Annie Lowrey in the Washington Post:

But what if the 100-member Senate were designed to mirror the overall U.S. population — and were based on statistics rather than state lines?

Imagine a chamber in which senators were elected by different income brackets — with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent and so on.

Based on Census Bureau data, five senators would represent Americans earning between $100,000 and $1 million individually per year, with a single senator working on behalf of the millionaires (technically, it would be two-tenths of a senator). Eight senators would represent Americans with no income. Sixteen would represent Americans who make less than $10,000 a year, an amount well below the federal poverty line for families. The bulk of the senators would work on behalf of the middle class, with 34 representing Americans making $30,000 to $80,000 per year.

Imagine trying to convince someone — Michael Bloomberg, perhaps? — to be the lonely senator representing the richest percentile. And what if the senators were apportioned according to jobs figures? This year, the unemployed would have gained two seats. Think of the deals that would be made to attract that bloc!

Or how about if senators represented particular demographic groups, based on gender and race? White women would elect the biggest group of senators — 37 of them, though only 38 women have ever served in the Senate, with 17 currently in office. White men would have 36 seats. Black women, Hispanic women and Hispanic men would have six each; black men five; and Asian women and men two each. Women voters would control a steady and permanent majority — making, say, discriminatory health-care measures such as the Stupak Amendment and the horrible dearth of child-care options for working mothers seem untenable.

So in total, there would be 51 female Senators in this made-up world, compared to 38 who have ever been in the Senate in reality, or the 17 current female senators.

One thing that Lowrey didn’t bring up: religious representation. There would be fewer Jews in the Senate, alas — 2 (rounding up) rather than the current 13. About 50 senators would be Protestant, and 25 would be Catholic. 1 would be Muslim. About 15 Senators wouldn’t identify with any organized religion at all; I’m not sure how many of those would be openly atheist, or openly agnostic. (Source).

90 95 years ago today, the women’s suffrage movement lost an important vote in the House of Representatives. From the New York Times, January 12, 1915.

Mrs. Arthur M. Dodge, President of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, said after the vote was taken tonight:

“The deliberations of the House of Representatives today were, of course, of the greatest importance because the final vote was such as to persuade the country forever that the National Congress will not undertake to dictate to the various States what they shall do in the regulation of their franchise.

“In my opinion today’s work in the House demonstrated that from now on the wave of hysteria in which the suffragists have indulged or of which they have been the victims will be on the wane.”

Curtsy to Donkeylicious.

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who’s wished me well over the past day. I obviously have had better days, but all things considered I’m feeling fairly positive about the outlook for the future.

I’ve done a lot of reading in the last day, and one thing that I am grateful for, other than the support of friends and readers, is that I’ve been exposed to feminist thought. I know, it seems strange to bring that up in terms of testicular cancer, but I’m serious. One of the recurring themes I’ve seen in my readings is the concern that losing a testicle will make one “less of a man.”

This isn’t a silly fear; we metaphorically refer to manly gumption as “having balls.” We talk freely about men being “neutered” or “castrated” when they’re silenced or marginalized. The testes, even more than the penis, are the metaphorical seat of manliness in popular culture. And so for many men, the loss of a testicle, even in the service of preventing death from cancer, is a traumatic psychological experience.

Fortunately for me, I’ve been exposed to the idea that what defines a person is not their gonads. I am no more “manly” with two testicles than I will be with one, and if cancer takes that one someday, I’ll still be no less manly. Who I am is not dictated by my genitals. And while there are no doubt a few MRA types who will find my demicastration appropriate, I will simply remember that I know an awful lot of humans who have never had testicles, who nevertheless embrace life without fear, who exhibit all the best of “manly” characteristics — bravery, loyalty, intrepidity — despite not being men at all.

And so I know that the loss of a testicle doesn’t make me lose my identity, any more than the loss of my gall bladder has made me a different person. That knowledge is a gift. Yes, it’s scary to face the potential of cancer, and I’m not looking forward to surgery. But at least I do not need to fear that I am going to come out of surgery somehow less worthy than I was before.

Rody Alvarado, whose case was blogged about on Alas multiple times a few years ago (such as here and here), has finally been granted asylum in the US.

In order to demonstrate a valid asylum claim, an asylum seeker must prove that he or she has a well-founded fear of persecution based upon his or her race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. It’s not enough for a victim of domestic violence to seek asylum based on fear that she will face recurrent violence if she returns to her country of origin. She also has to prove that her persecution is tied to one of the five statutory grounds. That’s historically been difficult to do, since these grounds do not include gender (or sexuality, for that matter), since domestic violence is often viewed as a relationship issue rather than a larger societal problem, and the final decision is left to one immigration judge’s discretion.

In Alvarado’s case, her lawyer successfully argued that her abuse was not just an interpersonal issue, because women in Guatemala face persecution on several societal levels and victims of domestic violence aren’t provided adequate protection by the state. Indeed, Alvarado repeatedly sought protection from the authorities but was told the abuse was a domestic affair. Under circumstances like these, simply being a woman could be considered membership in a persecuted social group.

Since U.S. law relies heavily on precedent for its interpretation, Alvarado’s victory could have a huge impact on future asylum cases involving domestic violence. Additionally, the Obama administration has said it is working on regulations that would create a clear pathway to asylum for victims of domestic violence who flee their home countries. The Bush administration, by comparison, fought hard against domestic violence being considered a valid claim for asylum.

Eastsidekate at Shakesville has more commentary on this case.

I have tried very hard not to write about the Tiger Woods kerfuffle, because, quite frankly, I don’t really see as it’s my business. Tiger certainly cheated on his wife multiple times, and I don’t condone that behavior, but his offense really is against his wife, and he owes her explanations and apologies, not me. (His wife may or may not have committed assault with a deadly weapon against him, which would be a more serious transgression than cheating, but we don’t know that for sure, and I’m not going to speculate further about it.)

At any rate, the Woodses will split up or stay together, and whatever; it’s not really my business. And quite certainly, it isn’t a “scandal,” unless you’re the sort of person who is deeply shocked that in 2009, there are rich, handsome people out there cheating on their spouses.

Enter Richard Cohen, WaPo resident concern troll and sexual harasser, who asks a question that has been on nobody’s mind ever since the Woods “scandal” broke: why don’t women cheat on their spouses like men do? If you don’t want to read any further, the answer is that they’re not driven to conquer things, which is also why women aren’t that successful.

No, really.

Cohen starts his post by noting that every white, middle aged guy he knows doesn’t know why women don’t cheat, which is because, I assume, most of these middle aged white guys Cohen knows have wives cheating on them:

It’s not that there are no women in the Tiger Woods category of professional sport. No woman makes Tiger’s kind of money, of course, but plenty make good money and become celebrities in golf or tennis, and you don’t hear about them hitting on every caddy, pool boy or masseuse. Why?

Well, until the last couple weeks, we didn’t hear about Tiger hitting on every caddy, pool girl, or masseuse. As far as anyone knew, Tiger was playing it straight and narrow, and totally faithful to his wife.

Or take politics. There are now 90 women in Congress, and yet you don’t hear about them recommending their lovers to be a U.S. Attorneys or hiking the Appalachian Trail all the way to Buenos Aires. No female member of Congress is known to have offered the wife of her lover the chance to become a major lobbyist or, just for nostalgia sake, to have had a bit too many and gone for dance in the Tidal Basin. Why?

Well, there are 445 men in Congress. The odds favor men. Also, a quick googling found that Rep. Loretta Sanchez, R-Calif., is currently being accused of carrying on an affair with a defense contractor. I don’t know if she is or isn’t, but it rather undermines Cohen’s point.

Or take corporate America. Fifteen of the nation’s top CEOs are women and there are lot more women one ore two rungs down the cooperate ladder. Yet, you do not hear of them taking their lovers on the company jet and checking them in to resorts as their research assistants. I’m not saying these things never happen, I’m just saying they happen so rarely as to amount to not happening at all.

Uh…yeah. Look, Richard, I don’t remember the last CEO sex scandal that made the news, because frankly, CEOs are screwing all of us all the time, and finding out that they’re screwing someone else specifically really isn’t all that surprising.

Even women entertainers do not carry on like the men do. Okay, Madonna was famous for bedding much of New York’s outer boroughs, but this was no scandal since she was intent on proving… something. Whatever the case, she was not married at the time. Men get caught with hookers and men have multiple lovers and men have groupies, but not women. Why? Why? Why?

Well, Richard, let me tell you about a little thing called the patriarchy, which punishes “slutty” women much more than it punishes “caddish” men, which means that the female entertainer/politician/CEO caught cheating on her spouse is likely to take a much more serious tumble in the eyes of the public than a similarly situated man.

This doesn’t mean women don’t cheat on their spouses. 15 percent of women and 22 percent of men have had intercourse outside of marriage, numbers that are frankly not that different. And the numbers of men and women who have been unfaithful in any relationship are both majorities — 57% of men and 54% of women, numbers that are essentially the same. Women cheat at a healthy rate, nearly as much as men, and it is ludicrous to think that no famous women are among that number. It’s just much more likely that they place a very high value on discretion.

Consider: Kobe Bryant confessed to raping a woman, and is still considered a superstar. Nike still hires him to do ads. He’s still a multimillionaire. Do you think that, say, Mia Hamm would have kept getting endorsement deals had it come out that she cheated on Nomar Garciaparra? Of course not. Her “all-American girl” image would have been shattered. Her endorsements would have been pulled. Her reputation would have been permanently damaged.

Now, I don’t know that Mia Hamm didn’t cheat on Nomar (if she’s interested in cheating, she should feel free to give me a call, as I’ve had a crush on Mia Hamm for something like 20 years). But if she did, she damn sure had to be careful about it, make sure because it simply wouldn’t do for a woman to be caught in the same type of situation as a man. And certainly, if she was tempted, she would have had the previous scenario in the back of her mind in a way that Kobe obviously did not. This is the slut/stud dichotomy, Richard, and I understand why you don’t know about it, because you’re a douche.

But even if you don’t understand it, you still should know better than to spin elaborate just-so stories out of misunderstood ev-psych studies.

We start with a backhanded complement.

