more careful about it than they are, but I do engage in mock slapping and friendly wrestling occasionally, and I don’t think the guys actually mind the double standards.
For example, two of the guys had gotten into an argument at a party, and the bigger guys started to clench his fists and act like he was going to beat up the smaller guy. The argument was real (though it wasn’t as much hostile as it was heated), but the fighting wasn’t. Most likely, the big guy would have punched the smaller guy somewhere on the torso, hard but not damaging, or he would have grabbed him, lifted him up, and squeezed. I wasn’t sure the smaller guy actually wanted it to happen, but I suspect it was a bit like BDSM and martial arts fights, he didn’t want it to happen, but he also didn’t want it to stop from happening, because it was part of the group-dynamic that he voluntarily subjected himself to.
However, knowing that the bigger guy had compulsions against hitting girls, I went over to stand in front of the smaller guy’s chair, leaning slightly backwards to shield his body. The smaller guy wrapped his arms around I my waist and grinningly thanked me, while the bigger guy put on an exaggerated show of frustration. People laughed and the big guy told me I could sit down again and promised not to hit anyone.
Thinking back, I realise there is no way to make that scene not offensive to someone who believe in the validity of the DV studies. Obviously, the way the guy held back from me showed that I was a spoiled bitch exploiting her female privilege. But if someone had started to argue that the guys should treat it other similarly and shouldn’t have been allowed to be as rowdy with each other as they were, the same people would probably give a lecture about how society no longer tolerates masculinity, and how boys are policed and prevented from being boys. It could also have ended with the bigger guy just pushing or lifting me away, or taken out his aggression on me, but I don’t think that would have been as workable, or satisfactory, for any of us.
But rather than exploring this issue, the way those studies are used seems like a “gotcha!” game, designed to tell women that since girls slap guys, they have no right to complain about violence, without actually doing anything to get the slapping stopped. It’s especially confusing for me, since my boyfriend long ago told me to stop holding back physically with him, but I’m continuously told that obliging him would make me a perpetrator of domestic violence, but not obliging him would be sex discrimination.
I’m not talking about how it’s about the norm with men, but how men are the norm.
They refer to when one group/class has institutional power that the other lacks. Straight people mocking gays is a different category than gay people mocking straights, because heterosexuality is the norm in our society and straight people have an institutional backing that gays lack.
But that’s the point. The terms are meant to be assessed that way in feminist terminology. Just like ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ have different meanings in Danish politics than in American politics. Same terms, different use.
I already said that a high position in society can come with it’s own disadvantages. They’re usually not equal to those of lower status statistically, but they can be individually. In this case, the burden was on both of them because they were royalty, but it was bigger on the women because they had lower status. Looking at the way Henry VIII wanted a son, there’s little doubt that he was under a lot of pressure, but it’s hardly worse than what he subjected his wives to. It’s also worth noticing than when we talk about sovereign queens, we usually focus on the power and glory too.
How exactly are men supposed to register with the state? And how exactly does adoption work in the US, are there money involved? Anyway, as I already said, I think there’s a strong correlation between men’s involvement in parenting (which is still significantly smaller than women’s) and their chances of getting custody. I’m pretty sure that if men had had equal involvement, much fewer people would have argued that placing children solely with their primary parent after a divorce was wrong.
It’s not about men manning up, it’s about what men seem to want for themselves. In my experience, men who want more of the traditional male role back (and men who mourn the lack of traditional women) are far more vocal about men’s rights than men who want the freedom to not subscribe to traditional manhood (the latter are often feminists and gay rights activists instead). And I find that, as often as traditional manhood is used as a way of saying “men have it worse”, few men actually want to get rid of it. I’ve met countless of men quoting statistics about the violence of women, but I have yet to see a single one of them feel traumatised, or often even just bothered, by what’s categorised as violence in those statistics.
Anyway, I have to go now, and this post is getting too long to do in one take anyway, so I’ll write the next part of the answer later :)
“Clarence, I have no problem with you mentioning that things are, or have been, different in your country. But please do not presume to correct me on the grounds that I did not use the USA, or England, as my default example. That’s the stuff anti-Americanism is made of. Thank you.”
If you are going to make stupid posts to Danny that assert that “mother custody” has only been the default for a short while and NOT qualify them in any way, shape or form, then you don’t get to complain if I assume you are speaking out of your ass. In short, what I’m saying to you is you made a universalist statement and then you attack me for pointing out that it is not universal. No dice.
“I acknowledge you do not consider yourself a feminist. I did not know this based on the few threads from you I have read both here , on Feministe, and on FC.”
I should have said “few threads I saw you or someone else named AB participate in” but other than that, I’m not inclined to do a massive websearch for you. So to the extent this looks like it’s saying you started threads, I acknowledge it is wrongly worded, I’ve never seen an AB start a thread anywhere. I have also never made any “charges” so I really don’t know what you are talking about there. I form my impressions on what I see written, and if I don’t see someone very often, it’s easy to come to incorrect impressions. I have no idea what country you are in, for instance, nor do I have any idea what country you might be talking about in this thread. I talk about European and anglosphere countries.
This thread has gone beyond my interest or abilities to moderate. I will say that for the record I disagree with many antifeminist positions in this thread; that I consider the false rape society blog to be incredibly biased. I will also say that I really don’t want to see the conversation from this thread start spilling over into other threads, because I think it will make the whole blog feel considerably more hostile. Bottom line though, feel free to keep talking; I’m just trying to head off potential spillage at the pass.
Clarisse, that was why I moved the discussion over here in the first place, and I agree this is where it should stay.
@Danny:
Continued from before.
That’s not exactly what I meant. I meant that I’m perfectly willing to accept, especially for the sake of argument, that compared to a black person, I have white privilege and they don’t have a corresponding black privilege, because I’m in a feminist space, and in the feminist sense of the word, they don’t. And I’m willing to take a long look at myself to see if me being white has affected the way I perceive racial issues, and accept that as a rule, a black person will probably have a perspective I lack.
However, if I have an opinion or perspective on something which I think is valid, and I take that long look at myself, and I listen to the criticisms of others, and reconsider my position several times, and look at it from different angles, and come to the conclusion that my position is still valid, I’ll defend it, privilege or not. And if, after having politely expanded on my position and taken criticisms into account, I’m still brushed off because I have privilege so my perspective don’t count, I’ll take it as a sign of an unhealthy debating culture.
I’ve met men who were more understanding of my experiences as a woman than many other women have been, and I have experienced plenty of times where I thought other women were in the wrong. I think it’s worth remembering what we are, where we come from, and which perspectives we will inevitably bring to the table, but I would never want it to be the be-all and end-all of gender debates, or anything else for that matter. The fault of some feminists in my mind isn’t so much in subscribing to these concepts, but more in how categorical they sometimes are about it.
