Rape Culture and the Myth of “Female Sexual Advantage”
| May 17th, 2005[This is a comment left by Shiloh on a previous thread. I've edited it a bit to make it "stand-alone," rather than quoting other posts. The post title was suggested by Kim (basement variety). --Amp]
I will agree that sexual power is about one’s “value” in the world of dating and relationship. What [some people] seem to be missing, however, is that the higher a woman’s sexual power, the lower her value as a person. Female sexual power, by definition, is dehumanizing. Female sexual power silences women.
First example - when I was fourteen, I took a summer class in typing at the local high school, because it wasn’t offered at my jr. high. One day, as I’m halfway to school, crossing this big field, a guy I’d met precisely twice before grabbed me and started kissing me and feeling me up. He informed me that he was a star wrestler, and that I was going to be his girlfriend. I informed him that my tastes ran to skinny bespectacled geeks who read a lot, and I had no interest what-so-ever in being his girlfriend, thank you very much. He insisted that I only said this because of a “poor self-image,” that he was going to make me popular and happy, etc. etc., ad nauseum.
No matter what I said, this guy “translated” it to fit his preconceived notions. “No” meant “yes.” “Not interested” became “interested but won’t admit it.” “You’re not my type” becaome “she’s just shy.” Many feminists argue that pornography “silences women.” This is what they mean. The woman is only allowed to say what the man wants to hear - even if what she actually says is completely different. Pornography that plays with the rape myth tells the story of a woman who says no, but ultimately means yes. That is what this guy was doing to me. He was insisting that whatever I said meant what he wanted it to mean.
Another real life example of how a woman’s sexual power silences her. I was not one of the “popular kids,” partly because I had little interest in being one, but one of my good friends was exactly what you describe when you are discussing a woman with a lot of sexual power. She was a cute, feminine blonde, popular, intelligent, cheerleader, upper middle class, dressed conservatively but was perceived as sexy. The guys I hung out with - who, like me, were NOT socially powerful - said she was the most beautiful girl in the school. What did all this sexual power get her?
Well, in 10th grade it got her raped by most of the guys on the football team. She was dating one of them, he slipped her something stronger than she was used to, then passed her around to his buddies. When she told people about it, most of her friends basically said she got what she deserved - if you’re going to be beautiful, them’s the hazards. Mind you, she did not disagree - she accepted that this is just the way the world is. When I pointed out that being pretty is no excuse for rape, she said I was probably right, but what can you do about it?
Nothing. There is nothing a beautiful woman can do about it. From her perspective, and in her experience, woman’s “sexual power” means that she does NOT get to choose her mate. If she was not interested in the most “alpha” guy around - tough. If said alpha guy laid claim to her, she was stuck, because he viewed her as his property, and any guy hanging around too close would be chased off. In high school, at any rate, if said alpha male was on a sports team, not only would he monitor her activities - his buddies would monitor her activities. If she was interested in another guy, she had no chance of talking to him or getting to know him.
Of course, once you get past high school (and college, in some cases, but she deliberately went to a college that did NOT have any sports teams), this male control is less blatantly obvious. But it’s often still there. Look at Kathleen Parker’s story (on the web). J*** R*****’s harrassment of his ex-wife’s family. Paul Corey. Eric Bleicken. A dear friend’s husband, who called everyone on her side of the family (including me, a non-relative) to tell them what a whore she was when she left him - this despite the fact that his adultery had so destroyed her reproductive system she had to have a hysterectomy and ovariectomy at 27.
Another friend, whose husband used to rape her when she was unconscious from the drugs they were using to help her sleep - this despite the fact that she was undergoing radiation treatments for her cancer and despite the fact that she was in constant pain and his rapes only exacerbated it. Yes, she’s blonde, long-legged, charming, and popular. What did all this “sexual power” get her? Abuse, plain and simple.
Most of the kids at my second high school were upper middle class. I used to hang out with actors, artists, engineers in the aerospace industry, millionaires who owned their own company. I’ve talked to the “beautiful people” of both sexes. Men who are beautiful complain that “she dumped me because I shaved my head” or “I never know whether she likes me for my self or for my looks or for my cash.” Women who are beautiful worry about being raped, about being abused, about ending up in a marriage to someone who will try to completely control them.
Again, men have access to sexual power, too - more access, through more channels, than women do. And the risk of sexual power for men is minimal. For women, sexual power is often outright dangerous. For women, sexual power is as disempowering as it is empowering. A woman weilding sexual power is easily silenced.
[...]
Rape exists primarily because a man decides that his version of reality is more important than the woman’s - he decides he gets to tell her what reality is. Whatever his motives (sex, power, anger), a rapist’s reality is that the woman’s sexiness somehow justifies his treatment of her. Everytime a male non-rapist treats a woman as a sex object, rather than a person, he is supporting the rapist perspective.
Arguing that a woman’s sexual power in any way “evens things out” between the sexes is to miss the point entirely. A woman’s sexual power is used to justify rape; a woman’s sexual power is used to silence her; a woman’s sexual power is used to dehumanize her. The fact that some women manage to use their sexual power in some instances to their benefit doesn’t change any of this.
May 17th, 2005 at 2:11 pm
*clap clap* I don’t think I’m a great beauty but I’m pretty enough and there’s no doubt that it’s exacerbated the problem of men who just refuse to get it when they are being turned down.
This comment was written by Amanda.Report this comment to the moderators
May 17th, 2005 at 2:23 pm
Real power is as collaborative as it is competitive, but power that is controlled by others is always competitive. Women’s sexual power in a Patriarchy is like working class economic opportunity in a highly class consious society. The stricter the class structure, the less economic power the average worker holds. Likewise the stronger the patriarchy, the less sexual power women in general have.
As a result of all this, women’s sexual power is also used to break the bonds of sisterhood, crippling our abilty to capitalise on our social power.
So, on that note:
Samantha, I’ll see your Ani DiFranco and raise you a Dar Williams:
“You point, you have a word for every woman you can lay your eyes on,
This comment was written by Jenny.Like you own them just because you bought the time,
And you turn to me, you say you hope I’m not threatened,
Oh — I’m not that petty, as cool as I am, I thought youd know this already,
I will not be afraid of women, I will not be afraid of women.”
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May 17th, 2005 at 3:30 pm
Right on, Jenny. Women are encouraged to internalize their oppression, and direct it outwards also against other women. So, with rape that manifests as treating rape survivors shabbily, or thinking that the rape survivor somehow didn’t do “enough”, since she was raped, or that she somehow brought her rape on herself. It’s all a way of saying “I’m the special one….I’m not like those other women…I wouldn’t have been raped.”
It translates into other arenas too, like the “lavender menace” of the women’s movement in the seventies—the abandoning of lesbian sisters, or the enforcement of beauty standards and harsh treatment of women who don’t/refuse to meet them. The act of trashing other women masks an anger at the their own treatment.
This comment was written by La Lubu.Report this comment to the moderators
May 17th, 2005 at 4:12 pm
I follow the argument until here (from the original post):
I understand the point if it is an unwanted and aggresive advance, but what if there is a consensual sex act involved in which the woman is the sex-object to the man (say nothing more than a one night stand) and the woman sees it as something more? What if the role is reversed (one night stand to the woman and something more to the man)? My view would be that the act of consent to the act implies that both people have entered an agreement (even though they may not end up agreeing on what happens afterwards — lets assume there is a cordial departure) in which they are treating each other as “people” and not objects. The scenario is a gross oversimplification, but I am curious to hear a viewpoint on the subject.
This comment was written by Ted.Report this comment to the moderators
May 17th, 2005 at 4:27 pm
A one night stand is not necessarily objectifying someone. The point is respecting women as people. I can see a sexy woman and think, “Man I’d like to have massive amounts of hot monkey-sex with her” without forgetting that she’s a person, so that were I to ask that woman if she wanted some hot monkey-sex and she refused I could say, “cool” and leave it at that.
The thing is with sexual power, besides, and I’m sure that this has been brought up in the other posts as well, is what sexual power amounts to is manipulation, which is really just a latching on to real power of men. A hot blonde who marries a rich CEO solely for his money does so because she has given up hope of earning that sort of money herself. And such a state of affairs skews the perspective of the powerful to think that the best they can offer a woman they’re attracted to is the chance to latch onto their power. (as illustrated so well by Shiloh’s story of the wrestler)
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May 17th, 2005 at 4:36 pm
Ted,
I see your point, but life doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Taken outside the context of a patriarchal society, treating someone as only a sex object may not be sexist (although it still seems a little inhumane to me) but within the context of the world we live in it is.
The differences between a single act of sexism, acting in a sexist manner, and being an outright sexist is generaly a matter of aggregate actions and specific circumstances. This is true of society as well as individuals, thus the theory behind labeling “hate crimes” as such. An act a vandalism or an insult may just be an insult, or it may not. Circumstances and history matter, and not just individual circumstances and history. A burning cross is rarely just a burning cross, and the convention of referring to female students as co-eds is insulting even if that isn’t the intention.
Besides, there is a difference between treating someone as a sex object and treating someone as a sexy person that you respect because you are a decent person, but still wish to interact with only for sex. A one night stand in which all parties involved are cordial and honest would fit into the latter catagory IMHO.
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May 17th, 2005 at 4:58 pm
Great post, Amp and Shiloh.
“Sexual power” is such a misnomer, isn’t it? It’s sad how language gets distorted by the prevailing power relations. Normally, we don’t attribute a power to a person unless we assume that they can wield that power to get what they want.
This comment was written by Lindsay Beyerstein.Report this comment to the moderators
May 17th, 2005 at 5:34 pm
Ted,
The issue, to me, is how the partners treat each other, not necessarily what they think of each other. Maybe one partner, meaning no malice, sees the other partner as primarily a source of sex, rather than as a person interesting in his or her own right. My question then is, did the person objectifying still treat the objectified partner with care? Did they make sure the other person agreed to the various acts? Did they do their best to give no impression that this act of sex was intended to lead to bigger and better things?
Say I tell a guy I don’t believe in sex outside of marriage. If he then tries to pressure or seduce me into a one night stand, then he’s objectifying me, no matter how “considerate” a lover he may be. I’ve told him that sex means more to me than it does to him, and he ought to respect that and not try to make me conform to his views on sex. But if I tell him casual sex is okay with me, and do not tell him that I think he’s special and hope we can have a long term realationship, and he wants a one night stand, then going on the information he’s got, if he pushes for a one night stand he isn’t objectifying me.
I’m really wary of anything that requires either partner to mind read. I personally don’t think you can have many one night stands (and certainly not many with strangers) without objectifying people, but I know plenty of people who’re happy to have one night stands without feeling objectified. Who am I to say? But I do believe that with any new partner, however long you hope or intend to hang out with them, people need to be extremely careful to make sure the partner wants what they’re being offered.
I personally think the polite and considerate thing to do is to say, up front, “Hey, all I want is sex; not looking for a long term relationship and don’t want any misunderstandings.” Some people who don’t want just a one night stand might go for it anyway, because they hope it’ll work out differently. Sometimes it does work out differently. I’ve known people whose relationship started out just that way - they originally had sex, a series of fairly isolated one night stands, just for the sex. But because of their careers they ended up running across each other a lot and it became something more. It happens.
One concern I would have with someone wanting a one night stand is if they end up with someone who freezes up. Some women do freeze up when they feel sexually pressured, especially, in my experience, if they were sexually abused as a child. They cannot escape the situation, even if the guy is not being particularly violent or even terribly aggressive, because they’ve dropped back into that experience they had as a kid where they were pinned down. That’s one reason I cannot understand why people protest to the idea of the more aggressive partner asking “Can I do this?” “Is it okay if we do that?” and waiting for a “Yes” before moving on.
If asking the question would so “wreck the mood” that sex would be “ruined,” then maybe the mood should be wrecked. If this couple is so irresponsible that they cannot literally name what they are doing, even euphemistically, without one of them calling a halt, then how can they be responsible enough to consider STDs, pregnancy, or birth control? I just don’t get that.
And I’ve wandered, I’m afraid. In terms of “supporting the rapist perspective,” anyhow, I think if someone makes sure to be honest about his intentions and to ask permission to do whatever, he is at least treating his partner as a person, whatever he may be doing to her in his head, so he’s not supporting the rapist perspective even though he may be guilty of objectifying a wee tad. I’m not sure it’s possible to never objectify someone you’re attracted to, particularly early in the relationship, because of course you want them to be what you want them to be. The issue is whether you expect them to conform to your fantasies, or whether you work hard to treat them as a real person, even if they don’t turn out to be what you hoped.
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 17th, 2005 at 6:15 pm
Not that the rest of the thread is chopped liver, but I really, really like this part. One of the major recurring themes in every thread everywhere about rape seems to be the perception that consent needs to be given only once. After that, it’s tacit. Unfortunately, most of us know where that leaves women. :(
The idea of asking permission to do specific things up to/during sex got such a huge ribbing in Chapter #560,003 of the Mainstream Media P.C. Backlash Follies, and I’ve never understood why. Are people just so brainwashed by those Olympic Marathon sex scenes in beach novels, bodice rippers, and what have you– that they believe in their souls that every act in bed is going to turn out just perfect without any discussion if we’re just “worthy” enough ? “Compatible” enough ? Whatever ?
Ugh. No, thanks.
This comment was written by alsis38.9.Report this comment to the moderators
May 17th, 2005 at 6:44 pm
I’ve always been puzzled by the myth of the sexual encounter without dialogue. I don’t know who does that — but I’ve always shared plenty of words with all of my partners about what I wanted to do and what they wanted to do. I do a lot of S/M, but I’m talking about vanilla sex, too. In fact, some of that talk is pretty hot.
This comment was written by Thomas.Report this comment to the moderators
May 17th, 2005 at 7:10 pm
In the midst of an otherwise unexceptionably sensible post I read, and literally winced:
Again, men have access to sexual power, too - more access, through more channels, than women do…
I am a fifty-year-old unhappily-married man without a lot of money. I find the notion of renting a prostitute grotesquely depressing (”Can’t Buy Me Love” and all that.) Also I have a positive irreversible disinclination to rape anyone - I bathe, too. Whatever anyone means by “sexual power” I have absolutely none of it. I’ll guess there are tens of millions of losers like me in this country; how can women have less than I, we do? Have you ever read James Tiptree’s story “The Women Men Don’t See”? That’s how - we don’t exist.
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May 17th, 2005 at 7:22 pm
Okay, so everyone answered my example but not really my question. Clearly that was my fault as my example was not a very good one. Thinking, thinking…
I guess what I really wanted to know is if a male non-rapist objectifies women and perpetuates and confirms the rape culture, what is a woman doing if she does the same thing to a man. I suppose that she would also be perpetuating and confirming the rape culture, but it seems to me that this would go against the original argument. That being that the rape culture is instilled in her by the teachings of her submissive gender roles before she has an opportunity to establish a sexual identity (as well as other facets that were also raised). Now I’m sure many more men objectify women than men, but I’m certain that this practice in women is not isolated to a few individuals.
I don’t wish to deny the rape culture arguement because I think it is compelling in certain circumstances, but I’m not sure that certain type of objectification (most notably using others for consensual sex) are part of the argument. Maybe it boils down to a general disregard for the ethics of treating others with dignity under all circumstances and refraining from activities in which you do not have the will to follow that ethic? Then again, maybe I’m fussing about something that was not the intention of the author.
This comment was written by Ted.Report this comment to the moderators
May 17th, 2005 at 7:41 pm
Well I’m not sure if that statement is true but what I meant to type was:
I’m sure more men objectify women than women objectify men, but…
This comment was written by Ted.Report this comment to the moderators
May 17th, 2005 at 8:15 pm
I think if a woman objectifys a man she is confirming the rape culture in the sense that she’s treating sex as a commodity rather than an actitivity meant to bring mutual pleasure. I’m paraphasing someone else here, but in a rape culture sex is something that a woman has (or is) and that a man gets (from her). A woman who “sells herself” sexually (whether money is literally exchanged or not), or who condemns women for being promiscuous while praising promiscuous men, or who condemns the woman who is raped rather than the rapist, is in that sense endorsing the rape culture.
I don’t mean that the men or women who endorse rape that way mean to endorse rape at all - that’s just how it works. Assumptions people believe to be benign, aren’t. The rape culture puts the responsibility for the rape on the woman, even though in the actual event, it is the man who has all the power. He has the power; she gets the blame. One of my problems with the whole “women should learn self defense” argument is that most rapes are acquantance rapes, and most self-defense courses are aimed at stranger rape. I was a fairly good “street fighter”, in the sense that I could hold my own with guys bigger than me so long as we were both upright and I had some room to manuver. I used to take on bullies bigger than me and win. But in a date rape situation, you start out pinned down.
By the time a lot of women realize the guy isn’t going to take “no” for an answer, they’re in close quarters and he’s probably got her down. Street fighting the woman can make use of skill, tactics, deflection - but if you’re down and wrestling, your options are way more limited. Strength is far more of a factor; strength may be the only factor, and the average male is stronger than the average female. The woman often has no choice, no options, no power - but she gets all the blame.
I would say that, whenever someone points at the one who had the least power and gives them the most responsibility for what happened, they’re endorsing the rape culture. That may be so broad a generalization it’s meaningless, I dunno. But to me, what defines the rape culture is that practice of blaming the one who is powerless to prevent someone doing something to them that causes them pain. It’s blaming the victim for her own pain. It’s giving responsibility to someone who literally can’t exercise that responsibility when it comes down to brass tacks. And you bet women do it. Absolutely.
Objectification is a big part of it, but it’s not the whole story, IMHO. It’s not just dehumanizing someone - it’s also making them responsible for any pain they might feel through being dehumanized. In my experience, even women who “misuse” their sexual power don’t go that far, because they can’t. Society blames them when they misuse their power and the guy gets hurt. Why do some guys argue that “men may rape, but what about the damage gold diggers do in a divorce”? Because ultimately, the woman is responsible for the rape, and the woman is responsible for using her sexuality against the man. Ultimately, the woman is responsible, even when she’s doing what guys do without condemnation (objectifying, or using someone sexually).
Not quite sure what you were asking, Ted, to be honest. This is what you got me thinking on, anyhow, for what it’s worth.
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May 17th, 2005 at 8:53 pm
::wonders if she can get the quoting right this time::
Ted wrote:
Ted, I agree. To me, the issue isn’t so much objectification per se as it is the cultural reduction of what it even means to be a woman to it being All About The Sex.
The aspect of objectification that I perceive as part and parcel of the rape culture (sorry, I know you don’t care much for the term) is the aspect that connects to a male sense of entitlement over women’s sexuality–a sense of entitlement which is often reflected in the belief that (female) reciprocation is somehow (male) attraction’s rightful due.
I do think that this is a particular form of objectification that we instill in our boys far more than we do in our girls as they are growing up. Women are not taught from birth to expect that just because they find someone attractive, that attraction necessarily should or ought to be reciprocated. Men, I think, are rather taught to expect that, and I think that we saw evidence of that expectation in the entire “women are obviously the privileged sex, because they can refuse a man’s advances - OMG The POWAH!” line of argument.
Although many people (especially the straight women) in that discussion tried to point out that to straight women, men are the more attractive and pretty and desirable sex, that women don’t like losing out in the sexual sweepstakes any more than men do, that desirable men absolutely have the power to reject an unwanted woman’s advances, and so on and so forth, none of it ever seemed to register very much.
My feeling was that the reason it didn’t really seem to register much was that the fact that men can refuse women is, well, so what? It’s a no-brainer. It’s okay. For a woman to refuse a man, on the other hand, reaps an “OMG The POWAH!” response because our society has constructed womanhood itself to be overwhelmingly about women’s sexual availability to men.
It’s not particularly notable for a person to fail to reciprocate sexual attraction, you see. It’s only particularly worthy of note when a woman does it.
Because what the hell else are women supposed to be for?
So yeah. It’s not the Gaze in and of itself that I consider so very problematic. It’s a Gaze that also carries with it an assumption of ownership, of entitlement and reduction. And sadly, I do think that it’s a type of objectification that we teach our boys at a very young age.
This comment was written by Elkins.Report this comment to the moderators
May 17th, 2005 at 9:34 pm
Johnny:
::sigh::
Yeah, I hear you, Johnny. That’s rather how I felt wading through the pages and pages of the reverse argument on the previous thread. As if “women” had been weirdly redefined to mean “that small subset of women who I think are hawt, but who don’t want me back.” And sorry that your circumstances aren’t happy ones.
People have a certain degree of personal power over those whose attraction to them is not reciprocated. Unscrupulous people who are so inclined can sometimes use that leverage to manipulate others into doing stuff they want. That is a form of “sexual power,” I suppose, but as you point out, it’s hardly one that everyone of either gender shares equally. In fact, I really can’t see how it’s dependent on gender at all.
I think, though, that what Shiloh meant by the line that made you wince was encapsulated in the sentences following it:
The point here, I think, was that to whatever extent the “power” of the femme fatale really exists outside of movies and television, it is more than mitigated by the host of cultural constructs designed to keep women “in their place.” Rape is one such construct. Community pillorying is another.
Desirable men who seek to use their sexual attractiveness to their own personal advantage aren’t taking half the same risks, nor does our society revel in quite the same way at the idea of such men being violently–even brutally–thwarted. The idea that rape is something akin to “just punishment” for sexually manipulative women, on the other hand, is incredibly, horrifically, depressingly prevalent (as, for that matter, is the assumption that any attractive woman must be consciously sexually manipulative).
This comment was written by Elkins.Report this comment to the moderators
May 17th, 2005 at 10:04 pm
As Elkins just commented, I think this whole belief of women being all powerful sex-goddesses does go back to Hollywood’s and the entertainment industry’s glorification of the femme fatale and the sexy black widow, and our culture’s lack of putting little or no responsibility on men for sexually based crimes committed against women. It’s “her fault for being too sexual and seductive–she manipulated him with her body,” blah, bullshit, bullshit, blah! The “men are weak against their own sexual impulses and sexy women” cultural syndrome strikes again!
Some guys see movies with the femme fatale, ultra-sexy woman getting whatever she wants from men in a movie or show, and say and think something along the lines of, “hey–look at all the stuff that hot chick is doing to those guys! Yeah women totally have all the power in sex!” How about Hollywood and the entertainment industry show what happens in real life to most women who try to be the femme fatale and sexy black widow? A couple of pictures of dead streetwalkers, murdered by their johns from the police archives? Reports of teenage girls who thought they were having a good time getting into a bar with fake ids, hanging out with “cooler” older men, and end up being enslaved in prostitution by those same “cooler” older guys?
I especially love “oh she wouldn’t give me the time of day, but I said she was sexy, so women MUST have all the sexual power” argument, which really shows how adult or not some guys are.
This comment was written by Pseudo-Adrienne.Report this comment to the moderators
May 17th, 2005 at 10:25 pm
Our popular culture reinforces the notion that women have sexual power by establishing and promotiong those kinds of sexual stereotypes of the desperate man. Mainstream pornography runs up on these stereotypes and provides a fantasy of male power. But the “fantasy” merely reflects the reality. The whole system is just self-justifying.
Being seen as a sex object does nothing to empower women. It confines them and dehumanizes them. No, there is nothing inheriently wrong with sex. I’ll actually go as far as to say there is nothing inheriently wrong with pornography. What’s wrong are our cultural attitudes towards sex and the attitudes promoted in pornography.
I think I have a somewhat unique position in men, in that growing I didn’t raid my fathers porno stash like all my friends were doing in middle school. I was heterosexual, but my attraction to fat women meant that mainstream pornography meant nothing to me. I had no interest in it. I don’t think I really sat down and watched a real porn film until just a couple months ago. This gave me a different perspective in seeing how it affected the men I was growing up. Trust me, these attitudes that plague men and dehumanize women aren’t inherient. They are absolutely learned. I see these boys go from having female friends they liked and respected transform into sexually obsessive misogonists. I was there for the lockerroom talk. It horrified me to see the change in my friends. In people who in all other ways were still good and smart people. And the change happened as they became more and more interested in porn. They became adversarial towards girls. They were crassly insulting, but it was also minimalizing themselves. I don’t think we can say that men, in the position of sexual power, are any better for it. No when that power is so often used in such dehumanizing ways. The whole system is awful for everyone, as far as I’m concerned, and its in everyone’s interest to change things. The trouble being that these attitudes are given undue value. Boys will boys, they tell us. Everyone looks the other way and meanwhile women are being abused and demoralized. Men are being made bitter and resentful. Sitting back and calling this parity does no justice.
This comment was written by BStu.Report this comment to the moderators
May 17th, 2005 at 11:02 pm
johnny uxor said,
Well, I would argue that, at minimum, “sexual power” means the ability to attract some small portion of the opposite sex. By that standard, unhappily married or no, you did at least have enough “sexual power” to get married in the first place. My sister, and any number of her friends, never even weilded that much sexual power. Nor have many men, of course.
I would argue that considerable sexual power, in the sense of being able to attract numerous partners of the preferred sex, is not available to many people, male or female. But, as Elkins points out, my main point is that, for women, possessing much sexual power at all is problematic. A man is not endagered by his own sexual power, while a woman’s sexual power makes her a prime target for preditors.
And, of course, a woman’s sexual power tends to be limited to the physical - to physical beauty. Men can more easily develop sexual power in other ways - although a lot of those “other ways” are, again, things most people probably won’t have access to; prestige, riches, etc. I never meant to say all women (or all men) have access to sexual power. I’m sorry if I was unclear.
Elkins said;
Interesting that we went opposite directions in our response to Ted - I broadened the issue beyond objectification; you defined that objectification more precisely. And correctly, I think. I would add that men’s “right” to a woman’s sexuality is limited only by other men - she’s off limits only if she “belongs” to someone else. Some guys also accept that women who are virgins are off limits (or used to back when I was dating), except they defined virginity very differently than I did.
I defined virginity as a person’s choice - as an internal thing, as an expression of self-control or direction. The guys I’ve known who chose to be virgins defined it much the same way - as a personal choice, as a deliberate approach. But most guys define women’s virginity as a physical attribute. I’ve only had one friend tell me about being stranger raped (everyone else was raped by someone they knew) - she was grabbed and raped in the classic “dark alley” scenario, except she passed out and doesn’t remember the actual event. She’s also the only one reported her rape to the police (although two friends reported incest to social workers), because she was found by somone before she came to.
She was a virgin when she was raped, and her boyfriend at the time argued that, “since she’d been popped”, she should start having sex with him. His response certainly didn’t help her trauma any, but I get the impression it’s typical. While she by no means chose to lose her virginity, he acted as if she was now available. She was “on the market” through no choice of her own.
A lot of guys consider a woman’s virginity a personal insult - like the t-shirt that says, “To all you virgins; thanks for nothing.” But at the same time, they don’t quite recognize a woman’s virginity as a personal choice. I understand a lot of girls are reluctant to accuse someone of rape because doing so will expose the fact that they aren’t virgins, and then it’ll be “open season” on them. If a woman feels empowered by her own virginity, that’s great - but I don’t think guys really see her as owning her own body somehow. If they honored a woman’s choice to be a virgin, she wouldn’t be considered available just because she’d been raped.
I don’t know what guys are respecting when they quit pressuring a virgin for sex, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t her right to own her own sexuality.
Elkins said:
That assumption really irks me - particularly when it comes to teenage girls (and, more rarely, when it comes to children, but I’ll skip that for now). I had a friend who wore pants so tight to school she wouldn’t drink anything all day because couldn’t use the bathroom - she had to lie down to zip her pants up. But she was deeply offended by the idea that she was advertising herself sexually - she dressed that way because she believed it was attractive, but what she wanted was friendly attention, not sex. She was always furious when guys assumed she wanted sex - her attitude was, “If I want sex, I’ll let you know.” She was completely oblivious to the idea that her clothes might be sending a different message - and to be honest, so was I. I thought she was stupid to wear clothes that tight, but I never connecting it to guys making assumptions about her. I think a lot of teen girls really haven’t processed that connection.
Then again, I’m still irritated by the fact that guys can pull off their shirts on a hot day and most people won’t think twice - but if a woman wears a halter top, “she’s advertising.” I hate heat, and sulk about this every summer.
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 17th, 2005 at 11:03 pm
The thing about the “power of sex appeal” is that it is almost completely in the eye of the beholder. It’s not a case of a woman being sexy, like it would be if she were being smart or strong or creative, it’s a case of some man or men finding her sexy. The power is not hers; it is dependent on them, and therefore can be used against her. Unlike various traits that are there for one’s own benefit, such as intelligence, sex appeal benefits the people who find one sexually appealing. A woman’s attractiveness might influence the amount and type of sexual activity she engages in, but has no real effect on how much she is capable of enjoying that activity, the way a person’s intelligence would affect how much of a concept he or she is capable of understanding. Rather, attractiveness affects other people, it affects how much they want a sexual relationship with somebody. And sadly, the world is all too full of assholes who think what they want is more important than what another person wants.
So they try to control the woman who has what they want (namely herself). And here we have a problem. By posessing this thing, attractiveness, which is supposed to be so wonderful, we become targets; they try to control us, to subvert our wishes when they don’t coincide with their desires. On the other hand, if we downplay our attractiveness in order to avoid such attention, they are still controlling us, denying us the use of what should be our power by threatening to use it against us.
So what is the solution? Get power of other types; get power that they can’t turn against us. Get strength, get knowledge, get courage, get determination. Strength to oppose them, knowledge to learn how to best use that strength and to assess risk, courage to stand up to them, determination to refuse to let them win. Guard against both overconfidence and despair. Take a self-defense course. Consider what forms this sort of harrassment might take, and how you would respond to it. If you have to defend yourself physically, don’t half-ass it. If you take someone to court for rape or other abuse, the defense lawyer will make all sorts of attacks on your character. Don’t let it get to you. And always remember that being raped or harrassed is never your fault; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
BTW, my favorite way to deal with the type of guy who thinks his desires override someone else’s wishes, is to ask him, shouldn’t he be hitting on women he actually finds attractive? When he protests that he does find you attractive, or is interested in you, tell him, obviously he doesn’t/isn’t, because if he did, he wouldn’t be treating you like trash, like your feelings are secondary to his. ‘Cause that’s how you treat an enemy, someone you hate, not a potential lover.
Or just tell him that you don’t sleep with/date guys who treat you like what you want doesn’t matter.
Anyway, discretion might be the better part of valor sometimes, but it seems to me that downplaying your attractiveness to avoid their attention is letting them control you in order to avoid the risk of them trying to control you. These people may exist, but it’s my world too, and my solution is to shine so brightly that they can’t touch me for fear of getting burned. It’s my body and my right. No arguments from the cro-magnon crowd will be tolerated.
This comment was written by Kyra.Report this comment to the moderators
May 17th, 2005 at 11:13 pm
I think in all circumstances, it seems like societies come up with some argument that claims that men and women are equal in power, just in different ways. In Victorian times, there was the doctrine of “seperate spheres:” men have power in politics, business, law, etc. Women have power over the domestic domain, and are angels of the house. See? They’re really equal!