We can guess. The first guess is that women are simply smarter than men. Say what you will about Woods, it’s not his wholesome image that has suffered, it’s his standing as a sentient being. A person with the wit of a mosquito knows better than to leave a voicemail message on a mistress’ phone or to text women who, from the angelic looks of them, would sell their own dear mothers for a chance to appear on Inside Edition. Few women are that stupid. Few men aren’t.

Except, Richard, that women aren’t inherently smarter than men. They’re not inherently dumber, either — men and women are cognitive equals. Women are prone to make dumb mistakes and rash decisions just like men are, and if you don’t know that, you don’t know many women.

It’s just that for women, the stakes are much higher in things like this than men. Bill Clinton largely survived his infidelities; do you think Hillary Clinton would have been electable if it turned out she was having an affair with an intern? No. She would have been pilloried for it, even as people allowed that she probably had earned the right. Good girls don’t, cool boys do. Slut/stud, Richard.

When you’re dealing with something that can end your career, or at the very least ruin your reputation, you’re more apt to be very, very careful. Tiger Woods didn’t worry about leaving messages and sending texts because he realized — accurately, I misdoubt — that the disclosure of his infidelities would not destroy his career. And it won’t. He may take a bit of a financial hit in the short term, but in the long term, he’ll be fine. A woman in a similar position would be a fool to take a similar risk. And so they don’t.

This is also probably a good time to note that there is no “female Tiger Woods,” period. Tiger Woods is on a different plane when it comes to endorsements. Only Michael Jordan comes close. The only woman with the kind of drawing power Woods has is Oprah Winfrey, and she’s chosen to build her own brand, rather than shill for others. And, for what it’s worth, Oprah’s been careful not to get married, hasn’t she?

All right, so women smart, men dumb. That may be it, Richard, but it’s not offensive enough. Can you really be obnoxious?

The other possibility that strikes me is that women seem not to have the evolutionary urge to couple with cheaply dressed strangers. They have a stronger need to mother — to have a child and then raise that child.

Ah, yes, ladies! I know, you say you liked New Moon for the level of shirtlessness involved, but you’re lying. What you really want is to birth babies. There’s no better proof of this than my seven-year-old daughter, who has told me flatly that she doesn’t want to birth babies, because it looks like it’s painful, and there are a lot of kids who don’t have parents who could be adopted. See? It’s so natural that a seven-year-old doesn’t know it!

Also, just so we’re clear, men have no interest in children. My daughter comes up in this column only so I can prove I had sex, not because I love the fact that she’s thinking that deeply about stuff at seven, and find it adorable and sensible.

The male equivalents of the sort of women who have courageously come foreword to claim their reward money for entertaining Tiger are evolutionary bad material. No woman would want them as husbands and fathers. They are what Darwin called dreck, which is Yiddish for cocktail waitress. Since recreational sex can lead to diapers, women have to be prudent. As they say down at the Fed, they have to consider the out years.

Yeah, cocktail waitresses are scum of the earth, and while men may have sex with them, they certainly don’t want to marry them. Also, women never have one-night-stands because evidently it’s 1523 BCE, and the only contraceptive that’s been invented is crocodile dung.

To be fair, in Richard Cohen’s America, abortion is something you probably can’t get, so there is that to consider.

This is why women more than men link sex to love and commitment. I’m not saying that all of them do or all of them do all the time. I’m just saying that there seems to be few women who behave as Tiger Woods did. Even women who have no moral compunction against multiple affairs draw the line at a number somewhat below Tiger’s.

Well, I mean, Jesus, even men who have no moral compunction against multiple affairs draw the line at a number somewhat below Tiger’s. Tiger’s kind of in a league of his own there, too.

Men, like the poor polar bear, have seen their ecology change. Their youthful aggression, so useful for wars of choice (not to mention necessity) or merely hunting saber-toothed tigers, is now just a social menace. Their urge to have sex with just about any woman with a pulse makes them crude laughing stocks. Tiger Woods has become a punch line — and so have men in general. (Thanks, Tiger.) We are a sorry lot. Almost no one, save maybe lachrymose country western singers, will defend the cheatin’ man.

I don’t even know what the hell Cohen is talking about here. Our “youthful aggression” is tied to sex somehow, which I thought was about love, or at least general friendliness. Also, saber-toothed tigers.

As for men becoming a punch line because of Tiger — well, no, you see, just no. Tiger’s a punch line, but if the statistics can be believed, 78 percent of men don’t cheat during marriage. That’s what statisticians like to call “an overwhelming majority.” I’m not saying men never consider cheating — nor that women don’t. (If statistics can be believed, roughly 70 percent of both sexes have said they’d have an affair if it could be guaranteed never to come out.) But most men and women don’t cheat, ever.

The fact that 78 percent of men and 85 percent of women don’t cheat during their marriages suggests to me that, as per usual, men and women are more alike than different. Or, possibly, it proves that women aren’t that driven, not like men are.

But it could be that the urge to get closer to cocktail waitresses and denizens of dimly lit hotel lounges is in some way linked to the drive to conquer, to prevail — to succeed. It could explain why all this time into the Age of Feminism, years after women were liberated, women make up less than 20 percent of Congress and only 3 percent of those top CEOs.

The reason the Glass Ceiling has not broken is that women have other priorities — maintaining relationships and being a mother. This is the way it is, and this is the way it has always been. As any of Tiger Woods’s cocktail waitresses could tell him, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

N’est ce pas?

Yes, that would be one explanation of why systemic sexism has prevented women from reaching parity with men. And I’d totally buy it, if it wasn’t the biggest load of shit produced on land since Amphicoelias fragillimus went extinct 150 million years ago.

Men are successful because we like sex? Really? Well, then, what of women who like sex, a group that includes, at last count, the vast majority of women? Certainly, they would seem to be likely candidates for success, would they not?

Oh, but there’s that slut/stud dichotomy, Richard, which holds women back. You see, women are taught that Good Girls Don’t, remember? So when you’re hitting on a waitress at Perkins at three in the morning, because Cool Guys Do, the woman across the way may be just as interested in hitting on the waiter, but she doesn’t, because she doesn’t want to be That Kind of Girl.

This is tragic, evidently, because a willingness to engage in random sexual encounters is evidently the key to success in life. And women are kept from that success by societal pressures. Too bad.

Of course, the irony is that women are kept from success by societal pressures. Just not the ones Cohen identifies or cares about.

Richard, do you want to know why there aren’t that many female sex scandals? Well, first off, recognize everything I’ve said here as a factor. Now, note that overall, the number of women in all of these “famous” situations are dwarfed by the number of men. Female athletes get nowhere near the endorsement deals that men do. There are far fewer women in Congress than men. There are far fewer female CEOs than men. Only in the case of entertainment is there rough parity, and frankly, I can think of several “sex scandals” involving women there — Britney Spears, you may recall, saw her career crippled by one.

Famous women aren’t that plentiful, and they have strong incentives to be discrete. That, it seems to me, is a far more likely answer than the idea that there aren’t that many famous women because women don’t like sex. They may not like sex with you, Richard, but that just shows they have good taste.

No, much as you may want to think that your propensity for sexual harassment and general rape apologism is the key to your success, it isn’t, Richard. It’s just proof that you’re a douche, like the small minority of men and women who cheat on their partners. Only douchier.

[Note: The comments to this post are "feminist only." If you do not think this blog's moderators would consider you a feminist, then don't post a comment here. However, the comments at the identical post on Clarisse's blog are open to all.]

In late October I posted a three-part series under the title “Questions I’d Like To Ask Entitled Cis Het Men” (Part 1: Who Cares?; Part 2: Men’s Rights; Part 3: Space For Men). These posts kicked up more of a furor than I anticipated, with a bunch of cross-postings and responses on other blogs.¹ It all gave me a huge number of new perspectives to synthesize, which is part of why it took me so long to post this followup … but here I am!

I really want this followup to be readable to people who didn’t bother with the initial three posts, so please let me know if I fail!

Introducing myself, and One Correction

Please allow me to introduce myself. I think those posts probably make more sense (as will large swaths of this one) if you know who I am, and they got linked around to so many non-regular readers that most of the audience now doesn’t.

I go by Clarisse. It is not my real name, because I am a sex-positive and, in particular, pro-BDSM² activist, and being all-the-way-out-of-the-closet about kink can have serious, long-term repercussions for someone’s life (the most pressing for me, right now, being employability: my immediate superiors here in Africa know about my BDSM identity, but the larger rather conservative organization sure as hell doesn’t). Identifying as feminist and pro-BDSM can be really fraught territory — many avowed feminists regard BDSM with suspicion and some, on the more extreme end, with outright hatred. (Famous German feminist Alice Schwarzer once said, “Female masochism is collaboration.” Many feminist spaces have a long tradition of excluding or marginalizing BDSM, like the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, which incidentally did the same thing with trans people. Nine Deuce, a popular radical feminist blogger, has been known to assert that sadists are morally obligated to either repress their sadistic desires or kill themselves. For example.) In her post “Healing My Broken Feminist Heart”, Audacia Ray talks about how much it hurts to identify as a feminist and yet be told, often, that the way you realize your personal sexuality is unfeminist; I’ve been meaning to write a response to that post for ages, because boy do I know how that feels. (I swear, I have the biggest crush on Audacia Ray. I want to be her when I grow up.)

I am Chicago-based in that I lived there for years before I moved here to Africa in order to work in HIV/AIDS mitigation, and I suspect I’ll move back there when my contract ends. In Chicago, I lectured on BDSM and sexual communication, and I created and curated a fabulous sex-positive film series and discussion group that it broke my heart to leave. (The film series was so successful that a group of loyalists gathered, formed a committee, and have continued it without me! Yes!)

My feminist history isn’t very “official”, though I was raised by two very feminist people. For instance, I haven’t read most of the classic feminist authors. My degree is in Philosophy, Religious Studies and Studio Art, not anything gender-related — and when I was in college I remember that I often viewed hard-line feminist assertions with suspicion. I would irritably characterize them as “conspiracy theories”: these people seemed to think there was some secret society of evil men sitting around and plotting to ruin their lives, which clearly was not the case! Ah, youth … :grin: The problem is, of course, exacerbated by the fact that definitions of feminism have become so varied and so many different issues have been attached to feminism by different people.³

In other words, almost my entire gender/sex background is idiosyncratic and self-trained. I certainly can’t hope to match the massive theoretical background that many Internet gender commentators have. And I am very familiar with having my experience discounted and dismissed in a feminist context (”Sorry, BDSM is abuse. Period. If you enjoy BDSM, you’re mentally ill or you have Patriarchy Stockholm Syndrome”). These are some of the reasons I tried to spend my entire Entitled Cis Het Men post series asking questions, rather than making assertions.