No, but believing it was a fault to give women the vote to begin with probably does.
That I can relate to. I think it often feels more natural and obvious to start with the things you disagree with, and that can easily make it seem like you’re more against the people you debate with than you really are. Sort of like how Clarence and certain others blame me for not spending more of my time here criticising feminism like most other posters on this thread.
I agree, though I’ll again point to how it’s an exceedingly common behaviour which takes place even here. I also think that what we perceive as attacks is highly subjective. For instance, you have often said how much you prefer to debate with me compared to other feminists (whom I often don’t have that much of a problem with), and how I’m more reasonable and respectful, but several other posters here have all but called me a feminazi, and Clarisse have repeatedly expressed surprise at how much hostility I receive, because she sees me as pretty reasonable and often expressing the same view as her.
In the same way, you don’t come across as the most friendly person to me. And I don’t actually see myself as particularly nice either. Every time you thank me for the way I take you seriously, I have to check for sarcasm. But I still like debating with you, and I rarely get angry over what you say. I can see that, objectively, you’re more aggressive than, say, Sam (who’d probably resonate better with a lot of feminists), but I still get less frustrated with you. On the other hand, several people that you appear to find completely reasonable (or at least not very objectionable) give me the urge to reach through the screen and strangle them. So I’m not sure it’s as simple as whether or not someone was provoked.
They can’t change the world in a vacuum.
Then I would have to think long and hard about why I came across that way. Believe me, I do that a lot.
But many 4E fans probably did have some very strong opinions about the superiority of 4E and the brokenness of 3.5.
Of course.
That’s usually a good tactic
I know how that is, but I suspect it’s more heavily linked to being a minority than anything else. I’ve experienced the same on message boards where I was alone or in the minority in defending a certain view. Perhaps that’s why people group together like they do, because taking the view in the middle can get you attacked from both sides.
Thank you.
@Clarence:
The correct assertion was “I actually think the right to come under consideration as guardian for their own children after a divorce was among the last equal rights for women to achieve”, which, given that it leaves the option for mother custody as the default in earlier cultures, doesn’t make any assertions about how it has been the default only for a short while, and also communicates that I’m not sure about it (at least that’s what “I think” tends to mean).
So it you make a bunch of stupid posts about who and what I am, and NOT back them up in any way, shape, or form, then you don’t get to complain if I assume you’re speaking our of your ass either?
So you get to declare that I’ve built my opinions on the basis of rape-culture theory, that I’m in favour of state-control, and that I post on sites which, if true, would make me a hypocrite and contradict half of what I’ve said here, and don’t have to back it up, but I’m supposed to do a massive websearch to see how divorce and custody worked all around the anglosphere, just to get the right to say “I think”?
Then perhaps it would be prudent if you withheld your judgement about that someone, and stuck to answering what you can actually see them post in the situation you’re commenting on. Where I’m from, what you’re doing is called going for the man instead of the ball (football analogy, the meaning should be obvious), and it’s not only considered bad form, but also utterly non-constructive.
Worse, you’re consistently ignoring what I say here, in order to pull something out of your ass concerning what you think I mean about something else. I have had some fairly long debates with Danny in which I’ve asserted that I didn’t find FC to be either welcoming or open to other perspectives, and I have just recently written about how I’m against someone going into the space of people they oppose in order to pick a fight and how I believe it’s quite possible to asses the mood of a site just by lurking. That’s a pretty strong clue that I would not post on FC myself, unless I was a total hypocrite (which you, had you been aware, would not hesitate to call me out on). But you don’t seem to have paid enough attention to what I write here to notice that.
If you had paid half as much attention to my actual posts as to the fictive claims you’ve pulled out of your ass about me, you would have known. I’m not going not waste any more time on your shit.
AB:
Oh yeah I know that light exists. Which is why I stopped with the presumption that the only reason feminists complain about critiques about them and their movement is because all of said critiques are unfair.
Yes that does happen and its terrible. But that still leave me with the question of why do feminists turn around and do the exact same behavior with MRAs? Most people in the mainstream have never heard of MRAs and would probably laugh at the idea of a mens rights movement (in fact feminists are notorious for this). And it would be partly for reasons you say. Yes when men talk about gender it gets framed differently but in the face of the fact that men are coming around to the idea of talking about gender in and of itself there is still resistance. If such things are so bad and its such a valid complaint then why do they do it themselves and suddenly think its okay?
Unfortunately there are those that do that. However there are also those who use these studies to show that there is more than one kind of violence. I’d love to see all the slapping stopped but how is that going to happen when most of the conversation focuses on one kind of slapping and there are people in that conversation that refuse to acknowledge other kinds?
No that would make you a participant in domestic violence and people don’t like the idea that a woman can do such a thing.
But that’s the thing. Starting off with the conclusion that men are the norm is flawed (or at least I think it is). Because doing so ends up with people declaring whether or not something is sexist/privileged/etc… based soley on that conclusion rather than looking at the situation.
And I think this might be another problem. When talking about gender people like invoke sexual orientation, religion, nationality, race, etc…. for the sake of an analogy. Looking through history its pretty evident that when it comes to sexual orientation its very clearly one sided in the way the deck has been stacked against gays in favor of straights. The same can be said of black/white, Christian/nonChristian, American/Foreigner relations. However unlike those other comparisons gender is not that one sided. You can’t just declare that men have had all the pleasure throughout history and women had all the pain.
Then I suppose I think there is some sort of fundamental flaw. “That’s just the way they use the terminology.” is not validation of methods one may see as flawed. This would be akin to actually trying to pass off the excuse “boys will be boys” when boys commit bad behavior.
And as I said I wasn’t trying to say that the pressures on him mitigated away his status and privilege (so I’m not sure why you think I’m saying that it was worse than what his wives were subjected to).
Yes there are states in which men have to register with the state in order to be assert their paternal rights and to be informed of adoption proceedings (in fact here’s one for one of our 50 states, Georgia. http://health.state.ga.us/programs/vitalrecords/fatherfaq.asp)
So how exactly would that translate with children who are not born yet? Prenatal care I would presume. So how is it that a man can be there actively doing what needs to be done before birth just to be cut out of the child’s life after birth? You’re right that men need to be taking a bigger part in children’s lives but that’s going to be a hard road when men are being actively kept out of children’s lives at every turn. Its like people will mention things like what you say here, ignore men that are trying to be in their children’s lives, and then go right back to complaining about how men need to take a bigger role in children’s lives.
That might be what they mean but that’s the case then they need to reword their words. The conversation (here in the States at least) is usually “fathers need to take on responsibilities of being a father” rather than “give fathers a chance to be fathers”. They call for responsibility then turn around and shut the ones who are doing just that. If its about what men seem to want then why are they being intentionally shut out?