Now we have the argument that men have power in politics, business, law, etc. but women have power in sexual relations. See? They’re really equal!
I’m not sure if this is true, but I’ve read reviews of Marjane Satrapi’s new Embroideries that suggests that, even in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a far more patriarchal society than ours, Satrapi thinks it’s an open question whether men or women are more powerful. Because in Iran, men have power in politics, business, law, etc. but women have power in their sexual and emotional relations with men. See? They’re reallly equal!
This comment was written by Julian Elson.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 12:03 am
I’m never keen or apathetic upon hearing stories of sexual abuse or rape, but for some reason, this particular story just tears my heart out. It’s yet another example of condoning rape, via playing up or down the circumstances that surround it, or are affected by it. Yet another way of blaming the victim, and reinforcing the idea that she’s simply a piece of meat - regardless whether someone see’s her as prime-rib, ground beef or spam. In the end, it’s all just more bullshit justification from people who wish to remain entrenched in a culture dominated by men that live in terror of losing the privileges they supposedly don’t have.
This comment was written by Kim (basement variety!).Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 1:10 am
Kyra Writes:
I spent all of high school a-sexualizing myself as much as I could, and while I still think that it was a better choice than trying to “compete” with the popular girls, I really regret letting sexism, and my own fear, dictate so severely how I presented myself, and how I perceived myself.
At the time I thought that I was hiding my body because I thought the whole popularity contest was bunk, and because I couldn’t hope to compete with the popular girls anyway. Looking back, and considering how other things that happened to me when I was entering puberty affected me (including breasts at age 10 and a persistent peeping tom a couple of years later) I realize that that isn’t the whole truth.
My sexuality became a weapon to be wielded against me almost before I knew what it was. It’s strange now to look back and realize that the boys and men who tried to control me through my own sexuality were able to do so because my sexuality was powerful; so completely had their derogatory actions convinced me that I was nearly undesirable, despite my fantasies.
Which is why the whole “women have the power ’cause you get to say no” argument just pisses me off. I didn’t have the power to say stop! to the budding mysigonists who whistled and yelled and me as I walked down the street (and don’t even try to convince me that they were trying to be flattering - not with what I was wearing and how much I weighed) and I didn’t have the opportunity to turn anyone down. How can I have so much power, all of which comes from my being able to say no, if I never got to do so? But of course, its not about me, because if it was, being able to say no wouldn’t be considered a special power.
This comment was written by Jenny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 3:01 am
Interesting discussion. I just wanted to throw in another element that perhaps is an even clearer example of how ambiguous that definition of “sexual power is” (for those who haven’t realised that already, that is). The amount of children who are victims of sexual molestation or abuse, of all degrees, within the family or from non-related acquaintances. Is that sexual ‘power’? Of course not.
Before puberty, children do not even realise they can have sexual appeal until they’ve been objectified, molested, or abused. Which is the worst way of realising anything about sexuality, having it forced on you, before you even care or know about it. People who molest or abuse children sexually claim that it’s the children who are just irresistible, it’s the children who hold this power over them, they just “can’t help it”. (Much like a stalker thinks it’s the person he stalks that holds this irresistible power over his perverted behaviour.)
Almost everybody, except the abusers and molesters, will recognise that is wrong, abnormal, sick, and that the “can’t help it” excuse is a perverse attempt at justification for an objectification and projection that is entirely in the abuser’s head.
But so often, when it comes to women, the fact that, unlike children, they’re adult individuals with a developed sexuality and personality must mean, paradoxically… not that they have a right to be considered as such and their own preferences and person respected!, but that they must be the source of any sexual response, they must have provoked it, so that’s their power on the person having that sexual response, and this person’s responsibility is diminished, because they’re so overpowered by that sex appeal that she, obviously, knows about…
Of course when the sexual response is simple attraction that does not objectify and does respect the ‘target’ of attraction as a person, not an object, nothing wrong with it, it’s what happens when people feel attraction to someone else, requited or not. But when it is not like that, then there’s this shifting of the cause/effect, of the source/target elements of that attraction, of the responsibility factor. Nevermind the rapist, even the arrogant jerk who thinks that a woman he has set his eyes on is just expected to be her girlfriend and/or sleep with him and why would she even refuse his sexual advances, he uses the very same justifications for his behaviour as paedophiles do for theirs, only to him it’s not as perverse as that, because hey, she’s a grown woman and she is sexually attractive and probably even sexually active, she obviously not just wants it, but wants me, because I’m a man and she’s a sexy woman. I’m just powerless, I can’t help it!
He believes that the difference between children and grown women, younger or older, is that the latter must be responsible in some way for his sexual reactions (which he’s not responsible for, he just can’t control them); but he acts as if the woman is even less of a person with her own rights than a child, and as if he himself is even less responsible of his own actions than a child…
Don’t know if I’ve explained it well, it’s such an obvious thing, I guess, but it does strike me as recurring in these ‘women have all this sexual power’ refrains, of the likes we’ve seen in previous threads… The very same behaviour that these guys would consider abusive to any other subject, is justified with women being irresistible.
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 4:42 am
Thanks for the responses to my enquiry. I think I understand the point of veiw now. My concern was that if women often objectify men (but not as frequently as men do to women) isn’t this contrary to the idea of the rape culture. I now understand that I was looking at the question from the wrong perspective. While the frequency of the objectification might be due to the pervasive rape culture, the act of objectification itself is more of a moral fault on the part of the individual. When men or women participate in such an act it perpetuates the rape culture insofar as they are imposing objectification on the other party. This is more dangerous when it happens to women because it perpetuates the idea that it is her fault that such a thing has happened to her (due to her “sexual power”) and reduces her percieved or real control over that power as it relates to men or society in general. Hope that makes sense
This comment was written by Ted.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 5:15 am
No matter what I said, this guy “translated”? it to fit his preconceived notions. “No”? meant “yes.”? “Not interested”? became “interested but won’t admit it.”? “You’re not my type”? becaome “she’s just shy.”?
I had problems with a guy like this last year. He was the president of a student society I joined, and right from the start he singled me out. At first, it was kinda nice to have someone talking to me and asking me to social events, as I just got to university, but as time went on he became very presurizing. I had a boyfriend, but he “wasn’t good enough for me”, according to P and I’d “be much better off with him”. Refusing him brought accusations of “hating him” and deliberately making him fallin love with me just so I could hurt him. He’d cry and say it was because he was ugly/I didn’t like “nice guys” (hah!)
I tried to stay friends with him at first, because we had a lot of friends in common and went to the same social events. Eventually I had to stop this, as he became increasingly upset with me, and even dragged his friends into the game. Once after popping into an event on my way back from a friends concert, I was accused of “deliberately wearing a backless top to torment him with what he couldn’t have”. When I broke up with my boyfriend, and went out with someone who was not P, he said I was dating the new guy just to show P how worthless I considered him, and that any other guy was better than him (the idea I might want to date someone because I liked them was not considered). He’s left uni now, and all contact between us has ceased which is rather a relief.
During all this, he had a bizzare image of me in his head - he’d tell me I shouldn’t wear make-up because that wasn’t the sort of girl I was (I’m a make-up artist in my spare time, I’m obseessed with make-up and how it chances a person’s look). He’d tell me not to wear slutty clothes (in summer! when high necked tops and long skirts make so much more sense!), or that I was doing it just to attract him. He believed I was some sweet angel virgin type, and even when I gave him a descrption of my social life he honestly believed I was acting against my character just to maliciously hurt him. He’d ask me “why do you keep hurting me, you know we should be together, I know how you really feel about me”
It was really hard to realise what he was doing was wrong, since he always painted himself as the victim of my feminine attractions - I felt so guilty! I’d taken a nice boy and hurt him terribly -and not even realised how much I was upsetting him just by being myself. It got for him becoming really unacceptable (telling my friend he was only friends with her to find out stuff about me, sleeping with another friend of mine, constantly comparing her unfavourably to me to her face, getting upset when i held hands with my boyfriend in front of him, becuase I was flauting my happiness to make him upset, forbidding me to bring my boyfriend to socials etc.) for me to realise that it wasn’t my fault - that he just needed to grow up and realise sometimes girls just don’t want to sleep with you *shock* there is no need to obsess over them when they don’t.
This was all compounded by another guy this year, who asked me out, was turned down so he first ran around telling people I was a slut and then got really drunk, pinned me down in the kitchen and tried to force me. Ask him now - it was my fault. I’d flirted with him, I’d turned him down, I’d dressed in the sexy dress. How was he expected to control himself? I’d led him on…
They link together in my head really strongly because they both did the exact same thing when I turned them down for a date “but… why not? I think we’d be really good together” and then proceeded to guilt me with how upset I was making them, and how I’d really made them belive made them believe I wanted them. And the really sda thing? It worked! I’m now worried I give guys the wrong impression just saying hello to them, terrified I am leading people on if I smile at them, horrified I may be upsetting someone by not fully considering the effect my actions may have on them.
Men, especially repressed private school types, can be complete bastards when it comes to realising sometimes what they want isn’t the overriding control on the universe.
This comment was written by VK.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 6:06 am
>>Interesting discussion. I just wanted to throw in another element that perhaps is an even clearer example of how ambiguous that definition of “sexual power is”? (for those who haven’t realised that already, that is). The amount of children who are victims of sexual molestation or abuse, of all degrees, within the family or from non-related acquaintances. Is that sexual ‘power’? Of course not. >>
Right. Possessing something–in this case, I suppose, a sexualized body–is not the same as having power over the people who want it. As even someone was willing to admit, it can be incredibly dangerous, particularly when you have no recognized sovreignity. I mean, look at the people who were in possession of this country before we moved in. Did they have power over us because we wanted their land?
It’s also incredibly troubling–and I know that a bunch of other posters have gotten at this point, too–to see that ownership of one’s own body as an advantage, a _disparity_. It’s a basic right, and one possessed in theory by both the man and the woman involved.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 6:23 am
I mean, look at the people who were in possession of this country before we moved in. Did they have power over us because we wanted their land?
That is a really interesting angle. I’d never thought of that in that way.
This comment was written by Anne.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 7:41 am
piny, that is a most excellent point. Paula Gunn Allen and other Native American feminists have been making that comparison all along; that the theft and rape of the land is parallel to the rape of women, and of acts of brutality and genocide against whole peoples. Other feminists of color have been making note of this, and so have ecofeminists. White ecofeminists influenced by Wicca, Paganism, or other Traditional European Religion (pre-Christian) have been saying this.
That’s why feminist critique of imperialism, colonialism, “Manifest Destiny”, ecological destruction, etc. is so important, and why internal critiques within feminism, like recognizing and challenging white privilege and class privilege is so salient. “Rape culture” doesn’t just involve the Female Body, but the Peoples who come from the Female Body, and the land which sustains us. The motivation to rape any and all of the above stems from the same sense of entitlement, of greed and control.
This comment was written by La Lubu.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 7:51 am
Whatever anyone means by “sexual power”? I have absolutely none of it. I’ll guess there are tens of millions of losers like me in this country; how can women have less than I, we do?
Wouldn’t you guess that there are “tens of millions” of fifty-year-old women who aren’t married, can’t or won’t see a prostitute, and aren’t inclined to physically force themselves on anyone? Or do you really believe that merely having a vulva guarantees an easy path through life? If so, you’re turning your resentment into delusion.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 7:58 am
I would further say that it stems from objectification; putting a false and arbitrary “value” on an “object” while at the same time stripping away autonomy or integrity.
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 7:59 am
Noodles, despite having just talked about being objectified when I was emotionally and socially still a child (if developmentally already into womanhood) I actually had not made that connection, so thanks and good point.
Ted, yeah, that sums a lot of it up for me, and the same ideas hold true for a lot of other types of discrimination as well.
This comment was written by Jenny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 8:11 am
I’ve written and deleted comments 4 times over the course of this 3-thread discussion. I keep getting bogged down with all my emotional baggage. Memories of the loneliness, desire, despair, misunderstanding, and resentment have really come to the forefront of my consciousness and prevented me from focusing on the general issues. I spent the better part of 2 decades being pretty screwed up, knowing I was screwed up, but not being to improve my thinking much. I dealt with it by mostly remaining celebate because being a jerk felt worse. I can relate to many of the men’s issues, but a fair number of the women’s as well. I’ve had several Aha moments.
So rather than contibute a perspective, I wish to thank Amp & the commenters for a really thought-provoking, soul-searching discussion. I mean it, you are smart & perceptive group. I wish they had blogs when I was 18, perhaps I would have come around sooner. I hope many others have a better perspective as a result fo this discussion too, especially the younger men.
This comment was written by Ron O.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 8:12 am
Does anyone think that some women fall for the idea that they have real sexual power? I’m reminded of this anti-feminist piece I found via Mouse Words a few months ago.
I wonder why it does not occur to Ms. Chunko (her real name!) that real power is independence. Real power is buying your own drinks and having complete control over your own self. This woman is just lazy and will be very unhappy when she no longer find herself ‘powerful’ as an older woman.
I have had male friends tell me that women have the power because they can get laid whenever they want. To them, it isn’t about being able to say no, it is about being able to say yes. And I suppose it is easier for women to get laid, but there are more repercussions for us. Our reputation, for one.
Then, as others have pointed out, there’s the idea that we should be obligated to say yes. Men have this pressure too, but I think it’s usually greater for women. Like VK, I have allowed myself to feel guilty for not reciprocating a guy’s feelings. I have no problem telling off the good looking, high status guys. For me, the unattractive ones are able to play on my sympathies until it’s too late and I realize I let them manipulate me.
I think what it comes down to is this: Perhaps attractive women have it better than unattractive women. Not in every situation, but (to repeat myself) the ‘net benefit’ is greater. But no woman has the luxury of having her sex appeal not matter. And that’s what sucks. That’s what I think real power would be.
Part of my reasoning for the above statement comes from other feminists. I have been told how easy I have it because I don’t “have to” watch my weight. I’ve been told about discrimination against those who are overweight or not pretty. So please, correct me if I’m wrong.
Also, you don’t have to be attractive to be raped. But I’m not going down that road or else I’ll write a novel.
This comment was written by Redneck Feminist (drumgurl).Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 8:15 am
VK, I had a similar experience in college, but alas, I dated the jerk. He built up this whole image of me (quiet, “ladylike”, less smart) based on my appearance, and never amended it in the nearly 4 years we dated. He would berate me when I didn’t live up to his idea of me, and, yeah, he didn’t take no for an answer in bed, even if I was ill. Whenever I asked anything of him (sex, a ride to the emergency room), he would get insulted and sulky.
Sadly, he’s far from the only guy who thinking I ought to be someone I’m not just because of my physical appearance, although I stopped putting up with it after boyfriend #1. I have gotten reactions of shock - shock! - when I have done something assertive in front of men like this solely because I am shorter than average. And a tall and curvy friend of mine has gotten the same sort of reaction when she has been quiet or uninterested in flirting. What sort of mental model leaves you so unarmed for reality? I guess one for a society where there really is no need to see women as actual persons with thoughts and desires of their own.
This comment was written by RP.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 8:24 am
Yeah, I’ve heard that one too. These are guys who don’t realize that your average standard-issue bout of vaginal intercourse isn’t an orgasm-fest for most women (and don’t hear you when you attempt to explain this to them). And these are also guys who are deaf when you list all the times that you’ve been turned down for sex.
This comment was written by RP.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 8:49 am
Isn’t Rachel Chunko a pseudonym for a male college student?
I have had male friends tell me that women have the power because they can get laid whenever they want.
Your male friends can get laid whenever they want, too. Anybody who is willing to set their standards low enough can get a warm body to lie on, if that’s all they’re after.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 8:52 am
Going all the way back to the original story about the teenage gang rape and cover-up by adults:
One of the things I was able to recognize really early on was that part of what messed me up about being a victim of voyerism was never seeing the other kid (and he was a kid, younger than me, actually) get into trouble. I can’t imagine what kind of a message that sends to the victim and the perpertrator when the crime has escalated to rape, and such an obvious case of rape.
After I told my parents what he was doing the first time, the kid stopped. But then he started again months later, and in the meantime, I had seen no evidence of him being punished. Obviously, he was very young himself and couldn’t be held accountable in the same way even a kid my age should have been, but still, we both needed to be taught that what he was doing was wrong. When I finally told my parents he had started again, after months of it going on, they were shocked that I had waited so long and asked me, almost angrily, why I had done so. I essentially responded with “What difference did it make the first time?” At which point they finally told me that the whole incident had been taken very seriously indeed, to the point of the kid going to the doctor to see if he need further counseling. (Why no one wondered at any point during all this if I could use some counseling myself, I have no idea.)
The idea that adults would not only fail to see the need to punish teenage rapists, but go so far as to cover up the incident, is just appalling and goes a long way towards explaining why so many women and girls still feel the need to conform to sexist ideas.
This comment was written by Jenny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 9:21 am
Shiloh:
Sometimes I agree that it makes sense to view virginity as a choice. Sometimes, though, I think it makes more sense to consider it an accident of circumstance.
After all, for someone who would very much like to have sex, but who has not been successful at attracting a suitable partner, the “choice” to remain a virgin is not really much of a choice at all, is it? I mean, if your options are to (a) hire a prostitute, (b) lose your virginity to a partner who may not be a safe partner, or (c) grit your teeth and have sex with someone who repulses you…well, yeah, I guess you’re still making a “choice.” But not, to my mind, in any terribly meaningful sense of that term.
Holy Christ, what a thing to say to a rape survivor. Yeesh.
Agree with Kim here: it’s not that rape stories aren’t always horrifying, but that’s a truly stomach-churning anecdote.
No. Far too many men don’t. Then, of course, traditionally a woman’s virginity doesn’t belong to her at all. It belongs to her father, and thereafter to whomever her father gives or sells her to.
Ever had a guy refuse to have sex with you the instant they found out you were a virgin, even though they had previously seemed a willing and eager partner, because they didn’t want the “responsibility” of taking your maidenly virtue, or some other such patriarchal bullshit?
But. Anyway. Let me put my personal baggage back in the overhead compartment, shall I? Point is, I think that the entire virginity issue can cut both ways. Either way it cuts, though, it comes down to exactly the same perception: a woman’s virginity isn’t her own. It belongs to men, and it is men who determine whether she “should” keep it or not. Her own ideas or preferences on the issue just don’t matter.
This comment was written by Elkins.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 9:30 am
Holy Crap! I need to know where you went to school and where you live now because if it is anywhere near my daughters I am getting them out of there.
What awful stories. I am so glad I went to a boarding school for disadvantaged children. We did not even have half those problems and many of the kids at my school had been sexually molested as children, beat by their parents or were living on the street before The Chocolate Man took us in.
This comment was written by jstevenson.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 9:42 am
Redneck Feminist:
Yeah. Thanks for saying it, though, because although I suppose that I could be seen as one of those responsible for that implication in this discussion, it had sort of been bothering me too.
There’s a nice little lose-lose dynamic built into the way we view the intersection between sexual power and rape, though. If an attractive woman is raped, she must have been “asking for it.” If an unattractive woman is raped, then she must be lying about it to gain “prestige” or “status” or somesuch by claiming a sexual connection with her higher-status rapist - the whole “she’s lying, ’cause why would the football star bother to rape a dog like that?” line.
Which I seem to remember was the one that got whipped out in the original story that prompted these threads. Those “normal” popular boys surely wouldn’t have orally raped that disabled girl! She must have offered herself to them in the hopes of gaining social status!
Blechh.
This comment was written by Elkins.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 9:56 am
The other one that has always struck me as bizarre, with regards to unattractive women is ‘She should be happy someone wanted her’, in essence turning the rape into some sort of public service.
This comment was written by Kim (basement variety!).Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 10:03 am
Kim (basement variety!) wrote:
Mine, too. I’ve had a lot of friends tell me their rape stories over the years, and all of the stories make me angry and sad, but that one really breaks my heart - it’s like she not only had to go through the horror of stranger rape and dealing with the cops (who fortunately believed her) and all, but she ALSO had to go through what is practically a date rape the next week! What a profound betrayal.
Precisely. Thanks for summarizing it so succinctly. The rape culture does not really justify rapists or sexual abusers of any stripe - it doesn’t make what they do right - but it does excuse them from any responsibility. It provides excuses, so they can more easily fake themselves out. It teaches them that they have the right to abuse, yes, but I think the fact that so many men recognize what’s being done is wrong tells us that the rape culture does not truly confuse people about what’s right or wrong.
IMHO, guys who act this way would not react with such anger and ridicule when flatly challenged if they didn’t know, in their heart of hearts, that what they’re doing is wrong. I would hazard a guess that the rape culture exists in the first place to justify what some men have done, and that it is perpetuated most strongly by men who need to excuse their own selfishness.
VK wrote:
Rape culture, to me, is when people hold the woman responsible for the man’s choices - particularly, it seems, when the man is being most childish or most selfish.
La Lubu writes:
If you read the documents of the time, there were also parallels in the way the powers-that-be would characterize the Indians; as helpless and weak and unable to make their own decisions, just as women were helpless and weak and unable to make their own decisions. The solution, in both cases, was for some white man to make the choices for them. American black slavery followed the same rules - the people being dominated “needed” someone to dominate them, for their own health and happiness.
And, of course, when any of these groups denied this need and fought for autonomy, then the oppressed group was “in the wrong” and deserving of punishment they “brought on themselves.” No power; all the responsibility.
Redneck feminist (drumgurl) wrote:
I think it depends a lot on the personality of the attractive woman. An attractive woman who is also kind of low key and tends to “go with the flow” is at a great disadvantage, I think, because she’s more easily abused and attracts more abusers. OTOH, an attractive woman who is pretty forceful and/or selfish can get considerable mileage out of her attractiveness. The lady you quoted (if she’s real at all) is powerful more because she’s manipulative than because she’s beautiful, would be my guess.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned in the sexual power discussion is the fact that self-confidence can be attractive. Everyone, I believe, is more attractive when they’re relaxed and at ease, and self-confident people are relaxed in more situations, so they come across as more attractive. They are also, if women, more likely to “accentuate the positive,” so if they are moderately attractive (physically speaking), they’ll make use of that, learning the skills and tricks of makeup and costume. Manipulative women are quite likely to accentuate their appearance, because they want power and that’s one way to get it.
Manipulative men do the same, I’m sure, but they usually have more ways to exercise power so they probably don’t expend as much energy on attracting the opposite sex. And, there’s less a manipulative man can *do* to improve his physical attractiveness - he may exercise and chose his clothes with care, but he doesn’t need such a broad selection of clothes and he’s not likely to spend hours every day applying make-up and doing that routine. What would be “seriously paying attention to his looks” with a guy would be considered “the bare minimum/just getting started” for a woman.
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 10:14 am
Elkins said:
Yeah, I should have clarified, but heaven knows I’m wordy enough as it is. I was discussing virginity when it is chosen, not when it’s an accident of circumstances. If a guy choses virginity (or celibacy, or restored virginity, or whatever you want to call avoiding sex during a specific period of your life), it’s his choice. People may think he’s nuts, and if he’s a teenager he may get teased (although I’ve never known a teenage male virgin who’d admit to it in public), but that’s about the extent of it. But when a woman choses virginity, she gets grief for “not putting out,” or for being a tease, or heaven knows what.
And if the woman is raped or simply is not a virgin when she decides to take a sabbatical from sex, guys treat this as a positive affront. Way back before the Internet there were these sex activity surveys (they’re still around, I’m sure), and guys would quite literally put their girlfriend through it “as a joke,” but then expect her to do with them anything she’d done with anyone else. The fact that she’d done it with anybody made it part of their “rights” over her.
Yeah. That.
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 10:24 am
This happens among adults, too. I can’t remember ever hearing a story about being harassed on a train or a bus or on the street and seeing someone step in to tell the harasser to stop it.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 10:26 am
Right. Both groups have been compared to children.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 10:33 am
Wow. This thread is amazing. Painful to read, but amazing.
BStu, I think you’re spot on about pornography. I keep going back and forth on whether porn is “okay” or not, and after something I read last night, I was forced to see that the stuff I’d been reading that I thought was weird but harmless was actually brutally misogynist. Part of what’s creepy about porn is the ever-recurring insistence that one cannot refrain from acting on impulse. We’re getting trained to treat sexist and misogynist behavior as inescapable and the basis of our sexuality.
The thing that’s getting me most about this discussion is the way men seem to regard their own suffering as an excuse to completely ignore anyone else’s feelings — particularly women’s feelings — rather than learning from their suffering to feel compassion for the suffering of others. I have to admit I’ve been guilty of this more times than I can count. Women, by contrast, seem to be trained to ignore their own suffering and pay more attention to that of others.
This comment was written by Brian Vaughan.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 11:13 am
Yet, oftentimes when we no longer ignore it, we are told we are being uncivil because of our anger and tone.
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May 18th, 2005 at 11:32 am
Kim (basement variety!) said:
I finally read I Never Called It Rape last year, and she discusses that some fraternities have what’s called a rude hogger award - given to the frat member who has sex with the woman they’ve voted most ugly. I have not the least doubt, having run across the concept in less structured groups, that the frat member who gets the award considers his act some form of public service, even if it involved force.
A somewhat off topic comment on the issue of feeling entitled - my sister went to the Boston Conservatory of Music for a while, and she lived next door to a frat. When hubby, brother and I meant to commiserate with her for this fact, she said it really wasn’t so bad - she said that the Conservatory frats were much less obnoxious than the frats around Colorado University. Her theory, and I suspect she’s right, is that the guys at CU frats considered themselves richer and more important than everyone else, which justified their more obnoxious behavior. But most people at the Conservatory and in that neighborhood were tolerably well off - without this class contrast, the frat boys were better behaved.
Studies indicate that guys also rate women who send “lower middle class” signals as less attractive - but also read “lower middle class” women as being sluts and sexually available. So less attractive women end up targeted as well. My friend who loved her tight pants ran up against that, I think. At her first high school she was apparently quite popular, and guys respected her. I’m fairly certain that her high school tended toward “lower-to-middle middle class” students (it was in the same system as my first high school and had that reputation), and her signals were mostly lower middle with a few upper middle mixed in. At our second high school, most of the students and pretty much all the “cool” students were upper middle class.
At our second high school, not only was she not as popular - when she did go on dates, the guys just assumed she’d “put out.” At her first high school, she didn’t face that problem - I think because the guys she was with “spoke the same language” when it came to unconscious things like clothes and how you stand and the words you choose in casual speech. But at the second high school, all of a sudden she was rated “low class” and thus “easy.”
She once told me I needed to quit giving her grief about her tight pants, because if it wasn’t for those pants she would have been raped - the guy couldn’t just push them off but had to move away from her to get leverage to try to pry them off, and so she got away. Heh.
Then again, while I “coded” for upper middle class in how I moved and talked, guys figured I was “easy” because of my bra cup size. Ya can’t win for losin’.
I do not at all argue that all hierarchy of any kind should be destroyed - but the fact remains that a lot of social hierarchy is used to excuse misusing those on another rung of the ladder. Women below a guy on the economic/social hierarchy are fair game because they aren’t worthy anything better. Women above a guy on the economic/social hierarchy are arrogant bitches who should be brought down a peg.
Every type of social interaction I can think of carries a “rape myth” to excuse mistreating the woman through some form of sexual harrassment. Our culture provides a myriad of excuses for dehumanizing women. It may be that in this culture it takes a very strong man to resist the temptation to make use of that power, particularly when the woman in question isn’t someone he cares about as a person in the first place.
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 11:48 am
I finally read I Never Called It Rape last year, and she discusses that some fraternities have what’s called a rude hogger award - given to the frat member who has sex with the woman they’ve voted most ugly.
Yes — as I mentioned on the other thread, basically in passing, women considered unattractive are either ignored or ridiculed, and they don’t have sexual power; their lack of attractiveness is used against them. As I’m not good at blogging my position on things in essay form, I wouldn’t want to tackle this subject — and I wonder if there’s really much more to add, since it’s pretty quickly summed up — but I think it rarely gets addressed, and I’d like to see it mentioned more often under this topic.
This comment was written by Anne.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 12:06 pm
Let’s put it in simpler terms. The sexual power that a woman wields (in theory) is totally dependent on the man being unable or unwilling to rape her.
The idea that a woman has more sexual power than a man is based on the idea that men on average want sex more than women do, and so they have to work for the woman’s approval so she will allow him to have sex with her. Obviously, if a man is willing to take what he wants without consent, then the female’s “sexiness” does not give her any power.
So that ultimately means that the more rape occurs in a society, the less that a woman’s “sexiness” can be seen as giving her any power over men.
This comment was written by Glaivester.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 12:49 pm
Hm.
Rape isn’t the only form of sexual violence, or the only thing women have to be afraid of.
How about, “The power that a woman might have by virtue of her sexuality does not operate independent of other kinds of power or powerlessness. It cannot be analyzed without reference to other advantages and punishments. Nor can the (putative) ability to trade on a commodified body be separated from the question of bodily autonomy; you can’t sell something you don’t own. The less power women have in general, the less power they have over their sexuality.”
Plus, since when did having someone over a barrel translate to power on their part? According to this sex-bartering idea, women can trade on their sexuality for career advances, security, love/support….But I haven’t heard mentioned anything that humans can easily opt out of.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 1:08 pm
and
I’ve heard this before . . . guys who think that a woman has no business looking sexual/sensual if she doesn’t plan to be sexual/sensual . . . with them, naturally. Funny thing is, you never hear them making that complaint about the women in Playboy. These types of guys are the types who often look at porn, and those women are displaying more than any classmate in a backless top, yet they aren’t berated as “tormenting him with what he couldn’t have.”
Next time anybody tries a line like that to me, I plan on telling him he’s too arrogant for me to be interested in him, because it’s very arrogant to assume a woman has no reason to want to be beautiful unless she’s being beautiful for his benefit. Yeah, if she’s not trying to attract a guy, why should she bother to be anything? That almost sounds like there’s more to a woman’s life than getting a man!
Let me tell you something, it is incredibly liberating and empowering to stop worrying about how others see you and just focus on how you see yourself. When I choose what to wear, I don’t care what the guys at my school will think of it; all that matters is that I feel good in it.
PS: If a guy tries to convince you to go out with him by bringing up the reactions you “inspire” in him, or asks how you expect him to control himself, that’s yet another reason you can give him to justify your lack of interest: “You can’t even control yourself? What a wuss! I don’t date people who are too weak-minded to control themselves.”
This comment was written by Kyra.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 1:28 pm
I’ve always thought that attraction has nothing to do with sexual violence at all (I prefer ’sexual violence’ rather than rape because it covers that and so much more, including non physical violence).
This is because I am lesbian, but yet am still expected to be available to male advances. Even when my lesbianism is revealed, this is not seen as me being able to have power in a particular situation to say that I won’t be definied sexually by a man, but rather is seen as evidence of my sexual nature; a sexual nature that, as a woman, can only be for him, for a man.