The posts weren’t intended to be prescriptive — I don’t have much of an agenda beyond “create more conversations around sex and gender”. There is of course my agenda (shared by almost every human alive) of “convincing people to agree with me” and “getting people to join my cool club or at least admire it from afar”, but I don’t personally have any pressing Grand Policy Goals. One commenter who went by Sailorman over at Alas said, on the third post: I read this thread with interest, but it is of course basically a very extended and well written TPHMT argument? I don’t know what the acronym means, but I’m honestly sort of annoyed by any attempt to boil those three posts down to a single argument, because I tried so hard to make it clear that a single argument was not my intent, with that series. I really am just interested in exploring various and often very discrete masculinity-related questions. No, really, I am. No, really, I am.

There’s just one correction I want to make to my own posts before I continue. In the third one, I failed to make a point that really needed to be made, which is: for women — and for men — any “privileges” they experience are also the flip side of unfortunate stereotypes. But what’s especially pernicious about male privilege is that every aspect of female privilege can be trumped by male privilege. The classic example of this is that yes, I can gain “privilege” by dressing to look hot, but that “power” can instantly be taken away by a man who decides to call me a slut.

So what comes clear from that correction is that, yeah — if we want to boil this down to the Oppression Olympics, I do think women have it worse than men and that America is still more centered around and gives more aggregate power to men. But the whole point of those posts was to evade the Oppression Olympics!

Criticisms!

I’m not going to address all the criticisms raised about my posts (and me), especially not the ones that are:

(a) fairly obvious misreadings (or extremely uncharitable readings) of what I said or even outright misquotes, or

(b) questions that I answered at another point over the course of the 3-post essay, or

(c) statements that “argh women derive some unfair benefits from the gender binary too!”

Here are some assertions/ideas/tendencies I thought were interesting, though:

Toy Soldier made the point that To answer [Clarisse's] question about how to broker discussions about masculinity with men, the best suggestion would be to lose the tone that turns men off. He was referring to the third post in particular, I think, in which I talk about how many feminist spaces are arguably hostile to men, and it might be in the interest of feminists to make them less hostile. In that segment, my language became especially strong: I did things like refer to men as The Oppressive Class, for instance. In part this was meant as mild irony on my part, but in part it was also because my intended audience was feminists⁴ and I knew that feminists might take some of the things I was saying badly. “You’re a collaborator!” Et cetera. And so I strengthened my “nearly-militant, obviously feminist” tone, in an effort to make up for that: to make it clear that I’m still part of the fold — a feminist arguing in feminists’ interests. Oh, my broken feminist heart.

I agree with Toy Soldier that this may not have been the best tactic. In general, I try to support debating as charitably and with as reasonable a tone as possible, which is something I did not succeed at in Part 3. And yet I think that I did succeed at the goal of “sounding feminist”: even though one commenter at Alas said, I honestly feel this post should not be in a feminist space at all. You can’t say you don’t want to be an “MRA asshole” and then just dole out their erroneous, misogynist talking-points, it’s worth noting that Ampersand — who runs Alas and made the decision to cross-post my stuff — stated: Part of the reason I wanted to guest-post this series is because Clarisse entirely lacks that anti-feminist vibe — not just because she’s a woman (there are female MRAs and anti-feminists), but because her tone rings as genuinely feminist, at least to this reader.

Another comment Toy Soldier posted: While Clarisse may be genuinely concerned with discussing masculinity, it is clear that she is not particularly open to actually doing that because it would require her to dial back her political views and the issues on men’s terms. It seems more that, like many feminists, she wants to define the problem, define the terms, define the rules of discussion and define the solution.

This is partly a reasonable point. I mean, I didn’t propose a solution — I did pretty much the opposite of proposing a solution, in fact: I asked a bunch of interrelated but differently-focused questions. Still, it’s true that I defined some problems, and the terms, in heavily feminist ways. And it may be that if we want to get the ball rolling on widespread discussion of masculinity, we aren’t going to be able to do that without softening feminist edges and feminist slants on the discussion spaces. The issue of who’s to blame — that is, whether this is because feminists have done legitimately alienating things to men, or because men are unreasonably biased against feminism — is ultimately almost beside that point. (The classes “feminist” and “men” really are too broad to reasonably settle the “who’s to blame!” problem, anyway.)

And yet there were plenty of men who answered the posts, emailed me, etc. in the belief that I was writing in good faith and without saying that existing spaces alienate them. Here’s a comment from Richard Jeffrey Newman at Alas:

I confess that, as a man whom I imagine most people would probably define as normative — at least according to the criteria Clarisse has been using in her series — I have trouble with the premise of this question. I have never found feminist discourses around gender and sexuality closed to me. Sometimes difficult? Sure. Does it sometimes make me uncomfortable? Sure. Are there contexts in which it is inappropriate for me as a man to enter into feminist discourse as a “speaking subject?” Sure, but that doesn’t mean I cannot listen and find myself somewhere within the discourse. Do I think feminist discourse is always accurate in the way it speaks about men? No, but that is not the same thing as saying it is closed to me.

So, what spaces do we create?

Daran at Feminist Critics accused me of hypocrisy, saying that some of my statements show that I’m not “really” interested in finding new perspectives or making space for them in feminism. For instance, in one comment I said that I suppose it’s true that men who disagree that men have it better than women are never going to ally themselves [with feminism]. Those aren’t really men that it’s ever going to be easy to communicate about these issues with, though … at least I don’t think so. I’m more interested in how to reach men who agree that men are generally in a more powerful position, and who are interested in describing, but have trouble expressing that agreement because they feel blocked from the discussion by feminists or because they’re afraid of suffering social consequences. To which Daran responded, How much is Clarisse’s demand that the men she addresses agree that men have it better than women a real requirement for finding common ground, and how much is it a shibboleth she’s using to distinguish between those she might be able to find common ground and those she thinks she’s likely to view as assholes?

The accusation of hypocrisy (and the idea that I’m “demanding” anything) pisses me off. So let me be really, painfully, slowly clear over the course of many paragraphs.

I can start by saying that get safe spaces; they are, in fact, extremely relevant for BDSMers. There are a limited number of places where expressing my sexuality is totally acceptable and introducing BDSM into the discussion isn’t taken as a signal that I’m sick, deranged, seeking attention, or attempting to shock. Take BDSM dungeons: different dungeons have different vibes, but they are almost always a cross between a safe space for kinky sex and an alternative sexuality community center. So, for example — given the history of radical feminism and BDSM — I am extremely unlikely to invite a radical feminist into my local dungeon or suggest that she attend a meetup for kinksters.

Yet at the same time, I know how exclusion feels, too. And I want radical feminists to learn more about BDSM. I don’t want to exclude them from opportunities to learn about common BDSM insights into sexuality, consent, etc. However, I sure as hell don’t want them around when I’m trying to pick up kinky dudes, nor do I want them in my dungeon watching me and my partners do our thang. Oh noes! What to do?

Actually, the compromise was easy. My aforementioned sex-positive film series makes a pretty good case study for this, I think (yes! it was actually worth it for you to read my narcissistic and self-serving introduction to this post!). When I started the film series and a related meetup called Pleasure Salon, I characterized both of them as open sexuality discussion spaces for everyone. I promoted them heavily in radical sex communities, and I specifically invited every radical feminist I could think of — not just by listing radical feminists among the target audiences in the invitations, but also by personally calling any number of traditionally second-wave spaces around Chicago. Not as many radical feminists attended as I would have liked, but some did, and I received feedback (in person, by email, etc.) telling me how much I’d changed some perspectives. (The events also drew a healthy population of men, by the way. And they sneakily allowed me to open some folks’ minds on the question of “This is what a feminist looks like …”)

If we’re going to try and make spaces where more male perspectives are gathered and even where more men are “recruited”, I think that’s the way to go about it. Not by trying to repurpose feminist safe spaces (at least not without the consent of the feminists within those spaces), but by finding other ideas — e.g. sexuality — that can serve as a focus for creating a space open to everyone. Those ideas would have to be carefully chosen — it would be very easy to choose a central issue that seems so biased in itself, it turns off the majority of potential attendees. (Of course, to a certain extent this is unavoidable; perhaps because of my BDSM bias, an enormous percentage of Sex+++ attendees have been kinksters. And despite my efforts to reach out to, for example, various liberal churches, Sex+++ attendance from churchgoers was regrettably low.)

As Richard Jeffrey Newman at Alas said: arguments about degree of privilege, etc., definitions of feminism, etc., are red herrings or straw men or whatever the purpose of which — conscious or not — is to distract from discussing the real issues at hand: sexism, patriarchy, whatever. And as a commenter here, sylphhead, said: it looks like we’ll just have to co-exist, and draw on our points of agreement where they exist, and there are plenty, without a wholesale joining hands in a circle. … I can’t speak for all of us “liberal but non-feminist-identifying men” that seem to be your target audience here, but for myself what would help is a light-hearted environment that best simulates a non-anonymous setting.

In other words, I think we can make spaces to discuss these things that are open to everybody, and we can still make feminism only available to people who agree with the basic tenets of feminism. I do not think these things are mutually exclusive. Sure, there are issues that I want people to agree with me about before I invite them to feminist events or define them as a feminist ally, but that doesn’t mean I consider it impossible to have any conversations about sex and gender with them. We just create the open-discussion spaces focused around issues that aren’t “automatically” feminist, and we keep them light-hearted, allowing feminist input and perspectives but other perspectives as well. As long as we are eloquent and open-hearted (and we are, right?), we’ll surely recruit people to our agendas in the process. We feminists may need to prepare ourselves for some tough messages and some disappointment, though, because ….

What will those spaces look like?