Because as you said a few lines before this their voices aren’t as loud (and it doesn’t help that they get shut out by some of the very people that regularly came to be about helping all victims). Society at large is just getting around to the idea that men can be victims of violence (especially by women). So just because you don’t see doesn’t mean its not there.
Clarisse:
Fair enough. I’m actually enjoying this engagement for the precise reason that its almost its own little universe.
AB:
Its good that you do that I put effort into doing the same in male/female situations. But there is a difference between someone else having a perspective that I lack (which will certainly happen even among people who share a characteristic) and declaring that because of a certain your characteristic your perspective is null and void. Not null and void because there’s actual evidence against it or upon thinking about it you realize yourself it might not be as valid as you thought. No I’m talking simple, “You’re ______ therefore you’re wrong.”
The rub. In the event that that happens and you conclude that such culture (or environment) is indeed unhealthy the people of that culture environment will then start to complain that they are the ones being treated unfairly. Which again brings me back to wondering since being angry didn’t work, being civil didn’t work, leaving them along just validates them, what’s left?
Then I suppose its a good thing that such a belief isn’t synonymous with being pro-man. Oh its a common belief but its not a defining belief. No more than presuming that the male perspective is worthless by virtue of it being male in gender discourse is a defining belief of being a feminist (but it is common).
You have a point. I think this happens because the thought process may go like, “Well I agree with them on all this stuff so there’s no need to retread. But I disagree with them on these things and I’d like to talk them out.” Which can get dicey when the feminists I talk to think that the things that I disagree with them on only occur because I haven’t tried talking to them to understand them (“If only you would talk to us you would see the light.”) or that the way to find common ground is to spend more time complaining about my “fellow men”.
That’s okay (and I’ll explain why in a bit).
I think this comes down to a matter of varying experiences. While you say there are folks I find reasonable that you’d like to choke let me tell that the reverse is probably true (meaning I’d probably want to choke some of the folks you would call reasonable).
This is why I can understand your looking for sarcasm (its more than a bit hurtful that you do, but my own experiences help me understand why you do that). But if you’re in doubt just ask. I would much rather you question my words than assume the wrong interpretation and go off from there.
I’ll be back later and yes this is getting long. Almost need a damn chat room before Clarisse starts charging us for storage of this long as thread.
AB:
For one, most of those sites don’t easily have ways to search for specific commenter, but I think you know that.
For two, I never made a series of posts about YOU. That happens to be a lie, and one very easily disproven in this very thread. You had a hissy fit because you don’t like my impression of you, yet you feel perfectly free to throw fact free impressions at websites and at men at whom you know nothing but their lives and the laws they live under. Once again, no dice.
By the way, I read your “I think” to Danny as being sarcastic, but once again, it’s only fair when you do it to Danny and people like me.
Oh well, whatever floats your boat.
Clarisse:
Whatever you think of the False Rape Society website, you are going to be held accountable for what you think of that letter that sets forth the new policies.
Accountable? Really? What’s going to happen, is my MRA card going to be taken away? I didn’t ask for one, and they already hate my guts, didn’t you notice? Even the feminists who hate my views haven’t written entire posts calling me defective and broken.
Let me make one thing really, really clear. Rape is not something on which my feminist perspective is very flexible. People very close to me have been raped and have suffered serious, lifelong consequences. I am a volunteer rape crisis counselor — I was trained by one of those evil nonprofit organizations, you know, the ones feminists set up to ruin men’s lives. Full of evil feminists who spend their lives working badly-paid jobs and hours of unpaid overtime. Spend enough time in the emergency room holding the hands of survivors who are crying because they’re sure no one will believe them, or learn firsthand how few rape cases go to trial and how few convictions result even from the ones that do, or personally engage with the PTSD of rape survivors who have been living with it for forty years, and I become pretty unwilling to debate the basics on the internet. I’ll drop links, or I’ll briefly voice my opinion on my own freakin’ blog, but that’s it. If you’re going to lose your respect for me as a result, then so be it.
@Danny:
Because they’re human, and because no one else does. The majority of non-feminists who seek out feminist spaces appear to be MRAs, or MRA sympathetic. Sometimes it seems like feminists and MRAs live in their own little bubble of mutual hatred, except feminists are the only ones taken into account over what they do by the outside world, which makes it tempting to try to turn the tables once in a while.
Men have always talked about gender. They constantly do it, it just rarely registers as being about gender, because men are rarely perceived as a gender in the first place. Clarence recently suggested that I familiarise myself with the plight of the male sex by reading books about the evils of women’s suffrage written a century ago. Men are not ‘coming around’ to the idea of talking about gender, they’ve just copied even more of women’s lingo to do it with, and they still get to be the ones who doesn’t make everything about gender.
I wouldn’t. It reminds me of having to tell a male feminist that I didn’t actually mind guys checking me out when I addressed to get attention, and I don’t mind people reacting to my choice of clothes (the actual argument was a lot longer and more specific, and included several “as long as”), and that a world where people always averted their eyes from the opposite sex would be a sad world indeed. It also reminds me of a lot of arguments on the PUA thread, mainly that techniques which would be devastating if used on women with low self-esteem (or drunk or socially awkward women) are OK if used correctly.
Why is it that when people want to outlaw prostitution in order to protect the prostitutes, it’s considered patronising and disrespectful of other people’s choices, but when my boyfriend (who’s both an adult and not shy at all about showing me vulnerability) says that he doesn’t mind if I get physically rowdy with him (to a certain degree), it’s totally OK to categorise it as violence anyway?
If you are debating with people who subscribe to the (very well-supported) theory that men are considered the norm in our society, that’s the position you’re going to have to argue from.
Really? The way I’ve heard it, there are several advantages from being black. It’s considered racist when Obama is portrayed as a monkey, but funny when Bush is. Black people are frequently considered cooler than white people. There’s no white history month (you wouldn’t believe how often I’ve seen this argument from people in the US). Black people supposedly have an easier time bringing up issues of racism. Blacks are considered more athletic. etc. And the same goes for Muslims and Jews vs. Christians. And to some degree, even gays over straights in popular culture.
I guess you’re subscribing to Glick and Fiske’s notion of ambivalent sexism (which I do too), but even one-sided discrimination is rarely one-sided. That doesn’t mean it can’t be lopsided though, which I think the gender roles in our culture very much are.
If you disagree with the theory, then you disagree with the theory. But insisting that the way you use certain words is the only valid way to use them, and argue against people as if they’d used the words in the same way you’d use them (even with evidence to the contrary), is not only unfair, but also meaningless. It has nothing to do with excuses like boys being boys, it’s more similar to if I said “boys will be boys”, meaning (and making it obvious that I meant) that boys will always feel oppressed by girls and complain about discrimination, or alternatively, fear that any influence given to girls will be used to oppress boys with, and as a result, I was told by a feminist that I was an MRA.