There have been times when I have been walking with my girlfriend of the time, hand in hand, and men have approached us, suggesting sex. And not in the “Oh, but I am just joking” way frat boys or jock boys do, or the “Woohoo, can I join in?” way that men driving by do, but rather drop dead serious, simply expecting us, as women obviously expressing ourselves sexually, by holding hands, that we are available for him.
Then, of course, my sexuality is denied. I can’t be lesbian because I dress so much “like a woman” or “too sexily” because I would wear a skirt, or a tank top. So, of course my sexuality must be directed towards the man, because he finds me attractive. My sexuality can not be defined on my own terms as his must have preeminence over mine.
That a woman would express herself sexually in a way that does not involve a man then becomes a situation where sexual violence needs to be used to ensure that I learn where my place is, where my sexuality should be. From the man across the rapid transit train that has seen the “Marriage for All” button on my tote-bag and taken it as a personal insult and attack on his masculinity by glaring at me with hate in his eyes, to the violence-swollen boys that drive past a group of me and my friends sitting outside a lesbian bar on a hot summer night yelling that they “would teach us what a real man feels like”.
The irony of sexual violence is that it isn’t even sexual. It’s about the use of a woman’s sexuality, taking it away from her, to be owned by society, by the men that would define her, objectify her, use her, in order to dehumanise her: to control her. Sexual violence is the epitome of our patriarchal society where sex is reduced to a tool of property and who has power.
And that includes me. Even as a lesbian. of course.
This comment was written by Sarah in Chicago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 1:52 pm
To say that rape, or if you prefer, coerced sexual activity (I am not using the term “sexual violence” because it covers situations that I am not addressing here, i.e. where the sex may be consensual but non-consensual violent acts occur collteral to the sex, e.g. someone pressuring his girlfriend to let herself be tied up before sex) is not about sex seems to me to be like saying that robbery is not about money.
Definitely there are some cases in which the sex is merely a tool to assert power over someone. But it seems to me in other cases (for example a lot of date rapes) that it is about sex. Specifically, one person wants sex and decides that nothing matters other than his own personal satisfaction; in other words, he may not have the intention of raping someone, but if that is what it takes to get sex when he wants it, he will do it, other people’s rights and feelings be damned.
Of course, even if rape in a particular case is all about sex, it doesn’t excuse the rape one iota. I don’t have the right to rob someone because I want money; I don’t have the right to rape someone because I want sex.
This comment was written by Glaivester.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 2:10 pm
Sarah in Chicago wrote:
This kills me, because the only self-proclaimed lesbian I’ve known IRL told me she began “exploring the gay lifestyle” because she’d been raped. She no longer felt safe having sex with men, so she decided to explore having sex with women. The sex was just as good, so she wrote men off.
Some study discussed in an LJ group I hang around with indicated that most lesbians have had sex with a man, while most gay guys haven’t. The lesbians in the discussion speculated that gay women are more “sexually flexible” than gay men, more open to experiences, more willing to try both ways before making a definite decision. Maybe. Not having seen the study, but having read some books and articles on rape that mention female rape victims “switching” to female lovers after the rape, I’m wondering if they asked how many of the lesbians who’d had sex with males were pressured or forced into it.
One friend of mine tried getting rid of unwanted suitors by telling them she was a lesbian - she discovered that wearing a fake wedding ring worked much better. Which makes sense, I suppose. If a woman can’t own her own sexuality, how can she possibly own the sexuality of another woman? No wonder telling guys she was in a committed lesbian relationship didn’t slow them down a whit.
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 2:10 pm
I once read somewhere and I’ve loved it ever since, “If it were truly possible for women to fuck to the top there’d be a whole lot more women at the top by now.”
Keeping the song quotes thing going, I listened to the Neko Case song “Pretty Girls” yesterday (get the album Blacklisted, it’s very good):
Your hearts are so tried and so innocent
Wind your flimsy blue gowns tight around you
Around curves so comely and sinister
They blame it on you pretty girls
Oh pretty girls, you’re too good for this
This comment was written by Samantha.How you break my heart in this cold waiting room
Oh pretty girls, you’re too good for this
Don’t let them tell you you’re nothing
Don’t let them break your hearts too
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May 18th, 2005 at 2:12 pm
Ooops. That should be, “Most lesbians have had sex with a man, while most gay guys haven’t had sex with a woman. Ahem!
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 2:25 pm
shiloh -
I have heard and read of similar studies, and to be sure, I don’t doubt there are some lesbian women that have turned to being lesbian through ‘bad’ experiences with men. However, I also think those are rather small numbers. I would argue that the exaggeration of such numbers has more to do with the same things we are discussing here; namely that a woman’s sexuality is being defined by her relation to a man. In other words, if her default position (her natural position) of being with men is for some reason not available to her, then she will go to women.
Now, as to more lesbian women having been with men than gay men with women *grin* I see two reasons for that. One, femininity in our culture is a considerably more flexible space than is masculinity, the latter of which is easily lost by even minor ‘infractions’ (as an aside, an explanation for the more extreme responses to ‘get it back’). Two, if the sexuality of women is defined in relationship to men but yet for men their sexuality is about access to sex as we have been discussing here, then its only natural that lesbian woman have had more heterosexual expereinces than gay men, as women’s sexuality is not constructed in relation to their own desires, whatever they be.
But that’s just my 0.02 :)
This comment was written by Sarah in Chicago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 2:35 pm
Sarah in Chicago said,
Sorry about that; I didn’t mean to conflate women who were raped and then gave lesbian relationships a try with women who were lesbian per se. I was just thinking that, since I know some women who have come to identify as lesbian were raped, isn’t it possible that women who always identified as lesbian were raped or otherwise pressured? I didn’t mean to connect the two concepts that tightly, it’s just that one made me think of the other.
I also wonder how strictly they’re defining having sex with the opposite gender - I’ve known a lot of gay guys who’ll “make out” with women without considering that any indication that they’re bi-sexual or anything other than gay. Our culture has this weird obsession with defining sex as intercourse and nothing else, IMHO.
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 2:49 pm
shiloh -
That is a really good question, and point. I know straight women, that after they have consumed a bit of alcohol, will go after lesbians (of course *cough* not speaking from any personal experience here *cough*) but yet do not consider themselves even remotely bisexual. One straight friend defines herself as “nondiscriminatory” but yet straight.
But I don’t think it is a coincidence that definitions of what sex is or isn’t becomes more and more narrow the more conservative the individual/group doing the defining is. This becomes particularly apparent with those religous groups pushing for abstinence until marriage vows amongst teenagers, and the statistics showing that those teenagers are highly more likely to participate in unprotected oral and anal sex as “that’s not sex”. How precisely that works in with our “rape culture” I’d be interested in discussing … hmmmm ….
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May 18th, 2005 at 2:54 pm
Brian Vaughn wrote:
…and I have to make the same admission. Worse, I’m afraid I’m about to do it again. I’m not disagreeing with anything here, I just need information.
My sense is that any kind of usable power involves a difference that can be evened out across a barrier and a means of controlling that barrier (a dam’s power comes from both a difference of water levels and the turbine). Sexual power would arise from a difference between a sexual want and reality and the ability to control that difference.
The simplistic view of women’s sexual power is that men desire sex and women control men’s access to sex, therefore women have power. Both halves of that generalization are pretty thoroughly picked apart above, so the only thing I’ll add is that the more common formulation in the real world would tend to be that a particular woman would desire not to be approached sexually by a particular man, who controls whether or not he does so.
(In my mind, the healthy reformulation of this power would be that each person desires a certain level of sexual contact (or lack thereof), and the joint control over attaining that level makes sexual relationships powerful. This is hardly a simple solution — desires change over time and can be hard to know even to oneself. Call me a dreamer.)
Here’s where I (oh-so-predictably) need help:
Shiloh wrote:
I could really use a clarification: is this intended in the same spirit as “…anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” [Matt. 5:28], or is ‘treats’ meant in the sense of an outward action? To my ear, it’s the former, but regardless of whether it’s meant exactly that way here, it’s a message I’ve heard enough as part of femminist critique elsewhere that it causes real trouble for me, and I’d appreciate help resolving it. I’ll try to be coherent, if I can.
My experience has largely been of having a surplus interest in sex. I’m not whining about that — I hear lots of people have that problem, it’s part of life. My point is only that there exists a difference and a barrier between my sexuality and the real world.
I often have sexual feelings towards people I don’t know, towards people I know I wouldn’t really want to be involved with, towards people I know would not want to be involved with me, towards lovers when they aren’t in the mood — all of which, according to the reasonable definitions above, objectify those people. It would never be an outward action, but that’s not the point; internally, I’m treating these people as sex objects. Since I’m more attracted to women than men, this is a gendered issue for me.
I could go on — I feel there’s something to be said about having a deficit of power without someone else gaining power over you — but I think the problem’s pretty clear as it stands without further muddling: does this desire itself support rape culture?
A friend of mine worked as an exotic dancer for a while, a verifiable feminist stripper working her way through school and proud of her work. In conversations with her and a couple of her colleagues, I found that while they had excellent theory about their own roles and those of lesbian customers (of which there were a few) in the sexual power system, no one seemed to know how to fit the sexual desire of the male customers into that system. The best characterization they could give it was “sad,” sometimes “pathetic.” I admit that they probably saw some of the least respectable expressions of male desire, but I’m still looking for a good sex-positive feminist theory that rehabilitates het (or bi) male lust. Links appreciated.
This comment was written by Cranefly.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
Kind of an interesting aside with regards to the concept of society giving tacit approval to rape, I found this article earlier today and thought it definitely fell within the confines of what could be considered ‘condoning’:
Excerpt from Harvard Stumbles Over Rape Reporting
by Lorraine Dusky
What sort of corraberating evidence, exactly? Isn’t the very act of investigating rape reports to collect evidence? So basically what this said to me is that women that want to file rape reports (at least at Harvard) need to do the investigative legwork prior to coming forward.
This comment was written by Kim (basement variety!).Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 3:20 pm
Cranefly;
I think in the last thread, this was spoken of more thoroughly; in essence as you suspected, treats is used in it’s active tense - lusting but keeping that lust private is well - it’s natural! Acting on that lust, even if it’s only slightly, in a manner that objectifies the object of that lust (inappropriate comments, unsolicited touches, etc.) is where the line gets drawn. The biggest and most unfortunate drawback of this is that flirting too is natural, but the hypothetical do not cross line is arbitrary from person to person, and how can a person know every single indicator that their actions are crossing the line at all times.
It’s confusing and delicate to balance - I remember being involved at one point with a fella I worked with and the first month of our involvement consisted of covert smiles moving into appreciative looks that progressively got ‘bolder’ (not like staring at crotch bold, but acknowledgment of the other in a personal way bold), and finally culminated in me sending him an email and asking him to lunch. For me, I had to make the judgement call that my asking him to lunch was where the line would be established (after I’d made a calculated opinion on our prior flirtation that it wouldn’t be unwelcome), and accept and back off should he send me a polite, no thanks.
This comment was written by Kim (basement variety!).Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 3:25 pm
A couple of things…
Some people have mentioned the fact that the only “sexual power” women usually ever have is related to their appearance–namely, being beautiful; however, men can have sexual power for many different reasons: if they are wealthy, attractive, intelligent (especially in the humanities), artistically talented, or powerful…to name a few. I would like to point out that many of the characteristics that increase men’s sexual power are considered (by men) to be liabilities if possessed by women. According to this mindset, an intelligent woman is less attractive, as is a female artist or a woman in a position of (political/business/etc) power. I think this only reinforces the point that what is called “sexual power” for men simply means “power” alone–they are what one desires to be–whereas a woman with “sexual power” is what one desires to have.
Also…
I sympathize. I have a friend with larger than normal breasts in proportion
to the rest of her body, and she has been blamed for it far too many times–guys complaining about how her breasts move when she walks or comes down stairs, as though it is something she controls! As though she deliberately made herself this way to torment them!
And finally, regarding this:
That is because these guys do possess the women in the Playboy. They can open and close the pages, look at the women whenever they want, imagine them to be whomever they want. Within the pages of a porn magazine, women are contained. They can’t reject you; they can’t be smarter than you; they can’t disappoint you. They never change and never go away. How unlike real women. No wonder guys who are nursed on porn are so shocked to find that they can be rejected, that real women have opinions and desires.
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May 18th, 2005 at 4:27 pm
Kim (basement variety!) wrote:
Hmm. I read through the last thread from the point after the comment that forked off into this one, and I didn’t really see anything about it. Thanks for the reply, though, and while I would tend to agree with you, I guess I’ve heard too much of the opinion that “lust is a male sin” from both the church I grew up in (”lust is male”) and the feminist theory I read in school (”male lust is inherently objectifying”) to be comfortable just casually assuming that someone doesn’t mean that when they sound like they might. Which is not to say that they’d be wrong, but if it’s so, then I need more help connecting the dots.
This comment was written by Cranefly.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 4:28 pm
To atone in part for taking the thread on a tangent:
If anyone’s going to be serious about making an argument that being sexually attractive in the passive sense is a form of power, they should first make sure they’ve read and understand a bit of mathematics called the stable marriage algorithm. While it fails to model the changing landscape of actual human relationships (and only works for heterosexual pairings!), it demonstrates pretty clearly that the real power in mate selection lies in being the one to approach your intended, not in the more limited power to accept or reject a suitor.
The actual proof is clean and simple and for some reason I’m having trouble finding a link to it right now, but an intuitive approach makes it pretty clear, too: would you rather be in the position of approaching your #1 mate choice first, then (if rejected) #2, and so on down the list, or would you rather wait and see who comes to you (having not succeeded with their higher-ranked choices) and pick your favorite among this pre-selected set?
And this is even if you strip away all the many societal reasons why “being sexy” is not a usable power for women.
This comment was written by Cranefly.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 4:40 pm
Has anyone been heard of the term “pity fuck”? I’m interesting of what you make of this phenomnon.
There’s this guy R, whom I kinda liked but after a couple dates realized that I wasn’t really all that attracted to him. But he was so sweet and kinda pathetic, so i slept with him anyway. Who had the power? Was he manipulating me into having sex, or was I leading him on?
This comment was written by Antigone.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 4:53 pm
Sarah in Chicago wrote;
Interesting. My experience has been precisely the opposite - when I was growing up, at least, Christian conservatives defined “sex” quite broadly. I remember reading Elisabeth Elliot angsting over a kiss she and her then-fiance enjoyed, feeling that they’d crossed the line somehow. Charles Shedd was more mainstream, but there were a lot of Christian conservatives arguing that sex is far more than intercourse, and that Christian teens should draw the line way before hitting the level of what most people call sexual activity.
Which makes the whole abstinence kids having anal sex even more bizarre, from my perspective. I’ve known people who practiced abstinence for any number of reasons, not all religious, but they were their own reasons. The abstinence contracts seem to be more an “imposed from above” or peer pressure sort of thing, so of course kids are looking for loopholes. Still, while I can understand a reluctance to tell kids, “Here’s where to draw the line,” I can’t imagine anyone reading some of the stuff I did assuming any form of intercourse but vaginal “doesn’t count” as sex.
I get the impression the abstinence program in question is presented as secular (wasn’t someone fussing that the program’s secular but the kids get a Bible as an award somewhere along the line?), which added to the fact that the Christian kids I know who are virgins and argue for virginity find the whole idea stupid probably indicates that, whatever it is, it’s nothing like what I was exposed to as a kid.
The current thing in the most conservative Christian circles is courtship rather than dating - courtship is defined differently every time I run across it, but the basic trend is to take the focus off sex and put it on the couple getting to know each other outside of having sex. The courtship movement tends to define sex much as Elliot did - pretty much anything beyond friendly kisses is considered “foreplay” and therefore sexual. So I guess I’m not seeing narrow definitions of sex being associated with conservatives.
Cranefly said,
I talked some about how “treats” is meant in the sense of outward action in post # 8 to this thread. My cousin’s an exotic dancer working her way through college, and having heard some of her tales I don’t think I can fit exotic dancing into any sort of feminist theory (although I know there are feminists who do). Stripping, like most pornography, is pretty much designed to objectify women, IMHO, and isn’t likely to function well outside of that.
I think everyone, male or female, tends to objectify their lust object - it’s natural to want them to be what we fantasize about. Not all feminists agree with me, but I would argue the feminist approach would be to fight against objectifying people and work towards treating people as individuals. To be honest, while on the one hand I’m really opposed to “policing thought,” I do think that if a guy’s having sexual fantasies about someone, while she’s right there, some women can pick that up and that’s part of why they characterize the guy as “creepy.” In that sense lustful fantasies can be an imposition - not only is the guy objectifying her, but she knows she’s being objectified.
I also think there’s a big difference between lust that’s just a visual flitting across your brain and lust that you sit there and dwell on and embroider and elaborate until you’ve got a whole scenario going where the person being lusted after does all manner of things they aren’t likely to do in real life. That, at any rate, was the conclusion of some Puritan(!) commentary I once read on the Matthew 5:28 passage on lust. It is not the fact that you experience lust that’s a sin; it’s when you foster it and cater to it and build on it.
Whether that has any meaning in a secular sense, I dunno. The Puritan guy connected it to, “But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” (James 1:14-15), which I found interesting because a lot of date rapists have pretty obviously planned the rape out before hand (setting it up so the woman is isolated and the like), so I would assume they’ve also fantasized about it. Except the “death” in that passage is no doubt spiritual death, so the parallel isn’t exact, but still…
Treating those we lust after as people does complicate things. If all women are just sex objects, then the rules are pretty easy. But if women are individuals, then what works with one woman may offend the next. Sex objects “bounce back,” so if you mess up, no big deal. Individuals get hurt if you aren’t careful. I sometimes suspect the people who protest to the idea of asking a partner, “Is this okay?” periodically are actually protesting the idea that they shouldn’t objectify someone. If they have to worry about what their sex partner thinks or feels, how can they relax and enjoy themselves? It’s a completely alien approach for them, and I suppose it’s pretty scary.
I wonder if the feminists who give the impression that lustful male thoughts are offensive in and of themselves are women who can sort of “tune in” to a guy’s thoughts. Although with some guys, it’s hard to miss. The old complaint of, “Hey, guy, Hello! My face is Up Here.” There’s a definite difference between a guy who’s too shy to meet your eyes and a guy who doesn’t meet your eyes because he’s too busy looking elsewhere. The line between “lustful thoughts” and “objectifying acts” does get pretty thin, sometimes.
I fear this post has not been very helpful in clarifying what I meant. Sorry about that.
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 5:03 pm
Can I be a sexual being without being a sexual object? Can it be recognized that I LIKE sex and like being percieved as sexy without the mysgynist comments of me “using” my sexuality or the feminist idea the I’m being objectified if I belly dance?
This comment was written by Antigone.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 5:11 pm
Thanks for the clarification, shiloh. I’d read your comments in #8 but interpreted them as being a response specific to the question about one night stands, in which the sexual action line has already been crossed and it’s a question of how it’s carried out. Thank you for taking the time to expand on what you meant, it was very helpful.
This comment was written by Cranefly.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 6:59 pm
And so, in honor of Q grrl not only being rightfully angry at someone in (one of the previous threads) for referring to women as girls, but also not being afraid or ashamed to show it, I’d like to dedicate the following lyrics from Shawn Colvin’s “Sunny Came Home” to her:
“Sunny came home with a list of names
This comment was written by Jenny.She didn’t believe in transcendence
It’s time for a few small repairs she said
Sunny came home with a vengeance”
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May 18th, 2005 at 8:30 pm
Kim (basement variety!) said:
I “heard” a more negative message - just don’t even bother coming forward. *sigh*
Antigone wrote:
There are feminists who argue that belly dancing is objectifying? How depressing. Never gone to a con or gathering or whatever you call it, but most of the people I’ve known who were into belly dance were female. I always thought of belly dance as very affirming of a woman’s sexuality - there is no “right” body type for belly dance; a woman can belly dance into her sixties and beyond; it’s terrific for pregnancy and labor; unlike ballet it’s very individualistic and constantly evolving, etc. In the 1970’s and early ’80’s belly dancing was seen as a feminist act, at least by the belly dancers I knew. It was a way of reclaiming your body and your sexuality.
I suppose women belly dancing in bars are or could be objectified (certainly they are in Egypt), but the only time I saw a belly dancer dance in a bar she gave a brief lecture first on the history of the dance and its meaning - like every other belly dancer I’ve known, she had considerable personal dignity, and certainly no one dared try a wolf whistle or otherwise treat her performance as anything less than art. Although I mostly remember that particular performance because I thought it so bizarre that she’d periodically throw in some Rockette-style high kicks…
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 9:41 pm
Well, I used belly dancing because I’ve never talked to a stripper. But I do belly dance, and a lot of women who claim to be feminist have said it’s objectifying.
This comment was written by Antigone.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 10:00 pm
What the heck does “objectifying” mean, anyway? Treating somebody as though they have no worth beyond their sexual utility to you? It’s really awkward term, like “liberated.”
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 10:34 pm
I understood it to mean treating a woman as an object only, and denying her as a subject.
This comment was written by Brian Vaughan.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 11:14 pm
>>To say that rape, or if you prefer, coerced sexual activity (I am not using the term “sexual violence”? because it covers situations that I am not addressing here, i.e. where the sex may be consensual but non-consensual violent acts occur collteral to the sex, e.g. someone pressuring his girlfriend to let herself be tied up before sex) is not about sex seems to me to be like saying that robbery is not about money.>>
I think that this is sort of a soundbite, albeit a profound one: a way to start thinking about a dynamic, but not a complete description. It’s not meant to imply that there isn’t a sexual element to sexualized violence, or that men who rape don’t get off on rape. I don’t think it’s inaccurate anti-feminist to say that sex, in our culture, is on several levels “about” rape.
One of the myths associated with rape–and one that anti-rape activists have spent a lot of time killing–is the idea that the existence of rape depends on the mediation of sex. That is, that rape exists because men aren’t getting enough sex, or because men are getting too much sex, or because women are making themselves too sexually available, or because women’s bodies aren’t available enough. This has been one of the historical rationales for legalizing prostitution: all that semen has to go somewhere.
Of course, this is bullshit. Rape doesn’t exist because men are horny and women are frigid. Rape doesn’t exist because sexual behavior is constrained or encouraged. Rape exists because men feel entitled to use women’s bodies. The causes of rape are misogyny and inequality. So, in that sense, rape is not about sex, but about power.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 18th, 2005 at 11:25 pm
I suspect that “objectification” is an oblique reference to Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative: that we must treat rational beings as ends, and never merely as means. Like the other formulations of the categorical imperative, and the rest of Kant generally, what this means in practice, if anything*, is uncertain. It doesn’t mean that we can’t “use” other people as means to our own ends. It is possible to “use” other people as means to your ends while still respecting them as ends in and of themselves. This raises the question of what exactly it is to not respect someone as an end. I think that rape and sexual harassment are pretty clear-cut cases of not respecting someone as an end. Kant drew some weird conclusions, though: for example, he believed that masturbation was wrong, because it violated one’s duties to oneself, because when you masturbate, you’re treating yourself as a means to the end of your pleasure, rather than respecting yourself as an end. (?????)
I was thinking about the way that men take a woman’s dressing “provocatively” or “conservatively” as signal of her sexual availability. That seems wrong to me, because it might just be her personal style. At the same time, it seems to me that women (and men) are better off if they have some way of signalling their availability or not. One might say that people really shouldn’t start a relationship unless they’re already friends who know the outlines of each others personal lives in the first place, so there would never be a question of who’s single by choice, single but looking, in a relationship, in an open relationship, etc. Still, some people seem to prefer starting a relationship — or a one-night stand, or whatever — tabula rasa. I guess personals are one solution, or, if you’re a college student and kinda-sorta know someone you’re attracted to, but not well enough to know his relationship status, you could try to see if he has a facebook profile that says anything.
*My ethics professor, Candace Vogler, believes that the view that the categorical imperative is prescriptive at all is a misreading, and, in fact, Kant believed that people already knew what their moral duties were from common-sense, intuitive ethics, and that in those situations with true moral dilemmas, the categorical imperative can’t be used as a formula for finding the right answer: you just have to think about it in common-sense terms until you come to a conclusion about what’s right. The point of the categorical imperative is to explain why we have the morals we do, not tell us what our morals should be.
This comment was written by Julian Elson.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 4:19 am
Well, I used belly dancing because I’ve never talked to a stripper. But I do belly dance, and a lot of women who claim to be feminist have said it’s objectifying.
Then they are Calvinists, not feminists. There is nothing inherently objectifying about a woman belly dancing, any more than a woman playing soccer or acting in a movie or dancing in a ballet. Of course, in all of these there is always the possibility that a viewer will see the body but never see the human being but that is the viewer’s problem, not the woman’s.
(I think people have more problems with stripping because it seems to be all about turning women into bodies. For a different view, read Lily Burana’s Strip City.)
This comment was written by AndiF.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 7:22 am
I run in radical feminists circles and I have never heard or read of one saying belly dancing was inherently objectifying. I don’t who these feminist women you’re speaking to are and I don’t deny your expereience, but I haven’t encountered it in radical feminism. The well mannered men in the audience shiloh spoke of knew the differences between strippers and belly dancers and having seen both I know the differences too.
This comment was written by Samantha.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 7:24 am
(I think people have more problems with stripping because it seems to be all about turning women into bodies
Or because it involves money. People are a lot more comfortable with women selling themselves when the terms of the exchange are not explicit.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 8:10 am
To add to mythago’s point, I would be upset if my boss wanted to pay me by stuffing money into my underwear instead of with direct deposit.
This comment was written by Samantha.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 8:36 am
Or because it involves money. People are a lot more comfortable with women selling themselves when the terms of the exchange are not explicit.
Perhaps but belly dancers also often get money from the audience. I think the difference in perception might be because belly dancers (at least the ones I know) do it because they enjoy dancing and especially enjoy becoming so sensual about and in control of their bodies. There is a great movie called ‘Satin Rouge’ that, among other things, explores some of these ideas.
This comment was written by AndiF.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 8:39 am
Shiloh, on thinking about this overnight, I’m having trouble with using the Puritan idea that “it is not the fact that you experience lust that’s a sin; it’s when you foster it and cater to it and build on it” (from your comment #69) to describe the feminist problem with objectifying people — largely because my early religio-sexual education used exactly that line of reasoning to make the case that masturbation was a sin. According to them, the problem was not “spilling seed” (at least they didn’t misinterpret the Onan story in the usual manner) but that when masturbating one is likely to foster, cater to, and build sexual fantasies, which is committing adultury in one’s heart. Likewise reading books with sex in them, etc.
(Coincidentally, that was also their reasoning behind the other phenomenon you talked about in #69, the broad definition of the “sex” in “sex outside marriage” to include anything likely to spark arousal.)
I’m probably over-sensitive to that line of argument, seeing how much it fouled up my own sexual development. So it’s likely that the definition you give is a generally useful one and it’s my own baggage that keeps it from being useful for me.
This comment was written by Cranefly.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 10:01 am
I don’t think stripping, belly-dancing or even prostitution are INHERENTLY objectifying. I do think it’s possible to conceive of such professions/performances being done in such a way that the individuals involved are seen as active subjects, not objects (as a comparison, think of male athletes).
What makes them negative for women (on the whole, I’m talking about trends here) is that the women involved aren’t constructed as subjects in our society. They are objectified through the misogynistic cultural practises we have regarding women and their sexualities/bodies, those that we have been discussing for three threads now *smile*
There are certainly women out there that can use such occupations to garner a degree of power (or perform a resistance to their wider oppressions) in their situation - hell, I love belly dancing as it purposefully CAN’T be done by women who are twigs: you NEED curves to do that the right way (speaking as a woman athlete with a swimmers body, ain’t gonna happen for me, no matter how femme I am *smile*) . I’m even in favour of decriminalising prostitution, as that puts considerably more power and safety in the hands of the women that do it, but that’s a different discussion *smile*
Personally, I think it COULD be empowering to have women in control of their bodies and sexualities, it could be highly empowering. But such performances need to be placed in their sociocultural context, and right now, in our culture, this is hard to argue as being anything other than a resistance rather than any real empowerment.
We need to ensure that we don’t look at performances of self outside of the relationships they are placed in. And in a society where in virtually all situations of cross-gender interaction are women-as-defined-by-men, then women are going to have large issues in self-definition, particularly in those areas that involved considerable social stigma. NONETHELESS, I do think such spaces provide excellent places for actions, ones that could be used as deconstruction … but I’ll launch into Lacanian analysis here *grin* so to head that off, I’ll say it has to be quite strategic.
This comment was written by Sarah in Chicago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 10:30 am
I think the difference between belly dancing and stripping is that the goal of stripping is to turn guys on; any artistry is secondary. A lot of strippers are good dancers, but when they dance “for themselves,” they don’t usually do a stripper’s dance. Belly dancers, OTOH, will do much the same dance for themselves or for a hetero female audience or for a mixed audience. The goal and purpose of belly dancing is artistic expression. The goal and purpose of stripping is to excite people (usually men) sexually; if the stripper hasn’t done that, she hasn’t done her job.
I think the feminist protest to stripping is that a woman is putting her sexuality on the market, which is problematic because it implies that women’s sexuality can be bought and sold.
Cranefly,
Well, as I said, I’m not sure that Puritan perspective does have much use in a secular world. I didn’t mean to connect it to the feminist perspective, necessarily, it’s just that you brought up that verse and I got to thinking of it. But I do think there can be a danger to guys fantasizing about having sex with a particular woman when they’re not actually involved with her, especially when it comes to sexually fantasizing about a woman they’re going to date, because I think it makes it harder for a guy to actually hear a woman’s protest to sex if he’s already “decided” she wants it.
Not all date rapes are deliberate on the guy’s side, in the sense that what he wants is consensual sex. It’s just that when she says “no” or tries to push him away, he does it anyway. Guys who rape and then blithly expect the girl to go out with them again have clearly not recognized what they did. I think in those cases the guy’s fantasy is blocking reality. He dreams of her being something else so strongly he can’t see what she really is.
My solution to the whole “fantasizing equals adultery” thing as a kid was to keep my sexual fantasies to fantasy people. I can’t agree with your early religious educators that Christians can’t read books with sex in them, because the Bible itself uses sexually graphic imagery on a right regular basis (Old Testament rather than New, but still…). I don’t think Jesus meant to say sexual fantasy per se is a sin - He is directly speaking of looking at a specific woman and fantasizing about HER.
And I’m conflating religious and feminist concepts again. Sorry about that. It may be my religious background influencing me, here, but even speaking as a feminist I would be uncomfortable sexually fantasizing about some man I knew who wasn’t my lover. Maybe it’s because I have a strong fantasy life in general, but I think it would influence my relationship with them, or my view of them, and I don’t think that’s a good thing. I want to recognize people as who they are and not turn them into what I wish they were.
“Free to be… you and me” implies, to me, that I allow the other person the freedom to be who they are, whether their beliefs and opinions fit with mine or not. Anything that interferes with that process I view with suspicion.