Commenter Sam linked to an interesting and relevant comment some dude left on another blog: I’m not sure I think [the problem of how most men can express heterosexual sexuality] is a problem feminists are responsible for fixing. I don’t want to minimize it but it seems that feminism is only the proximate cause of the problem because there isn’t any positive script for male heterosexual sexuality. The fact that the old script is gone can be laid on feminism. But the old script sucked and I’m not sure any movement that challenges a norm or institution should be expected to have a replacement. As a feminist I think it would be a good strategy to have a replacement, in this case. But this isn’t something I would demand of other feminists. And if anyone hear cares about this issue a lot they should spend time coming up with ways to teach boys how to develop romantic relationships that both work and don’t involve misogyny. I’d help.

Recently, Sinclair Sexsmith was writing about masculinity over at CarnalNation and said that, Though I feel very strongly that there is a place in feminism for these experiences and for all of us to be included, I understand the qualms and hesitations. I’ve fought with feminists about the inclusion of queers, trans folks, butches like me who like masculinity, or men themselves. And I firmly stand my ground: I don’t care if you say you won’t let me in. I understand what this movement is trying to do: examine gender and the ways it hurts. I want to be involved in that. We may disagree on the means by which we achieve that goal, but there is room for me in this revolution, in this re-visioning of what gender means. There must be.

Both of these paragraphs — and lots of other evidence I’ve seen or heard of — make it clear that as people come more and more to the conclusion that masculinity needs examining and discussion, people are going to be having those discussions whether feminists are involved or not. And sure, it’s hard to say right now what that’s going to look like. (In my three-post series I said that although I think dealing with abuse issues is an incredibly important potential facet of any masculinity movement, since most abuse is after all perpetrated by men, I don’t think it’s good for a masculinity movement to be centered around abuse. Commenter Sam responded, I have a feeling it will be in one way or another, simply because that’s the way masculinity has been framed by mainstream feminism, particularly radical feminism in the last 30 years. Whether you believe it or not, this is the issue that will be front and center when you’re trying to redefine masculinity.) — But though it’s hard to predict that movement’s shape, the movement itself is certainly gonna happen, it’s already happening, nonetheless.

Yet since overtly feminist spaces are either not going to be welcoming to everyone, or aren’t going to be seen as welcoming by everyone, feminists aren’t going to be able to define the terms of the masculinity discourse. We’re just going to have to create, influence, or attend the discourses held in other places. And if we’re invested in honestly trying to get men’s viewpoints on what manliness means and how to be a man, then we have to prepare ourselves to get some answers that will unsettle us or even come off as unfeminist.

I’m still not sure how to attract lots of men to feminism, to convince them to identify as feminists — or even if we can. But the question of creating conversations about masculinity is separate from the question of attracting men to feminism. And I am sure that if feminists want to influence the masculinity discourse, we have to be open to it. Telling men who disagree with us to go elsewhere and stay away from us is all well and good — but then they’ll go elsewhere. And they may or may not incorporate feminist ideas when they do.

1. Ampersand over at Alas, a Blog asked to cross-post them: here’s Part 1 at Alas, Part 2 at Alas, and Part 3 at Alas. There are a ton of comments on those three posts, many of them interesting. Also, Toy Soldier wrote a single response, and Daran over at Feminist Critics wrote a response to each segment (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Although there are a lot of aspects to these responses that irritate me, particularly the failure to — you know — even try to answer the vast majority of my questions, I think there were some fair and decent points made as well. The comments are an often-offensive minefield, however, as Daran himself later acknowledged. (back)
2. BDSM is a 6-for-4 deal of an acronym: Bondage/Discipline, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism. There’s a lot of stigma, stereotypes and misunderstandings around BDSM; thus there naturally arise BDSM activists who seek to correct those things. (back)
3. If you feel that you need evidence for this assertion, I read an interesting paper recently called “Who Are Feminists And What Do They Believe?: The Role of Generations”. American Sociological Review, 2003, Volume 68 (August), pages 607-622. The paper notes that there are three separate papers with the exact title of, “I’m Not a Feminist, But …” and others that work along the same theme. (back)
4. The three-post series was originally meant as a contribution to a feminist/radical sexuality anthology. (back)

So as you know, yesterday we found out that there’s a new kind of woman out there: the “cheetah,” a girl who dates guys slightly younger and/or hotter than herself, or possibly a date-rapist, or maybe just someone with low self-esteem, or maybe a cow giving the milk away for free. I’ve read the column several times, and still don’t quite get it. But anyway, cheetahs: they’re women who have sex.

Cheetahs, of course, are part of an increasingly ridiculously expansive meme in which women who have sex are given a cutesy feline equivalent. Are you an older woman who likes sex? Well, then you’re a cougar. A thirtysomething who likes college-aged boys? You’re a puma. Older than a cougar, but still daring to have sex? Spencer Morgan proposes “saber-toothed,” because you’re old. Get it? Get it? Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more?

Anyhow, all these feline descriptions got me to thinking: there are an awful lot of different members of the family Felidae, and many of them have not yet been used as pejorative cognomens to describe women who dare to enjoy sex.

That ends today.

Yes, today I’m happy to share with you a guide to all the many known cat names for different types of women. Feel free to clip and save this post; it will save you a lot of time, and allow you to deal with women as the strange, inhuman, bestial creatures they are, rather than as fellow human beings.

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Bay Cats - Women age 24 to 29 who enjoy sex, surfing, and dating men either age 18-27 or older than 29, but never, under any circumstances, 28-year-olds. 28-year-old guys totally suck.

Barn Cats - Red-haired women from rural areas whose stated love for you will never completely cure them of their secret desire to seduce an unwitting international superspy into turning traitor.

Bobcats - Women named Roberta who are very attracted to men who detest Latvian cuisine, yet find Lithuanian cuisine sublime.

Caracals - Women who dare to like sex, yet find cutesy feline nicknames to be patronizing, demeaning, and dehumanizing. Silly little things, aren’t they, fellas? It’s almost as if they think they have feelings and desires of their own! Ah, women are funny creatures.

Cat Powers - Talented but mercurial singer-songwriters.

Cat Stevenses - Since 1977 conversion, are known as “Yusuf Islams.”

Cats - Women aged 35 years, 11 months, 12 days to 41 years, 10 months, 28 days who are incredibly turned on by Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. Except for Starlight Express, because, I mean, roller skates? Really?

Fisher Cats - Women over the age of 70 who enjoy threesomes with male gymnasts and/or models, but also secretly have a crush on the late Chris Farley.

Kittens - Creepy old men call ‘em “Jailbait,” creepy twentysomethings call ‘em “Lolis,” Humbert Humbert calls ‘em “Nymphets,” and John Derbyshire calls ‘em “A little long in the tooth.”

Lionesses - Women who go out and work hard while their lazy, no-good boyfriends stay home and play Wii all day. Wait — sorry, folks, that’s a negative stereotype about men. Obviously, please disregard this one.

Lynx - Women under the age of 27 who are between 5′10″ and 6′7″ and who enjoy dating men shorter than 5′8.

Ocelots - Women aged 23 years, 2 months through 23 years, 4 months, who like to date men who once played professional jai alai.

Panthers - Women age 19 to 23 who engage in serial monogamy with men whose hair is shoulder-length or shorter. Often (but not always) like food, breathing air, and drinking liquid beverages of some sort.

Servals - You may confuse these brunette, left-handed waitresses aged 37 to 42½ who enjoy one-night-stands with circus roustabouts with their closely-related sisters, the Oncillas, but unlike Oncillas, Servals find the prose of Dan Brown to be somewhat stilted.

Shorthairs - Would be the cutesy cat name given to lesbians, except those bitchez totally get annoyed when my bros and I ask if we can videotape them, so they don’t get a cute cat name, so there.

Siamese Cats - Asian chicks. Amirite, guys? Amirite?

Smilodons - Women who live outside of Schenectady, New York, who prefer to date men who live in their parents’ basements and blog in favor of conservative politics. Favorite aphrodisiac? Cheeto dust.

Tigers - Women who actually like sex. The dirty sluts.

Tiggers - The wonderful thing about Tiggers/Is Tiggers are wonderful things/Their tops are made out of rubber/Their bottoms are made out of springs/Also, they love to receive oral.

Vampyrictises - Women aged 14 to 49 who are totally on Team Edward. Or Team Jacob. Or Team Larry. (I haven’t actually read the books, and my daughter isn’t a tween yet; my knowledge of them comes from Burger King commercials.)

Wildcats - Ironically, wildcats are actually pretty calm most of the time, unless you get them started on how bad Two and a Half Men is. Do not get them started on how bad Two and a Half Men is. You will never hear the end of it. Trust me.

York Chocolate Cats - Actually applies to all women, because as we all know, all women love chocolate. And diamonds. And flowers. And whatever other little trinkets and baubles you can buy them to keep from having to actually talk to them.

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So anyway, that’s the list as it stands today, although it could probably use expanding. I mean, there are always more cat names, and always more demeaning stereotypes that can be applied to women, so I’m sure we’ll come up with more. Until then, though, I hope this list allows you, the trend piece writer and misogynist (but I repeat myself) to write great columns for your local shoppers, explaining precisely why women suck. Because nothing proves women suck more than men stereotyping them.

So when we left off, I was talking about the fact that this god-awful article from the New York Observer started out talking about slut-shaming by giving an example of date rape. Now, I’m all in favor of shaming rapists, and if the article had been about calling out rapey behavior among women, I’d be happy to join in, although I’d probably point out that we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that female-on-male sexual assault occurs about one percent as often as male-on-female sexual assault, and indeed significantly less than male-on-male assault. Noting that a woman raping a man is a bad thing is not the same thing as saying men rape women, women rape men, and it’s all pretty balanced. It isn’t.

But Spencer Morgan’s article isn’t about attacking women for assaulting men. It’s about attacking women for having libidos — which is something very different. You see, the “cheetahs” that Morgan identify aren’t looking for a quick one-night stand. Oh, no. They’re looking to seduce men into long-term relationships by getting them into bed for a night. Or something. Really, the article is pretty incoherent. About the only thing that comes through loud and clear is that some women like pursuing men, and that’s bad.

Morgan jumps from Seth’s story to talk about women as species of cats, because that meme evidently hasn’t burned itself out yet. You may know about cougars — 40-something and older women who like sex — but cheetahs are their younger nieces, you see. They’re 25-somethings who like sex. This distinguishes them from pumas, who are 30-somethings who like to have sex with 20-something guys. (One might get the idea from this that women like sex. Hmmm. Nope, must be some feline metaphor I’m missing.)