Because the term “boys will be boys” usually means that boys should be allowed to act in a way we’d find unacceptable in girls, because that’s just the way they are, but I was using it to mean that no matter the status of women in society, boys will always have the same complaints, so it is of no use to feminists to devote all their time to trying not to offend the boys, because the boys would always be offended and that was just how they were. Same words, different meanings. And feminists do not use the words privilege and sexism like you use them, so either you argue with their choice of words, or you argue with what they say.
I didn’t say it migrated anything, just that the pressure he was under was probably a lot less significant than the pressure he put everybody else under, so it’s obvious why people don’t focus on it. And they don’t focus much on it in regards to female sovereign rulers either.
The link doesn’t work for me. I would have thought it quite obvious that mothers are registered in hospital (where the authenticity of their maternity can be established by the baby coming out of them), while fathers have to register themselves, so I wondered if it was some other form of registration you were talking about.
It wouldn’t, because that’s a different issue.
And it’s obvious why. Men don’t fight, at least not very publicly, for getting to take more care of their children or take parental leave, or for things like changing tables for babies in the men’s rooms. However, they’re extremely vocal about getting the legal right to make decisions regarding their children’s lives, and for being the winner in more fights with their (ex-)wives. Combined with how a lot of work with children (like changing dirty diapers) is considered extremely unglamorous, many people get the impression that men are not actually interested in any of those aspects, only the aspects involving power, influence, and getting the better of their wives.
There is a time-honoured tradition of people getting rewarded for their efforts, e.g. if you work hard you get paid more, which doesn’t always happen in real life, but is still the ideal for how the world ought to be for most people. So if everything except custody is seen as work and sacrifice (which it is partly because of reality, and partly because men appear to have no interest in it), and custody is seen as the reward, then it makes sense to tell men that if they want the reward (parental custody) they have to put in more work (parental involvement).
The problem is that they’re probably not traumatised about the same things that other men use to play ‘gotcha!’ with, so they’re really more a tool for shaming women than they’re beneficiaries of all the work going into propagating and defending those statistics. Not to mention all the times I’ve heard a story going something along the lines of “So this girl was mad at me for calling her a slut, so she slapped me in the face, and the moment she did it, I punched her so hard she fell to to the ground with a broken nose, haha!”. If a similar story had been going around about a girl getting slapped on her butt, and reacting by pulling down a guy’s pants and jamming a pencil into his asshole, none of the same guys would see it as anything less than a dangerous over-reaction.
Men benefit immensely from people not distinguishing between violence, or between the threat-level involved, as do big people and people who’re good at fighting (though they also happen to be mostly men), so it’s no surprise that that’s what they’re propagating. I have tried to imagine what I’d feel if a girl a head shorter than me with no fighting experience would have slapped me with an open hand, and all I could think was annoyance and offence, nothing close to what the same situation would do to me with a different person doing it, or a different level of violence.
I thought that was what I was saying.
No, not the rub. Your rub was with the words used only. I don’t mind the words and the concepts, and only have a problem with the execution. Big difference.
Yeah, but I think there’s a difference. Wanting to more or less relegate one half of the population to the status of slaves, or believing that not being among the half of the population that is supposed to be more or less relegated to the status of slaves makes you bad at comprehending how it feels, are not really in the same league.
Exactly. And as a non-MRA woman discussing gender, that’s pretty much how you’re perceived and treated everywhere outside feminist spaces (and inside a lot of feminist spaces too). So it really sucks to not feel satisfied with the way debates are carried out in those feminist spaces.
I thought that was what I said in the first half of that paragraph, in regards to how you perceived feminists. That’s why it’s important to keep in mind that not everyone you feel antagonised by is trying to antagonise you, and that not all the people you feel like you’re not antagonising will feel the same way.
Oh definitely. Post 419 is a good example of what happens when people don’t ask before judging. That was why I chose to assume you were not being sarcastic but still gave you an opportunity to confirm that you weren’t.I’ll be back later and yes this is getting long. Almost need a damn chat room before Clarisse starts charging us for storage of this long as thread.
AB:
(I wonder why that majority appear as such to feminists. But considering that “does not automatically condemn MRAs is enough to be classified as the enemy…) The difference is presence. Mainstream media sources (as in outside of activist blogs themselves) have barely begun talking about MRAs while feminists have been a known topic for decades. And even among feminists that touch into the mainstream (like Amanda Marcotte) most of them seem to be unable to even mention MRAs without attacking them. But then we’re supposed to act like the attacking is one sided.
Yes actually they are. I’m sure you mean that copy to mean to literally copy but with no substance of their own then yes that does happen but for a lot of us there is substance. I’m sure the idea of men coming around seems odd when you start from the conclusion that its always been about men in the first place.
That was a continuation of the analogy you started.
So in short just start off agreeing that they are right? And its not even so much the “who is the norm overall” that bothers me so much in and of itself. Its when that conclusion is then used in every single instance. Like the fact that I share gender with a serial rapist means that I somehow owe it to women to do my part to end violence against women.
And that’s the problem. To a lot of them its just a little bad for men while women have it oh so much worse. Coming from people whose part of their definition is to fight off those who would define their experiences for them, just to turn around and do the same to others.
Let me try again:
(http://health.state.ga.us/programs/vitalrecords/fatherfaq.asp)
Just so you understand what I’m talking about here is not the process of putting the father’s name on the birth certificate. That’s something else.
And also I doubt that registration process for mothers is under the condition that failure to do so means that you forfeit your parenting rights forever. And isn’t a simple DNA test on dad just as reliable as watching the mom give birth? Like this from that link:
When should a man place his name in the Registry?
The possible biological but not legal father is encouraged to place his name in the Registry as soon as possible after engaging in a sexual relationship with a woman who is not his legal wife where such union could result in the birth of a child, preferably before the child is born.
Telling men to register as soon as possible after getting sexual with a woman he’s not married to just in case there is a child? That’s basically telling men that we have to register to be parents. Parenting is not voting, hunting, or driving.
In short men have to call a preemptive dibs on the children born between him and woman he’s not married to.
I can dig that (and it goes hand in hand with women trying to get into the boardroom). And just like women who are trying to get into the boardroom there are barriers that have to be overcome. But when you tell men they need to put in more work while actively denying them the opportunity to put in that more work (like requiring us to register to be parents) then that’s just dirty.
While the version you have here does happen I was mainly talking about the many men/boys whose story would go more like, “So this girl slapped me and I wanted to punch her but I know that’s a double whammy. If I win I’m a jerk for beating up a girl, if I lose I’m a wuss for getting beat up by a girl, if I do nothing I’m a wuss for getting beat up by a girl.”