I think we objectify others when we expect them to subvert their personality to our preferences. It isn’t objectifying my husband to fantasize about him sexually - he loves that! It would be objectifying a Mormon guy or a conservative Christian guy to fantasize about him sexually, because he woud never do those things with me in real life. I suspect even the guys who say they’re doing a woman no harm by turning her into their sex object, on the grounds that they’d love it if she treated them as sex objects, would change their tune if they knew the woman’s sexual fantasy was to see them as the degraded sex slave of a half dozen barbaric homosexuals, ultimately saved by the love of a good man, who the slave then services sexually in a loving and submissive fashion….
Which, let’s face it, is the plot of many a fanfic written by a woman, written specifically because it turns her on. But that is not, I suspect, quite the sexual fantasy most hetero males would care to live out. I’ve been surprised to discover that people object (”What? I would never do that!”) to much more common sexual practices - I married a guy who is open to just about anything, but some of the guys I dated would never have done what I wanted in real life.
One of them actually did ask, “You didn’t imagine I would do that…?” and I was very happy to be able to say, “No, nope, not me.” Because from his tone of voice - yeah, the idea that I might have fantasized about him doing that bothered him. Should it? I dunno. Would it most guys? I dunno again - I tend toward geeks, guys who are probably more introspective than the average male, so maybe the guys I date are more sensitive to that sort of thing.
The “problem” with treating people as individuals is that they respond as individuals - what bothers you might not bother them, and vice versa. I try not to sexually fantasize about real people first because it would bother me if I knew they were doing that to me. I’m sure some women don’t care, while others would think it was great. And secondly, I feel sexually fantasizing about someone changes my view of them - again, some people might feel their fantasy life is completely separate from their real life and not consider this a problem. My problem with that is the studies that indicate people’s attitudes are influenced by fantasy (for example, the studies where guys exposed to specific levels of porn then considered women who’ve been raped as more guilty of inciting it and less harmed by the experience than they had previously). Our fantasies can influence us more than we realize, and personally I don’t care to risk it.
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 10:55 am
There’s a (brief) discussion of feminism and belly dance here:
http://people.uncw.edu/deagona/raqs/feminism.htm
Among other things shes says:
Most belly dancers don’t wrestle with this too much, because either they’re not professional performers or they don’t perform in venues that make them feel objectified. I’ve never known a belly dancer who’d put up with guys tucking money in her hip band or that sort of thing, on the grounds that in this culture that’s objectifying. I understand other belly dancers have no problems with that - I’m reminded of the debates in families where one side has a “cash dance” at a wedding reception, where the wedding guests pay money to the bride for dancing with her (or for dancing with anyone in the wedding party, or for watching her dance…). People who’ve grown up with the cash dance think nothing of it - people who didn’t grow up with it find it objectifying, or hopelessly patriarchal, or money grubbing. Context is everything.
I think belly dancers are more able to control the context than strippers - I think my cousin went into stripping thinking she could control the context far more than she actually could. In our culture, the only audience for strippers is an audience that is looking to be sexually turned on, usually by seeing her as a sex object and not a creator. Belly dancers have a much broader audience - they can perform at ren faires, mixed-sex and all-age parties, festivals, dinners, retirement homes, etc. They have created a space within the culture where they are not automatically sex objects to be defined by others.
Strippers may be able to create that sort of space someday, too, but I can’t see it in this cultural climate.
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 10:55 am
I think the goal is making money. From my limited experience, it seems that the most sucessful strippers focus on the men who are least likely to get any attention from women. This is the part that bugs me; it appears to me that strip clubs profit by taking advantage of the weak. In general, I don’t think handsome, self-confident men spend as much on strippers as the socialy awkward, adverage looking guy.
If they had a flat rate to get in the door with no tipping, I’d have a easier time seeing with it. Also, I find actual dancing much more sexy than a lap dance.
This comment was written by Ron O.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 10:58 am
I think Shiloh did a good job distinguishing the difference, I just had an additional thought when I initially considered the point - how often do belly dancers experience people catcalling and hooting to ’show us yer tits!’ or ’show us yer pussy!’, which seems to be pretty darn common from what I’ve seen in strip clubs. Granted I’ve only gone a handful of times, but from what I’ve seen that seems to be the general tone from the more boisterious audience members.
This comment was written by Kim (basement variety!).Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 11:43 am
My Turkish friends who liked belly dancing were really aware of the quality of the dancer and when I’ve gone with them, the boisterousness of the audience really seemed to be a response to the dancer’s skill. I don’t think that their reactions (male and female) were that much different than those of fans yelling things at Mia Hamm.
What bothers me about the comments about context is that that approach seems to lead to denying women any agency. If the belly dancer is dancing because she wants to and she enjoys it, should the fact that someone else is objectifying her negate that?
This comment was written by AndiF.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 11:54 am
AndiF -
Good question to bring up, and for us to do such here would be to bring us back to the bad old days of claiming ‘false consciousness’ of women, which is seriously something we want to avoid doing. What is meant by including context is not that women have no agency in their presentation, but rather to understand that the reality being constructed is not entirely of her making. The total ‘product’ as it were is a complex interaction between the woman articulating herself and the sociocultural context (also involving the other individuals around her). At leas that is how I view it.
This comment was written by Sarah in Chicago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 12:16 pm
AndiF wrote:
My point was that belly dancers have taken charge of context. At one time, in the states, belly dancing was “hoochie koochie” and it was considered about on par with stripping (strippers didn’t take as much off back then). It was considered something done for men, and for men’s enjoyment. Many dancers in the seventies and eighties deliberately worked to challenge that context, and to create a new context of their own.
Whether strippers can do that, I don’t know. I don’t think they can if strippers only appear in bars to audiences of mostly men who are more interested in their nakedness than their artistry. I think it’s possible for a woman to ignore the fact that she’s being objectified, but OTOH it’s a lot tougher to keep your head space clear when the guys are loudly demanding to see your pussy than it is when the guy is just sitting there thinking his own thoughts. I believe context demands that a stripper needs a much stronger sense of self to perform without feeling used than a belly dancer does.
I’m all for women having a strong sense of self - but I still think in a lot of areas we need to work to change the context. When the underlying assumption is that a woman’s sexuality belongs to men, then the woman refusing to believe that in her own mind is only the first step - that concept needs to be challenged in society at large.
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 12:57 pm
I think there are more rapists than feminists because too many women already refuse to believe that most men think women exist for them, sexually and otherwise. I know I told myself what a badass sexy chica I was for fooling around with just about any guy in front of me thinking I was 100% their equal in this “post-feminist” age. Boy, did those boys prove me wrong about how equal I thought I was in my own head.
Without societal changes making women what happens in women’s heads doesn’t amount to much more than mental self defense. At the core of these conversations has been questioning real power as compared to percieved power. I’m not a physicist, but if what goes on in a person’s head is the extent of their power it’s bound to happen that pressure from outside exerts a force stronger than the weaker one inside and comes to dominates the space inside.
Men’s outside force is working overtime to pressure women’s inside forces into thinking they have gotten all the equality they need and perhaps a smidgeon more than is even good. Most women believe it; that’s how oppression works.
This comment was written by Samantha.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 1:02 pm
The sentence should read “Without societal changes making women externally more equal that happens in women’s heads doesn’t amount to much more than mental self defense”, and pretend I switched the i and e in perceived before submitting. :)
This comment was written by Samantha.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 2:09 pm
Interesting discussion, to include a little bit more on my PERSONAL experience:
I belly dance because I like to. I’m a very curvy women, in a society that seems to think that “thin is in”, so to me, this is a good way to experess my sensuality in a way that doesn’t conform to social norms. It feels very artistic, and natural (and I like the outfits :D). But many girls say something to the effect of “your just trying to turn guys on” and “you’re degrading women on the whole”. And men start doing this thing where their eyes glaze over their mouth opens a bit and I’m pretty sure they are having their own fantasies. I honestly get similar responses when I say I model nude for the art class.
I guess I can’t change anybody’s oppinion about it, but, in turn they can’t change it mine either. I know a lot of guys that think that women are the “lesser” sex, the weaker sex, the more vunerable, less important sex. (Go on a conservative blog if you don’t think this is a case, see how much they bitch about “self-righteous, uppity American feminist chicks”). But, if I know that I AM EQUAL, then I’m okay with letting them be wrong in their own heads. Which, I guess, doesn’t make me equal- it makes me better.
This comment was written by Antigone.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 3:12 pm
Antigone, I think that you can.
Jettisoning our sexuality because misogynists use it against us is letting them win. It all comes down to why you’re doing something. I belly dance for several reasons: it’s good exercise, I enjoy it, and it makes me feel sexy. There are no men in my class. No men have ever seen me dance. I don’t feel sexy because someone else is watching me and lusting after me. I feel sexy because I am fully inhabiting my body and allowing myself to love it. And I’m not giving that up.
We have the right to be sexual creatures. We have the right to want sex, and to dress to get it. But we also have the right to change our minds or to be selective in our partners. If I’m wearing a halter top in a bar, maybe I do want sex, but that doesn’t mean that I am in any way obligated to accept the creepy guy that’s currently hitting on me.
It is possible to mislead or hurt others, which is never a good thing. but sometimes misunderstandings are the fault of the other party. And in the case of the creepy guy in the bar, the problem’s definitely on his end and not on mine.
This comment was written by Lo.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 7:49 pm
Lo writes:
Yes, we have that right.
I do think, though, that this touches on one of the issues that came up on the previous thread: the way in which the gender construct of “men attract partners by directed action; women attract partners by passive display” can contribute to the rape culture by fostering feelings of resentment and anger against women in men.
One of the big problems with the way in which we consider passive displays like costume and “beauty” as the only socially-accepted way for women to signify their sexual willingness and/or availability is that visual beauty is not a directed form of communication. You’re on display, sure — but for whom is that display intended? How is one to know?
Men put on visual displays too, of course, but traditional gender roles also offer them far more in the way of active methods for signifying interest in particular people. Furthermore, society teaches girls to look for and to interpret those methods as the signifiers of interest, while we teach our boys to look to the purely visual–beauty, certain body types, fashion, “how she’s dressed,” and all that–as the signifiers of female interest.
I’m not saying that’s hard-wired. We teach boys and girls to look for different things as the signifiers of interest — and we teach them to do different things to indicate their own degree of interest as well.
And I do think that this contributes to the problems that came up on the other thread. How, after all, is the “creepy guy” to know that the sexy outfit isn’t meant for him? He’s not been trained to notice how you look at him, or how you respond to his overtures, or whether when you smile politely at him, it’s a perfunctory “just being courteous” smile or a genuine flirtatious smile. He’s only been trained to look at how you look.
The problem with visual signals is that they’re generic, undirected. They signify availability and interest…but you can’t control to whom. So you end up with a situation in which the woman who, let us say, really went to the bar in the hopes of flirting with one particular guy she had a crush on ends up leaving feeling very annoyed at the way she was mashed on by all and sundry all night long. Meanwhile, “all and sundry” wind up feeling resentful and ill-used and, well, teased - because the signals they’d been taught meant “green light” actually got them an “ewwwwwww! Go away, you creepy beta male, you!” response.
Not, of course, that any of that excuses rape, or that it means the woman is doing anything “wrong,” or even that your particular creepy guy wasn’t just a, well, you know. A creep. I do think that it contributes to the rape culture, though, because it encourages the notion that the equation “men are horny; women are frigid” is somehow natural — it encourages men to think of women as both the obectified and as the sexually privileged sex.
Women aren’t the sexually privileged sex. I can understand how they might seem it to men sometimes, though, because I don’t think that men are generally aware of just how often women are similarly frustrated in their desires.
They aren’t aware of it in part, I think, because men aren’t taught to attract primarily by visual cues, and because women aren’t taught just to look. I think that women are therefore often in a better position to correctly identify the degree of a man’s interest in them and consequently don’t get smacked with the “ewwwwwww! Get away from me, you dog!” response quite as often.
(Instead, they just sigh and go home and think dire vengeful thoughts about how much they resent attractive men, and about how men are, like, so totally the privileged sex. And they remain invisible, a la Tiptree.)
Of course, I do think that this ties into the entitlement issue as well. Part of the reason that boys aren’t taught how to read signals very well is that they’re also taught that they shouldn’t need to do that: they’re entitled, dammit! It was not too long ago, after all, that women were legally little more than chattel. Social structures that weighty don’t just erode overnight. Alas.
[Note: Reading this over before posting it, I suddenly realize that it would be very easy to interpret this as harshing on Lo. Eep! Not at all my intent! So just to clarify: I wasn't harshing on you, Lo, nor saying that dressing up to go out on the town and maybe find someone is a horrible thing to do, nor that your being pestered by the creepy guy was in any way your "fault," nor anything else of that sort. I was just trying to point out some of the things about how we've constructed gender roles that I believe lead to just the sort of weird sexist assumptions we saw so much of in the last thread. It's the gender disparity in how we teach people to read signals--and the gender disparity in the acceptable signals themselves--that I see as the problem here, absolutely not someone who looks good being sexually selective!]
This comment was written by Elkins.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 8:45 pm
Elkins wrote:
Men who rape are not good face readers - in studies, they’re unable to tell the difference between a woman’s friendly smile and a more seductive smile or expression. I think these are studies done on blitz rapists, incarcerated rapists, but I can’t remember where I read it so I’m not sure. But I wonder if they just never bothered to draw a distinction because of their sense of entitlement. If someone assumes women are there for his sexual enjoyment, he’s not worried about what she’s thinking.
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 19th, 2005 at 10:53 pm
But many girls say something to the effect of “your just trying to turn guys on”? and “you’re degrading women on the whole”?.
Do you use the Icy Stare, or merely point and laugh?
If they had a flat rate to get in the door with no tipping, I’d have a easier time seeing with it.
Because then you can avoid confronting the uncomfortable reality that the women are only interested in your money? After all, if you don’t have to tip to get their attention, you can happily buy into the illusion that the female attention is about you, you, you.
I have to say that as a stripper, I never noticed the “go for the losers” phenomenon you mentioned. “Go for the guy spending money,” sure. Handsome men, in my experience, expect to get female attention for their looks, and are puzzled or angered when that rule doesn’t apply–such as in a strip bar, where a pretty face always loses to an open wallet.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2005 at 1:32 am
Men who rape are not good face readers - in studies, they’re unable to tell the difference between a woman’s friendly smile and a more seductive smile or expression.
The most intuitive explaination of this to me — which is not to say the right one, but the most intuitive one as I’m no psychologist — is that empathy, among its many functions, allows more accurate reading of facial expressions and prevents people from raping each other. Rapists have little empathy, which is the cause of both their rapes and their difficulties telling facial expressions apart.
With regard to women’s dependence on passive display signals, while men use directed action, I don’t know about women’s female friends, but men are generally not offended about women transgressing their gender prerogative by doing the asking. Generally, most guys I know think that the expectation that they’re the ones who ask is a burden, not a privilege (they may be wrong about this, because they don’t have much experience with creepy women hitting on them: the grass is always greener, huh?). I have read one account of a man who thinks that women should wait around for some man to ask them out, and men should do the asking: that guy who wrote He’s Just Not That Into You. Every other man I can recall would prefer that this particular construction were more equal. So, if you want some man, and the “passive display” signaling isn’t working, just ask. You’ll strike a blow for gender justice, you’ll avoid ambiguity about whether you were rejected or he just didn’t pick anything up, and you’ll possibly make that guy’s day too!
Of course, all of this is easier said than done, which is exactly why most of us males think of it as a burden in the first place :^).
This comment was written by Julian Elson.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2005 at 5:18 am
Julian Elson,
I think your empathy comment is right on. I don’t know anything about these types of studies with rapists and response to facial cues, but in my field (pain neuroscience) empathy is a big deal right now and some of the neural correlates of empathy have started to be described in functional MRI studies. It would be interesting to see if some of these neural correlates are missing in rapists (although that might be used as another excuse for their abhorrent actions).
Quick comment on the “passive display”… As a terribly shy youngster I was usually able to recognize the “passive display” behavior but horribly incapable of acting on it. Thank goodness as I grew older women seemed to grow out of this ridiculous culturally imposed behavior and became forward with me because I never grew out of my shyness (although I guess they caught onto my “passive display” signal). As a man i can say that a forward (but not aggressive in the man sense) woman who knows what she wants and goes for it is hands down the biggest turn on I can think of. I can honestly say I don’t know any other men who don’t agree with that, but then again, the more I read this blog and its comments the more I’m convinced that my little science circle of friends is just about polar opposite from the rest of the world!
This comment was written by Ted.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2005 at 5:39 am
One thing that really undercuts the idea of ‘female sexual power’ is the advantage of being ordinary. I am very ordinary looking and have always been very happy about it. Even back in my younger days, I rarely had to worry about being hassled in bars or on streets; there were always plenty on much better looking women to get the attention. The guys I attracted were the ones I met in situations where we got to know each as individuals; deciding to date was a natural outgrowth of enjoying each other’s company. The advantage carried over into work where I also had the advantage of being taken (pun intended) at face-value.
In high school and college, I had a friend who had an absolutely gorgeous body. I was teasing her once about her lousy relationships when she got angry and said “Yeah, how well would you do if every guy you met said ‘nice to meet you’ and then did this” as she bent over so her face was level with my breasts and her hands were in the grope configuration.
Her anger and her situation made it very clear for me how bogus the notion of ‘power’ of women is when the best thing for a woman is to not be seen as one.
This comment was written by AndiF.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2005 at 6:28 am
I’m always hestitant aboput accepting studies like these (can you find a link to some shiloh? I’d really appreciate it hon) because the vast majority of studies show no psychological difference between men who rape and men who don’t.
Why I am hesitant is that any study that shows those kinds of studies can be held up by anti-feminists or MRA’s as “See! They are sick! There’s nothing wrong with society, it’s all about the guys, all you feminists are wrong, we don’t need to change society”. It gives them a chance to distance themselves and not look at what they have done to contribute or continue a sexist culture.
You can really see this in the reactions to the school shootings that have been happening. The perpetrators were constructed as disturbed boys, somehow fundamentally screwed up. This allowed the societies and communities where this occured to a certain extent deny culpability in creating an environment where this could occur. Classic in this was the whole “blame the video-games” or “blame the internet” responses that cropped up, when perhaps … oh, I don’t know … maybe the fact that these guys were bullied and harrassed all the bloody time MIGHT have had something to do with it (but, of course, we don’t want to do anti-bullying initiatives, because that would increase tolerance for ‘lifestyles’ that are wrong and evil).
I’m not saying that these guys DON’T have something wrong with them, and niether am I saying they are just victims of their environment. But you see similar stuff in relation to hate crimes and racist behaviour (saying how bad the racist is allows us not to investigate our our racism, for instance). The overwhelming evidence shows that the majority of these guys that rape aren’t any different, and we need to be wary of anything that stops people from stepping up to the plate and taking a personal stake in that.
(but then, of course, this kind of framework is quite prominent in my dissertation, so I’m kinda biased too *smile*)
This comment was written by Sarah in Chicago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2005 at 9:52 am
I’ve never been able to confirm this, but my suspicion for some time has been that in most decent heterosexual relationships, the first move was made by the woman.
I’ve really never seen any other way around the problem that when men try to initiate things, it’s almost always unwelcome, and usually makes women uncomfortable at best.
This comment was written by Brian Vaughan.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2005 at 9:59 am
I find an “your-so funny” laugh and a patronizing pat on the head works best for this.
This comment was written by Antigone.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2005 at 10:04 am
Actually I just avoid strip clubs altogether now because they make me uncomfortable.
I don’t have a problem with stripping in theory. If voyeurs want to pay exhibitionists to get naked, then good for them. I was just thinking about the differences between watching belly dancing (and I forget the name for them, but those cabaret, sexy song & dance shows that are gaining popularity) and going to strip club. My thinking was that strip clubs contribute to the rape culture in the way other shows don’t by making the money transfer direct and frequent. Maybe having men be able to purchase attention in such a direct way contributes to their sense of entitlement. An average guy is more likely to have an open wallet. I was not trying to say that you or any other strippers were greedy bitches only interested in a man’s wallet, but you are there to make money. I do think that economics of the transaction does reinforce an attitude that women are there for men’s enjoyment as long as the men are willing to part with their cash over and over and that that can be damaging. So that led me to think about how the economics could change. Perhaps if stripping were more like other entertainments with a flat entry rate, they’d be less misogynistic and the exhibitionists could just enjoy making their living entertaining the voyeurs w/o re-enforcing that sex object/wallet problem. Maybe it wouldn’t work. You’d know better than me.
You are perfectly right to point out that my opinion is influenced by the fact that I’m pretty turned off by the whole atmosphere of strip clubs. When I went in the past I found myself wondering who had kids, who was paying for school, who was supporting their shitty boyfriends coke habit, etc. Then there’s that detached look in the eyes of half the women, so the whole thing is depressing to me. In the best routines I remember seeing the women could dance, showed a lot pf personality, and after a few songs still wasn’t completely naked; it was more about her and not just her body.
Even though I have no interest in going anymore, stripping is here to stay, so I’m interested to know what we can do practically to structure it better. Can it be done in a way that re-enforces agency in women? Where men are subtly or not so subtly influenced to view women as more sexy for their confidence and abilities?
This comment was written by Ron O.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2005 at 11:04 am
Sarah in Chicago,
I looked around a bit before I posted last night and couldn’t find the study - I was thinking I read about it in I Never Called It Rape, but in a quick skim of that the closest thing I could find was Heilbrun and Loftus’ study where 60 percent of the men who “rated faces of women displaying emotional distress to be more sexually attractive than the faces showing pleasure” had “committed repeated episodes of sexual aggression”. I’ll keep looking, but I have read a ton of stuff on rape this past year and haven’t been taking notes, so I’m not too hopeful.
I did a quick google and didn’t find the study I was remembering, but I did run across one that says women are better at reading faces than men - but neither sex was right even 50% of the time! (Chosing between four possible emotions.) If that’s typical, then even if rapists are worse at reading women’s faces, it’s probably not by much.
http://www.yorku.ca/ycom/profiles/past/nov99/current/dept/dispatch/dsp4.htm
I thought there were studies showing that men who rape tend to have more “traditional” attitudes about male-female roles, and considerable openness to aggression in sexual relationships. Warshaw mentions a study by Karen Rapaport and Barry Burkhart on that, and I think I’ve seen others mentioned. The sheets on “how to avoid a rape” usually warn against guys who have overly traditional attitudes toward women and who are aggressive.
OTOH, I tend to be skeptical about that whole idea that you can peg rapists by their attitudes, because the worst sexual assault I’ve dealt with, the guy who did it considered himself a feminist, his friends considered him a feminist, his best friend was a female feminist, and he completely rejected the whole traditional “women should get married and have kids” scenario. He wasn’t exactly known for aggression, either. Nor did he buy into the idea that women want sex less than men - his theory was that if he forced it on me (I was a virgin), I’d decide sex was a Pretty Good Thing, and thank him after. Which is the classic rape myth, really, but isn’t connected to traditional attitudes as far as I can tell.
And I would think the fact that rapists rape must indicate that they’re more open to aggression in sexual relationships, studies or no studies. But I guess what the studies showed is that the guy doesn’t have to be typically aggressive to rape - contrary to the studies on incarcerated rapists, who do often to have a history of general aggression.
I believe the idea that rapists are bizarre aberations was pretty much disproved by Malamuth’s study where more than half of all men surveyed reported they’d rape so long as it was called “force a woman into having sex” and they were sure they wouldn’t get caught. Then there’s the fact that one in twelve men confess to having committed rape (Koss, other studies show about the same) - I’m supposed to buy that one in twelve men are psychologically whacked? All the studies I’ve seen that indicate rapists share certain views of reality, it can be easily shown that these views of reality saturate the culture as a whole. And then there’s the anecdotal evidence, like this gem, from an old discussion here:
Last post to this thread:
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2004/05/05/how-many-men-are-rapists/#comments
Whether this guy has raped or not, he certainly considers rape as normative. One hopes that sentiment isn’t common, but of course in reality it is. *sigh*
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2005 at 11:31 am
I do think that economics of the transaction does reinforce an attitude that women are there for men’s enjoyment as long as the men are willing to part with their cash over and over and that that can be damaging.
See, I tend to see it working the other way - the cash is a reminder that the women are not there because they love getting naked for strangers orbecause men are naturally entitled to look at women however much they like. (I used to tell shocked ‘liberal’ friends that the difference between stripping and walking around in public normally was that in a strip bar, I got paid to listen to the catcalls, and if anyone gave me any crap there was a bouncer five feet away.)
Which to me is the real problem. It’s not the men who paid willingly to stare at us who gave us grief; it was the men who resented having to pay. To those men, hiding the cost of the transaction through a cover fee would just exacerbate the problem.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2005 at 1:27 pm
How can you tell the difference between a man who pays to see a woman minstrel show ‘willingly’ versus a man who pays to see it ‘resentfully’? The look on his face?
I think most strip club going men don’t consciously consider that they’re paying for an act and that leads to a lot of men’s abuse of strippers (and other sex workers). Think how often people think they “know” celebrities because they watch their characters on tv, and that famous study from not too long ago that showed people seeing faces of actors from Friends reacted physiologically as if they were seeing real friends of theirs and not actors. As one stripper recently said in an interview, “We’re not showgirls, we’re prostitutes pretending to be showgirls”, and men treat strippers like they treat prostitutes not like they treat actresses.
I’ve witnessed too many chumps who think they can be quasi-friends with strippers after they’ve paid money to peer into their spread assholes or run their fingers along their genitals. The NY Times had an article a few months ago where a stripper in Las Vegas said she has her stage name and then a second stage name for the yobos who insist she tell them her real name. She never tells them her real name, but why do enough strip club going men demand this information from her to necessitate the fake persona within the fake persona? I’ve got some theories I’m spare you right now, but it’s a good question.
I have also heard strippers speaking of how intricately they construct an entirely false persona for when men ask them the various forms of “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” many seem to take perverse delight in asking. Saying to a man who asks that you’re an anthropology honors student at a local college is a whole lot sexier than saying you wake up at noon, eat macaroni and cheese and smoke pot while watching TV until your 11-2 shift begins.
This comment was written by Samantha.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2005 at 1:51 pm
I see what you mean, though I still think being able buy attention is inherently problematic. I wish more of the men would work on themselves so a woman they know would help them fulfill thier fantasies. But I may be projecting here, I don’t really know what the turn on is for others. From my point of view of as a basically well-behaved male, forking over cash says women are attracted to money like men are attracted to looks. And to bring it back around to the orginal issue, to the adverage guy that makes it seem like women do have more sexual power, because if they don’t have money, they don’t get any attention. I know I felt that way for a long time; what looks I have didn’t do much for me. If I was less introspective or less honest with myself, I have no doubt I’d have ended up one of those boorish men that gave you hell.
This comment was written by Ron O.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2005 at 2:40 pm
Ron O wrote:
But this is assuming all women are attracted by the exact same thing. In my experience, women are strongly attracted by looks, but they are not attracted by the same looks. I think men are socialized to see only one type of beauty (another example of why saying women have “power” if they’re beautiful is false - men define what is beautiful), while women are not strongly socialized to be attracted to a particular look, so women’s visual interest in guys is more dispersed.
I think some men assume women all prefer one particular look, but I ‘ve never known a woman who had my taste in men and I can’t think of any two friends who lusted over the same type of guy, either. One friend lusts after a guy because he’s got a hairy back; the next one hates that. Some women like men with hairy chests; I don’t. A friend of mine had this whole list of physical traits her guys had to have - from dark hair to short legs to broad torso. Most friends have much shorter lists of likes or dislikes - no blondes, or must have brown eyes, or not too tall to dance with.
Guys, in my experience, are less likely to have a personal preferences list and more likely to name a star or type they want (”looks like Barbara Eden” or “built like a Playboy bunny”). When it comes to being physically attractive, if some women have an edge, it’s because guys tend to want the same woman. I’ve “made the moves” on guys who later told me they were convinced they’d never get to date anyone, because they “weren’t good looking” - one of the guys who told me that had at least three other females lusting after him, it’s just that I did something about it and the others… didn’t.
Part of the enculturation of men seems to be to direct them toward a particular type of woman - a particular body type, for starts. Either women aren’t enculturated that way or they fight it off better, I think. In jr. high and high school, at any rate, when an “average” guy whined to me that “all the girls like x”, I could generally respond that I knew of no female who really liked ‘x’, and half of us couldn’t understand why the other guys put up with him. It may be the women who have the look guys like tend to prefer that type of guy (which would explain why so many guys wish they looked like that - the women they want want that), but in my experience most women don’t.
Kind of wandered there, but my original point was that assuming all women are attracted to money just because some women do sex work for it is kind of silly. If women are attracted to money as men are attracted to looks, then why wouldn’t prostitution be the norm instead of the exception? Because women are enculturated against it? To me, that buys into the whole rape myth that women really want sex with every guy who asks, it’s just that they’ve been enculturated to say “no” unless the guy insists.
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2005 at 3:10 pm
Shiloh,
Of course, looking back on it, it is a stupid assumption, but one I had for a long time. There were probably several women who were attracted to me over the years, but I never knew it. Since I was shy and women are socialized to not making thier interest known directly, I really did assume I didn’t have “what women want.” I certainly never got the sex or attention my better-looking, richer or more charming friends got without paying for it & then I felt like a schumck who was taken advantage of for being socially awkward. I was stuck in self-perpetuating rut, I admit. It wasn’t until much later when more women became comfortable with asking men out that I realized I was actually OK and had some power to attract as well. FWIW, my fiance made the first move by calling me first.
This comment was written by Ron O.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2005 at 4:38 pm
It would seem to me that to get a meaningful ratio of rape victims, one would need to put “holding down your reluctant girlfriend”? into a different category than “rape of/by someone that you don’t have an ongoing sexual relationship with”?.
I hope he also puts “having your girlfriend remove your penis with a rusty saw” in a different catagory from “violent assault by someone that you don’t have an ongoing sexual relationship with” as well…
This comment was written by VK.Report this comment to the moderators
May 20th, 2005 at 9:28 pm
How can you tell the difference between a man who pays to see a woman minstrel show ‘willingly’ versus a man who pays to see it ‘resentfully’? The look on his face?
Samantha, do you really want me to discuss this with you? If you’re just throwing insults again, I really am not interested.
From my point of view of as a basically well-behaved male, forking over cash says women are attracted to money like men are attracted to looks.
Again, from my point of view of dealing with non-well-behaved males, the real problem was the men who believe they were entitled to female attention, period. These are the same sort of guys who get mad when a woman sitting next to them on the bus won’t respond to a pick-up line. They resent paying money because, in their minds, it’s unfair that gorgeous women don’t willingly strip for them for free.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 21st, 2005 at 4:00 am
Right. I’ll just barge right in here.
It seems to me that the people in this thread who are spending an awful lot of effort dissecting every tiny aspect of ‘the rape culture’ are barking up the wrong tree. It really isn’t very hard to understand why men rape.