At any rate, women like sex and actually sometimes seek out men to have one-night stands with. In the real world, this is called “dating,” and unlike the date-rapey behavior of Dana, it’s considered pretty normal. Or predatory:

I thought the same on a recent night here in New York, when my wife showed me a “funny” text one of her girlfriends sent her inquiring what she was up to—we were in a car, heading home—and sniggering that she herself was “out on the prowl.” I immediately thought of the widely held view that single women are keen to get their paws on a hunk of man to hunker down with for the winter months. I looked out the car window—it was raining. A cold, insinuating rain. The conditions were perfect for a cheetah to a strike.

Yes, strike with her vagina. Just like a cheetah, who, as we all know, is native to the New York area, and likes to strike in freezing rain.

Now, you might get the idea from this text that Morgan’s wife’s friend is a woman looking to hook up with a guy. On the contrary. She’s had her heart broken and stomped on, and is finding that love stinks, yeah yeah. At least, that’s what a cougar named Angela says:

She noted that her friend K.C. was a cheetah. Recently out of a relationship, K.C. has discovered that getting a man was no longer as easy as it once was. “It seems like whenever she can, she winds up going home with the drunkest guy in the bar,” said Angela. “Of course, in the back of her mind she’s hoping that her pussy’s still good enough to keep him.”

Because, you know, a woman never would look for a one-night stand. She has to get into a relationship. Any relationship. Especially with guys who have drinking problems:

A cock loiterer is typically a girl who has recently come out of a relationship that she’s been in for a long time, and she suddenly realizes that getting laid is not as easy as it once was,” [Deadspin writer A.J.] Daulerio explained. He noted that the cheetah hunts alone, and prefers gatherings where she can blend into the crowd until the quarry grow weak and sloppy. “You know, she’s the type who’ll come out to the sports bar for Sunday football and then, whereas most people will leave after the 12 o’clock game ends, she’ll stick around for the 4 o’clock game,” he said.

He added that the cheetah was not necessarily unattractive but that for some reason or another, she was not aware of her attractiveness. That said, the cheetah he had in mind was notorious for looking dreadful without her makeup on and, as with Dana, working her way through his friend group.

First off, once more, we have a nod and a wink to rapey behavior. But more to the point, we also have a direct shot at women. You see, the real failing of cheetahs is not that they like sex, or that they initiate it, but that they aren’t that hot anymore. Not hot enough, anyhow, to date hot guys.

And that’s what lies at the black, beating heart of this article: a huge lump of Schadenfreude. “Cheetahs” are too old to be having casual sex. At least with cute young guys. Serves ‘em right, I guess, for having once been hot enough to. Or not — the article isn’t clear. At any rate, they should settle down, get married, aim for a less attractive man. And they’re never going to find it through sex.

“Women in New York tend to be at a huge disadvantage,” said John Carney, of Businessinsider.com and another cheetah victim, via Gchat. “Many moved here from elsewhere, severing the kind of social bonds that ordinarily would provide introductions to potential mates. The cheetah is an ill-conceived attempt to overcome this situation.” He added later: “It is tragic. They should put a warning in cabs, like they used to about seat belts and remembering to collect your belongings: ‘This random hook-up will not likely lead to a relationship. Please exit the cab with all your dignity.’”

The troubling thing about the cheetah is that it’s a lose-lose for both predator and prey. Both her Auntie Cougar and Cousin Puma have a certain dignity. They’re out there shakin’ it up, slaying dudes and taking names. Not so the cheetah, who hopes that her victim will find something in her searching eyes when he rolls over the next morning, and will try to subtly guilt him into another round next time they meet: “Hey, where’ve you been? I haven’t seen you in so long.”

You see, there’s no chance that she just wanted a night of sex. Women hate sex. They like relationships — even though these cheetahs seem to be “working their way through” every friend group in the world — which doesn’t sound like a woman looking for monogamy, now that I think about it.

At any rate, what would an article like this be without a paragraph that makes you want to bash your head against the wall?

Angela would like to do the cheetahs of the world a favor: “Heed my warning: You’re never going to get a boyfriend or a husband this way. Men like to chase. The only man you’ll ever get to stick around by being a cheetah is going to be a total pussy.”

And there we go: misogyny, misandry, misanthropy — whatever you want to call it, that reductive belief that human beings are incapable of making individual decisions, that men and women are of two separate, unrelated species that behave in easily-categorized ways, and that All Men behave in one way, and All Women behave in another.

Do some men like to chase? Yes. I’m not one of them. Chasing sucks. I’d rather be chased, myself, but alas, that doesn’t so much happen because women are always told that they’re supposed to sit back and be pursued.

The truth is that some men like to pursue, some like to be pursued. Some women like to pursue, some like to be pursued. And nobody likes to be taken advantage of. This is not rocket science. But it is too difficult for the New York Observer to grasp.

This completely awful New York Observer article has been making the rounds on the twittersphere today, with most of my feminist and ally friends observing that the article boils down to, as Spencer Ackerman says, “adult women should not ever have sex with any men ever, and especially not with us.” And frankly, how can one look at an article headlined “Rrrowl! Beware Cougar’s Young Niece, the Cheetah,” and think anything else? Clearly, the article is all about slut-shaming women into retreating to demure ladyhood.

And clearly, that’s what the article is about, which is why I’m breaking my reaction to this post up into two parts. Because while the article is about slut-shaming, the anecdote given to shame sluts is an anecdote about something else entirely.

The piece opens with an anecdote about “Seth,” one of the writer’s friends, who’s been at a party and had a few too many.

“I can barely stand,” Seth said, swaying innocently on the soggy sidewalk. (Seth’s a gentleman and asked that I change the names and obscure certain details in unfurling the horrors that so thoroughly furled him that night, in order to protect the honor of a woman.) He was 24 at the time, a magazine writer.

Joel said, “O.K., I think he needs to go home.”

Dana, who was 29, said, “Let’s go get another drink!”

“I wanna go home,” Seth warbled.

“O.K., I’ll take him home,” Dana said.

Joel gave Seth a “WTF?” look and said, “I’ll take him home.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Dana said, hailing a cab and then bundling Seth inside.

“I woke up with a condom still on my dick,” he told me.

[...]

Dana’s hunting methods and psychology bear no resemblance to the cougar. As Seth aptly points out, “A cougar would fuck and then leave and not feel bad.”

Instead, Seth awoke to Dana’s limpid eyes, followed by an awkward kiss in broad daylight as the two parted ways on the street. The cheetah stays the night.

Now, you may see the problem here, but you may be thinking to yourself, “Jeff, that’s just a story about a girl having a one-night stand. What’s wrong with that?” Well, to illustrate, let’s turn to Amber at Prettier than Napoleon:

“I can barely stand,” Sabrina said, swaying innocently on the soggy sidewalk. … She was 24 at the time, a magazine writer.

Jennifer said, “O.K., I think she needs to go home.”

Dave, who was 29, said, “Let’s go get another drink!”

“I wanna go home,” Sabrina warbled.

“O.K., I’ll take her home,” Dave said.

Jennifer gave Sabrina a “WTF?” look and said, “I’ll take her home.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Dave said, hailing a cab and then bundling Sabrina inside.

“I woke up with a condom still in my vagina,” she told me.

Precisely. Flip the genders around, and we have what is clearly a case of date rape. Not a borderline case, not a questionable case — a clear-cut, no-question, over the line case of date rape.

Now, we don’t know all the details here, and frankly, we don’t have to. We know 1) Seth was extremely drunk to the point of being barely able to stand, and 2) Dana knowingly took advantage of Seth in that condition. Anything beyond that is going to take us straight to Blame Town, where we can talk about what the victim did to cause his victimization.

So why is it that otherwise sensible people like Megan Carpentier respond by saying, not that this was rape, but that, “Everyone should be disgusted by a one night stand with any of the dudes quoted in the piece, imho.”?

The other day, in comments to a post of mine excoriating Bernard-Henri Lévy for his fawning support of Roman Polanski, a commenter named Politicalguineapig came up with a novel solution to the problem of rape:

Maybe setting up restrictions on men’s movements and disallowing men from gathering in groups would stop the problem. But a bill like that wouldn’t have a hope of passing.

This, of course, thoroughly derailed the thread,¹ causing people to debate whether men having their movements legally restricted would be worse than the present situation, where women are pressured to restrict their own movements out of fear of men. The answer, of course, is that the argument was an apples-and-unicorns debate — the idea that men should be prohibited from gathering in groups, for example, is the exact opposite of what we tell women, which is that they should be in groups at all times.

But that’s neither here nor there. The reason I cite this argument is that it stems from the same place that has people completely miss the rape in the NYO article. It is, quite simply, a gender essentialist argument: men are predators, women are victims.

Now, that is the case more often than the reverse. And one shouldn’t pretend that the number of men being raped by women is in the same statistical universe as the number of women being raped by men — it isn’t. But if you believe, as I do, that one woman being raped is one too many, one man being raped is one too many, too.

Women are capable of being victimizers, just as men are. They’re capable of being abusive. They’re capable of sexual assault. They’re capable of rape. Not all women, mind you. Not even most women. Not even a sizable minority of women are capable of assaulting someone else. But some women are, just as some men are.

The proper response when a story such as this is not to minimize or ignore it, not to bury it by saying, “Well, it’s an outlier, and women are the victims of rape far more, and that’s the real problem.” It may be an outlier, but that doesn’t make it okay. Rape is evil, no matter who perpetrates it.

Is the fallout different? Of course it is. I doubt Seth thinks he was raped, and most people — even most feminists — seem to think that it’s all okay, because he got laid, and that’s what men want most in the whole world. But quite frankly, men don’t want to get laid by anyone, and not all the time. And the fact that Seth was taken advantage of, and that so many people who I consider allies don’t see it — or worse, use the incident as reason to attack the victim — saddens me greatly.

Men commit more crimes against women than women do against men. That has its roots in a number of causes, most societal, some having to do with sexual dimorphism — men are on average bigger and stronger than women, and it’s easier for a man to use force against a woman than vice versa. But that doesn’t mean that men have a unique seed of evil planted inside of them, nor that women are pure. Women and men are both human, and all of us are capable of doing great good, and great evil. We are far more alike than different, and that goes for the bad as well as the good.

