I’ll have to post the paragraph from the old BSA handbooks discussing the evils of masturbation one of these days.

My point was that if it is true that this guy was thinking “i am a manly man and get the best of women without being dependent on them”, that he probably feels that way because that is how feminism tells women to behave.

Maybe in your twisted interpretation of feminism. In my interpretation of feminism, rape is wrong and can never be justified no matter the gender of the rapist or the victim.

Yeah, we tried that one, John. Didn’t work. You see, it turns out that means the woman has to be inferior to the man all the time, and if she’s smarter or taller or makes more money, why, that destroys the balance and she has to be put in her place.

I also can’t help noticing what side of that equation you fall on. What a happy coincidence!

What, even if we’re queer?

And that rabbi’s quote seems to me to also to be making a statement about how most men have interpreted the modern parlance of homosexual/heterosexual to mean that they have to have a gross “manly man” sort of attraction to women in order to be heterosexual. It’s like if a guy isn’t proving his atraction is as animalistic and base as possible, then the source of his heterosexualism is challenged.

You’re seriously arguing, Ron, that this quote is talking about individual people and not abstract concepts of ‘men’ and ‘women’? Seriously? Not just trying to keep an argument going through contradiction, but seriously?

Interactions with a female (who is seen as sexual) should not be seen by a man as a match to be won or lost.

I don’t believe swaggering dominance is biologically linked to sexual orientation or gender. It has to do with self-image and reputation. If you are a man trying to keep the reputation that you can overcome every girl’s resistance to you, a very dangerous attitude has a hold on you.

Only fools and criminals believe everything they want is theirs for the taking.

Which leads me to this, from the Washington Blade about the significance of the 2 cases pending against Collin Finnerty:

A criminal psychologist said Collin Finnerty, the Duke University lacrosse player charged with rape and assault, could be attempting to prove his masculinity.

and

“Masculinity is something that has to be proven,” she said. “It is not innate or natural. It’s something young men have to establish, and they have to establish it publicly.”

If you go to link farm no. 19 and click on Bark/Bite, you’ll get to the rest of this:

Now, homosociality is one of them 10-cent words that can take an awful long time to explain (I took something like 5 pages in my dissertation), and it’s roughly the idea that men’s relationships with women are secondary to men’s relationships with other men, and that women are used as currency of exchange in male relationships, that women are used by men in various ways in order to negotiate their relationships with other men, etc.

What do we suppose the (apparently normal, it’s often said…) men who perform the male bonding exercise of gang raping a girl or a woman are communicating to each other? What bond is being forged in the utter de-humanisation and brutalisation of a female human being? Why couldn’t the most reluctant rapist of the group ‘just say “no”.’?

I do agree with the general tenor. I have met an astonishing number of men who don’t seem to like women. They tolerate their presence, appreciate some of the things they do, but (for example) couldn’t imagine sitting down with a beer and shooting the shit with them for a while. You wonder how they manage to live with one.

Of course, there’s plenty of women I could say the same about with regards to men. Nice to have around when something needs to be lifted or fixed, but when discussing anything else about them, out come the disparaging remarks. And forget about hanging out with them.

In both cases, I think it’s a blindness that “the way I do things or the way I feel is best, and anyone who comes at it from a different direction or method is wrong.” I’ve often come across the stereotype in business that “men think tactics, women think relationships”. To a certain extent it’s true. What both often fail to see is that you need both, and that by combining strengths and abilities, instead of disparaging those you don’t have, you can be more effective in business and in life in general. But when people have a weakness where someone else has a strength, the impulse is not to accept that and seek it out, but to say “well, it’s not really a weakness, and the other person’s strength in that area is not really a strength and we don’t need it.” That’s a denial that hurts everyone.l

I find this attitude disturbing and utterly perplexing, since I can’t stand men who think like that nor do I want to sleep with them anyway, despite it. ;)

And in turn what I find disturbing and perplexing is not your attitude, but the fact that these guys do end up finding women that will sleep with them.

Based on what I read in the original post, I was presuming that you presented the rabbi’s words as a blanket indictment of male college students.

Just to be sure I’m clear, I’ll say that many college men reject the attitudes I highlighted long before they reach college.

Good. Glad to hear it. Of course, many of them never see those attitudes presented to them until they get to college and meet creeps that they weren’t exposed to at home and high school.

Some men leave the type of environment I discussed but take all the harmful attitudes with them.

I accept that statement as well. There are some young (and older!) men out there with some very sick attitudes towards women. Some of them even act on them.

Sounds to me like you’re setting up a straw man to counter an argument that John hasn’t made. You don’t know what kind of traits that John considers complementary. You’ve just put a bunch of words into his mouth.

The entire romantic/predatory sexual model is about hating the ones you desire (and loathing the ones you don’t).