Look, people enjoy having sex, and they enjoy having power over, and dominating other people. If you rape someone, you can have sex *and* dominate someone at the same time. There are of course other things people enjoy which conflict with this, and these explain why all men don’t rape all of the time.
But consider this. Say you were raped, brutally. The thing goes to court, but the rapist walks, because the judge is a misogynist prick.
So you want revenge. So you decide to do the natural thing; an eye for an eye, right? You’ll just rape that bastard right back, and the misogynist, rape-apologist judge too. That’ll teach ‘em that it’s no fun when you force someone against their will. Or will it?
Clearly, no one would want to get revenge
in this way, and the scenario above has never happenef, and probably never will. But why?
Why can men rape women, while women simply can’t rape men?
This comment was written by Vladimir.Report this comment to the moderators
May 21st, 2005 at 11:48 am
“Look, people enjoy….enjoy having power over, and dominating other people.”
People as in everyone, or people as in some people?
“If you rape someone, you can have sex *and* dominate someone at the same time.”
Ummmm….are you trying to say that rape is always about both control and sex? ‘Cause if so, how do you explain all the rapes in which the perpetrator doesn’t ejaculate? All the rapes in which only an object was used for penetration?
“Clearly, no one would want to get revenge
in this way,”
Why is it “clear” that no one would want revenge this way? (are you being sarcastic?)
“Why can men rape women, while women simply can’t rape men?”
Last I checked we could sexually assault men, it’s just harder and we are less likely to do so.
This comment was written by Jenny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 21st, 2005 at 1:21 pm
Vladimir writes:
Er, no. I’ll agree that virtually all people enjoy having sex, but the idea that virtually all people enjoy having power over and dominating other people is flat wrong. The only “power over” anyone I want is the power to keep them from hurting me, and I have no great desire to dominate others. Lest you think this is just because I have been “enculturated” that way, many functional Asperger and Autistic people, who are notorious for their resistence to enculturation, also have no interest in having power over or dominating others. Many people are quite happy so long as they have power over themselves.
Valdimir asks:
It isn’t that women can’t rape men - some women do rape men. One reason there are few female blitz rapists is that the blitz rapist is a bully, and bullies are cowards. Rapists only act if they’re pretty sure they can get away with it - if they think someone will fight back, they look for different prey. Since men tend to be larger than women as a general rule, a male rapist has far more opportunities to rape women than a female rapist would have to rape men. While I’ve never seriously looked into it, my suspicion is that most female rapists would rape children or young men, because of the size issue.
Anyone with any grasp of history knows that when people take an “eye for an eye” approach to life, the situation tends to escalate, and everybody loses. Perhaps women are more likely to take a long term view of things, and thus less likely to retailiate?
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 21st, 2005 at 1:33 pm
> >Look, people enjoy….enjoy having power
> > over, and dominating other people.”?
> People as in everyone, or people as in some
> people?
Everyone, to some degree, and given the right (or wrong, if you see it that way) circumstances.
> Ummmm….are you trying to say that rape is > always about both control and sex?
No.
> >”Clearly, no one would want to get
> > revenge
>> in this way,”?
> Why is it “clear”? that no one would want
> revenge this way? (are you being
> sarcastic?)
No. And clearly, it isn’t as clear to you as it is to me that things would never play out that way. But then again , maybe you’re the idiosyncratic one?
> > “Why can men rape women, while women
> > simply can’t rape men?”?
> Last I checked we could sexually assault
> men,
You’re being too literal.
> it’s just harder and we are less likely to do > so.
Yeah, a whole lot less, in fact I’ve never heard of a confirmed case of a forcible rape of a man by a woman. This, I think, is an interesting (non-) phenomenon, which deserves some kind of explanation.
This comment was written by Vladimir.Report this comment to the moderators
May 21st, 2005 at 2:01 pm
>Er, no. I’ll agree that virtually all people
> enjoy having sex, but the idea that virtually > all people enjoy having power over and
> dominating other people is flat wrong. The
> only “power over”? anyone I want is the power > to keep them from hurting me, and I have no > great desire to dominate others.
Oh, well that’s just splendid!
See, ’cause I’ve always felt that enlightened despotism has a lot going for it. The only problem has always been finding someone who really doesn’t want the power, and consequently can be trusted with it. Now, finally, we’ve found someone we can safely trust to be a just King (queen/whatever).
All Hail Supreme Emperor/Empress Shiloh!
> many functional Asperger and Autistic
>people, who are notorious for their
> resistence to enculturation, also have no
> interest in having power over or
> dominating others.
Well, the one Asperger guy I know definitely
does not fit that description.
> Since men tend to be larger than women as
> a general rule, a male rapist has far more
> opportunities to rape women than a female
> rapist would have to rape men.
The colt 45 ‘equalizer’ was invented back in the 1850s, IIRC.
> when people take an “eye for an eye”?
> approach to life, the situation tends to
> escalate,
That is beside the point I was trying to make.
*Assume* you want revenge. How would or wouldn’t you get it?
This comment was written by Vladimir.Report this comment to the moderators
May 21st, 2005 at 2:42 pm
Vladimir wrote:
I can only speak from my experience. The people I know with Asperger’s are not interesting in controlling others, because it’s too much effort for too little payoff. All they want is for people to quit trying to control them.
Vladimir wrote:
Yes, and it is best used at a bit of a distance. Rape, by its very nature, requires close-up work that is distracting and probably requires the use of one’s free hand. Your average pistol weighs a pound or more - this kind of weight gets awkward pretty fast. Most rape prevention courses recommend aginst using a pistol for a defense because women have been raped facing the muzzle of their own gun.
Vladimir wrote:
Sorry, I feel no obligation to stick to the points you’re trying to make.
Vladimir wrote:
Focussing on revenge puts the other person in charge of my life. Speculating on same strikes me as a complete waste of time.
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 21st, 2005 at 3:07 pm
Women can rape men–we have photos of it from the Abu Gharib prisons. Actually, that entire situation makes the power dynamics in rape very, very easy to grasp. I haven’t yet heard a single person tell me those women in the prison who were sexually abusing the male prisoners were doing it because the victims teased them and they were overcome with lust and couldn’t help themselves.
This comment was written by Amanda.Report this comment to the moderators
May 21st, 2005 at 4:00 pm
Vladimir,
Thus far, your arguments are incoherent and trivial. You have generalized the beliefs of some men as the beliefs of all people, and then seemed (although your argument is sufficiently ill-formed that it is impossible to know what you think you are actually arguing) to argue that women never act on those beliefs. And you framed the entire statement as though it were a profound explaination of why this is so. Actually, all you have said so far is an inaccurate and poorly phrased statement of the starting point of this discussion. Men are more likely to think that rape is a reasonable way of getting either a) sex, b) sex combined with abusive power, or c) abusive power. Women are less likely to do so. This discussion has been about why.
Your answer appears to be: It is natural for people to want that, and women never do (or never act on it). This answer is both logical nonsense, and irrelevant. Even if anyone accepts your argument that a desire for power over is natural, and a desire to for genital-genital contact is natural, so it is natural to wish to combine the two, it is also natural for people to defecate as soon as they feel the need, but you find very few people doing so. The question of whether rape is natural is irrelevant. Depending on how natural you think it is, the question is why is it either amplified by the culture, or not suppressed by the culture.
You know, the belief that all people like power and control and like sex, so it is perfectly natural that people rape, combined with the counter-factual insistence that women never ever commit rape is an interesting position.
Are women not people?
If women are people to you, then how do you explain the fact that women rape much much less frequently than men, despite the fact that they presumably have as much of a natural desire to combine abusive power and sex as men do?
The thing that explains this disparity is what is called rape culture, and is what has been being talked about here. The disparity can be described in either direction (or both): what makes women rape less than men, what makes men rape more than women. However, if, like other sane people, you would prefer that there be less rape in the world rather than more, it probably makes more sense to talk about it in terms of why men rape more often, not why women rape less often.
What makes people like you think that combining the desire for abusive power over and sex is perfectly natural, or more accurately, what makes people like you think that sex is a good tool for enjoying abusive power over another? This is an important question, and one that folks here have been exploring in all the detail that you think is so irrelevant. If you have something to contribute to that question, then please procede, but so far, you are merely stating the starting point of the discussion (and doing a bad job of it) and insisting that the question of “why?” is answered by the statement “It just is.”
Not very interesting.
Also, try to respond in coherent posts, not in one line responses to individual lines of other people’s posts. It is much more likely that a meaningful discussion will result if you actually state your positions, rather than responding to to a question on your position with a one word answer.
is not useful or interesting.
Also, drop the sarcastic and insulting tone.
Not that I have all that much say in setting policy around here. Just some suggestions that might lead to an argument with you being interesting and productive, rather than a waste of everyone’s time.
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 21st, 2005 at 4:19 pm
Victor, how do you reconcile this statement
with this statement?
What gives? Are you interested in an exploration of the possible reasons for that “(non-)phenomenon,” or aren’t you?
I mean, if what you’re saying is that you don’t agree with the reasons people have proposed here, then why not propose some of your own? You seem to be trying to lead people to your own explanation through some sort of Socratic dialogue, but it’s really not working out very well, is it? Maybe it’s time to show your hand.
As for women fantasizing about taking vengeance on men by raping them…well, I guess I’m just not the saint that Shiloh is. Or perhaps I just don’t share her autisms. I fantasize about that frequently when I’m royally pissed-off at someone.
Thing is, though, see, I wouldn’t actually do it. Why?
Well, because I don’t believe that I have the moral right to treat another person like that.
Men who rape clearly don’t have that same idea. On some level, they’re just not grasping that whole “you don’t have the moral right to rape someone just because you feel like doing so” concept. And studies indicate that there are a scarily high number of men who don’t grasp that fundamental moral principle - who think it’s okay to rape women, so long as you call it “using a bit of force” or some such nonsense, rather than calling it rape.
So why? Why is that? Are all of those men really moral idiots, do you think? Isn’t it more likely that they’re somehow being taught that the moral rules which apply to their fellow men do not apply to women, at least not in regards to rape?
This comment was written by Elkins.Report this comment to the moderators
May 21st, 2005 at 4:39 pm
Vladimir. Not Victor.
Sorry about getting your name wrong, Vladimir. My coffee was a’brewing as I wrote, but I hadn’t swilled it down yet.
This comment was written by Elkins.Report this comment to the moderators
May 21st, 2005 at 6:32 pm
> Men are more likely to think that rape is a
> reasonable way of getting either a) sex, b)
What an interesting choice of words.
“Reasonable”.
That is *exactly* what is wrong
with this whole discussion. The words “reasonable” and “rape” (or “mayhem”, “riot”, “rage”, “assault”, “pillage”, or “murder”) just don’t belong in the same sentence. People - which category, since you asked, includes women - don’t sit around *deliberating* as to what would be the ‘reasonable’ course of action and come up with ‘rape’. Neither do they, as someone suggested, sit around philosophizing about the moral correctness of their possible future courses of action; am I *entitled* to rape this person? is this my *just deserts* somehow or other?
No, rather, you do what you can get away with, given societal sanctions and your own inhibitions, and then you dream up a justification afterwards, as needed.
This matters because the remedy that people seem to suggest to ‘rape culture’ is to - over and over again - disabuse presumptive rapists of the notion they suppose they have that they are ‘entitled to access to the bodies of women’. Surely, if you repeat that litany a couple more thousand times they’ll take that into account when they *deliberate* on whether or not to commit rape. Or maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll hear not an abstract (and trivial) point of moral philosophy, but simply the message ’screw you, buddy’. I know I do.
About ‘power over’. Well, I don’t mean to imply that the sort of dominance that a rapist exercises isn’t in some sense pathological. But it’s a pathological exaggeration of things that should be perfectly familiar to anyone who ever spent five minutes in a schoolyard. Usually, people more-or-less grow up, and manage to go through life without ever, or only rarely, feeling a need to openly dominate or humiliate their fellow humanoids. But the potential for that urge is universal, and the thirteen-year-old mind always lurks just beneath the surface.
Now, you say:
> However, if, like other sane people, you
> would prefer that there be less rape in the
> world rather than more, it probably makes
> more sense to talk about it in terms of why
> men rape more often, not why women rape
> less often.
That doesn’t follow. For example, I understand that people in your country, often belonging to your aftrican american minority are given to engage in various types of anti-social behaviour, such as, for example, robbing convenience stores, often run by people from your various asian minorities. Now, while there is no reason not to study what causes a black youth to rob a conveninence store, it might *also* be useful to study what would cause him run one.
But of course, asking the former question offers much less in the way of opportunities for people like Bill Cosby (and other right wing creeps) to act morally superior, so it doesn’t happen.
It seems to me that this is why it’s better to approach the ‘rape culture’ question from the womens’ side rather than the mens’ . If you try to answer the question ‘why do men rape’ it takes about five seconds for any answer to get shot down as being an implicit apology for rape. That doesn’t happen when you flip the question over.
Which brings me to my final point. Now, this is wierd and - ooo Weee ooo!! - paranormal, absurd and unaccountable for, but when I asked the question ‘why’ it was because I was interested in the answer, and didn’t, and don’t, know.
Any ideas?
This comment was written by Vladimir.Report this comment to the moderators
May 21st, 2005 at 7:08 pm
> What gives? Are you interested in an
> exploration of the possible reasons for that
> “(non-)phenomenon,”? or aren’t you?
I am. I hope I’ve explained my position in the above post.
> You seem to be trying to lead people to
> your own explanation through some sort of
> Socratic dialogue, but it’s really not ‘
> working out very well, is it? Maybe it’s time
> to show your hand.
Funny how everyone assumes I’m being *sly*. I’m not. I don’t have a ‘hand’.
> As for women fantasizing about taking
> vengeance on men by raping them…well, I
> guess I’m just not the saint that Shiloh is.
> Or perhaps I just don’t share her autisms. I
> fantasize about that frequently when I’m
> royally pissed-off at someone.
Oh. If that’s commonly the case then my whole argument is shot to hell.
> Are all of those men really moral idiots, do
> you think?
No. But moral rectitude isn’t the only thing to consider. ‘Coolness’ counts, too. Being a rapist -especially when you don’t fit the sneaking-in-the-bushes pervert stereotype - is cool compared to being a kiddyfiddler or a pickpocket. Morally wrong, and all, but cool. Rape will end when Jay Leno starts making the same kind of jokes about Mike Tyson as he does about Michael Jackson.
This comment was written by Vladimir.Report this comment to the moderators
May 21st, 2005 at 7:28 pm
Elkins wrote:
I wonder how common that is. I’ve fantasized about taking a baseball bat to a rapist or two, but I wanted to whap them upside the head with it because I was angry and pounding on the cause of my anger sounded good. And I’ve had more involved fantasies about specific rapists getting a clue about the pain they caused, but those never involved rape, either. I guess I figure if the guy got raped, he’d be focused on his own pain instead of worrying about the pain he caused. I mean, if the guy getting raped was likely to make a difference, then all the guys getting raped in prison would get a clue. Which they generally don’t, best I can tell.
I kind of think that’s part of what caused the problem in the first place - the guy is so hung up on his own angst and pain he’ll do anything to resolve it and he isn’t real interested in worrying about what pain his solutions might cost others.
Vladimir wrote:
But if “socieital sanctions” allow rape as a valid choice, then you’re going to have more rapists. Among other things, this thread - these threads - have been exploring the lack of societal sanctions, and the fact that the culture in some ways endorses the choice to rape. Challenging and changing social standards can be a more effective way of changing behavior than changing laws. The classic example I was taught is the period when deuling was outlawed in the U.S.. In the North, deuling died out, because it wasn’t socially acceptable anyhow. But in the South, the law didn’t make much of a dent, and it took decades for deuling to be elminiated, because Southern society endorsed deuling. Society’s attitudes have more impact than the law.
If coercive sex were truly condemned by the majority in this society, rape would still exist, but far fewer men would choose to rape.
Vladimir wrote:
I am not thrilled with this example, and I think it poorly supports your argument that “it’s better to approach the ‘rape culture’ question from the womens’ side rather than the mens’” - on the contrary, your example suggests that looking into why men rape and what can be done to help them treat women with compassion is the more logical approach. Which I think it is.
If a considerable percentage of rapists justify rape by labeling women the privileged ones, challenging that concept can help to cut down on rapes. If men rape because they believe that men should be aggressive while women are passive, then changing the cultural assumptions so that women are allowed to be aggressive and men passive can cut down on rape. If, as some researchers claim, rape rates are considerably lower in more egalitarian societies, then working toward an egalitarian society will cut down on rape.
This comment was written by shiloh.Report this comment to the moderators
May 21st, 2005 at 9:56 pm
“Oh. If that’s commonly the case then my whole argument is shot to hell.”
I’d say it’s pretty typical of most women I know. So, unless the forces of the universe have conspired to make my life so exccessively unique that the majority of my female aquaintances fall into the furthermost edge of the bell curve when it comes to women and violence, yeah, your argument is shot to hell. (Although my fantasies do run more to the type Elkins describes and for similar reasons, as well as the fact that I generally just want to obliterate them - simply hurting them rarely suffices.)
“No, rather, you do what you can get away with, given societal sanctions and your own inhibitions, and then you dream up a justification afterwards, as needed.”
The point is that culture helps us determine where we draw the lines between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour; indeed, that’s one of it’s main functions. I’m not convinced that people justify things to themselves after the fact, I think they are more likely to justify their actions to others after the fact - once they are caught. Since “inhibitions” covers not just fear and revulsion but morals as well, a person being raised in a culture that is less likely to teach them that something is wrong is also less likely to have inhibitions regarding such actions. Such moral inhibitions, or lack therof, often come with (or are created by) arguments for or in favor of such actions. Maybe I’m unique (though I doubt it) but I don’t choose not to steal only because I was taught that it was wrong, (much less for no other reason than because I’m afraid I’ll get caught), but also because of why I have come to believe that it is wrong. Futhermore, I’m more likely to steal when these arguments fail to hold up due to the circumstance of the situation (if I were ever starving, in need of medicine I couldn’t afford, stealing from someone who steals themselves, etc.). So a society that makes a certain action illegal, but gives weak arguments against such actions, will tend to create a culture that condones such actions, despite the laws against it.
“…moral rectitude isn’t the only thing to consider. ‘Coolness’ counts, too. Being a rapist …. is cool compared to being a kiddyfiddler or a pickpocket. Morally wrong, and all, but cool.”
Um, exactly. How does that not support the idea that culture can and does condone rape? After all, if something is “cool” how wrong can it be? You may be able to argue that rape culture isn’t especially pervasive if rape is only considered “cool” in certain subsections, but I’d hardly consider Jay Leno’s audience representative of only a small subsection of American culture.
This comment was written by Jenny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 21st, 2005 at 10:16 pm
Well, I don’t know about “sly,” but I did think that you were trying to get at something specific in a roundabout way with all of your questions before. Clearly I misread. I apologize if I seemed to be accusing you of some form of dishonesty.
I don’t really know how common it is. (Hey. Maybe I’m just a freak. Who knows?) But it does seem to me that we’ve got an entire body of “sex as violence” metaphor floating about in our language and our thought, and that no matter how strenuously one might intellectually believe that sex isn’t (or shouldn’t be) viewed as conquest or used as dominance display, we’re pretty well enculturated to think of it as such anyway.
And I don’t think all of that enculturation is just directed at men, either. I’m suddenly thinking of myself, as an adolescent girl, listening to Pat Benatar belt out “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” on the radio. That’s sex as violence, sex as conquest, sex as dominance, and even sex as revenge right there –and it’s all being narrated very much from a woman’s POV. I mean, we’re talking pop culture here, not any deeply hidden subtle stuff. That entire idea of sex as conquest, too, is to my mind intimately connected with a view as sex as dominance display, and I remember it being very much a part of how teenaged girls (whose thirteen-year-old minds were still pretty close to the surface) often talked about the objects of their attraction.
So no, I really don’t think that “sex as dominance/violence” is something that only men find themselves internalizing. I do think that society sanctions them actually acting on the more excessive external manifestations of that equation a lot more than it sanctions women doing so, though — like you said, rape is wrong, but it’s also “cool.” Only for men, though. It’s not at all “cool” for women. That right there is what I think we mean when we talk about there being a “rape culture.”
Well, yeah. I do think that’s the solution, in the long run. Unfortunately, the ways in which people get that sense of entitlement are pretty deeply-engrained in the culture. I mean, how do you convince people not to be racist? Obviously it’s not half as simple as just wagging the finger in the face and crying “shame!”
The point is, though, that I don’t think that most rapists (ie, date rapists and marital rapists, not sociopathic serial rapists and the like, who are a much less common phenomenon) really are “deliberating,” any more than the person who has been taught to believe that black people are worth less than white people is “deliberating” when she behaves in a way that reflects that belief. They’re just operating under the assumption that a woman’s volition means less than their own. The same balk instinct that would kick in to stop them from committing some other violent criminal act just isn’t kicking in for a lot of guys when they think about forcing sex on a woman.
Okay, I was with you right up until this line. Now I’m confused. Where’s the feeling of indignation coming from? Is it the entire idea that men are enculturated in ways that make them more likely to commit rape than women that smarts–does it make you feel unjustly accused, in other words; is that where the “hey, fuck you too!” reaction is coming from–or is it something else?
This comment was written by Elkins.Report this comment to the moderators
May 22nd, 2005 at 4:26 am
What about the people who use rhypnol? It’s not an easy drug to get, it’s certainly not something you were likely to get ahold of unless you were planning to rape someone - especailly the variant that makes women infertile! In drug “date rape” cases, the rapist has to have deliberately sat down and thought “I want so I will go to a club and rape someone, I will procure drugs to do so, and I better ake sure she’s infertile coz I don’t want the bitch screwing me for child support later”. In their heads it must be a reasonable course of action, that they are able to drug, rape and screw up the fertility of some women just because they feel like it.
Perhaps not am I entitled to rape, but am I entitled to have sex with this person irrespective of their wishes?
A (male) friend of mine was quite recently raped by a girl he knew - she was staying the night at his house, made a pass at him which he refused (in part because he had a long term girlfriend). At some point in the night, she decided he couldn’t really be serious, how could a guy turn down sex? how could a guy turn her down for sex? So she went into his room and woke him up with a blowjob, and then was surprised that (once concious) he hit her off him and ordered her out of the house.
This comment was written by VK.She honestly believed that, having offered him sex, she was entitled to that sex and ignored his opinion.
Story has a rather sad ending. He didn’t dare tell his girlfriend, afraid she would believe it was consentual and break up with him. He got a load of shit for giving rapist girlie a bruise when he threw her off the bed, and for kicking her out in the middle of the night and that plus problems he then had sleeping around with his gf lead to their breakup anyway.
Report this comment to the moderators
May 22nd, 2005 at 4:44 am
And today’s rhetorial question is…
Is it ever possible to have a discussion about rape without being given examples of the one in a million times that a woman sexually assaults a man?
This comment was written by Spicy.Report this comment to the moderators
May 22nd, 2005 at 8:30 am
Is it ever possible to have a discussion about rape without being given examples of the one in a million times that a woman sexually assaults a man?
I know it’s rare. But it’s a bad effect leading from the rape culture idea - she raped him because she believed it was impossible for a man to refuse sex, that men cannot control themselves and have such a great desire for sex that they _cannot_ ever mean no.
While it’s the reverse of the logic of why men rape women, they both stem from a simliar idea - that men have a greater desire for sex. An idea that is not nessisarily true, but is accepted as true and have negative consequences. This is what we were talking about yes? Rape culture, beliefs in our society causing rape. Just because it happened to a man doesn’t make it any better.
This comment was written by VK.Report this comment to the moderators
May 22nd, 2005 at 9:11 am
>>Perhaps not am I entitled to rape, but am I entitled to have sex with this person irrespective of their wishes?>>
If you don’t understand that these are exactly the same thing, you really shouldn’t be here.
This comment was written by piny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 22nd, 2005 at 8:08 pm
I think VK’s point was that in the mind of the rapist, they’re not raping–they’re not beating the woman over the head and physically violating her in a dark alleyway, they’re just, like, encouraging her.
while women simply can’t rape men?
Of course they can. Surely I’m not the only one who’s seen the pool-cue scene in A Gun for Jennifer? (Okay, maybe I am.)
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 22nd, 2005 at 11:08 pm
Excellent post, Elkins.
Exactly! I took a similar thesis in the other thread. The fact is, directed action takes more work than passive display. When your directed action is rejected, you suffer more than if your passive display is rejected. Because males bare the emotional brunt of being actively rejected, they must learn to suppress their emotions. They must become more stoic, and also learn to invest less emotionally when they pursue females in the future (knowing that you may well be rejected painfully is a disincentive for you to invest emotionally). If a male is afraid to invest in a woman emotionally, he is more likely to see her as a sex object, and he is less likely to seek out genuine emotional connection with women in the future. Furthermore, when males are required to become extra stoic, they are likely to (a) look down on less stoic men as “wimps,” and (b) look down on women as “over-emotional.”
As Warren Farrell has pointed out in Why Men Are The Way They Are, males may react to this state of affairs by seeing their interactions with women as “the game.” The advantage of playing the game is that you can’t really get hurt… but neither can you show the vulnerability that would make a real relationship possible.
This system is obviously fucked up. It is unfair to females, because it reduces them to sex objects. It is unfair to males, because it often requires them to ignore their own feelings, and substitute those feelings for assertiveness and sexual aggressiveness. In romantic/sexual situations, there is usually a certain level of doubt, hesitancy, nervousness, and ambiguity. By requiring males to initiate, our culture is saying that the man must thrust aside all of those extremely human feelings, and go for it. He is supposed to do it in such a confident and smooth way as to alleviate all of the woman’s feelings of uncertainty also by “sweeping her off her feet.”
In a context like initiating kissing, because situations with women are so often ambiguous (not all women give clear signals that men can read), a man must basically try to read the woman’s mind. This becomes harder when he has no idea how to read body language and recognize what few signals do come his way. Thus, there will usually be a certain amount of ambiguity: he will never be able to tell for sure whether she really wants him to make a move or not. If he asks, he risks being seen as a “wimp” who isn’t confident or smooth enough to sweep her off her feet. Thus, he must take a risk, which means ignoring the chance that she might not want him to initiate. He must ignore her feelings to some degree also. And he might feel bad about about doing so, but apparently those feelings don’t matter either.
Yes, the training that males get for dealing with women in romantic/sexual situations in our culture is so abysmally bad it defies belief. It isn’t practical, it is damaging to both males and females, and it doesn’t seem to correspond to what women actually want and feel comfortable with. I’m not even going to get into all the reasons for this right now, because there are so many.
Of course, men are supposed to do all this stuff naturally. But not all males are naturally smooth, suave, confident, and sexually assertive. The current system seems to assume that males are naturally womanizers. In other words, you are only a man if you embody the current male sex role. Or it assumes that all males need to attract females are looks and money (so males aren’t taught to develop all the other qualities that attract females). Neither of those assumptions are true. Since interacting with women are not really “natural” for all males, many males will lack the tools for initiating and maintaining positive romantic/sexual relationships with women, and our culture does not help them gain those tools. Both men and women pay for this state of affairs.
This comment was written by Aegis.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 12:09 am
thanks, mythago, I did mean that from the point of veiw of the rapist. Sorry if it wasn’t clear.
This comment was written by VK.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 2:23 am
I’ll consider the subject of f/m rape to be as important as m/whoever rape w hen the fear of it keeps men in the house after dark, causes them to consider their clothing carefully for fear of being provacative, and earns them all the handwringing that women get now. Not until.
Yeah, and ‘my buddy got raped by this girl’—this is something that keeps popping up. It’s very seldom the guy himself reporting it—it’s always a buddy he evidently told it to, which makes an interesting counterpoint to all those people who complain that rape is so much worse for male victims than it is for women—to the point where the guys can’t talk about it.
This comment was written by ginmar.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 2:36 am
> > while women simply can’t rape men?
> Of course they can. Surely I’m not the only
> one who’s seen the pool-cue scene in A Gun
> for Jennifer?
If they did what I think you’re suggesting with the pool cue (and how may ways are there to sexually asssault someone with a pool cue?), then it just shows you that the best way to sexually humiliate a guy is to treat him like a woman.
“Suck my dick, bitch!” is a threat and/or an insult. “Eat my pussy, dog!” is a joke.
This comment was written by Vladimir.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 2:36 am
Aegis:
Well said and very true. (And the rest of post 135 was true as well, but im quoting only that).
This comment was written by Tuomas.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 3:27 am
Yeah, and ‘my buddy got raped by this girl’…this is something that keeps popping up. It’s very seldom the guy himself reporting it…it’s always a buddy he evidently told it to, which makes an interesting counterpoint to all those people who complain that rape is so much worse for male victims than it is for women…to the point where the guys can’t talk about it.
I didn’t say it was worse for the male victim - I would say it is as bad for both. He doesn’t call it rape, neither do several female friends who were raped - the rape myths keep people thinking their assaults are their own faults.
This comment was written by VK.I related his story, because I felt it was obvious how cultural perceptions of the different sexes had lead to the rape. I could have told the story of one of my female friends, or my own but I picked on that one because I thought it was an obvious link from gender stereotypes -> rape. I wasn’t trying to make a point that it’s worse for men and I’m sorry if it came across like that.
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May 23rd, 2005 at 3:57 am
I mostly agree, Sarah. However, I don’t think that this is an all or nothing, 100% nature or 100% nurture argument. If 5% of men rape (I think that’s about the case), that 5% may be, on average, less empathetic and morally developed than the other 95%. That doesn’t mean that the culture isn’t screwed up, though, because 5% is still such a big fraction of the male population, when it comes to committing a horrible crime like rape, that our society is doing an inadequate job of preventing rape.
Or, to put it another way, lets say there were a medication, say a sleeping pill, that killed 5% of people who took it. If one did a study, and found that, generally, those who died were in worse physical condition than the other 95%, generally more sedentary, more likely to be smokers, with worse diets, more congenital health problems, more diseases, etc, does that mean that the medication is okay? That the only problem is with the patients? No, of course not, because 5% is way out of the range of acceptable tolerances for a sleeping pill!
I’m willing to say that there is a point at which rape is rare enough that it can fairly be said to be indicative solely of the problems of an individual, and not a problem of rape culture, best addresssed through law enforcement and incapacitation for perpetrators and therapy for victims rather than broad cultural change: I would say our culture has arsonists, but I wouldn’t say we have an “arson culture.” I’d guess that that point comes at roughly when 0.01% of men rape or attempt to rape. However, we aren’t nearly at that point, because our culture is still toxic enough in its attitudes towards women to teach men to be rapists who, if they aren’t as empathetic or nice as most, are certainly a large enough fraction not to be rare abberations.
Summary: in our culture, a lot of men, mostly meaner and less empathetic than average men, rape. In a better culture, even the meaner, less empathetic than average men would not rape, and rape would be a rare abberation of a truly twisted handful of people.