Later tonight: Part the Second: In which I discuss slut-shaming.

1. Which, of course, led Mandolin to write her fine rejoinder. (back)

I could write paragraphs and paragraphs about Bernard-Henri Lévy’s bizarre and disgusting HuffPo article, in which he does a premature touchdown dance at the prospect of the freeing of convicted child rapist Roman Polanski. Were I to do so, I’d probably start by noting that Lévy is wrong to say Polanski is about to be freed; at best, Polanski is about to be released on a $4.5 million bond, will have to wear an ankle bracelet, and remains without a passport. The extradition hearing remains, and is considered a slam dunk by most legal experts; Polanski is far from having been “freed.”

Were I to go on, I’d probably note Lévy’s deep concern that Polanski’s children have evidently been taunted in school because their dad’s a convicted fugitive child rapist. Now, that’s not fair to Polanski’s kids — they didn’t choose their dad, and one can’t blame them from the fact that their dad once forcibly raped a 13-year-old. But one can’t help but wonder whether Polanski’s children would face taunts if Polanski had paid his debt to society when it was due. Or, for that matter, if he had simply made the very easy decision not to rape a child.

I could go on in this vein for some time, pointing out the factual errors in Lévy’s piece, his pathetic attempt to paint Polanski as some sort of political prisoner, or the fact that not once in the article does Lévy even acknowledge that Polanski was ever even accused of drugging, forcibly raping, and sodomizing an underaged girl, not to mention the fact that Polanski pled guilty to statutory rape in the case, then fled before he could be sentenced.

I could note all this, but I won’t, because nothing I can say would be more damaging to Bernard-Henri Lévy’s credibility than these, his own words, as written:

I am mostly thinking about him: Roman Polanski, who I don’t know, but whose fate has moved me so much. Nothing will repair the days he has spent in prison. Nothing will erase the immense, unbelievable injustice he has been subjected to. Nothing will take away the hysteria of those ones who have never stopped pouring contempt upon him, hounding him through hatred and asking for his punishment as if we were living the darkest and most ferocious hours of the McCarthy era all over again. At least the nightmare is about to end. At least the end of the hell is looming. And this, for the time being, is what does matter.

Lévy wrote these words, sincerely, about a convicted child rapist and fugitive from justice. Nothing I could possibly say would be more damning than that.

North Star Liberal, which decided to launch by calling Minnesota House Speaker Margaret Anderson Kelliher, DFL-Minneapolis, fat and mannish. Of course, it’s okay because they also mocked the appearances of male politicians, which, er, only makes things worse. Also, it’s “snarky,” which is evidently now code for “place where people who claim to be liberals can ignore liberal values.”

For the record:

1. Fat jokes aren’t funny.

2. Jokes that portray women are mannish aren’t funny.

3. A site that claims to be “liberal” would understand that.

Yeah, you can steer clear of them. They aren’t liberal in any meaningful sense of the word.

UPDATE: I guess we can at least be glad they pulled the part making fun of Paul Wellstone’s death — which they used to attack Minnesota State Rep. and gubernatorial candidate Tom Rukavina, DFL-Virginia, Minn. Incidentally, where were Paul and Sheila going again when their plane crashed?

On October 25, 2002, Wellstone died, along with seven others, in a plane crash in northern Minnesota, at approximately 10:22 a.m. He was 58 years old. The other victims were his wife, Sheila; one of his three children, Marcia; the two pilots Richard Conry and Michael Guess, his driver, Will McLaughlin, and campaign staffers Tom Lapic and Mary McEvoy. The plane was en route to Eveleth, where Wellstone was to attend the funeral of Martin Rukavina, a steelworker whose son Tom Rukavina serves in the Minnesota House of Representatives. Wellstone decided to go to the funeral instead of a rally and fundraiser in Minneapolis attended by Mondale and fellow Senator Ted Kennedy

Oh yeah.

You guys stay classy, now.

I am trying very hard to see where Newsweek’s choice to use Sarah Palin’s Runner’s World photo as their cover is a horribly sexist decision that belittles women everywhere. No, seriously, I am — I’m aware I’m not going to see a flaw the first time I look at something, and I find it not just possible, but likely that a major newsmagazine would use sexist imagery to depict the most popular woman in the GOP.

But I’m sorry, no matter how many times I’m told the sexism is obvious, I just don’t see it.

It’s not that the image doesn’t play on sexist tropes. Dear Ceiling Cat, does it ever. If it was a Photoshop job, I’d absolutely decry it for portraying Palin as a bizarre faux-patriotic fembot. I mean, look at it:

That’s out of control. And it reminds me of another image that mixed faked überpatriotism with extreme conformity to gender roles. You may remember this one. It was all the rage in April 2003:

The images are almost a perfect yin-yang of the conservative vision of female and male. Sarah Palin: athletic, but not so athletic that she can’t strike a cheescake pose. A mom, first and foremost, keeping the home fires burning (note the careful positioning of the Blue Star banner over her right shoulder). So in love with her country that she’ll desecrate the flag in order to show it. And George Bush: a total warrior with a big cock. Not concerned about family, but about blowin’ stuff up. A guy fighting in war (or, you know, avoiding it; same difference, right?). So in love with his country that he’ll use soldiers and an aircraft carrier in a premature photo-op to prove it.

Both of these images were calculated — Palin’s, to show she’s not one of “those” women, who choose sensible clothes when they run, but who is sexy all the damn time, because she can be. To show that she loves her country, war, apple pie, and the beautiful scenery you can see from her front porch, the one that was built with kickbacks she received as mayor. And Bush? Bush, of course, to show he isn’t a wimp like Clinton, but a true Warrior-King, one who literally conquered Mesopotamia himself.

Both photos also show something else, something hiding behind the artifice: that both Bush and Palin are Potemkin representations of these ideals. By trying to oversell the idea that they are perfect representations of their genders, Bush and Palin remind us of how hollow those representations can be. Bush is not a warrior, and he looks silly playing dress-up. Palin is not a pin-up girl, and she looks silly playing dress-up. Both took what could be powerful symbols and went so over-the-top with them that they look like fools.

That’s why Newsweek chose this cover. Not because it shows Palin as sexy, but because it shows her as a caricature of herself. As a sitting governor, Palin chose to engage in a photo shoot that would do a better job of validating the “Caribou Barbie” epithet than anything the most misogynist liberal could come up with. As Lindsay Beyerstein accurately says:

Predictably, Palin complained that Newsweek’s use of the image was sexist. Yes, the image was plucked from its original context. The whole point was that the picture was appalling it its original context. Newsweek is holding this picture up to the world and asking: Who does this?

The bottom line is that Palin’s a clown. She doesn’t get a pass because her chosen clown persona is stereotypically feminine.

She caricatures herself. Day in and day out. Good for Newsweek for pointing and laughing.

And that, my friends, is the point. One cannot point out the absurdity of Sarah Palin’s wallowing in sexist tropes without using the very sexist imagery that she herself approved of. Yes, the image is appallingly sexist. But that is not Newsweek’s fault. It’s Palin’s.

Using a photo shoot that Palin posed for and endorsed after the fact to make the point that Palin is a caricature of herself is not sexist. It’s good journalism. Believe me, I will defend Palin from true sexism wherever it rears its ugly head (like, say, this bit of “humor” from HuffPo, which is crappy, and simply an excuse to attack Palin for being a woman). But this is not a case of sexism being used to attack Palin. This is a case of Palin’s own sexism being used to attack Palin. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

First off, let me note that I hate Carrie Prejean as much as the next sentient human.

That out of the way, it’s time for me to defend Carrie Prejean.

As you may have heard, former Miss California USA-slash-anti-gay activist Carrie Prejean has a sex tape that’s gotten loose, and perhaps “several more” in the hopper. (No, I’m not linking to stories; keep reading, you’ll see why.) This is, of course, totes hilarious, as Prejean was trying to build a career around moralizing while still being a normal human with feet of clay. This tape, as I read from various liberal blogs and see discussed on liberal talk shows, is a tape of Prejean masturbating that she sent to an ex-boyfriend at some point. The ex-boyfriend is now distributing the tape, and telling stories of how Prejean allegedly wanted him to say she was underage when she made it — leading Michael Musto to opine waggishly that she’s just a typical girl, wanting to look younger than she is.

Hee hee, ho ho, sigh.

You know why Carrie Prejean wants us to think that tape may be illegal? Because she doesn’t want everyone and their twin sister to have video of her masturbating. Why? Because she didn’t release a video of her masturbating for worldwide distribution. She sent it to her then-boyfriend.

Now, yes, Prejean has been involved in moralizing. And here’s where I’m supposed to say that she has this coming, having the temerity to be a sexual being while criticizing others for their sexuality. But you know what? I’m having trouble believing that. Because while Prejean’s opinions on same-sex marriage may be wrong, it doesn’t therefore follow that it’s okay for someone she trusted to break that trust by sharing private videos with the public. Indeed, on the moral spectrum, I’m having trouble seeing why Prejean should be embarrassed by the sex tape, and a whole lot of reason to think that her ex-boyfriend is a major league asshole who women should avoid like the plague. Men too, for that matter.

Guys? It’s me, Jeff. Let’s say your wife, girlfriend, lover, friend with benefits, or friend without benefits is nice enough to send you a tape of herself in flagrante delicto. Guess what? She didn’t sent that to you and anyone you feel like forwarding that to. Unless your best friend, your preacher, your mom, Harvey Levin, Joe Lieberman, or J.K. Rowling was copied in on the email,¹ you shouldn’t send it to any of them without first seeking permission from the young² lady in question.

The reason, of course, is that this woman is choosing to risk a bit of her privacy to give you a momentary sexual thrill — perhaps many, depending on how lonely you are and whether or not your girlfriend goes to college out of state. You owe it to her not to run to your roommate and say, “Hey, look what this girl sent me!” Why this is so should be blindingly obvious — what said woman sent for your consumption may not be something she’d want her mom, her high school math teacher, Kevin Sorbo, or the crowd at an L.A. Lakers game to see. She sent it to you, personally, because she likes you and trusts you enough that you won’t go sending it to someone else. If you go sending it to someone else, that proves that you’re a scumbag who can’t be trusted, and while the woman may be guilty of not seeing that quickly enough, the only real jerk in this picture is you.