But they would cheer her on and still ridicule the guy for that would fit the “got beat by a girl” condition.
Of course the who has it worse argument. But at least I can trust you to not segway that difference into appointing yourself as the end all be all of gender situations.
Yeah that was a grammar fail big time (I can’t even recall what I was going to do there).
And actually I do have a problem with the execution. I have a problem with the act of using a single characteristic as justification to declare their view null and void.
The only reason this caught my eye is because you mentioned big people. But unless I’m really misunderstanding you I can say from personal experience that what you say here is not true for big men. I’ve been that big guy in a situation where I wanted to strike back and I’ll tell you what went through my mind. “If I strike out I’ll become the big mean bully.” And smaller people (this includes women too) know this.
@Danny:
Exactly, and it’s taken its toll. MRAs get to have the best of both worlds, feminists largely get to have the worst.
All feminists are in the mainstream as soon as they’re identified as feminists (with or against their will) because feminism is in the mainstream. There is (effectively) little difference between feminists who try to keep to themselves and feminists who want into the mainstream, just as there’s little difference between various kinds of feminists. They’re all scorned and ridiculed. Even Clarisse, who has so many factors protecting her from the worst of it, is attacked as if she was identical to the feminists that people like you hate.
In the mainstream, feminists are routinely identified as feminists (even when they don’t identify as feminist themselves), and more time is spent talking about feminism itself (that is, people’s perceptions and prejudices about feminism) than what actual feminists (who aren’t extremists good for a quote or two to make fun of) are saying. In contrast, MRAs are left relatively in peace. Also, you yourself said that it was a problem getting feminists to frequent places that weren’t feminist, with the implication that the opposite (non-feminists and anti-feminists coming into feminist spaces) happened frequently. So no, I’ll not concede that the situation is even remotely equal or two-sided.
Men have always talked about gender. The majority of the people who’ve opposed feminism have been men, and I fail to see how increasing that criticism of feminism translates to men coming around. To me it just seems like men are doing what they’ve always been doing, but in larger numbers and with more effective tactics. Nothing has really changed, the fronts are the same, except now anti-feminists are demanding that feminists help them propagate more anti-feminism in the name of fairness.
And that analogy is an example of why those studies, and the conclusions drawn from them, are simplified and leaves women no options.
If someone, in this case a feminist, subscribe to a certain viewpoint about society, and wants to discuss something within that scontext, insisting on questioning the basic viewpoint is largely futile. And that’s what I see in most feminist discussions I’ve bothered to check out: Conversation about the subject is happening, then someone comes in a says that there’s a fundamental error in feminism that needs to be addressed, and the discussion either turn into the same old fight about feminists defending their choice to be feminists, or devolve into a straight-up flamewar.
It’s the reason I usually side with feminists, just like I usually side with 4E fans despite not caring for the system itself. I expect a certain amount of favouritism in regards to one’s own chosen system, so I don’t see it as more than mildly annoying when 4E fans mention how 4E has addressed a lot of the issues with 3.5 (especially since they’re right, even though it has just replaced them with new issues), but when 3.5 fans feel the need to constantly go into every 4E debate just to state “There are a lot of fundamental flaws with the 4E system, we should discuss those instead”, I think they’re embarrassment to geek culture.
There are discussions set aside specifically to discuss the merits of different systems. And there are discussions loose (and civil) enough that bringing up fundamental differences is feasible and don’t ruin the overall debate (like in this discussion, most of the time). But the majority of the time, I think it’s OK to let discussions among the proponents of a system stay largely in the context of that system. Especially because discussions like that are so easily spoiled, so I understand people’s frustration of feeling like they never get to have them, but always have to defend/discuss their system with outsiders.
I don’t doubt that people have different experiences. But I have to admit, there’s a limit to the validity I’m willing to ascribe to those experiences. I don’t honestly believe white people in the US would benefit from a white history month, nor that they actually care half as much about it as they say. It seems more like they don’t acknowledge the experiences of black people that lead to that black history month in the first place, and therefore find it unfair. Basically “When you express a dissatisfaction with the way your group is treated, it hurts my group, so our concerns of over your concerns should have equal validity to your concerns”.
That doesn’t seem like a demand, it seems to be an opportunity. From what it says, it gives men who aren’t the legal father of a child the opportunity to get influence on the child’s life nonetheless. Perhaps they should have more influence, and perhaps it should be easier to get registered, but it seems more like an improvement than anything else.
Sure, but DNA tests cost money and don’t happen automatically following pregnancies the way births tend to do. I think that if a mother had her child in secrecy, never registered, gave her baby away to someone else who became the legal guardian of the child, and then suddenly showed up to demand the child back (the closest thing I can think of to a father who never registers as a parent and later shows up to demand parental rights), she would have to prove her motherhood, and even then, getting the child back would be problematic. And it should be.
I would still suggest men attack more of the actual barriers, of which parental leave is a big one, rather than almost always focussing on how judges should be obligated to give them more parental custody. As for the registration, I still have trouble seeing how the state is supposed to register fatherhood by itself.
And funny enough, in the vast majority of these situations, the guys do not feel anything more than annoyance or anger at the situation. They do not feel physically harmed (because seriously harming someone by slapping would require an immense amount of muscle power) and they do not feel any fear. And yet the situation, and the level of threat, is supposed to be considered completely identical to the kind of violence that frequently leaves its victims traumatised for years afterwards.
In regards to the example, unless the girl constitutes a serious physical threat (which girls who slap rarely do, since they usually intend the slap to be more a way of expressing dissatisfaction and aren’t physically equipped to win a fight after giving the opponent an opportunity to prepare for the aggression), I always recommend not escalating the violence. The same goes for when guys do the slapping or girls are on the receiving end. There’s a reason kindergarten teachers rarely accept “but they started it” as an excuse.
It always baffles me how many guys I’ve seen oppose escalation of violence outside self-defence, and how the laws support that notion (here at least, you’re not allowed to respond to an unarmed attack with a weapon, dog, or martial arts unless you have no choice, and you have to give your opponent a warning), and yet, the first response to girls slapping is always either passivity or punching. I would like to know how it would go if more guys instead would deliver a deliberately gentle slap back (preferably with loose wrists, to make sure it’s not seen as an attempt to cause damage), so show “if you get to touch me like that, I’ll do the same to you” without escalating.
Not the guys who claim men are the victims of female violence more often than the reverse.
No, but on the other hand, I do often concede that others, simply by virtue of being what they are, are more qualified to talk about certain hardships than I am, and that I need a damn good reason to dispute them. But that doesn’t mean those damn good reasons don’t exist.
But it’s very important to establish whether the problem is with the basic premise or the execution, because focussing on the premise is, in my observation, what has caused so many communication breakdowns between feminists and non-feminists, especially in feminist spaces.