I have to say, I fully understand the point that male-on-female rape is a bigger problem than female-on-male rape, but I don’t at all understand why this incurs hostility toward the mention of female-on-male rape. It sounds to me a bit like Nicholas D. Kristof (whom I generally like, by the way) or someone saying, “those white middle class feminists are wasting their time on the problems of women in America — they should care about Afghan women instead!” The middle here is falsely excluded.
Aegis, I doubt it’s true that directed action takes more work than passive display. Many women do a lot of time-consuming and sometimes unhealthy things to themselves for the sake of passive display enhancement. Various diets, makeup, fashion. Nor is “passive display” limited to physical work, without the emotional demands of directed action. A woman must develop a self-confident yet relaxed demeanor of the type that most men like, something that I don’t think can really be achieved without significant emotional investment in that “facet” of oneself.
This comment was written by Julian Elson.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 4:05 am
For once Aegis, I agree with a lot of what you said. With regard to parts that I didn’t agree with:
That isn’t what I got from Elkins’ post. Of course, I could be wrong, but I read hers as acknowledging that this type of catch-22 tends to contribute to the rape culture, not that women suffer less from rejection - as you point out later in your own post, men’s inability to handle emotions has a lot to do with it.
On the previous thread you posted that:
Well, I’ll do my best.
I think that you underestimate the extent to which women invest their time, effort, and emotions into getting a guy - often a specific guy. (Well, actually, I mostly think you suffer from your very human inability to read people’s minds and possibly a very “masculine” lack of practice with empathy.) I think that at best you can argue that our rejection is usually less public, and so our humiliation is too; although, again, this fails to take into account, for instance, the fact that since girls and women share their feelings more, more people are likely to know how much we actually desire someone, even if the guy in question is clueless.
Most importantly though, while this public humiliation may be especially difficult for guys to deal with properly, which helps explain their tendency to lash out at the woman in question, I think that it is important to note that at this point, it is often their rejection by their peers as a result of “being shot down” that is the important factor, not their rejection by a specific girl or woman. With this in mind it’s not hard to see why we might cry foul at being told that we hold more power when it is perfectly clear to us that all too often it is not even our opinion that men ultimately care about.
And of course, in the end, what you said doesn’t make sense anyway. Rejection is rejection, but when you put time and effort into it…what? It can’t be that you feel more rejected because you just said that wasn’t so. Is it that you feel more entitled, as if she owed you something for your efforts? What else is there?
I think that you brought up an important point, though, when you said:
Stereotypes hurt everyone. I empathise with guys who are trying to do the right thing and acknowledge and deal with their emotions properly in spite cultural opposition, and often despite not having been given the tools to do so in the first place.
However, I don’t see how going around saying that women have “more sexual power” or have the better deal when it comes to dating helps you in this effort. It seems especially myopic and illogical to me to argue that women’s “sexual power” is directly related to why guys lash out when rejected, but still deny that the construct behind female “sexual power” is related to rape in any obvious way.
This comment was written by Jenny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 4:44 am
In a context like initiating kissing, because situations with women are so often ambiguous (not all women give clear signals that men can read), a man must basically try to read the woman’s mind. This becomes harder when he has no idea how to read body language and recognize what few signals do come his way. Thus, there will usually be a certain amount of ambiguity: he will never be able to tell for sure whether she really wants him to make a move or not. If he asks, he risks being seen as a “wimp”? who isn’t confident or smooth enough to sweep her off her feet. Thus, he must take a risk, which means ignoring the chance that she might not want him to initiate. He must ignore her feelings to some degree also. And he might feel bad about about doing so, but apparently those feelings don’t matter either.
*sigh*
I have come across this sort of description of the ‘poor confused male who cannot read the signs’ before, and it never fails to strike me as convenient tripe.
Why is it universally accepted that every person knows how to behave with other people in every other context but sex? Like it’s some incredibly complicated nuclear reaction that requires a degree in engineering?
Every person, unless they have particular difficulties and personal problems, knows how to tell if another person they just met is interested in their conversation or not, in a friendship context.
Throw sexual attraction, or even just the *possibility* of it, into the mix, and we’re supposed to believe it becomes so impossible - for men only, conveniently! - to “read the signs” of what is none other than normal human communication. Why?
When this happens, ie. when people do really behave according to this assumption, it’s only because there is such an amoung of fakery involved and such an amount of stereotypes and expectations that get in the way of actually being there, you know, talking to that person, and engaging in direct, personal communication with them, not with the idea of how they as women/men should behave.
That a man should genuinely be incapable of understanding if a woman is as attracted to him as she is to her is, in my experience, a complete myth. IF a guy seriously thinks he couldn’t tell if she liked him or not, it only means he didn’t even bother to consider the actual person in front of him, he just assumed that of course a smile, a nice comment, a laugh - in short even the most basic forms of human communication that, if taking place between two people of the same sex and heterosexual, would be considered normal gestures of friendliness - must in fact be read as “hey baby take me I’m yours”.
No man who has a functioning brain is incapable to tell the difference between friendliness and sexual attraction, unless of course he thinks he must suss that out within 10 minutes and get laid within the next two hours, no matter with who. Then of course he won’t be paying attention to the actual person in front of him.
The other problem I guess is women are more often expected to be always nice, smiling, friendly; couple that with men expecting friendliness to signal attraction and sexual flirting, and you get the perfect recipe for miscommunication.
I do find it amusing that even this supposedly mild level of miscommunication should be attributed to women’s ambiguity and men’s inability to read their *minds*. No, dear, it’s not about telepathic or magic powers, any more than all other ordinary human communication is.
Also, another thing I find interesting is this recurring use of the “initiating” term. It’s not working, when it’s only one person “initiating” any form of behaviour that involves sexual attraction. When it works, you *cannot tell* who initiated who because it’s mutual. Two-way communication. No special secret codes or signals, just basic human capacity to relate to other human beings.
There is nothing mindboggingly complicated or ambiguous about it, unless you want to make it so, but that to me seems like a nice excuse to treat people you feel attracted to as stereotypes, as if they were not human beings right there in front of you.
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 5:56 am
Why is it universally accepted that every person knows how to behave with other people in every other context but sex? Like it’s some incredibly complicated nuclear reaction that requires a degree in engineering?
Every person, unless they have particular difficulties and personal problems, knows how to tell if another person they just met is interested in their conversation or not, in a friendship context.
There are quite a few people (not just men) who don’t know how to behave in every other context. It’s just that in the context of sex, the “stakes” tend to be a lot higher.
This comment was written by Jeff.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 6:11 am
I think that it is important to note that at this point, it is often their rejection by their peers as a result of “being shot down”? that is the important factor, not their rejection by a specific girl or woman.
I would disagree with this - I think that a lot of the hurt of rejection for both men and women stems on being especially attracted to someone and that attraction not being reciprocated. (Though I suspect it can seem that way when gender roles encourage one to wait to be approached - men may have less need to invest time, effort and emotions, but that doesn’t mean that a lot of them don’t.) I think it’s largely irrelevant whether this rejection takes the form of being turned down or never being asked; or rather, it’s a matter of personal preference. Some will think the finality hurts more, others that the lack thereof does.
As for the peer reaction to “being shot down,” I suspect it only occurs in a few contexts (e.g. approaching someone whom one’s never met in a bar) that I don’t think are as representative as we make them out to be.
This comment was written by Jeff.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 6:44 am
Quoting various people:
> But if socieital sanctions allow rape as
> a valid choice, then youre
> going to have more rapists.
> If coercive sex were truly condemned by the
> majority in this society,
> rape would still exist, but far fewer
> men would choose to rape
> Since inhibitions covers not just fear and
> revulsion but morals as well,
> a person being raised in a culture that
> is less likely to teach them
> that something is wrong is also less
> likely to have inhibitions
> regarding such actions. Such moral inhibitions,
> or lack therof, often
> come with (or are created by) arguments
> for or in favor of such actions.
I more or less agree with this. Where I
differ is in thinking that rape could be
any more morally unpopular than it already
is.
Now as for ‘coolness’, it’s not a sign of endorse-
ment. Think about all the Che Guevara and Charles
Manson themed merchandise people buy. It’s not a sign
of widespread belief in the tenets of hardline
marxism-leninism, or insane homocide cultism.
> What about the people who use rhypnol?
I agree with whoever said they are sociopaths,
and, as such, very atypical.
> The same balk instinct that would kick in
> to stop them from committing
> some other violent criminal act
> just isnt kicking in for a lot of guys
> when they think about forcing sex on
> a woman.
Or a man. And I’m not even sure about the
idea that they’ll balk at rape but not at other
violent crimes. A disproportionate number of
rapists will probably be the sort of guys that
might get into a bar fight or join a jolly band
of football hooligans.
Another thing is that violence somehow is only
violence amongst men; against children it’s
discipline, amongst women a catfight and against
women ‘a bit of rough’.
> > screw you, buddy. I know I do.
> Okay, I was with you right up until this
> line. Now Im confused.
> Wheres the feeling of indignation coming
> from? Is it the entire idea
> that men are enculturated in ways that
> make them more likely to
> commit rape than women that smarts
> does it make you feel unjustly
> accused,
No. It makes me feel *justly* accused, which smarts
a hell of a lot more. I don’t know, maybe I’m strange
or something, but personally, I feel entitled to the
whole *world* and the best of it. I also know that
*feeling* so won’t *make it* so. I am in fact *not*
entitled.
Only, what say ye to not scornfully reminding me of
This comment was written by Vladimir.what I already know every five minutes?
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May 23rd, 2005 at 6:56 am
> That a man should genuinely be incapable of
>understanding if a woman is as attracted to
> him as she is to her is, in my experience, a
> complete myth. IF a guy seriously thinks he
> couldn’t tell if she liked him or not, it only
> means he didn’t even bother to consider the
> actual person in front of him, he just assumed
>that of course a smile, a nice comment, a
>laugh - in short even the most basic forms of
>human communication that, if taking place
>between two people of the same sex and
>heterosexual, would be considered normal
>gestures of friendliness - must in fact be >read
>as “hey baby take me I’m yours”?.
Well. it works the other way around, too (i.e not just friendly -> flirting, but also flirting -> friendly).
And now for some elizabethean rape culture:
On a time in summers season,
Iocky late with Ienny walking,
Like a lout made loue with talking,
When he should be doing, Reason
Still he cries, when he should dally,
Ienny sweet, sweet, shall I, shall I.
Ienny as most women vse it,
Who say nay when they would haue it,
With a bolde face seemed to craue it,
With a saint looke did refuse it,
Iocky lost his time to dally,
Still he cries, sweet, shall I, shall I.
She who knew that backward dealing,
Was a foe to forward longing,
To auoide her owne hearts wronging,
With a sigh loues sute reuealing,
Said Iocky sweet when you would dally,
Doe you cry, sweet, shall I, shall I.
Iocky knew by her replying,
That a no is I in wooing,
That an asking without doing,
Is the way to loues denying.
Now he knowes when he would dally,
How to spare, sweet, shall I, shall I.
Do you see, btw, how that “you’ll just automatically know what to do” attitude might be problematic?
This comment was written by Vladimir.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 7:47 am
Well thought out post and they all shine light on the subject thread.
However no context has been defined as to what women you are talking about? All women in the world, through the course of human existance?
This comment was written by William Rice.All women in the world in modern times? Or all women in the cilvilized world? I don’t keep track on the daily numbers but i would argue that in modern times in developed countries, particularly the last couple of decades, in that context, females do have an advantage due to there sexuality becuase those negative *consequences* of there advantage are rapidly diminishing but are still reaping the benefits of sexual manipulation, without the cost or risk. Which in my opinion is ok, that is your human right to do what you want with your body, including using it to make money or simply for pleasure and hey if some smuck lets himself get taken advantage of, thats his human right. But i get scared and sometimes see this picture that is already getting painted. I see a picture of feminism being used to silence males, and any form suddle or overt of his sexuality, good or bad.
1)in the future it will be the normal social if not legal standard that only a female can intiate any form of sexual contact physical or verbally.
2)pornography will be illegal in any form but male sperm will be freely availible to any adult female.
3)females will have all child costady.
The above is of course a very extreme scenerio but i see people buying into all over the place and either by intention or lack of foresight the leading feminist perpetuating it. As a male i feel extremely vunerable and i think there is a real possibility males could become second class citizens and for more reasons then one i would trade places with a female any day, at least in this country, at this time but i have lived a realativly sheltered life i admit, ive never been, seen known anybody who was raped. But im definatly tramatized into ever asking a women out for fear of being a harrasser. Ok im done before my post turns into a double standard rant!
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May 23rd, 2005 at 7:58 am
A lot of the posts on this and the related thread over the past few days have been amazing. Unfortunately, some of them have also been annoying as hell.
Could we just for ONCE in our lives have a discussion of rape and rape culture where going on about how PHMT & lists of woman-rapes-man tales were prohibited? I don’t like the idea of censorship, but dammit, I’m really sick of having to wade through long drawn-out post after post after post of knee-jerk male defensiveness every time the word “rape” comes up.
Guys, get a grip: rape happens a LOT, and it’s NEARLY ALWAYS men who do the raping. Accept it and let us get on with some productive discussion about how to deal with it, ok?
This comment was written by Crys T.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 8:17 am
Just voicing my opinion as an individual male and yes it is defensiveness and i elborated on why :) Yes rape does happen and the only solution is that we evolve, our science technology so that people are happy and healthy on this planet and males rape becuase they has a differant sex drive and they are strong physically, rape is not much differant then any form of violence.
This comment was written by William Rice.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 8:38 am
I have to second noodles’ cry of bullshit. The idea that asking for a kiss is insulting to women isn’t a woman-generated idea. If some women believe it, it’s because they’ve been suckered by fairy tales and whatnot. Most women I know, myself included, think that there is probably nothing sweeter and cuter than a guy asking if he can kiss you. I cannot think of a man I’ve been out with who up and kissed me out of the blue. Generally they either ask outright or confess their feelings or something first.
So, men who think they have to up and kiss and are confused if they are getting “mixed signals”, just ask. I promise, the right mix of respect and love-struckness wows the ladies every time.
This comment was written by Amanda.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 9:30 am
First of all it’s men’s responsibility to face rape culture, not technology or “people”. Men don’t have a different sex drive; they have a human sex drive; as in, both males and females are human. Men rape because they are taught that this is how to be sexual — it is rarely an act of violence. Most usually it is an act that threatens violence (or other coercion: economic, child custody, etc.) but rides on the coattails of the threat. It has very, very little to do with any inherent male sexuality, and everything to do with gendered power and maintaining that power.
We really don’t need technology to end rape. Men just need to keep their zippers shut.
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 9:39 am
Soooo…. it’s better to risk possibly molesting a woman than to be viewed as a wimp. Let. me. get. this. straight.
… your ego is more precious than a woman’s bodily integrity.
You do realise you’re portraying men as social neandrathals who are victimized by women’s so called poor-signals. Poor, poor men. They can’t read the signals so they’ll just go ahead a do the ONE THING that is most inappropriate — touch without being invited. If you don’t fucking know what to do — DON’T DO ANYTHING. How pathetically apparent is that?
No one has to be “confident” or “smooth”. That’s just a line of pop culture bullshit. I’ve had plenty of geek-powered, fumbling hot sexual encounters (with women, thank you) that were anything but “confident” or “smooth.” Somehow they were quite fulfilling… and get this, fun!
Why are men so hung up on sex=performance?
Oh, that’s right. They objectify women.
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 10:09 am
>So, men who think they have to up and kiss >and
>are confused if they are getting “mixed >signals”?, just ask. I promise, the right mix of >respect and love-struckness wows the ladies >every time
I took the noodles to mean that if you don’t already know the answer to that question, then you’re either an autist, attracted to a stereotype or a drooling sex-mainiac.
Maybe I misread, though.
This comment was written by Vladimir.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 10:45 am
Oh no, Q, didn’t you get the memo? Men rape coz they got “different sex drives”, so they’re really just the poor, poor little old victims here, and us women are like, soooooooooooo mean and evil coz all we do is get mad at them for doing what just comes naturally.
The level of male arrogance on this thread is pissing me way the hell off.
Any lame-ass, pathetically weak excuse is a-okay to these guys as long as it lets them off the hook for their own damn behaviour. Talk about playing the victim!
Look, if men can’t be trusted to keep their willies in their trousers unless nicely asked to get them out, then they freaking have no business walking the streets where they can harm the innocent. Either grow a sense of responsibility or accept that your “natural” place is locked behind bars where you can no longer do harm. How fucking clear is that?
This comment was written by Crys T.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 11:03 am
I think it’s not only the arrogance, but this rather immature fear that women (or men) won’t ask them to take their willies out that makes me want to scream. I’m tired of the “different” male sex drive and the woman-as-virgin-who-faints-at-the-sight of the manly willie. Both set me up to behave badly and then blame it on women who have “mixed” signals.
Maybe if these guys could admit that women like to fuck there wouldn’t be as many mixed signals, eh?
I guess it’s just easier to force yourself on a woman than it is to accept that women are 1) actively sexually active 2) horny 3) horny and sexually active 4) sexually agressive 5) still horny 6) willing to play with men’s willies, agressively or not 7) rather, rinse, repeat.
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 11:10 am
Good point noodles and Amanda.
I hope I didn’t come across as buying into such bullshit - though I have a feeling I did. I do think that its possible that a lot of men currently have trouble “reading” women in social situations, sexual or otherwise, but I also think that while some of it comes from lack of practice, quite often they don’t even bother, or want, to try. Simply accepting this an an excuse and not challenging such men to learn to pay attention to body language and tone of voice (or, you know - bothering to actually listen when women talk), doesn’t help anyone.
And Jeff, I wasn’t trying to say that men only get hurt from rejection by women because it means they are rejected by their peers - thus the words “at this point.” To clarify, I simply meant the only ways that I could see men being especially hurt simply because they have to do the asking are because a) doing so means making their desires public (as opposed to internal - not necessarily “in public”) b) they have less practice in dealing with their emotions in a healthy manner and c) they feel entitled after having gone through the effort. C is clearly mysoginistic and A means that being “especially hurt” is dependent upon their desires having been exposed to the larger world - which means that it isn’t that particular woman’s rejection that is “especially hurtful” - it’s public exposure. B speaks more to loss of control than actually feeling anything more intensely.
Qgrrl - that’s what I was trying to get at in the end, thanks for saying it more clearly. Aegis: Recognising that masculine and feminine ideals encourage men to disregard women’s wishes isn’t mysoginistic; in fact it’s an important step to challenging such stereotypes. However, saying that men being encouraged to ignore women’s wishes and autonomy is somehow more hurtful to men than women is.
This comment was written by Jenny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 11:57 am
You know, I’m beginning to get so cynical about all this that I doubt even their accepting that simple fact would change anything much at all. I suspect for a lot of them, thinking that women do actually like to fuck would just serve as further excuse to force fucking on us when we don’t want it, using the “but you know you *really* want it” chestnut to excuse themselves (once again) for ever, ever having to be held accountable for their own actions.
This comment was written by Crys T.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 12:02 pm
Do you see, btw, how that “you’ll just automatically know what to do”? attitude might be problematic?
Vladimir, no, yo no compriende Elizabethan English, however, just last night I was watching the Fifth Element on tv and there’s this cute scene where Bruce Willis has taken Milla Jovovich to this priest guy who supposedly knows that she came to save the universe blah blah preposterous sci-fi plot blah blah, so she’s unconscious and he drops her on the couch, and while he’s alone in the room with her, as she’s laying there passed out, he gets closer and tries to kiss her on the lips, at which point she snaps awake, snatches his gun and holds it against his throat, looking dead serious like she’s going to use it, and he retreats and says “sorry, I was just trying to wake you… ok, you’re right, I know, I shouldn’t have done that!”.
Later he asks what she meant with this phrase she said when she snapped awake, and it turns out it was “never without my permission” - “yeah, I figured it was something like that…”
There you go, I think that illustrates my point somewhat better than your poem, even if a little emphatically. No, no one was talking of sneaking up to kiss unconscious women, but an “initiating kissing” situation where the kiss comes out of the blue, without any two-way communication leading up to it, is more often than not an unwelcome advance, and yes, exactly like Amanda and Q Grrl said, if you aren’t sure if it’s going to be welcome or not, you don’t do anything! It’s not such an outlandish concept, is it? It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.
That was my point, not what you thought you read into it, Vladimir. The point was not “a man will automatically know what to do” - there is nothing “automatic”, because he’s not alone, he’s interacting with another person, not a robot. Anyone who isn’t a jerk or flat out drunk and stoned (and even that’s not a good excuse) will know he cannot just go and make a move on a woman without the slightest consideration for her, the situation, the level of contact that’s been established, etc. And in any situation where there is uncertainty in how to behave to another person, the basic rule of civil behaviour is, you err on the side of caution and politeness. IF I’m on a plane and I don’t know if the person sitting next to me and with whom I only exchanged an hello is interested in having a two-hour conversation or just wants to read their magazines, I’m not going to start chatting to them for two hours just because I decided I want to do that.
Any form of human interaction is made of that kind of dance, exchanges, exploration - communication, that’s what it is.
It shouldn’t be any different with basic sexual advances, really. It’s just a really sad excuse to say that men don’t know if women are flirting or not, women are so ambiguous, and all that crap about how a man is going to feel less of a man if he asks. You found a rather bizarre way of *justifying* unwelcome advances by saying a man just *has to* ignore a woman’s reactions and just go ahead and “initiate” because oh poor thing, he’s so caught in this damned if you do damned if you don’t. That’s just ridiculous. It’s you, Vladimir, who are speaking of men as autistic, sociopathic, drooling sex maniacs without a working neuron, not me.
This myth that the possibility of sexual attraction suddely deprives males - and males only - of the most basic capacity to engage in a civilised way in the most basic, natural and spontaneous steps of human communication is part and parcel of the “just couldn’t help it” refrain, that is so typically used to turn sexual harassment and sadly, often, even rape into some kind of product of ambiguity and confusion that women supposedly generate in men just by virtue of being sexual beings. Tiresome, and not very flattering for men, is it?
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 1:12 pm
> This myth that the possibility of sexual
> attraction suddely deprives males
>of the most basic capacity to engage in a
>civilised way in the most basic, natural and
>spontaneous steps of human communication
>is part and parcel of the “just couldn’t help
> it”? refrain, that is so typically used to turn
> sexual harassment and sadly, often, even
> rape into some kind of product of ambiguity
> and confusion that women supposedly
> generate in men just by virtue of being
> sexual beings.
Oh. I wasn’t aware of believing all that, but, well, sorry about that, then.
This comment was written by Vladimir.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 1:53 pm
Q Grrl:
If I’ve got Aegis pegged right, his complaint isn’t that he should be allowed to commit rape, but rather that because (a) he can’t read signals very clearly; and (b) men are expected to be sexual aggressors; that his choices are to be aggressive or to be celibate (of course, Amanda’s solution of asking seems to me to be a perfectly fine middle ground).
Jenny:
I’ve been in situations where I was waiting for a clear signal, and I’ve been in situations where I’ve asked someone out (in a private context) and been rejected. It’s hard to say which hurts more; I think it’s very personality-dependent (some people like closure, some don’t) and prone to “grass-is-greenerism.”
This comment was written by Jeff.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 2:08 pm
Amanda - I cannot think of a man I’ve been out with who up and kissed me out of the blue.
Eh, it happened to me. Twice, at least, that I recall. Not in a really disturbing manner, but annoying all the same, because it was literally out of the blue. With nothing, nothing at all leading up to that. Once, I’d never even met the guy before or spoken to him for more than two seconds, a friend of a mutual friend, and we were with lots of other people, coming out of a pub, I’d just been left behind with this person, and I cannot figure out what, except from one too many pints - and again, it’s not an excuse - led him to think that kind of move could be welcome. It wasn’t aggressive, it was extremely clumsy, and even funny, because it was so unexpected, and he was so not the type of person I’d have expected it from.
Another time, from someone I did know well, we were training together, once we went out to the cinema, it was so not even anything resembling a “date”, but I think in some odd way because it was his car, when he drove me home he just felt like he was entitled to a kiss. Agh. Very clumsy. Again, it was not so much the move itself that was disturbing - nothing aggressive about it either, he never even touched me, I retreated and made it clear I wasn’t interested, he apologised and was genuinely embarassed, and he really wasn’t the arrogant jerk type either, but it was so annoying and so pathetic, really. You just wondered, who does he think he is and why on earth did he think of doing that? I’m not even flirty when I want to flirt, nevermind when sex is the last thing on my mind. I couldn’t have possibly given out any signals whatsoever. Ambiguity my ass, really. He just felt like it was expected of me, because I’d gone to see a film with him, oh what an obvious signal of sexual interest from my part. I was used to hanging out with my group of friends, my own age, mostly students, females and males, there was none of that bullshit with them; this guy was older and probably more used to the notion of women being passive and men having to “make a move” even with no sign of reciprocal interest.
And that’s only the two harmless experiences I recall. Other times attempts involved more than kissing, less than sex, something in between, and very much more annoying. Once, from a former primary school mate of mine, I knew him since we were five. The asshole.
All the other, good, times that something was “initiated” in a good, pleasant way, and with pleasant results, I cannot genuinely recall who “initiated” what, it was so obviously reciprocal. Otherwise, how on earth can anything even begin to develop, if it’s not reciprocal?
Jenny - I do think that its possible that a lot of men currently have trouble “reading”? women in social situations, sexual or otherwise, but I also think that while some of it comes from lack of practice, quite often they don’t even bother, or want, to try.
Exactly, that’s what I mean. And those instances I recall fit perfectly in that definition. It is an excuse for a mentality where the man has to “get” and the woman to “give”. Those kind of guys may not even be that aware of thinking in those terms, they’re so used to it.
What I don’t understand is, how can there be anything sexy going on if one doesn’t even bother to pay attention to the person in front of them. For me, the whole ‘leading up to’ movement is the best part, the whole dance of attraction, the progression towards physical contact. There is a special pleasure in that exploration, in sussing out how much of a chemistry there actually is. If there’s no evident mutual chemistry, nevermind how little or long it takes to develop, how can the sex be anything than boring, mechanical, forgettable - and that’s assuming it *is* consensual…
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 2:12 pm
Oh. I wasn’t aware of believing all that, but, well, sorry about that, then.
I don’t particulary care to know what you believe, Vladimir. I have a feeling the discussion is about a mentality that’s wider than your own precious person. I also have a feeling you’re just pissing about, throwing in comments and then refusing to argue them. But nevermind.
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 2:23 pm
In case you forgot, this is what you said, Vladimir (to pick one exemplary phrase out of that whole paragraph I already quoted):
he will never be able to tell for sure whether she really wants him to make a move or not
Please note that “never”.
I did acknowledge very clearly that you were talking of “initiating kissing”.
But that phrase, that mentality it speaks of, that notion you described in that paragraph that I was responding to is precisely the same that is used, even in court!, to minimise or shift responsibility for rape, nevermind “kissing”.
I thought the point was clear enough first time, but just in case.
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 3:31 pm
> In case you forgot, this is what you said,
> Vladimir (to pick one exemplary phrase out of
> that whole paragraph I already quoted):
> he will never be able to tell for sure whether
> she really wants him to make a move or not
That was Aegis, not me.
>I don’t particulary care to know what you
> believe
So I see.
>I also have a feeling you’re just pissing
> about, throwing in comments and then
> refusing to argue them.
Well yeah, frankly, I kind of am taking the piss here. But, the thing is, for example in this particular instance I don’t necessarily care that much about who’s right in this whole initiating-a-kiss (or whatever it was) discussion. It just seemed to me that your response to Aegis(?) argument - an argument, lets face it, about a fairly tiny problem - was just way, way over the top, and it made a pretty uncharitable interpretation what he was saying, too.
And that happens thruout these threads; ridiculous arguments about petty, inconsequential shit (”I popped a boner at the bellydancing show. Am I a stooge of the patriarchy?”), constantly people going “so what you really mean is…”, “are you saying that…”, “that’s the kind of attitude that..”, “oh, that’s just Typical…” and the absurd defensiveness (”this argument must not be construed as an attack on..”, “I don’t mean to say of course that this in any way excuses…”) and the ridiculous pedantry (”I will define Sexual Power to mean the property such that a) Blah bluh blah b) Buh snuh duh c)…”) and all the people who again and again get hopping mad and put forth claims and arguments they’ve clearly put forth a million times before, and in very nearly the same words, and who clearly are enjoying being hopping mad at the same things in the same way for the nth time to a completely *unhealthy* degree, and, and and…
All that stuff.. well, when I saw that anthill I just couldn’t resist the temptation to poke at it with a stick, and then unzip and… well, you know?
So, uh, I should probably be going, now.
This comment was written by Vladimir.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 4:37 pm
Jeff says:
I concur. :)
I wasn’t trying to prove that women are more hurt by rejection than men, but rather trying refute his claim of the reverse. I was also trying to point out how, despite talking about some of the root causes and larger implications of gender stereotypes, he still can’t to see how these same ideas of “masculinity” and “grass-is-greenerism” can be found throughout his arguments that men suffer more, and, indeed, by continuing to find that to be the more worthwhile discussion to begin with.
It’s just my opinion, but it seems to me that if you want to talk about “female sexual power,” standards of “masculinity,” and how men are hurt by all this, it makes more sense to expand the discussion to include men’s overall lack of training in dealing with their feelings and how this affects all of their relationships, not concentrate just on the early stages of their romantic/sexual interactions. If Aegis wants to focus on this one aspect of the idea of “female sexual power” and its consequences for men, that’s his perogative, but I can’t help but wonder why.
This comment was written by Jenny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 4:54 pm
Well, obviously not from personal experience, but still: gee, thanks for condescending to piss on us. It really goes a long way towards convincing us that we are the ones “who clearly are enjoying being hopping mad” and making “ridiculous arguments about petty, inconsequential shit.”
I bow to your wisdom, oh PissAnt Master.
This comment was written by Jenny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 5:21 pm
How often does a troll admit being a troll?
This comment was written by Brian Vaughan.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 5:30 pm
Well, perhaps we can pack him a nice bag of ‘fuck you’ for his departure. Wouldn’t want him to not feel like he wasn’t fed enough during his stay.