You see, it’s like sex. If you and your girlfriend are having consensual sex, that’s fine. If you invite your buddy in unannounced to start having sex with your girlfriend too, without clearing it with her? That’s rape. No, selling smutty pictures of your ex-girlfriend to TMZ isn’t rape. But it’s rape’s evil, less-reviled cousin, and it’s in the same moral ballpark. And just because we like to put the fault back on the Carrie Prejeans of the world for sending these tapes in the first place, the fact is that their privacy is being violated, while the ex-boyfriend in question is lauded for said violation. A moment’s foolishness in the name of lust or love is understandable; a willful betrayal of trust in the name of lulz or cash is reprehensible.

It’s sick and wrong. And it’s nothing to laugh about, even if the victim in this case has been moralizing about other things. For all her wrongness, I don’t recall Prejean arguing that LGBTQQ individuals should have their nude, intimate photos and videos released to the world. She’s wrong on marriage. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay to laugh when she’s violated.

1. They may have been. Hey, I don’t judge. (back)
2. At heart. As long as you’re legal, I say feel free to send sexy videos to your heart’s content, no matter how old you are. (back)

[This post was originally published on Clarisse Thorne's blog, and is reprinted here with Clarisse's kind permission. All three installments may be viewed here.]

I’m about to assert something that makes me nervous, because I worry that people are going to stick me in the “asshole MRA” box. Don’t get me wrong: I certainly don’t think that women have it better, overall, than men do. But I do wonder whether it might be good for feminists to acknowledge that — although we don’t experience nearly as much privilege as men — there are a lot of advantages women experience that men don’t.

Because women aren’t seen as threatening, we have an easier time doing confrontational things like approaching strangers on the street. Because women aren’t seen as fighters, we stand a lower chance of being mugged than men do. Because women are seen as emotional, we’re given a huge amount of social space to consider and discuss our feelings. I can work with and be affectionate with children far more easily than a man could. I can be explicit and overt about my sexuality without being viewed as a creep.

And there are at least a few recurring complaints about how trying to be masculine can suck. First and foremost: that men don’t feel they’ve been taught to process their emotions, or don’t feel allowed to display them. Another: that they’re perceived as less manly if they don’t achieve success through a career, especially if they aren’t the main breadwinner for their family. A third: that men are expected to be sexually insatiable, or always to be sexually available.

Of course, it’s worth noting that the advantages women experience are almost always the flip side of unfortunate stereotypes. For instance, one might say that women get more social space for emotion because we’re stereotyped as irrational and hysterical. But that doesn’t change the fact that most of us easily grasp that space, while most men don’t. And if we can reject the Oppression Olympics for just one minute and stop thinking about who’s got it worse, it becomes clear that the advantages and drawbacks associated with being both male and female are intertwined. The two systems reinforce, and cannot function without, each other. The gender binary may not hurt everyone equally, but it hurts everyone. As those beautiful “Every Girl / Every Boy” posters say, the most obvious example is: “For every girl who is tired of acting weak when she is strong, there is a boy tired of appearing strong when he feels vulnerable.”

I do suspect that it may not be psychologically realistic to ask people from our underdog-loving culture to embrace an image of themselves as privileged; my thoughts turn again to the trans man who hated the thought of being a white male. But if we feminists can’t work productively from a stance that acknowledges our social advantages, how can we expect straight/dominant/big-dicked men to do it?

Could feminist acknowledgment of the women’s gender-based advantages help pave the way for more men to acknowledge male privilege? Could feminist acknowledgment of the advantages on both sides of the gender binary help us better grasp what sucks about being a guy?

Am I citing Thomas Millar too much here? Well, at least once, he frustrated me. Amongst the comments on one blog post, I thought he was stating his views about stereotypical guys rather harshly. I suggested that it might be better to seek common ground, or at least to explain things gently; he said he wasn’t interested — “I think we all work with some people where they are and can’t soft-sell our views enough to deal with others.” He added, “If I’m going to alienate someone for saying what I think too bluntly, I’ll pick entitled cis het dudes.”

I won’t pretend I didn’t laugh when I read that — but I worried about it, too. I’ve had an enormous number of experiences trying to discuss feminism/sex/gender with men in which the men tensed, bristled, and closed me out. I don’t think it was always because those guys couldn’t stand the thought of losing their privilege, either. I think a lot of dudes have been led to feel that they have no place in gender discussions — that those discussions will always be about what men are doing wrong, and that no one’s prepared to work with them where they are.

All groups have outsiders. Movements inevitably form themselves around oppositional forces. As someone who’s spent her share of time feeling feminist rage, I’d say that being filled with feminist rage is totally understandable. And seriously, don’t get me wrong: I’m not giving unfeminist guys a free pass. I’m not happy about the fact that so many men are apparently alienated from feminism because us radicals are too confrontational — or too uncomfortably correct — for their fragile masculine egos to handle. (I’m being sarcastic! Mostly.) I’m really not happy about the fact that I’ve got to think about marketing anti-oppression — in a just universe, wouldn’t anti-oppression market itself?

But at the same time, I’m a realist. I know this isn’t a just universe, and I want to use tactics that’ll achieve my goals. Which are: I’d really like to find more men at my side in the sex and gender wars. I’d really like to talk to more guys who don’t see ideas stamped with feminism as an attack — rather, as an opportunity for alliance. Plus, if we’re going to think in terms of cold hard tactics, it’s worth noting that normative men hold most of the power in America. (That’s part of what we’re complaining about, right?) So swelling our ranks with The Oppressive Class means we can ruthlessly use their power for good.

Can we do better at making feminist discourses around gender and sexuality open to normative men, without driving ourselves crazy? How can we make our movement open to, and accepting of, normative men? Put another way, how do we convince normative men to support us?

Maybe we don’t need a lot of normative men in the camp of sex and gender radicals; maybe we’ll be happier without silly Gender Studies 101 questions clotting our discussions. Still, even if we don’t try to “recruit” them, I’d love to see more widespread analysis of masculinity and masculine sexuality amongst normative dudes … if only because getting a sense for their societal boxes might simply make them happier. If only because I think they’ve got their own liberation to strive for.

So at the very least, I’d like to contribute to an America where serious examination of masculinity and male sexuality can flourish.

That’s my final question. How do I do it?

[Reprinted with the kind permission of Clarisse Thorn. All three installments of this series (once they've all been posted) may be read here.]

In the 2006 documentary “Boy I Am“, a trans man talks about how one of his mental barriers to transitioning was the fact that after transition, he would be a “white male”. And, he laughs, the “last thing in the world” he wanted to be was a white male!

A year or two ago, I attended a lecture by Jackson Katz, a rather overtly masculine, cis male anti-abuse educator who lectures in colleges around the country. Bullet-headed and aggressive in stance, he said a lot of valuable things — particularly about how men ought to take ownership of problems we traditionally consider “women’s issues”. It’s certainly true that if we want to end male abuse of women, men must participate in the movement. But although Katz discussed some issues of masculinity, I heard little about how we can make things better for men. His proposition of a men’s movement was centered around correcting the things some men are doing wrong. (I attended in the company of my friends Danny, who blogs at Sex, Art & Politics, and Sammael, who started his own BDSM blog this year. Hey guys, got any good memories of Katz?)

Although they’re often watered down, many feminist concepts have gone mainstream. For instance, Americans have some consciousness of traditional feminist critiques about how women’s bodies are represented in the media. Indeed, that consciousness has become so endemic that, in a grandly ironic twist, marketers now capitalize on it to sell beauty products: the nationwide Dove Campaign for Real Beauty attempts to use deconstruction of the media’s representation of women to sell Dove soap. Americans are also quite aware of men as the privileged class — sometimes regarded outright as the oppressors.

But this shift in awareness about gender issues faced by women has not been accompanied by a widespread understanding of gender issues faced by men. And that creates situations like an activist working towards a masculinity movement that talks mainly about how men are hurting women, or a trans man who has trouble with the idea of transitioning partly because he doesn’t want to be a white man — one of the oppressors.

How can awareness of oppressive dynamics make it difficult for men to own their masculinity? Does male privilege ever make life harder for men? When does male privilege blind us to oppression of masculinity? There’s some mainstream awareness of gender issues faced by women; is there any similar awareness of the problems of masculinity?

A good friend of mine first caught my attention by talking about gender. We encountered each other at a BDSM meetup, and when I mentioned that I’d been thinking about the boxes around masculine sexuality, he launched into a rant about oppressive sexual dynamics. He gave me references to complex sexuality blogs and intelligently used words like “heteronormative” and “patriarchy”. But a month or so after we started talking, I mentioned his interest in gender issues … and he gave me a puzzled look. “I’m not really into gender studies,” he said.

He talks about sex, gender and culture all the time — but he also specifically identifies as highly masculine, and felt that to be at odds with identifying as someone who questions masculinity. As Thomas Millar writes: “There’s a huge unstated assumption that to even address the question [of male sexuality], for men, is to mark one’s self as ‘other.’ … cis het men are brought up to fear that their masculinity could ever be called into question. By even opening up a dialog, I think some folks fear that they are conceding that their sexuality is not uncontroversial.”

Men currently experience this problem in a way that women do not. In other words, women don’t risk being seen as unfeminine as easily as men risk being seen as unmasculine; nor do we have quite the same fears about it. In 2008, a group of researchers published a paper called “Precarious Manhood”. Their concluding statement: “Our findings suggest that real men experience their gender as a tenuous status that they may at any time lose and about which they readily experience anxiety and threat.” Earlier in the paper, they wrote that — although “our focus on manhood does not deny the importance of women’s gender-related struggles” — “Women who do not live up to cultural standards of femininity may be punished, rejected, or viewed as ‘unladylike,’ but rarely will their very status as women be questioned in the same way as men’s status often is.”¹

When is it to a man’s disadvantage to publicly examine and question masculinity? Surely the mere act of questioning and examining gender does not make a man less masculine; how can we work against the perception that it does?