I was a big girl (still am, but now most guys are bigger than me), I know what you’re talking about. I was always told to not hit anyone smaller than myself, and the smaller kids new it. Some of them would even start slapping me and other big kids while chanting “you mustn’t hit anyone smaller than yourself, you mustn’t hit anyone smaller than yourself”. But the remarkable thing is that I never felt threatened like I have with later violence (or even just later company), only annoyed and outraged over the unfairness of it. On the other hand, the only time I seriously struck back against a smaller girl…. well, she could walk home after a while, but she was still bleeding after being thrown into the asphalt.
Size matters, especially in open fights (a smaller person could easily attack a vital spot without warning, or use a weapon to compensate, but when it comes to spontaneously lashing out, few things beat shear size and muscle), so bigger people have a bigger responsibility than smaller people. It also comes with many advantages that they’re often not aware of, so all in all, it’s not a bad trade. But it seems many of the people who promote the view that a woman slapping a guy in anger and storming out afterwards is easily on par with someone using physical force to control their spouse over the course of years, want to remove those distinctions.
I remember an interview with a (somewhat small and thin) lesbian who’d been the victim of a hate crime. It started with a man hitting on her in a bar. She told him that she had a girlfriend, but since the Danish word for it, ‘kæreste’ (literally ‘dearest’), is gender-neutral, he pointed at a guy and asked “Is that him?” and she answered “No, it’s her”. The guy then proceeded to call it various sorts of disgusting, and she got angry and followed him and asked what exactly what he meant by it. Instead of answering, he turned around and punched her face, causing her to loose consciousness and require stitches afterwards. But when she reported the assault to the police, they investigated and told her that several witnesses had reported that she had been provoking him when he punched her, so they wouldn’t press charges.
I played that scene in my head several times, and came to the conclusion that the only possible choice for her would be to accept whatever insults men flung at her, and never retaliate in any way. Because if they provoked her, and she provoked back, they could beat her up and not get arrested for it. If she provoked them first, they could beat her up and not get arrested for it. If she responded to the provocation by trying to beat them up, she could either punch the man directly, in which case she wouldn’t be likely to cause enough damage to prevent him from punching her back and the same thing would happen, or she could damage him so badly he wouldn’t be able to strike back.
However, the only way she would be able to inflict that kind of damage, the same as he had inflicted on her, would be to be calculated about it (e.g. grab something heavy and hit him while he was looking away), which immediately changes the action from a spontaneous reaction to a provocation (i.e. normal bar fight) and into premeditated assault, which would land her in jail. So because the law doesn’t take a difference in muscle-mass into account in these cases, it pretty much results in big people being allowed to say whatever they want about smaller people, while effectively being protected from retaliation by the law. And I have seen plenty of men (and even a few women) argue for the justice of that.
Clarisse:
You are entitled to your own opinion. You are NOT entitled to your own facts.
That letter is going to result in innocent men being expelled from school.
I’m willing to work with you on some things are you willing to work with me?
Or will you just ignore the standard of proof?
If so, then count me an enemy.
I don’t wish to work with a movement that is so stupid about this stuff that it lets people like this :
http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/04/18/op-ed-standard-of-proof/
speak for it.
As for the hatred you get? It’s policies like this and refusals by feminists like you to say -hey, maybe this isn’t such a good idea, hey, tone down the rhetoric..and op eds like I linked to above that will make this a gender war.
And in the end, we will all lose.
Oh, and Clarisse:
You are not the expert on this. “No one” will believe them?
Is there evidence of sex?
That’s all it takes to get it to trial.
I’ve known a woman who was brutally stranger raped.
She’s a close relative.
I’ve also been falsely accused of various sexual things before. Thankfully NEVER rape.
Take your high horse and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
AB:
What? How does being as monsters or not being regarded at all the best of both worlds?
Because there’s a big difference between opposing and criticizing. Yes I criticize feminism and some of its members but I don’t criticize them as a whole (which would be unfair) and I certainly don’t oppose them.
I can agree with that. But sadly that seems to also prove the case in even places that are supposedly for the discussion of those basic view points.
Helping men get through legal hoops by introducing more legal hoops? I agree that they may be trying to help but it still sets up a “if you don’t sign up you can get kicked out of your child’s life”.
Agreed but like the difference between DNA testing and birth this isn’t quite the same either. Would you say that it should be just as problematic as a father finding out that a child is his later in life and wanting parenting rights?
It would be seen as him still being wrong.
Now if only everyone would practice what you preach (on all sides).
Good for you. I was the personal target of a couple of classroom bullies for a long time. Bullies that were known as trouble makers and fighters. If I could feel “only annoyed and outraged over the unfairness of it” I’d probably be better off now. Maybe its the way my mind works but there was plenty of feeling threatened thinking what would happen if they attacked me. If I don’t fight back I get beat up (and with the way bullies had teachers snowed over I would have probably got in trouble instead of them), if I do fight back I’m the fat scary violent kid (and with the way bullies had teachers snowed over I would have probably got in trouble instead of them).
Even to the point where smaller get a free pass in ways bigger people don’t?
While I’ve seen people with that angle I’ve also seen those who will try to take that and leap to the presumption that all woman against guy violence if like the former in your example and all guy against women violence is the latter, expanding those distinctions to the point of unfairness.
Based on that the Hollaback campaign would fail.
And it also doesn’t help that there are cases in which people will side with the smaller person despite the smaller person initiating simply because bigger people supposedly have to be more responsible than smaller people. Which is why there are stories of men calling the police because their wife is attacking them and when they get the man is arrested instead. Since men “are for the most part larger and stronger than women” there is a presumption of guilt, even if actual evidence is to the contrary.
Maybe its just because I’m on the outside of feminism looking in but those differences are not so little to me.
There is a big difference between Clarisse’s “Hey there are some big problems with the PUA community and I think feminists chiming in might do some good for the guys who look to PUAs for advice.” and Marcotte’s “If only those fucked up manipulative assholes that are only whining about not getting the best pussy out there would shut the fuck up and stop paying any attention to those douchbag PUAs and embrace feminism everything would be alright.”
Now its certainly unfair that Clarisse gets attacked as if she were Marcotte. But I admit that I have a hard time seeing people defend Marcotte’s behavior as if it were the same as Clarisse’s because it sure as hell isn’t (and seeing some of those same people then liken Glenn Sacks to Angry Harry as if they are the same MRA). So your concession isn’t necessary when you have people who will point out the unfair things you point out and then turn around do that same behavior to others.
Clarence that link you have there is almost scary. I’m all for stopping sexual assault on campuses but its seems to be that this is pretty much saying to put more faith in the accuser’s telling. It wouldn’t be right but I can easily see people leaping from that to “this basically translates into take the accuser at their word”.