This comment was written by Kim (basement variety!).Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 8:16 pm
I think it all boils down to human respect, you don’t rape someone else, no doesn’t mean yes and yes can change to no at any point during an encounter, why some people fail to see this i honestly am oblivius to but thats it in a nutshell and this thread is about expanding on the hows and whys and solution. I think up to a certain point gender issues have to be addressed to each gender accordingly but i think ultimatly after progress is being made it can start to have a negative effect phycologically. An example is race relations where the gap between black and white power has closed alot and will continue to close all you know of other people is the stereotypes and the political theme tags attached to them so an issue like *race* continues to be the filter through which you see, and judge people, oh thats *black* guy he is always distingished as such with his very own generic theme blah blah. The same thing with gender issues. Ultimatly people walk around with guilt for things they haven’t done or even thought of doing and then resentment builds up. The arrogant expectation that any individual has to be of a sexual nature in the first place to define who they are or that all they are is a some unit in some system designed by some other unit regarding sexuality. I can say with confidence the majority of us more or less didn’t enjoy most if not all of our schooling experiences which main focus is socialization and exagerated gender roles assigned to us. I found that issues like rape or harrassment didn’t exist in the social microcosims at the least the one i was in which was the drop-out crowd becuase we all knew each other as individuals and i think in a larger social structure the danger of rape becomes greater becuase individual human value is greaterly diminished not to say it doesn’t exist in more isolated settings or that other sexism issues weren’t there like a couple of the group i was in getting there gfs pregnant and being jerks about the responsibilty and forcing them into getting an abortion but average kids even with some special problems somehow had a natural and healthy experience with each other more or less. Take porn for instance which relies on stereotypes for its material, always the strong stud and always the passive female or if she isnt passive she at least is unrealistically sexually agressive and desires the guy and if she is lesbian well she at least wants some *stud* to watch if not join in. I see all the pitalls of porn and i see rape-culture as unfortunatly its driving theme but what is an alternative to it? For guys who are shy or unattractive or for whatever reason don’t want or can’t have a relationship which the opposite sex only alternative to be nonsexual completly? Homosexually is an easy answer and it suits many well becuase more easy partners are on equal grounds and have similair interest but thanks to hiv and the negative social stigma its very very flawed alternative. I think a more unisexual approach to sexuality is the most healthy and logical though some would argue less natural but it is our capacity to alter and improve our enviroment beyond its natural state that elevates us above the animal kingdom and enanles us to impower all individuals and make life better for all and some where there is where the solution so my last point is that social awareness and policy only have there uses up to a certain point.
This comment was written by William Rice.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 9:04 pm
*Crys T Writes:
May 23rd, 2005 at 10:45 am
If you don’t fucking know what to do … DON’T DO ANYTHING. How pathetically apparent is that?
Oh no, Q, didn’t you get the memo? Men rape coz they got “different sex drives”?, so they’re really just the poor, poor little old victims here, and us women are like, soooooooooooo mean and evil coz all we do is get mad at them for doing what just comes naturally.*
I can understand where your coming from with that response but thats not where i am coming from, to further clarify, men rape becuase they can and i admit i could be wrong but i do think sex drive is a factor as more sex drive equals ultimatly more chance of rape and i agree keep your dick in your pants if you lack the capacity to function as a empathetic, reasonble human being and no male decent or not has any *right* to a women, if 2 people of the opposite sex find middle ground so be it but nobody is owed sexual privalege from birth.
This comment was written by William Rice.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 10:29 pm
Yeah, I was making a point separate from Elkins’ argument. I am saying that the way that being actively rejected is worse than being passively rejected could be a cause of resentment and misogyny.
There are at least a couple reasons why I think that being actively rejected is worse than being passively rejected. I don’t doubt that both males and females feel anxiety around the person they are interested in when they don’t know if their interest is requited, the problem is that if you must actively make advances on a person, that anxiety gets much worse. Hence, even if woman who gets rejected passively suffers just as much as a man who gets rejected actively, the man has dealt with more net suffering because he had to go through extra anxiety and stress to get rejected than the woman did.
The second reason: yes, you suffer more over rejection when you put more time and effort into it. This is not necessarily because you feel more rejected, but rather because you feel more dissappointed. It’s normal to feel more dissappointed over not succeeding at something you put more work into. This is nothing to do with entitlement, but more to do with frustration about seeing a lot of your time and energy go down the drain. And it definitely takes more energy to pursue than to be pursued.
This is made worse by a lot of the current norms for how men should pursue. For instance, some men are taught that they should treat women they desire as goddesses, and give them various gifts. Or they might hear the common mantra that “women like to be treated well,” but go completely overboard. For instance, some males will do favors or homework for women they desire, or provide a listening ear and virtually be her therapist. Even if such men don’t think that those behaviors entitle them to sex/relationships with women, they may believe that those behaviors should make women desire them. In reality, such behaviors won’t make a woman desire a guy sexually: at best, giving favors/gifts/therapy might make her like him as afriend but not as a potential lover; at worst, such behavior might appear manipulative to the woman.
When a man gets rejected after pursuing a woman with these anachronistic scripts, it should be no surprise that he is frustrated and angry. He might react by blaming himself for not pleasing her enough, or he might wonder what was wrong with her for not appreciating him. This is one way nice guys turn to misogynists. The real problem is the system that told him to waste his time and resources basically trying to buy a woman’s love (or maybe just her sexuality). If less men were trained to pursue women in such a supplicative manner, then less men would feel entitled to female sexuality and less men would develop resentment towards women when they were rejected. This system also makes things difficult for females when males feel entitled to their affection, and they might feel extra guilty about rejecting males who have spent tons of unecessary effort pursuing them.
I used to do a lot of favors for women I was interested in, and help them with homework or provide a listening ear. When I would get rejected, it would be even worse because I felt totally used. And I was used… it just wasn’t the woman’s fault. But before I realized that, I would resent her for not appreciating me more. If I hadn’t been taught that such behavior was “romantic,” then I would have been able to save myself a lot of time, energy, and suffering. I don’t even know why such behavior is still encouraged. Some women probably like getting free lunches from men, and some men might like to give gifts because it makes them more confident (and it is easier than actually having an interesting personality). The problem is that in a lot of cases, the scripts for male gift-giving in “romance” amount to nothing less than forced misogyny (now there’s a polemical statement for you, Amp!). In other words, these scripts will make males feel so used after rejection (and the scripts might even cause that rejection) that they will develop resentment against women, or at least the specific woman involved.
It’s clear that a lot of the current social constructs lead to (or cause) misogyny. But it isn’t as clear how such misogyny directly causes rape. There are plenty of misogynists who don’t rape, and not all misogynistic beliefs will lead to rape, so I think the connection between misogyny and rape needs more explanation, instead of being assumed from the start.
This comment was written by Aegis.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 11:28 pm
In other words, these scripts will make males feel so used after rejection (and the scripts might even cause that rejection) that they will develop resentment against women, or at least the specific woman involved.
Unless they do so via mind-control satellites, the man is choosing to blame the woman rather than the sexist tradition. Instead of saying “Geez! It sucks that we have this sexist society that pressures me and my girl to follow this script!” he decides all women are bitches. That’s a choice, and an easy one, because it slips right into the pre-existing and very comfortable sexist programming: I, the man, am put upon by women wanting anything from me.
Oh, p.s.: as a women who has, in virtually every relationship, done the “asking out,” I assure you that active rejection (”No, I don’t want to go out with you”) is about a thousand times better than passive rejection (”I sat there all night and smiled every time he walked by and he never paid any attention to me”). The anxiety of passive rejection is worse because it’s, well, passive. A five-minute phone call is nowhere near as tension-producing as an hour of pacing and waiting for the phone to ring.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 23rd, 2005 at 11:56 pm
That is just complete bullshit. How the fuck do you know how much time women put into being pursued and how much time men put into doing the pursuing? To act as if it’s a given that men invest more time and effort, without more than anecdotal proof, in a culture with the type of beauty industry we have, is just myopic. What exactly do you think the stereotypical woman does during all that time she spends in the bathroom?
And yet also has nothing to do with the woman in question.
I don’t see how the connection between hating women and hurting women is anything less than obvious, although the exact ways in which its connected deserve to be explored.
And saying that, directly after saying this:
stinks to high heaven of denial.
On a lighter note: to unecessarily take this discussion off into an only remotely related tangent, for no other reason than because I have Star Wars on the brain, I want to say that, noodles, I really liked this:
Partly ’cause it just rocks, and partly because I have this uncontrollable urge to yell at all the people complaining that there was no chemistry between Amidala and Anakin:
“It’s not meant to be sexy, people! It’s not suppossed to be a healthy relationship, that’s the whole flipping point of the Ep I-III! If the chemistry between Amidala and Anakin was equal to that of Han and Leia none of what happens would make sense! Not that the exchanges couldn’t be more entertaining, but I won’t get into whose fault that is….”
/off topic rant
This comment was written by Jenny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 24th, 2005 at 1:18 am
I’m usually afraid to approach women, but it’s not exactly rejection I’m afraid of; I’m afraid of being seen in the same category as the endless horde of men who harass and torment women. Every woman I’ve ever known has story after story about how badly men treat them — and usually, at least a few of those stories took place within the week of the telling, if not within the hour. I’d rather be celibate than be thought of as one of those men. And that still leaves me getting off easily compared to what women go through.
Frankly, in the context of discussing a rape culture, complaining about men’s pain from rejection is like complaining about paper cuts in the context of discussing people who’ve lost limbs to landmines. Grow up, already.
This comment was written by Brian Vaughan.Report this comment to the moderators
May 24th, 2005 at 1:38 am
This sounds suspiciously like the “you women make us hate you!” defence, and that has no place in the context of a discussion about rape. In fact, it kinda chills me to read it.
This comment was written by ms. b..Report this comment to the moderators
May 24th, 2005 at 2:22 am
Vladimir, so I confused you with Aegis, for some weird reason… sorry about that.
Well yeah, frankly, I kind of am taking the piss here.
Oh you don’t say? I guess we have to admire the honesty now?
But, the thing is, for example in this particular instance I don’t necessarily care that much about who’s right in this whole initiating-a-kiss (or whatever it was) discussion.
Well perhaps it’s not even matter of “being right” as in arguments about did or didn’t Saddam have WMD, it’s a matter of personal experiences and how they intersect with certain mentalities.
It just seemed to me that your response to Aegis(?) argument - an argument, lets face it, about a fairly tiny problem - was just way, way over the top, and it made a pretty uncharitable interpretation what he was saying, too.
See, the way I see it, it’s what Aegis wrote that was so over the top ridiculous, based on my experiences and experiences of male and female friends and partners alike.
I didn’t accuse Aegis of minimizing or supporting or finding excuses for rape, for pete’s sake. For the third time, I did acknowledge the topic was initiating kissing, ordinary ‘flirting’ context, ordinary situations in which a man feels attracted by a woman. I didn’t qualify that situation he described as harassment or rape, I said “mild level of miscommunication”. I also qualified the examples I brought, of men making a move out of the blue, as “harmless” annoyances. So what exactly is over the top there?
I just found Aegis’s statement about women’s ambiguity and men’s inability to engage in ordinary communication a pretty poor excuse for men making unwelcome advances. Also, the mentality it describes - women don’t really know what they want or don’t make it clear; men are so confused and unable to understand if a woman has any interest in them; but it’s men who are expected to make the move anyway or else they’ll risk being considered wimps…
On a non-heavy level, it’s the usual litany of, men are from mars women from venus, which is good only to market books that supposedly tell you all about how it “works”; or the other usual litany of, poor men, with all this feminism and gender role confusion, they don’t know anymore what they’re supposed to do, but we all know deep down a woman loves a man who takes the lead, and let’s take that to mean making a pass even if he has a feeling it’ll be annoying and unwelcome, so let’s just revert to stereotypes, it’s easier than being individuals. Let’s just keep talking of sex as a conquest, a competition, a points-scoring business, that has nothing to do with communication.
On a more serious and heavier level, that is far beyond “initiating kissing”, it really is the same typical mentality by which a woman who was flirting, drinking, or acting like she was interested will not be believed easily if she claims things went beyond what she was willing to engage in.
If you don’t like to hear the words “typical mentality”, or to see the stereotypical connections between even harmless annoying behaviour and mentalities and more disturbing behaviour and mentalities pointed out, it’s not my problem. Typical mentalities exist, whether we like them or not. Some were encapsulated perfectly in Aegis’s comment.
and all the people who again and again get hopping mad and put forth claims and arguments they’ve clearly put forth a million times before, and in very nearly the same words, and who clearly are enjoying being hopping mad at the same things in the same way for the nth time to a completely *unhealthy* degree, and, and and…
Yeah, yeah, women just like to whine and play victims… *yawn* That was so the point of the whole discussion, yeah yeah.
“Unhealthy” and “hopping mad”, just because of responding to patent neanderthal bollocks like ‘he must take a risk, which means ignoring the chance that she might not want him to initiate. He must ignore her feelings to some degree also. - now who’s being over the top, hmm?
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 24th, 2005 at 2:45 am
I am saying that the way that being actively rejected is worse than being passively rejected could be a cause of resentment and misogyny.
Well, I second what mythago and Jenny and ms.b said.
Women do get attracted to other people too, be they men or women, they do make advances and tentative explorations of the possibility of sexual chemistry, they do invest time and emotions into that, and shock horror, they do “get rejected” too, or simply realise on their own, thanks to their amazing powers of mind reading, that there is no reciprocal chemistry. It can be a real bummer, believe me, especially when you’ve fallen like a fool for someone that made you go weak at the knees the very first moment you saw them. Do women become misandrists just because they know how to read clues and take no for an answer?
Jenny - glad you liked that comment but I’m afraid I must be the only person in the world who never watched any of Star Wars (I swear) so I’m completely at a loss about the reference :-)
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 24th, 2005 at 2:55 am
Every woman I’ve ever known has story after story about how badly men treat them … and usually, at least a few of those stories took place within the week of the telling, if not within the hour. I’d rather be celibate than be thought of as one of those men. And that still leaves me getting off easily compared to what women go through.
Brian, you shouldn’t think in those extremes, beacuse there is no celibate-or-asshole alternative, it’s a trick, a stereotype, don’t let yourself be conditioned by that crap. There is a perfectly pleasant, nice, friendly and non-assholish way of making advances or just tentative enquiries, call them what you like, and even if they lead to nowhere or are not reciprocated, there’s a way of making them without being the slightest annoying, in fact, it can be so nice to be approached in a pleasant way even if you don’t reciprocate. I guess you know that too. Works the same for men and women. Anyone can tell the difference between an asshole and someone genuinely interested, except those who consider politeness as something only wimps do…
Frankly, in the context of discussing a rape culture, complaining about men’s pain from rejection is like complaining about paper cuts in the context of discussing people who’ve lost limbs to landmines.
Yeah, but it is interesting, that in any of these discussions, the topic the troubles of the confused man in ordinary dating always, always comes up…
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 24th, 2005 at 6:20 am
I agree, but I do think it takes a while to pick up on that in our society - you don’t see nearly as many examples of that middle ground as you do of the other two extremes, which means that men tend to internalize either the “men must be ‘persistent’ to court women” message or the “men’s sexuality is wrong and unwanted” message.
This comment was written by Jeff.Report this comment to the moderators
May 24th, 2005 at 7:11 am
This is lame, all the way through. I think only a man could be so hopelessly passive aggressive enough to suggest he only has a choice between inappropriate aggression and (horrors!) celibacy. How insulting and base — you are basically saying that if the man can’t get the fuck he wants on the terms he wants, the only alternative is not to fuck. Great.
Your last sentance also comes across as increadibly condescending. The women in this thread have already stated that this is the approach that should be taken when interested in a woman… there isn’t any “seems to me” involved. You either listen to us, or you don’t. But of course, you’ll whine about not understanding us when we have been perfectly clear.
Again I will say, in a slightly different way, if men want to make sex about performance and signals etc., then keep your damn willies in your pants.
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
May 24th, 2005 at 7:14 am
William Rice writes:
This might make for an interesting side angle to come in from… the “sexual privilege” idea…
This comment was written by Q Grrl.Report this comment to the moderators
May 24th, 2005 at 8:55 am
you don’t see nearly as many examples of that middle ground as you do of the other two extremes, which means that men tend to internalize either the “men must be ‘persistent’ to court women”? message or the “men’s sexuality is wrong and unwanted”? message.
Bah, smells like another excuse to me. What you call “middle ground” is the behaviour of most normal, civilised people all over the world. How else do men and women get together? No one would be having sex and relationships, casual or long-term, if it was all only either assholes or… I’m not even sure what is the “other extreme” here. If you mean celibate, then I don’t think it’s fair to even compare that to the assholes. Celibacy can be a choice and it’s not necessarily to do with a lack of supposed “skills” at “courting”, and come on, “courting”… as if women are only sitting there waiting for some man to come up to “court” them…
You know what’s funny, one day you hear (or read, it’s a popular refrain) the complaint that men are confused because women today are too aggressive, too demanding, too outspoken; then it’s the complaint that they’re not giving clear signals, not “guiding” the poor confused men, not responding unambiguously, not outspoken enough… Which is it? Notice how it’s always the women’s fault? Both are just excuses used by those who *want* to return to clear-cut stereotypes that are no longer even feasible or as largely represented in actual behaviour as used to be. Each generation makes a few steps forward in being more spontaneous about sexuality but there’s always a few steps back to deal with because there’s always people who want things to fit into the usual old patterns. It’s like that for anything, from sex to politics…
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 24th, 2005 at 9:30 am
Brian’s useful paper cut to landmine analogy reminded me of a question asked to men and women about what they most feared from the opposite sex. Men said they most feared women would laugh at them and women said they most feared men would kill them.
This comment was written by Samantha.Report this comment to the moderators
May 24th, 2005 at 10:10 am
I’ll buy that you don’t see very many examples of healthy male behaviour, and that this can make it more difficult to act in a “normal” way. On the other hand, something being hard is never a good excuse to not even try.
noodles - oh, well, let me enlighten you. :)
The chemistry between Han and Leia in the original trilogy is great, to the point that their exchanges are often some of people’s favorite lines, even among guys. Their relationship is a very healthy one: neither takes the other’s shit and, by the end, both are willing to show their vulnerability as well as their love.
Anakin and Padme/Amidala have pretty much no chemistry, but their relationship isn’t so healthy. Anakin doesn’t just shut Padme out (all the while obsessing about her) but Padme barely protests when he does so. So, I buy that their getting together could have been more slightly convincing and the tension could have been more entertaining, but how are you suppossed to have chemistry when they never talk?
In the end, the original trilogy is a positive lesson in how to act, but Ep I-III are examples of how you shouldn’t. It just amazes me that people fail to see this when they complain about things like Padme becoming increasing less kickass. If the whole story shows how you aren’t supposed to be, what message would it send if Padme was as strong as Leia?
This comment was written by Jenny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 24th, 2005 at 10:36 am
When did I imply the internalizing of these messages about men’s sexuality was women’s fault, or that I wanted to revert to traditional stereotypes?
I feel like I’m being shoehorned into positions I don’t hold here.
This comment was written by Jeff.Report this comment to the moderators
May 24th, 2005 at 10:59 am
Jeff, the first paragraph of my last comment was in response to the part of your comment I quoted.
The second paragraph, the one that started with “You know what’s funny, one day you hear (or read, it’s a popular refrain)…” was talking, as you might have guessed, about popular refrains, and how they related, in my view, to that recurring reactionary tendency for anything in which there is some progress, in this case, interaction between the sexes. I wasn’t particularly attributing to *you personally* that pull to revert to stereotypes. I wasn’t launching any personal j’accuse, I was only making an observation on some of the classic “confused men” refrains we happen to read in papers and magazines and so on.
Like, you know, people sometimes expand on their own views when they reply to someone else’s comment.
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 24th, 2005 at 11:07 am
Jenny, thanks for the enlightenemnt, now I think I get your point :)
Sometimes I do feel a bit left out and like I *should* get the DVD’s once and for all and catch up on what the world has been watching the past twenty years ;)
(To think my mom even bought me the toys, mini replicas of the two robots, I loved playing with those, but it took me ages to find out they were from Star Wars…!)
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May 24th, 2005 at 11:14 am
Jenny, I just saw ROTS last night. I think you’re basically right, though it’s hard at first to distinguish the “Anakin and Padme have a sick relationship and don’t genuinely relate to each other” from “the acting in this movie is awful.” It’s like there was a rule that, at most, only one actor was allowed to act well per scene. In general, I thought the movie was almost brilliant, but kept missing the mark, through excessively fast pacing and bad acting.
On the asshole/celibacy thing: I was presenting that as sort of a false dichotomy. Sort of, given that the only models I’ve seen for male behavior in this context are poor models, so that the alternative is for women to initiate things. This gets tricky for me, since I’m getting close to where I know I’m neurotic and irrational, and it’s rare I ever see relationships at the very beginning. I see flirting going in both directions once things have been initiated, but I’ve never seen a man try to initiate that sort of thing and have it welcomed. At best, I’ve seen the relatively polite and mild advances by men politely and mildly rejected by women.
As I said, I’m getting close to my own neuroses, so I suspect my perception of things may be distorted. (Oddly, though it must be a common problem, I rarely read any discussion of how to deal with perceptions when you know you’re neurotic and your perceptions are distorted.)
This comment was written by Brian Vaughan.Report this comment to the moderators
May 24th, 2005 at 10:43 pm
Who says it’s universally accepted? People don’t always know how to behave, even when sex is out of the picture. As Jeff said: “There are quite a few people (not just men) who don’t know how to behave in every other context. It’s just that in the context of sex, the “stakes”? tend to be a lot higher.”
Well, of course. If people can’t tell if a person they just met is interested in their conversation or not, then they obviously have some kind of social difficulty.
I think sexual attraction does make signals more difficult to read, because it adds another dimension to the interaction. Women may have difficulty reading signals too, but it doesn’t matter so much because they aren’t the ones who need to initiate. Also, there is reason to believe that females are better at reading nonverbal communication on average than males are. Perhaps this discrepancy exists for purely social reasons, but it does exist.
Bullshit, noodles. How could you know this? You are female, right? It’s funny that for all the flak someone and I got in the previous thread for supposedly “telling women what women think,” certain posters seem to have no qualms about telling men what men think. I think certain inferences into the thoughts of the opposite sex can be justified, but this isn’t one of them.
It isn’t always possible for people of either sex to know if someone is attracted to them or not. Men have even more trouble registering attraction for several reasons. First, they may have more difficulty reading nonverbal communication. Second, if young women are often sexually repressed (which some feminists here claimed as an explanation of why females may appear to have a lower sex drive in our culture), then those females are less likely to broadcast sexual interest. In fact, the ambiguity or lack of signals from women could be one of the main reasons for the perception that women have a lower sex drive than men. Third, different women are likely to have slightly different signals of attraction, and some women will be harder to read than others. Perhaps a man could read the signals of some women, but it is unlikely that he will always be able to tell when a woman is reciprocating attraction or not. Fourth, the range of ability in reading nonverbal signals varies from male to male. Some males will be able to read female attraction easily, and some men won’t. Fifth, males are not given any teaching/socialization in reading female nonverbal communication to make up for these difficulties.
Again, bullshit. I don’t think people of either sex are always able to tell the difference between friendliness and sexual attraction. Males will have extra trouble because of the reasons I outlined. Also, some females will be flirtatious with males they aren’t attracted to. They may not be trying to “manipulate” him or lead him on, but that might simply be how they communicate and express affection. In such cases, it will be much more difficult for the male to tell the difference between friendliness and sexual attraction. Your claim is simply a counterfactual.
Oh, I totally agree with you here. Two way communication communication is the best. But in our less-than-perfect world, it doesn’t always happen. If one person is sexually repressed, then it doesn’t work. If one person chooses to remain passive, then it doesn’t work. If one person has trouble reading signals, then it doesn’t work. If one person gives ambiguous signals, then it doesn’t work.
One of the reasons that two way communication doesn’t always happen is because of the weird assumptions that all men can read female signals, and all females give clear signals. Your claim that males can always tell whether women are attracted to them, or else they have “something wrong with them” is one of those assumptions. You assume that males can naturally read female body language. If males weren’t expected to basically read minds, and instead: (a) males were taught to read female nonverbal signals better, and (b) females gave more obvious signals, then two way communication would work a lot better. It’s definitely a two-way street.
This comment was written by Aegis.Report this comment to the moderators
May 25th, 2005 at 12:24 am
(Whether a man asking for a kiss is “insulting” or not isn’t the issue. The question is whether females may find such behavior “wimpy” or otherwise undesirable.)
It doesn’t matter whether the idea is woman-generated or not; actually, I doubt it was either “woman-generated” or “man-generated,” but rather generated by past evolutionary conditions (oops, I used the “E-word”). What matters is that a substantial amount of women seem to hold it. Not all women are feminists (and there is no reason to believe that all feminists like a guy to ask for a kiss). Maybe they have been suckered by fairy tales into holding the expectation that the man initiate a kiss without asking, but that doesn’t change the fact that they do hold that expectation, and that males have to deal with that expectation. This is one example of the ways that females, or subsets of females uphold “patriarchal” norms.
Most of the women I have talked to on this issue have said that they can stand it when a guy asks for a kiss. Some said it was wimpy. One didn’t think it was wimpy, but that it might be inept. She said that maybe a man could pull off asking for a kiss in a way that wouldn’t be a turnoff (considering that asking for a kiss in a steady voice is difficult due to nervousness), and that most men wouldn’t be able to manage this. One of my female friends said that she much prefers it when a guy asks. It seems to me that there is hardly a consensus among females on this issue. Yet guys are still supposed to figure out whether a female wants to be asked before a kiss or not, and no matter what he chooses, he risks a chance of rejection.
No. Why do you insist on always jumping to conclusions? First, I wasn’t advising any course of action. Second, I am not certain that it is molestation if a man tries to kiss a woman without asking. Creepy? Maybe. But not molestation (unless he forcibly kisses her). She always has the choice to say “no” or turn her head away. By trying to kiss a woman in such conditions, a man is not forcing or coercing her to do anything (unless you believe that women are frail porcelain statues with no free will), hence it is isn’t molestation. Also, I am not convinced that it is molestation if someone kisses another person without asking, as long as they stop if the other person doesn’t respond. If I refused a gay male who tried to kiss me without asking, I might feel uncomfortable, but I would not feel molested. Likewise, if a gay male kissed me, but immediately stopped when I didn’t reciprocate or when I resisted, then I would not feel molested. (If a male felt molested in either of those contexts, I would suspect that he was homophobic.)
If everyone lived their lives by that philosophy, it would be rare for anyone to do anything.
Wait, because some women don’t have to be smooth or confident with you, males don’t have to be smooth and confident in general with women other than you? The standards of sexual desire that women have for other women are probably slightly different from what women have for men. And of course men have to be confident. First, you need confidence to initiate anything; men must initiate, therefore men need to be confident. Second, many women claim that “confidence” is an important quality in men, sometimes more than looks. By smoothness, I mean (a) relaxation, and (b) good interpersonal skills. Both of those qualities are going to make people more attractive, even in non-sexual contexts. In my experience, most of the males I have seen with girlfriends are confident, relaxed, and have good interpersonal skills. In my own life, women started being a lot more interested in me after I developed more confidence and interpersonal finesse. It is well documented that females place a larger emphasis on personality and less on looks than males do, and the qualities I mentioned seem to be some of the character traits that make males attractive.
That’s like asking “why are women so hung up on attention = conformity to conventional beauty standards?” The answer to your question: Because we usually only get sex when we perform in some way. Think about this for a little while.
This comment was written by Aegis.Report this comment to the moderators
May 25th, 2005 at 12:30 am
The answer would be no, asking for a kiss/to kiss (in the right context of course) is respectful, romantic, endearing and at times heartstoppingly romantic. Some of my most memorable kisses are those that were asked for.
This comment was written by Kim (basement variety!).Report this comment to the moderators
May 25th, 2005 at 12:38 am
I never said it was more hurtful to men, only that it was hurtful. You have been one of the more astute people in this discussion, but please read my posts a little bit more carefully! Thanks. Btw, you made some good points on the issue of initiating that I will get to soon.
Yes, except that I’m not sure what Amanda is suggesting is really a viable solution. It’s my suspicion that the majority of women prefer not to be asked for a kiss, simply because they don’t seem to be exceptionally enlightened on the subject of gender roles. But I have no way of backing that up, so I don’t expect anyone to agree with me.
Maybe he felt that trying to kiss you was expected of him, and that you would see him as a wimp or reject him otherwise?
This comment was written by Aegis.Report this comment to the moderators
May 25th, 2005 at 1:14 am
Well, Aegis, it sounds to me like your troubles are largely from dating sexist women who expect a knight-in-shining-armor act from you. Spare yourself some of the stress there! Why not date women who are more “enlightened on the subject of gender roles.” I’m not saying she has to have read Wolstonecraft, Mill, and Brownmiller before you can have a reasonable relationship with her, but if she expects you to be a Hollywood hero that you don’t know how to be, then it’s not making either of you happy, is it?
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May 25th, 2005 at 4:00 am
THANK YOU, Brian!
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May 25th, 2005 at 4:13 am
Also, there is reason to believe that females are better at reading nonverbal communication on average than males are. Perhaps this discrepancy exists for purely social reasons, but it does exist.
Either “there is reason to believe” or “it does exist”, Aegis.
That capacity for communication varies a lot on an *individual* basis, otherwise all men would be behaving one way and all women another. There’s many women who are pretty bad or clueless at communicating too, whether it’s about sexual attraction or any other social interaction. But because it’s impossible to tell which part of a behaviour of social interaction is ‘innate’ or ‘learned’, how much and in what proportion the individual is behaving according to their own personality and wishes or the expectations of the society they live in, because of all behaviour is naturally a mix of all those factors, then it’s impossible to ignore that cultural expectations to behave differently according to gender, as opposed to individual behaviour, come into play.
So all notions of ‘women are more skilled at social interaction’ still leave the question open - isn’t much of social interaction something we learn? So why are some men supposedly learning that it’s ok for them to ignore the responses of the other person?
How could you know this? You are female, right?
Yes, which also means I have had both friendly and sexual interaction with males for years, how weird, and because I was there and know what happened and what didn’t, and you don’t, I can tell you that in my own experience, the vast majority of those males were perfectly capable of telling the difference between a friendly gesture and an expression of mutual sexual attraction. Oh lucky me. I must have some radar that attracted only those endowed with exceptional ‘mind-reading’ powers.
Second, I am not certain that it is molestation if a man tries to kiss a woman without asking. Creepy? Maybe. But not molestation (unless he forcibly kisses her).
Well dude, since we were talking unwelcome and not asked for, of course it is molestation. No, not as serious as other heavier kinds of molestation, and pretty harmless, and it does depend a lot on the specific circumstances, context, etc. but by definition any sexual advance coming out of the blue, not asked for, not welcome, nothing leading up to it, is a form of molestation. Try imagining your slimey boss that you loathe creeping up on you and planting his tongue in your mouth. See how you’d like that.
And you don’t get to define how a particular woman views an unwelcome sexual advance, any more than you get to define what that woman sees as a welcome and pleasant sexual interaction.
It seems to me that there is hardly a consensus among females on this issue.
Good grief, maybe because women just like men are not some herd of sheep but individuals with their own individual preferences and behaviour. And that’s precisely why any man who’s not an asshole will pay attention to the woman right in front of him, not some imaginary notion of what the imaginary Woman expects from the imaginary Man, as the latest bestseller says.
Maybe he felt that trying to kiss you was expected of him, and that you would see him as a wimp or reject him otherwise?