I would add to that parenthetical: “and/or the ones who don’t desire you,” and then I would add “and using sex to subdue/control them.” That has always seemed to me the reason why heterosexual men who hate women so often have this overwhelming compulsion to have sex with them anyway. And at least some of that compulsion, I think, comes from the double bind that male dominant heterosexual masculinity puts them in: on the one hand, acccording to that standard, in order to be “real” men, they must have sex women, and so their masculinity does not exist, cannot exist, except in the presence of women–or at least sexual images of women that can serve as stand-ins for actual women. On the other hand, this need for women can never really be satisfied because women are still fully fledged human beings in their own right who, simply by living their own lives, will always at some point slip out of the bounds of male heterosexual control.

The simple fact of women’s presence, in other words, cannot help but remind such men that they can never fully possess what they need. Hating the person who possesses what you need but will not give it to you–and of course it is an illusion that women gan “give” this to men anyway–is the next logical step, as is the constant attempts by such men to get what they need anyway, by any means necessary, and to hate themselves on some level for needing it and feeling compelled to get it.

Bleh, it’s late and I’m babbling. Perhaps I’ll have a better grasp on what it is I’m trying to express in the morning!

Hah! We cross-posted.

Gotta say, while I agree with a sentiment of disgust for men who lust after and hate women (which, oddly, is not actually what the rabbi was describing exactly), I think there is a serious problem with even playing at the edges of suggesting that it is akin to homosexuality (or even that it is fundamentally un-heterosexual).

It isn’t homosexuality at all (as, to be a homosexual man, one generally shouldn’t lust after women, and hating women is entirely tangential to homosexuality), and it is very much heterosexuality. The entire romantic/predatory sexual model is about hating the ones you desire (and loathing the ones you don’t). Fucked up as all hell, but bog standard heterosexuality (or anyway, bog standard male heterosexuality)…

Okay, this is a trivial point, since I agree with your thesis that the Duke gang rape was the predictable result of a profoundly misogynist college culture, but I have to say that I found the Rabbi’s piece to which you link (which is actually about life in a British college - Oxford- and in Tom Wolf’s pathetically prurient fantasy world, and if it matches anything about modern US college life, probably does so only by coincidence) to be reactionary misogynist tripe, with a thin dressing of feminism to cover the stench.

This passage could just as easily have fit into one of those absurd “Oh for the great days of male chivalry, when men were decent and kind because women acted as proper guardians of Teh Sex!” essays that made the rounds a few months back:

Tom Wolfe’s newest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, chronicles the unbelievable scorn for women that permeates the American campus, and depicts how women have lost all dignity, becoming complicit in their own degradation, as they stop at nothing to become the male plaything.

The greatest cultural story since the 1960’s is the decline and fall of the Western male, and how women have accommodated that fall by allowing themselves to be treated like garbage by men. It’s now 40 years since the second wave of feminism, and yet to be a guy today is to have your pick of hundreds of women who will sleep with you and expect not only no commitment, but not even courteous treatment. You can burp in their presence, break wind, and they will still go to bed with you. To be a guy is to have women move into your apartment and cook and clean for you, even as you endlessly push off the question of marriage, which you have no intention of addressing anyway.

I hate masculinity and men more than most, and I haven’t been an undergrad for more than a decade, so there is no anti-feminist defensiveness on my part here, but I have to say I’m with RonF on this one (I suppose it had to happen some time).

Also, didn’t that passage (in context) just suggest that the Duke gang rape is the fault of loose women? WTF?

Of your version (#14):

I’d probably amend it to something like, “if the definition of a heterosexual man is a male who likes women”, since there are so many men who seem to hate us and yet somehow can’t stop trying to get into our pants.

Well, I agree with the second part, but I think that while your rephrasing of the statement is a less dubious statement than the rabbi’s original (men who don’t sexualize every woman they encounter are somehow failing to treat women with proper respect? WTF? The rabbi’s version doesn’t even actually capture the idea of misogynist men not liking women. Most women I’ve met are also only attracted to a small portion of men they meet, this is a problem?) the problem with your phrasing is that it isn’t anywhere close to the definition of heterosexual. Do you really think the definition of a gay man is a man who doesn’t like women? So would a man who likes both men and women be a bisexual? Again, WTF? Basically, both the rabbi’s version and your version of this seem to be playing the game of mocking misogynist (and presumably homophobic) men by suggesting that they don’t really measure up as real heterosexuals, which is a pretty homophobic game to be playing.

I just don’t think this passage, or the rabbi’s piece in general, serves the purpose you want.

But as to your larger point, yes, definitely.

If the definition of a heterosexual man is a male who is attracted to women, then most men today are barely heterosexual.

I love this quote. I think it is absolutely true. I have run into so many men that are so amazingly hateful in how they perceive and speak about women, who also consider themselves to be Playah MacDaddy’s that it’s nauseating. That isn’t to say that I’d automatically classify them as homosexual, but instead whatever sexuality, be it autosexual or lacking affectional orientation. There is a definitive disconnect with men like this, and they aren’t uncommon.