Danny:
That’s exactly and precisely what it is all about.
It’s False Accusation nirvana.
@Danny:
Because being regarded is not important, having the issues you raise being regarded is. I see plenty of MRA theory in real life and popular culture, I just don’t see (m)any MRAs (who’re identified as MRAs and held responsible for the views of MRAs). That’s the best of both worlds to me, and I wish I could get my views through while not being identified as a feminist myself.
And plenty of the men opposing feminism in the past would have said the same, and some of them would have been right. It doesn’t change that men complaining over, and having issues with feminism is not a new thing at all, nor is it some monumental change in masculinity.
I haven’t seen many of those places. Most discussions are about a subject, and pretty much anyone who came in and said “but feminism has done a lot of bad things, we should talk about those instead” (like a poster recently did in the PUA thread) would be derailing, no matter how open the site was.
What do you propose the authorities do instead? A woman comes in, gives birth, get a birth certificate for her child, walks out again, and no man is involved. Should they demand she gave them a name of a father and refuse to believe her if she said she didn’t know him (or alternatively, gave a name but no sure identity)? Should they seek out the father themselves? I thought you Americans were paranoid over government interference (especially men), so exactly how much should the government do for men who don’t register by themselves?
In the case of the father, there’s a chance he didn’t knowingly have unprotected sex with the mother, so that could be a sign that he was at least not an irresponsible parent (then again, the mother might have a good reason to give her baby up earlier), but there’s still the issue of the child being attached to the foster parents. So no, it still wouldn’t be as simple as just giving him custody.
I have never seen it happen. It’s like how (according to the last survey I heard about) most of the American men who apply for parental custody after a divorce actually end up with either full or shared custody, and yet almost every man in the US I’ve heard talk about it always say that men might as well not try because they’ll never be successful.
It’s a possibility. My father gave up playing handball because he was too big, so I wouldn’t say it doesn’t happen. But on the other hand, there is a video gone viral showing an older, bigger boy body-slamming a younger and smaller boy in response to bullying, and pretty much all the sympathy is with the bigger boy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isfn4OxCPQs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaexZhRj-hM
And that is wrong too. My beef is with the way these studies are used to conflate various kinds and degrees of violence (even uses of physical force I would not classify as violence, such as what goes on between some of my friends), and try to minimise the significance of one by equating it with the other.
I have read plenty of stories on the Hollaback page in which the woman in question wasn’t believed, or was told to stop making such a big deal out of it instead. The woman in this example was probably young, conventionally attractive, correctly dressed, and able to put on just the right air of righteous indignation to play the perfect victim. Other women are not as lucky.
Of course the real differences are huge and significant, but people are not unbiased observers. Most people have heard of feminism, and it seems most of them already have a negative impression of it, which affects the way they perceive the words and actions of people who’re labelled feminist. There’s a reason so many people have tried to paint me as a feminist, and it certainly isn’t because that label would afford me greater authority on a subject. If noting else, feminists can be blamed for not speaking enough out against other feminists.
Personally, I think the best thing that could happen to feminism was to become unknown, with individual feminists being judged on their individual actions and opinions instead of their relation to a movement. I think they could accomplish a lot more if so much of their energy was not tied up in defending their association with the feminist movement.
Think about it, Clarisse gets a lot of goodwill by arguing for the legality of porn (which is usually done by women for men), prostitution (same deal), and female sexual submission, for talking a lot about men’s problems on their own terms, and for not being fat, old, and ugly while doing it, but even with that, she is subjected to a lot of the same treatment as other feminists, simply because of the label. And she has said that it’s bothering her and making her less tolerant than she wants to be. Imagine how it is for feminists who aren’t in the same age group, who don’t have quite the same level of patience (and let’s face it, few of us do), who have more anger and pain they need to get out, or who choose to focus more on women and not propagate an outwardly mainstream/male-focussed view on sexuality. They don’t stand a chance, and honestly, many of them ought to.
AB:
Lucky you. There’s more to critiquing feminism is more than “but feminism has done a lot of bad things, we should talk about those instead” (yes that does happen but that’s not all there is going on). When a thread is dedicated to a subject and is advertised as being a place to discuss that subject questioning it is not derailing. I know there are feminists that think disagreeing with them is by default derailing but its not.
And its people who think like you (to an extreme that I don’t think you would go to) on this that will intentionally drag out cases just so they can pull that excuse. A similar tactic would be a woman going to an abortion clinic to have the procedure done but the facility (being a pro-life front) keeps giving the woman a line of excuses until vola, the pregnancy is too far along and thus too late to go through with it. I agree that just ripping a child away after an actual long time has passed. But that does not justify intentionally dragging along in hopes of enough time passing in order to invoke that.
Did that study by chance mention how many of those men actually get the custody they are awarded? And yes I’ve heard that from men as well. I’ve even see men telling stories where their own lawyers recommended against fighting too hard for custody under risk of not getting any.
Ah dear Casey Haines. Now despite that sympathy bear this in mind. Casey was also suspended for his actions. I personally ultimately agree with him being punished, however this does show that even in a situation of regular bullying (a class mate mentioned that that kid actually had a history of bullying Casey) there is the stigma of “If I fight back I’ll get punished.”
Not to nitpick but sometimes that blame is a matter of holding them to the same standard they hold others to. If they can expect me to police other men then the least they can do it police their own as well.
You know it really is a damn shame that she gets treated that way. Its not right to folks like her. But at the same time I will admit that being called an MRA (folks who can openly be described as wanting the right to rape women) in effort to dismiss me, being told that the fact that I’m not a feminists invalidates everything I say, getting dog-piled on forums where its not just tolerated but sometimes joined in on by the mods, being told that because I’m a man I have no idea what sexism is (not to be confused with “no idea what sexism against women is” but “there is no such thing as sexism against men”), being told I hate women and equality because I disagree with feminists, being told that my life doesn’t happen the way I say it does (because apparently feminist theory actually rewrites one’s life experiences), and then being told that because I’m a man I need to suck it up and put my efforts into helping women instead (and that talking about how feminists treat me is privileged whining) I have a hard time sympathizing with feminists as a whole.
Don’t I deserve a chance too?
While I think it’s reasonable for Clarence to request comment on the recent lowering of the standard of evidence in college sexual assault/harassment hearings, this request could have been made to sound more like a request, rather than a demand:
Clarence said:
While I am against this new standard, there may be some inferential distance between Clarisse’s perspective and ours, so I think she deserves better than being put on the spot like that.
Clarence,
I appreciate the defense you have given me in some places where I have been attacked, frequently in nasty and personal ways. I appreciate your presence as a commenter. It’s clear that we share some opinions and some experiences.