And where am I, the real me, in that picture? How does that make it any less annoying, to think that he only thought of what was expected of him according to what *he* believed was some kind of universal rule about how Men should behave and what Women really like, rather than think about how I had actually behaved towards him? I was there physically, not some stereotype of woman. ‘Wimp’ is not even a word in my vocabulary. I don’t think in terms of ‘macho’ vs. ‘wimp’. I think in terms of, I like, I don’t like.
I don’t care what he thought, when he did something that affected *me*, physically and emotionally, I care about how it affected me. Understand that?
See, you may think you’re finding excuses, but they only make that harmless but annoying situation look even more pathetic than it was. And I did purposefully described only the harmless examples, because I have no intention of talking about far creepier and more obvious instances of molestation, luckily rare but still very vivid in my memory, only to hear ‘oh but he might have thought this and that’. Those guys weren’t ‘clueless’ or ‘confused’ and I was not ‘ambiguous’, when I like someone I made it very blindingly clear myself, and only if I know there is some possibility of reciprocation, otherwise I don’t bother. I expect the same basic civility from any other person, man or woman.
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 25th, 2005 at 1:50 pm
Aegis, how do you reconcile the following statements?
And regarding those women who do think you are “wimpy” when you ask for a kiss because they are unenlightened about gender roles: If you are, but they aren’t, it wasn’t going to work anyway, so rejection may sting, but its better to find out sooner rather than later.
Jeff, I wasn’t speaking of you in particular, just that people have a general tendency to do that, and it’s always useful to remind people (including myself) that “knowing is half the battle” not all of it.
Brain, yeah, there is so much about Ep I-III that sucks (although RotS made me at least glad I had seen it, even while wishing is was better made) which is why noodles, if you ever do watch them, you must watch the original trilogy first. And that’s the end of my pop culture references - I swear!
This comment was written by Jenny.Report this comment to the moderators
May 26th, 2005 at 1:36 am
Exactly. But that isn’t consistent with your earlier position: “Why is it universally accepted that every person knows how to behave with other people in every other context but sex?”
Because there is a wide variance in interpersonal skills in both sexes, a certain subset of males is below the cutoff point for being able to reliably read the signals from most females. The only question is how big this subset is; maybe it’s 90%, or maybe it’s 10%. Either way, I think the amount of males that have trouble reading female signals is big enough to be a problem. So I still take issue with your statement: “That a man should genuinely be incapable of understanding if a woman is as attracted to him as she is to her is, in my experience, a complete myth.”
I agree (note my statement: “perhaps this discrepancy exists purely for social reasons”). The point is, no matter why a male is having trouble reading nonverbal communication, he still has to deal with that difficulty, and he can’t immediately make it go away.
Perhaps males sometimes think it is ok to ignore a woman’s signals, or do so out of chauvinism, but I think it’s more common that they are simply oblivious and don’t even know there is something they are missing.
I’m still wondering how you know your male friends could always tell the difference. Did they tell you that, or are you simply inferring it because they never complained that they have trouble recognizing the difference? Or do you think so because they didn’t seem to have any difficulty interpreting your gestures?
On the subject of women’s preferences varying about being asked for a kiss:
Of course. What I am getting at is that since women’s preferences in this area vary, then if a male is to ask for a kiss, then he is going to get rejected a certain amount of the time. Hence, Amanda’s claim that asking the woman with “the right mix of respect and love-struckness wows the ladies every time” don’t make sense; asking will not wow the ladies every time. Some men may feel (either correctly or incorrectly), that asking for a kiss carries such a high risk of rejection that it might be more pragmatic for a man not to ask if he wants to kiss a woman any time soon. I am not necessarily advocating that attitude (although I haven’t ruled it out); I am simply describing it. The alternate solution would not be for him to randomly jump her, but rather for him to closely watch her body language for invitations to kiss, and for him to obviously signal when he is going to do it (i.e. two-way communication!).
You are definitely justified in being annoyed.
As a side issue I don’t think that following universal rules in one’s interaction with the opposite sex necessarily means that you are ignoring them as a person (although sometimes it can). There are sometimes perfectly legitimate reasons in following various social norms and simply assuming that the other person shares them (for instance, showing up for a first date wearing clothes instead of naked may be following a universal rule, but there is good reason to assume that the other person follows that rule even if they haven’t done anything to prove it). The problem occurs when people think some rule is universal when it really isn’t.
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May 26th, 2005 at 5:16 am
Perhaps males sometimes think it is ok to ignore a woman’s signals, or do so out of chauvinism, but I think it’s more common that they are simply oblivious and don’t even know there is something they are missing.
Ok Aegis, then let’s posit all those men you’re talking about are that clueless and inept at interacting with women. (Again, I must have been lucky, except for a few obvious assholes, I only met the ones exceptionally endowed on the cognitive front!)
How is Q Grrl’s reply - if you aren’t sure, just don’t do anything - not enough of an answer to that “clueless” scenario?
We’re talking sexual advances and the difference with molestation, Aegis, in case you forogt. Actually, the original topic was rape. But nevermind. It always drifts off into the troubles of the young man during courtship, doesn’t it?
Your reply to what Q Grrl said about that simple rule was to read it as a prescription for all behaviour in life. Sure, if we were always to avoid any sort of choice or action only because we’re not sure how it turns out, we’d do nothiing. When it comes to our own decisions. But when it comes to doing something to another person, and when the uncertainity is not knowing how it will be received by them, not by you, then it’s a basic rule of civility that you don’t trespass what is polite behaviour and you don’t assume that the other person is just waiting for you to plant your tongue in their mouth or your hands on their butt out of the blue, when they have shown no inclination whatsoever to that effect, and most of all, you don’t assume that some notion of male and female behaviour expects you to behave in that way, regardless of the person in front of you. You also don’t assume that it’s you who are expected to “act” as the male and the woman expected to “react” as the passive female. You just talk to the actual person in front of your bloody nose.
The men who are genuinely more ‘clueless’ or ‘inept’ at sexual interaction than others are the kind that are genuinely shy, clumsy, reserved and more polite than anybody else, Aegis.
The men who plant a tongue in your mouth or a hand on your butt or boobs out the blue - just to pick the more harmless examples, again - without even knowing you are the ones who are assholes and think they’re entitled to get attention and sex from anyone they want, regardless of the actual person in front of them.
This is not some revolutionary feminist concept, for god’s sake, it’s basic notions of civil vs. uncivil human behaviour.
If I have a sudden impulse to clean the windows of my neighbour, I don’t just go up there with a bucket and clean them. Even if I assume it’ll please him. I have to ask before, or at least get a clear indication that he wants me to clean his windows. Otherwise, even if I’m doing him a favour - which is cleary different from unwanted sexual contact (and I’m making a comparison here!) - he might be very annoyed all the same. Why? Because I’m invading his space before he’s done anything to allow me in.
Just like, again, if I’m on the train, I don’t assume the person sitting next to me wants to hear me talk for two hours, if we haven’t even started any conversation - con-versation, mutual. Inter-action, mutual. You don’t ‘initiate’ an interaction by yourself, it takes two.
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 26th, 2005 at 5:49 am
I’m still wondering how you know your male friends could always tell the difference. Did they tell you that, or are you simply inferring it because they never complained that they have trouble recognizing the difference? Or do you think so because they didn’t seem to have any difficulty interpreting your gestures?
Ok perhaps I didn’t explain that clearly - I was talking of the situations in which sexual contact was welcome because there was already, indeed, a mutual interaction. What I’m saying is, I do know what they were thinking and I do know they could tell I was interested, because I made that clear and because it was mutual - that’s why I said, in the pleasant interaction experiences, I cannot even tell who “initiated” what, because it was reciprocal.
Of course I am not reading anyone’s minds, but I do know what happened to me while I was there, how I behaved, and how the other person behaved towards me. In short, how we both behaved to each other, and how we ended up together. That I can very well tell, since I was there.
No, they did not have any difficulty in ‘interpreting’ my ‘gestures’ (I am not a hyeroglyph, I am a person, you know), anymore than I had in ‘interpreting’ their ‘gestures’.
In some cases, what started as only friendship developed into something else, and it was not an overnight process. It was mutual attraction developing in time. Other times, it was more sudden, and I’ve also often found myself dropping more overt hints, or even “pursuing” a guy, but I’ve never needed to be obnoxious about it.
In those, fortunately rarer, situations where the sexual contact was ‘initiated’ out of the blue by guys and most unwelcome, both the less annoying and the more annoying cases, I know they were assholes because I know how they behaved. Again, I was there.
In other cases, where there was an interest on the other part that wasn’t reciprocated by me, where I was only being friendly but they were interested in something more, I know that too, because it was obvious - even said overtly. I appreciated that a lot, and believe me, I’ve found myself in that situation too. Of course it is disappointing when someone doesn’t reciprocate your attraction. Both parties need to be sensitive and polite about it. There’s no need to be obnoxious about “rejection” either, you know. It can happen to anyone, both females and males, because the notion that males initiate and women react is complete bullshit.
If some men are so egocentric they just can’t take even the most polite “rejection”, it’s their problem, Aegis, it has nothing to do with insecurity, because a genuinely insecure person won’t even go and behave like an asshole in the first place. Those who do, do it only out of an inflated sense of ego and a sexist notion of women as being expected to fall to their knees and worship the man just because they’ve been given that male attention, even if it is most unwelcome. That’s not an inability, that’s voluntary ignorance of the difference between reciprocal or not, consensual or not; it’s voluntary disrespect of the actual person they are acting towards. It may well be so automatic they don’t even realise it, doesn’t make it any less escusable. When it’s just a kiss, or even a hand on your butt, really, it’s nothing. Compared to what happens when it doesn’t stop there.
Hence, Amanda’s claim that asking the woman with “the right mix of respect and love-struckness wows the ladies every time”? don’t make sense; asking will not wow the ladies every time.
No, because of course if you mean being ‘wowed’ as in sexually attracted, it obviously depends on the woman in the first place if she’s interested or not on a sexual level in that particular person - but that right mix Amanda spoke of will definitely be nice and welcome and polite, and yes, even charming, wether the woman does reciprocate the actual sexual attraction or not. So yes, in the sense of being actual civil behaviour, it will wow anyone.
Sexual attraction is no excuse to turn into hooligans, you know. Politeness is still nice, and even shyness is nice, and it doesn’t matter wether it gets you laid or not, you still behave civilly anyway, if you’re not an asshole, no matter what ‘result’ you get. Civility is not an option and sex is not a competition for scoring points and results.
Of course, if all the guy in question wants is get laid no matter what, then I guess civility is an option for him, but not to the other person, you know. If somebody wants sex without even respecting the other person, then there’s always masturbation. Treating women as inanimate sex toys is not a susbtitute for that.
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May 26th, 2005 at 5:52 am
oops, in #199 I left out a “not” - in ‘Otherwise, even if I’m doing him a favour - which is cleary different from unwanted sexual contact (and I’m NOT making a comparison here!)’
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May 26th, 2005 at 6:13 am
Oh, and that there are women who can indeed be pretty bad or clueless at communicating too, whether it’s about sexual attraction or any other social interaction - is not at all inconsistent with saying “Why is it universally accepted that every person knows how to behave with other people in every other context but sex?”. Because there is this double standard of civility, not so much capacity. Perhaps I phrased it badly - what I mean is, yes of course there are a lot of people who are clumsier in all kinds of social interaction, including the kind involving sexual attraction. But as I said above, genuine insecurity, clumsiness, shyness, usually goes with lower self esteem, not inflated egos. Actual ‘ability’ in social communication does not contrast civility. The disrespectful kind are not insecure or clueless. They’re arrogant. They’re so full of themselves they only think about themselves and their precious need to get laid.
So yes, we expect everyone, even the nerdiest types, to be able to tell the difference between civility and incivility in behaviour with other people. But people make a lot of excuses for the *voluntary* disrespect of that difference when it comes to sex. Because of the notion that men are expected to pursue and women be pursued. Blah blah blah. I mean, it’s obvious enough.
This notion of ‘abilities’ and ’skills’ and ‘results’ is precisely what I find so wrong and unappealing. I don’t care about supposed ’skills’, I care about respect. Human interaction is not a job for which one needs special qualifications, or a competition to assess who is most popular. Shouldn’t be any different when sex is thrown in the mix. Aetually, the interaction should be even more laid-back, and fun, and respectful, precisely because “the stakes are higher”, if we really want to put it like that.
I still take issue with your statement: “That a man should genuinely be incapable of understanding if a woman is as attracted to him as she is to her is, in my experience, a complete myth.”?
Ok then, read it in context of everything else I wrote, Aegis. If it’s not clear yet, let me rephrase it and clarify: That a man who makes a sexual advance out of the blue without anything leading up to it, should genuinely be incapable etc. is a myth.
Because, again, it’s not incapacity that makes someone an obnoxious asshole. It’s being an obnoxious asshole. If he doesn’t do anything, or waits to get to know the person better to understand if they’re reciprocating or not, or even asks or takes a chance to make his attraction clear in a more nuanced way than planting his tongue in your mouth, or maybe gee even asks the help of another friend as mediator - I’ve acted as mediator a lot of times - then that is not obnoxious at all, it’s how a normal, civilised person behaves.
Civility and respect doesn’t even have to be associated with shyness (if you consider shyness a fault, which I don’t) or ‘ineptness’, at all. Being confident, seductive, even bold, does not mean being uncivil or obnoxious. There’s a million ways even of being confident and bold without being an asshole. It’s not up to women to teach men the very basic principles of human behaviour, is it?
Well I could go on and on but I hope the point is clear enough now.
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 27th, 2005 at 9:27 pm
I should point out that a woman doesn’t need the word “wimp” in her vocabulary to look down on a male who asks for a kiss. She could think that he is simply inept (especially if the way he asks happens to be a turnoff).
Ok, I think I’ve been unclear also because I’m talking about something slightly different. I’m not talking about a guy jumping a woman out of the blue. Say that they are on a date, or they have been firting. The woman has given the guy some favorable signals, and initiated or reciprocated physical contact with him. Say they are even sitting together with physical contact. At this point, the situation is ambiguous. The woman seems to be displaying attraction to the guy and she is obviously comfortable with him. But she hasn’t given any concrete signals that she wants to be kissed. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t be completely out of the blue if the guy did make a move (so it wouldn’t be molesting her).
In a situation like this where the signals genuinely are mixed (unlike with the guy you went on a date with), it is difficult for the guy to know what to do. Simply paying attention to the person in front of him isn’t good enough, because the person in front of him is being ambiguous: he basically has to try to read her mind. If he asks for a kiss, he risks rejection, and it is very frustrating to get rejected for doing the nice, civil, caring thing. If he doesn’t ask, he also risks rejection, but probably not such a high chance of rejection (at least in my estimation).
So I agree with you that most of the time, when a guy makes a move on a woman totally out of the blue, that he is an asshole. Though what about when a guy makes a move in a situation with mixed messages like the one I described above? The problem is that he must try to read the woman’s mind, and that places an unfair burden on his shoulders.
I do mean “wowed” as in sexually attracted. And it won’t always be charming. Several women have told me that they consider it a turnoff when a guy asks for a kiss. I would like to believe that they are just flukes, or sexist, or not “enlightened” as far as gender roles go. But that isn’t the case. One of them said she makes it very obvious when she wants to be kissed, so she tries to make it so the guy doesn’t have to ask. I can understand that way of doing things. The problem is when females expect the guy to initiate the kiss, don’t want him to ask, and don’t give clear signals. I suspect that a large percentage of females has this set of expectations, and I wish I could pretend otherwise.
There are at least two problems with that set of expectations:
1. They are unfair. A man who must kiss a woman without asking and on minimal signals is doing a lot more work than she is. These expectations can create resentment in males.
2. They give males an incentive to be sexually aggressive and take risks without being certain of consent. Of course, in the case of kiss, this isn’t too bad (because she has given him some signals). The problem is the picture this paints of male-female interaction, because it maintains old romantic scripts and constructions like “a real man knows what he wants and knows how to get it.” These constructions could contribute to rape myths. (there, I’m back on topic!)
This comment was written by Aegis.Report this comment to the moderators
May 27th, 2005 at 9:50 pm
Okay, fine. It takes a big man to get past stupid gender stereotypes and treat women like humans whose opinions count for something. You are spared from having to push yourself on women to prove yourself now.
Your “naughtiness” doesn’t impress me. Explain to me how we evolved a resistance to asking for kisses.
They do because they are S-E-X-I-S-T. Explain to me again why feminism isn’t the cure for sexist beliefs that damage people’s lives.
I can’t vouch for all feminists, but I assure you, your belief that women freak at being asked for kisses as if we were human beings with feelings that deserve respect doesn’t upset as much as you seem to hope. Even non-feminist women like respect.
This comment was written by Amanda.Report this comment to the moderators
May 27th, 2005 at 9:53 pm
If kissing is such hard work, why not just give it up?
Jeez, I’ve been the first to kiss before, I’m sure of it. Bas-ackwards gender stereotypes and consent issues are what feminists excel at. All this confusion would be less confusing if people actually listened to feminists.
This comment was written by Amanda.Report this comment to the moderators
May 28th, 2005 at 2:07 am
Hmmm, this topic has shifted right back into avoiding discussing rape as it applies to the notions of sexual power, and instead talking about how dating dynamics are rough on men.
That sort of bugs me.
This comment was written by Kim (basement variety!).Report this comment to the moderators
May 28th, 2005 at 2:45 am
Well there are dangerous consequences to discussing rape you know… we might start noticing who does it and then we might start noticing that men aren’t the primary victims and by then we’ll all be well on the way to - gasp! - feminist analysis!
This comment was written by Spicy.Report this comment to the moderators
May 28th, 2005 at 2:46 am
Damn those tricky block quotes… [Fixed! --Amp]
This comment was written by Spicy.Report this comment to the moderators
May 28th, 2005 at 4:18 am
This kinda reminds me of the latest few strips from Doonesbury. The sorta, “well, sexual assault happens, and that’s too bad, but what should we do? Ruin men’s prospects?” attitude.
This comment was written by Julian Elson.Report this comment to the moderators
May 28th, 2005 at 4:32 am
Um, yes, Aegis, the idea that men are always required to “make the first move,” and that sex is something that is initiated by one person on another person is a central underpinning of rape culture. Given that it is, it is bizarre to try to argue that it benefits women more than men.
Yes, if you define your question extremely narrowly, then possibly, but once you have defined your question that narrowly, who cares.
To have it work out so it is men who are worse off, it seems to me you have to do the following things (all of these are points that have been raised repeatedly, and yet you still write:
)
First, you have to ignore that the expectations you are describing are an underpinning of rape culture, so unless they lead to harm to men equivalent to rape, they are worse for women.
Second, you have to ignore the fact that women who buy into the standard cultural model are at a disadvantage in terms of controlling their situation (since being the active person in a passive-active situation always involves a greater degree of control), and must operate at a continuously higher level of anxiety (”Will he call? Is he about to kiss me? Am I showing just the right level of subtle influence? Did he ignore that subtle clue because he’s oblivious or because he’s not interested?) since all of these questions are only resolved in the standard model by the man acting, so the woman in the standard model must always be in a state of preparation without the ability to initiate.
Third, you have to ignore the fact that women who buy into the standard model spend much, much more money and time on appearance, because appearance is the manner in which they are expected to communicate.
Fourth, you have to ignore the fact that communicating by appearance sucks, because you can’t turn it off, and it is very hard to communicate only to a specific person through appearance. Even worse than communicating by appearance is the expectation that you are communicating by appearance, since other people’s expectations are not controllable.
Fifth, having ignored everything that happens in this interaction except the instant in which it is happening and you are thinking, “Does she want me to kiss her? Would she be upset if I leaned in towards her to kiss her?” you now have to ignore the fact that that nervousness is not really any different from thinking, “Am I conveying the fact I want him to kiss me? Is he not really interested or is he just missing my signals?” Actually, you also have to ignore the biggest difference at the level of immediate worries, which is that men in the standard model don’t have the additional worry of, “Does he get it I’m not interested, or is he about to try to kiss me?”
Sixth, you have to insist that you are only going to talk about romantic interactions where a significant degree of signalling has already taken place, but not so much that the progression of the situation is reasonalby clear and mutual, and you have to insist that men being jerks and molesters is unconnected to men deing pretty sure they are expected to kiss their date but worried that they may be wrong, even when they are exactly the same situation. This, again, frees you from recognizing the connections to rape culture (other than the dating is unfair to men, which makes them resentful, which makes them misogynists, whihc makes them decide to be rapists angle) and frees you from recognizing the equal or greater anxieties women face in the same situations.
Finally, you have to treat some sort of energetics as the all important metric. If two people interact, and one of them expends more physical energy by, say, leaning forward and raising their arm to mid-torso level, and also the supposedly greater iota of mental energy required to think, “I think I’ll reach forward and put my hand on her arm, and then kiss her,” then in your opinion this man has suffered a grevious injury sufficient to drive him to misogyny.
I think all of these things have been pointed out to you repeatedly, but it always gets back to “Dating interactions are unfair to men.”
The final icing on the cake is that the response you’ve gotten to the “Dating is unfair to men” argument has been at least as much, “Um, sexual attraction doesn’t have to work along those lines, there are other ways to deal with those situations. For instance, if you’re unsure, ask.” Yes, the whole standard model sucks, so make a new one. It doesn’t help to say “The situation is unfair to men, but we couldn’t possibly change it so it was less destructive, because there might be some women who would find a communicative style of romance unsexy, and that would mean more rejections, and rejections are so horrible that they drive men to become rapists.” Which of course you never do, but you do say each piece of that string.
I realize that this is something you are trying to work through, having gone through a misogynist phase which you feel was based on this dynamic, but I think you need to accept that you are never going to get anyone here to agree with you that the dynamics of rape culture are worse for men (something which you don’t mean to be saying), and you aren’t going to get anyone to agree to limit the discussion to the extremely narrow terms you need to have your argument that the standard model of romantic interaction is unfair to men make any sense. Given that, you need to look at what it is you want to get out of this argument. In the frame everyone else here is using, your argument doesn’t make much sense, and while you are willing to make nods towards the larger framework, you don’t seem very interested in it.
There a lot of excellent arguments in this thread if you are interested in the larger framework. Even if you don’t feel up to addressing them, I hope you are thinking about them.
You have said a number of times that you are trying to make sure everyone is on the same page with you. We aren’t. Maybe you’d like to come over to the same page we’re on?
And yeah, it sucks that this thread lost its focus on rape culture somewhere back there, and there is something particularly obnoxious about a thread on rape culture becoming a thread about the traumatic dating difficulties of men. Actually, I think the thread half-way lost its focus back where it became a discussion about stripping (about 100 comments in?).
This comment was written by Charles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 28th, 2005 at 5:03 am
In a situation like this where the signals genuinely are mixed (unlike with the guy you went on a date with), it is difficult for the guy to know what to do. Simply paying attention to the person in front of him isn’t good enough, because the person in front of him is being ambiguous: he basically has to try to read her mind. If he asks for a kiss, he risks rejection, and it is very frustrating to get rejected for doing the nice, civil, caring thing. If he doesn’t ask, he also risks rejection, but probably not such a high chance of rejection (at least in my estimation).
You know, this is sounding like the depiction of an autistic mind. Like it’s all about him, other people aren’t there; only this is not an illness, it’s just total self-centredness.
Once again: *not* acting like an asshole is no guarantee that you will get laid; acting like an asshole is no guarantee either, for that matter, unless we’re talking *forcing* people to have sex, but we don’t want to go there, do we.
If all you want to do is get laid, there’s million ways you can do that without having to fake interest in the person. Going around with a “I wanna get laid” t-shirt is more honest than pretending to be interested in conversation. And why is it the man who is supposedly the only person interested in sex? Women aren’t? Wether you just want to play around for fun or are interested in something deeper, it’s not that difficult to find a willing sexual partner of either sex or sexual orientation, you know, unless you live in some godforsaken place in the desert.
You speak like being civil or nice, at a very basic normal level, not some soppy pseudo-romantic hollywood crap notion of ‘nice’, is somehow in contrast with being a Man. Hmm, I wonder why that sounds so very appropriate in a thread like this that started out about rape.
Once again: no, having some basic sense of respect and interest in the other person won’t automatically get you laid. Get over it. It’s not automatic for women either, you know. That’s no reason to abandon that basic sense of respect and interest.
No one’s talking of treating flirting like a burocratic process where you need papers signed before you even say a word. It should really come natural, if the interest is there; the object of that interest is not a military target for which you need special intelligence to suss out their supposed strategy. It’s a person.
If someone is really getting mixed signals from the person they’re attracted to, how about being cautious and actually enjoying the process, whatever its ‘results’? How about finding ways to clarify whether there’s a reciprocal interest or not, without having to assume anything on your own? Otherwise the problem is not the supposed ambiguity of the woman, it’s the obvious duplicity of the man you’re talking about, faking an interest in the process of seduction when all he can think of is his dick.
I do mean “wowed”? as in sexually attracted. And it won’t always be charming. Several women have told me that they consider it a turnoff when a guy asks for a kiss.
Here’s somethign shocking: yes, it may even be a turnoff, depending on the circumstance and the person; maybe the woman wasn’t interested in the first place, how about that; but it won’t be an asshole thing to do, it won’t be creepy and unpleasant as getting a tongue shoved in your mouth before you even realised it.
Again, respect and ’scoring’ are not synonyms. This is a ‘problem’ only for men who don’t respect women.
And there’s not just asking directly. There’s such a thing as waiting for clearer ’signals’, asking common friends, dropping more obvious hints yourself that you’re attracted to that person, and a whole lot of things that anyone who’s not a jerk can do. If you do like human beings, you will be interested in them for real, and the whole idea of getting to know each other will be more appealing than ’scoring’ per se. If on the other hand you just won’t take no for an answer, and think the possibility of you being rejected is worse than the possibility of disrespecting the other person, then we’re not talking of flirting here.
It’s not that difficult. Civility, respect, is not a tool to use to get something for yourself. It is a given that’s due to any human being, including those you actually are sexually attracted to. In fact, more so.
I suspect that a large percentage of females has this set of expectations, and I wish I could pretend otherwise.
Oh well, you may think whatever you like about what ‘most females’ want or do or behave like, but no single individual male of the human species flirts with ‘most females’ in one go. He will be flirting with one at a time, usually. So it doesn’t really matter what *he* thinks that all or most women think, if it’s that particular woman he’s interested in, how about actually bothering to interact with her, not some stereotype or what’s written in some manual or his own mental masturbations about his own ideas of women?
They are unfair. A man who must kiss a woman without asking and on minimal signals is doing a lot more work than she is.
Oh dear… This really is a massive waste of time. I wouldn’t even know where to start with that notion, there’s about three levels of fucked up in it.
These expectations can create resentment in males.
Oh really? And where do these magical expectations come from, when they’re ideas that are formed independently of that actual person right in front of the man in this situation? You’re talking of a man who’s having this self-centred dialogue in his mind about what he’s supposed to do according to what he thinks all women like, and ignoring the actual person in front of him, and somehow this is ‘unfair’ - on *him*?
I’ve never heard more of a convoluted excuse for behaviour that’s unpleasant - at the very least.
You have just perfectly described the nature of mysoginy, Aegis. Lack of respect and objectification engenders resentment. Yep. It’s all in the man’s head, though.
And again, are women magically free of having to make any effort whatsoever, when they’re the ones attracted to someone else, man or woman? They just go up to them and wiggle their ass and it’s done? They never get rejected, never have unrequited attractions, sexual or romantic or both? Stop press: they do. So…? Where does that leave this charming model of sexual relations you described?
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 28th, 2005 at 5:06 am
Well there are dangerous consequences to discussing rape you know… we might start noticing who does it and then we might start noticing that men aren’t the primary victims and by then we’ll all be well on the way to - gasp! - feminist analysis!
Oh, god forbid!
It’s interesting that even when the discussion shifted towards ‘initiating kissing’ and relatively innocuous sexual advances, it keeps being pushed back to discussion of women’s ambiguity and men’s discomfort or inability or disadvantage…
Very telling.
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 28th, 2005 at 5:27 am
Um, yes, Aegis, the idea that men are always required to “make the first move,”? and that sex is something that is initiated by one person on another person is a central underpinning of rape culture. Given that it is, it is bizarre to try to argue that it benefits women more than men.
Well put, Charles. The rest of your post, too. Especially about that attempt by Aegis to narrow down the question more and more with each response. When other commenters and I had been giving examples of that kind of unwelcome move to explain how it has so littel to do with supposed or perceieved ambiguity, the response is, let’s talk about this example I’m thinking of again where I define the woman’s ambiguity as the main problem, which is not like that example you described from your own experience…
By the way, Aegis, ‘that guy I went on a date with’ - it wasn’t even a date at all. In none of the examples I made. That’s the problem. The guys imagined it all by themselves, played this little movie in their heads, whereby being nice enough to engage in chit chat with them for three minutes in the pub while in a group of twenty people I knew far better than him, or to go see a film with them one summer evening, was enough of a ’signal’ to them that I would reciprocate any sexual interest. Go figure.
Some people have a very wide concept of ‘mixed signals’ and ‘ambiguity’ and ’sexual interest’, you know. Anything is a sexual signal to them. Because they’re only interested in getting their own fix.
This comment was written by noodles.Report this comment to the moderators
May 28th, 2005 at 9:19 am
This thread is making me happier than ever that I don’t have to traverse the dating pool anymore. Come to think of it, it’s a reminder of why I’d given up on the dating pool for something like a year when I met the guy who became my current partner.
Oh, hell. :p I’m a genuine card-carrying gummint bureaucrat (soon to be ex, though) of six-odd years. I can vouch for the fact that long conversations with customers are possible without them having to produce or take away a single paper–depending on the question. I can also vouch for clarity from customers being just as welcome as it would be from a prospective date.
OTOH, if I’m not clear, I just ask for clarification as many times as it takes to get it. Or to find out that the customer was interested in something other than what I orginally thought he/she was. Amazing how well that works, eh ?
noodles, I admire your stamina. 8) Once I find a new job, can I buy you a nice coffee and a nice dessert somewhere, sometime ?
This comment was written by alsis38.9.Report this comment to the moderators
May 28th, 2005 at 9:31 am
Some really good posts from Charles and Noodles. Thanks, you two.
What I’m finding most chilling about the way this thread has gone is the Aegis’s absolute inability to understand that the trauma a woman suffers from rape is much, much greater than the trauma a man feels when the object of his lust doesn’t reciprocate. It’s like to him, women who are out on public display are sort of empty shells of meat who should fuck him or not based on whether he primes them with the correct pattern of stimuli. When they don’t, he responds with the same sort of impotent (no pun [or, for that matter, insinuation] intended) rage & incomprehension the computer-illiterate amongst us feel when our machines crash on us.
There’s no recognition on his part that women can have individual preferences (rather, he seems to view differences in sexually-related preferences as soulless prick-teasing), no recognition that no woman is required to respond sexually to any given male (rather, if they’re out on display, they should be available on a first-come, first-serve basis), no recognition, as far as I can see, that wome