However, I don’t owe anyone my thoughts, and I refuse to be tokenized. I also need to draw boundaries against conversations and engagements that will take up a lot of my time and emotional energy, without giving me any support or even being especially interesting.
I tried writing some other paragraphs, but really I think that’s it.
I’ve not followed this thread in the last weeks, both as a result of a lack of time and the fact that Clarisse mentioned it had become a snipe-athon about feminism. Still, I found this TED talk by a guy called Tony Porter and thought it may be useful to the discussion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td1PbsV6B80
In the talk, Porter mentions how he was socialized into what he calls the “man box” and explains how leaving the man box would allow him and all other men to be free. I don’t agree with a number of points he makes about how men see women as lesser beings and how he includes porn in his chart about sexual violence. That’s the standard radical feminist stuff that’s really an impediment to discussion as much as the man box is an impediment to male growth. Yet as so many others, like Hugo Schwyzer, when he comes to explaining why there is a man box, he only mentions homosocial pressure – and, of course, how it is inextricably linked to rape. The story he tells is close to a story in a PDF about “good masculinity” in Africa that Clarisse linked to and that was briefly discussed in relation to rape culture in the mega thread.
The pressures he talks about certainly are important factors in constructing the man box as well as forcing guys to put themselves and others into it, to judge their performance as men by those standards (again, I disagree with a number of the things he put in the box, but that doesn’t invalidate the concept). But when he closed his talk telling the enthusiastic largely female audience that “his liberation is linked to theirs”, I found myself wondering why he didn’t mention – and by extension, why really no one talking about man boxes, socialisation pressures and the like mentions – another set of pressures that is constructing and forcing men into the box: female desire, female sexuality and the need to perform (in this case heterosexual) masculinity in a way that is sexually successful.
Because to me, those pressures seem at least equally, if not more important, and may well be a/the causal factor for the first category.
I really wonder why that category of pressure is largely ignored in this debate. I believe there is enough evidence that addressing on set of box-elements without the other is unlikely to work. In a way, this is another rephrasing of Clarisse’s original qustion: If female desire is requiring men to perform in a certain dominant fashion, and at the same time, the cultural patterns following from the male desire to fulfill female requirements lead to them putting themselves in a box that is dysfunctional for both women and men, and neither female desire nor male desire to comply with it are going to change, what can be done about the dysfunctionality?
Or as a start – would it be possible to even only analytically separate the two sets of forces?
Hugh Ristic:
Clarisse commented on the False Rape Society on her own, I was not talking to her about it to begin with. Since she didn’t offer a critique (honestly, I doubt she can, as Pierce Harlan is far more an expert on rape law, rape statistics and etc. then I think she will ever be)and I had just learned the upsetting news about the new policy change , I decided not to try to engage Clarisse in terms of defending the False Rape Society website. You see, if she couldn’t say anything on something happening right now because of actions of a movement that claims her allegiance, there would be no point in debating the topic anyhow. And indeed, her responses to me showed me that I had made the wise choice. There’s many regrettable facts about sexual assault laws, policies, and procedures. It’s sad that often victims of false accusations and victims of sexual assault can’t work together but in over 13 years of researching this stuff on the web and in libraries the grip of the Duluth model hasn’t weakened one iota institutionally, and until it does -which will happen even if only in terms of a backlash due to crap like this- I see no hope of truly quantifying these problems OR solving them, and I see much pain for many innocents.
Yes, I put Clarisse on the spot. It was not my intention to do so, but then I never expected her to be involved in the conversation in the first place.
Clarisse:
When you say that worrying about whether policies pushed through in the name of feminism are:
A. Effective
B. Fair
is boring then that tells me all I need to know about you.
I can understand not talking about a subject because of experiences like you have had. That is far different. But , hey, you said what you said. Goodbye.
Amazing the things I say without even actually saying them, huh?
“…even being especially interesting.”
You tell me. I can assure you the implementation of the new policies will be VERY interesting to the students on these campuses. Since I’m not in school, nor do I have a kid in school, I shouldn’t be very interested I suppose. But as I watch my country slowly turn into a police state and feminism do its part to normalize policies that help that along, I find it very interesting and infuriating indeed.
@Danny:
There’s a huge difference between believing that the rights of the biological parents should not supersede the welfare of the child, and manipulating the situation so that the welfare of the child comes to contradict the demands of a biological parent.
That’s rarely mentioned by the men complaining, it tends to be all about the judges.
When two kids are involved in a fight, they tend to both get punished by the school no matter what. But the sympathy is still completely with the big kid regardless of his size.
Sure, but you’re comparing your treatment on perhaps 0.2 % of the internet with being treated that way constantly. I’m merely saying that perhaps you shouldn’t look to feminists to take care of your needs to discuss sex and gender, because most of them are probably under too much attack to deal with it.
AB:
Yes there is but that doesn’t stop the court systems here from doing it. I would be hard pressed to say that the dad (or mom) in such a situation should be able to just come in and take a child under those circumstances but there needs to be something in place to keep people from being able to hold out for that condition to kick in. If anything it really bothers me that sometimes the adoptive family becomes a pawn in a vicious game to hurt the dad (or mom). That space in that adoptive family would be much better served to a child that doesn’t have a fit, willing, and able parent ready to take them in and heaven knows there’s plenty of such children out there.
Actually I’ve only ever heard that complaint from men (and its not alway so rare). In the States the state governments actually get a bit of reimbursment for the child support they collect but get nothing on custody. As a result we have a system that will spend millions to make sure child support is collected while not lifting a finger to enforce custody/visitation.
Having been in Casey’s shoes I can say that its not always that pretty.
You minimizing my experiences notwithstanding I do agree that I shouldn’t expect feminists to take care of my needs (and in the past I did, but I’ve gotten over that). However now its not a matter of expecting them to do it for me. Its a matter of holding them to their very own claims, which a good number of them simply don’t. Its also a matter of them acting like since I’m not trying to prove myself to them I must hate them and equality (which some of them spend no small effort in trying to make them synonymous). Its also a matter of them acting like any and all criticisms about them are unfair generalizations and figments of our imaginations.
1) Some feminists are opposing the upcoming police state. Others are supporting it. This is true of pretty much every social movement right now.
2) What’s boring about False Rape Society and its ilk is not just its bias (which I could handle, everyone’s biased) but its seething rage — which I have no interest in engaging, especially given that the site has absolutely zero space for my feelings.
3) I’m tired of being the token “good” feminist for non-feminists, antifeminists and feminist critics who insist that I’m therefore supposed to agree with them about all their critiques of feminism — and also contribute my opinion to every debate about feminism ever — and also be perfectly knowledgeable about everything to do with feminism ever. If that’s what it takes to keep your good opinion, then I’d rather you just left me alone.