At the same time, though, this isn’t a “with us or against us” situation: men who don’t choose to identify as non-normative also don’t tend to join the “opposition”. By “opposition” I mean folks like “Men’s Rights Activists” (on the Internet we call them MRAs). MRAs — at least according to my stereotype of them — are conscious of social and legal disadvantages suffered by men, such as the fact that men are at a severe disadvantage in child custody cases; at the same time, they’re blind to male privilege. It’s a deadly combination. My personal favorite MRA quotation ever is, “White men are the most discriminated-against group in the country.”² Mercifully, MRAs are a fringe group, but they make a big impression.

My “not into gender studies” friend once told me that although he frequently deconstructs problems of masculinity in the privacy of his own mind, he doesn’t like to publicly have those conversations because he doesn’t want to sound like an MRA. He said, “A lot of the time, men who want to think seriously about masculinity won’t talk about it aloud because we really don’t want to be that,” emphasizing “that” with loathing. He later added, “It’s very tricky to discuss masculinity yet avoid simply devolving into male entitlement. That’s the crux of the problem with the ‘Men’s Movement’ assholes — none of them are addressing the underlying problems of masculinity. They’re just whining about not receiving the privileges their cultural conditioning tells them to expect.”

How do the current “men’s rights movements” discourage men who might, in a different climate, be very interested in discussing masculinity? Assuming men can reclaim the “pro-masculinity movement” from MRAs, do any men feel motivated to do so? Can men occupy the middle ground between MRAs and LGBTQ, feminist, or other leftist discussions of gender — that is, can men find space to discuss masculinity without being aligned with “one side or the other”?

All too frequently in radical sex/gender circles, the theme has been blame. Men in particular are excoriated for failing to adequately support feminism — or criticized for failing to join the fight against oppressive sex and gender norms — but few ideas are offered for how men can be supportive and non-oppressive while remaining overtly masculine, especially if their sexuality is normative (e.g., straight/dominant/big-dicked).

There are fragments: some insight might be drawn from the ways in which many BDSM communities create non-oppressive frameworks within which we have our deliciously oppressive sex. With practice, one can get shockingly good at preserving a heavy dominant/submissive dynamic that still allows both partners to talk about their other needs. Surely that understanding of sexual roles vs. other needs could be adapted to the service of gender identity. Yet so many BDSMers still fall prey to the same old gendered preconceptions.

Don’t get me wrong: of course anyone would deserve plenty of blame if they refused to let go of their entitlement, or chose not to examine the ways their behavior might support an oppressive system. But I think men exist who are willing to do those things, yet feel blocked from relevant discussions because participating creates anxiety about their sexual or gender identity. It strikes me as unreasonable to attack them for that. Choosing to present one’s sexuality and/or gender identity in a normative way is not in itself a sin. It’s not fair to expect people to fit themselves into a box that doesn’t suit them — not even for The All-Important Cause of better understanding sex and gender.

Where can we find ideas for how men can be both supportive and non-oppressive, and overtly masculine? How can we make it to normative men’s advantage to analyze masculine norms? What does it look like to be masculine, but liberated from the strictures of stereotypical masculinity? How can we contribute to a Men’s Movement that encompasses all three bases — being perceived as masculine, acknowledging male privilege, and deconstructing the problems of masculinity?

1. Vandello et al. “Precarious Manhood.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 95, No. 6, 1325 - 1339. 2008. (back)
2. Kuster, Elizabeth. Exorcising Your Ex. Fireside, 1996. (I know, it’s hardly the most official of references — but isn’t it a great quotation?) (back)

This is the first of three guest posts, reprinted with the kind permission of Clarisse Thorn. This post originally appeared here on Clarisse’s blog. Once they’ve been posted, all three posts will be accessible at this link.

Clarisse Thorn is a feminist, sex-positive educator who has delivered workshops on both sexual communication and BDSM to a variety of audiences, including New York’s Museum of Sex, San Francisco’s Center for Sex and Culture, and several Chicago universities. She curated the original Sex+++ sex-positive documentary film series at Chicago’s Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in 2009, and has also volunteered as an archivist and curator at the Leather Archives & Museum. Currently, she is working on HIV mitigation in southern Africa.

Due to irregular internet access while she’s in Africa, Clarisse may be slow responding to comments.

* * *

Over the summer, I wrote a 3500-word piece about masculinity. It touched on some themes I’ve messed around with before, most notably in my reviews of the Sex+++ documentaries “Private Dicks: Men Exposed” and “Boy I Am.” I fondly hoped that I might be able to do something “real” with it, but I’ve gotten rather immersed in my work here in Africa — and I’ve been having some trouble keeping up with America, due to irregular Internet access. Today, I managed to catch up with some of my blogroll and saw that Audacia Ray recently posted some thoughts about masculinity, including excellent links to various new frontiers in the masculinity conversation. Looks like the topic is really heating up — finally! I’ve been obsessing about it off and on for years, and it’s exciting to think that people might finally talk to me about it.

So, rather than letting my masculinity piece languish under a rug — since I’ll probably never be able to do anything official with it before the conversation moves on, anyway — I’m just going to serialize it here. (I’d post the whole thing at once, but I don’t want to inflict 3500 words on everyone’s blog reader!)

Questions I Want To Ask Entitled Cis Het Men, Part 1: Who Cares?

Why do I care about masculinity?

I’m rather perverted, but not enormously queer. I present as femme, and — although I’ve been known to tease my sensitive (frequently long-haired) lovers for being “unmasculine” — I fall in love with men. At heart, I love knowing that I’m fucking a man.

However, because I’m cis and straight, I feel profoundly at a loss when trying to articulate problems of (for lack of a better phrase) “Men’s Empowerment”. The issues don’t feel “native” to me; I’ve intersected with these questions mainly through the lens of lovers and friends. Watching their struggle is demoralizing, but trying to imagine how I can give them feedback is more demoralizing.

A male friend once wrote to me, “I think you personally find expressions of masculinity hot, but you also have no patience with sexism. You’ve caught on that it’s tricky for men to figure out how to deliver both of these things you need, that you don’t have a lot of good direction to give to fellas about it, and that neither does anyone else.”

So:

How men can be supportive and non-oppressive while remaining overtly masculine?

On top of my limited perspective, there’s been an echoing lack of discourse — that is, very little mainstream acknowledgement of the problems of masculinity. The primary factor in that silence is that normative cis men themselves tend to be flatly unwilling to discuss gender/sex issues. Often, their first objection is that the discussion is neither important nor relevant. This is true even within subcultures centered around sexual analysis, like the BDSM world — I once met a cis male BDSMer who said, “Why bother talking about male sexuality? It’s the norm. Fish don’t have a word for water.”

But if masculine sexuality is water and we’re fish, why doesn’t that motivate us to examine it more — not less?

Don’t get me wrong: I agree that America’s sexual conceptions are centered around stereotypical male sexuality, and I agree that this is damaging and problematic. Believe me, I’m furious that it took me many years to reconceive “actual” sex around acts other than good ole penis-in-vagina penetration! But if American stereotypes and ideas of sexuality are male-centered, then surely that makes it more useful for us to be thinking about male sexuality — not less.

And those male-centered ideas of sexuality aren’t centered around all men — just stereotypical men. LGBTQ men are obvious examples whose sexuality falls outside the norm; fortunately for them, they’ve created some spaces to discuss that. But there are lots of other non-normative guys who aren’t gay or queer, yet feel very similar sexual alienation — and because there’s so little discourse about masculinity outside LGBTQ circles, they usually just don’t talk about it.

What does it mean to be a cis het man whose sexuality isn’t normative? Which straight cis guys don’t fit — and hence, feel alienated from — our current overarching sexual stereotypes?

Guys who identify as straight BDSM submissives are one fabulous example of non-normative men who are frequently alienated from mainstream masculine sexuality, but who often don’t have a forum. Men with small penises are a second. There are lots of others. In the words of sex blogger and essayist Thomas Millar: “The common understanding of male sexuality is a stereotype, an ultra-narrow group of desires and activities oriented around PIV [penis-in-vagina], anal intercourse and blowjobs; oriented around cissexual women partners having certain very narrow groups of physical characteristics.”

Still, that doesn’t mean that straight, dominant, big-dicked dudes who love boning thin chicks feel totally okay about the current state of affairs. It just means they tend to have less immediate motivation to question it. They also have less of an eye for spotting gender oppression, because — though they’ve got their own boxes hemming them in — they’re still more privileged than the rest of us, and the nature of privilege is to blind the privileged class to its existence.

A male submissive once told me, “Lots of heteronormative men know something is wrong with the way we think about sex and gender. I can see them struggling with it when we talk. They can’t put their finger on it; they have a hard time engaging it. But I engage it all the time; I have to, because my sexuality opposes it.”

When is it to a man’s advantage to examine and question masculinity and stereotypes of male sexuality? Which men are motivated to do so?

It’s tempting to assert that men whose desires fit neatly (or at least mostly) within the stereotype have it made — after all, their sexuality works within the norm so many of us struggle to escape. But I’ve had this assumption corrected several times, usually by smart “stereotypical” men themselves. At one point, while developing a sexuality workshop, I sent the outline to a bunch of friends. The original draft contained this paragraph: “Our sexual scripts favor a certain stereotype of men and male sexual pleasure, which makes it hard for women to figure out what we really want and what we really enjoy, and also makes it harder for non-stereotypical men to figure that out.” One friend sent that paragraph back, having quietly appended: “… as well as for stereotypical men to discover or explore new desires beyond the stereotypical script.”

When we discuss the limitations around sexuality from a non-normative perspective, how do we exclude normative people who might develop themselves in new directions if they had the chance? What do normative men stand to gain by thinking outside the box about masculinity and sexuality?

Unless you live in Minnesota or are really, really plugged in to state-level politics, you probably don’t know who Margaret Anderson Kelliher is. So allow me to introduce her. She’s the current Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, the second and longest-serving woman to hold the position. She’s also one of the DFL candidates seeking to replace incumbent Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty in 2010. She’s considered one of the front-runners for the DFL nomination, along with a handful of others, like former Sen. Mark Dayton, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak (who has not officially announced, but who is widely expected to run), and former Minnesota House Minority Leader Matt Entenza. If nominated, she’d be the first woman to head a major-party gubernatorial ticket in the state’s history.

Oh, and she’s also a gossipy teenage girl.

That assessment of Speaker Anderson Kelliher comes from progressive Minnesota blogger Brian Fallidin. Fallidin has not endorsed a candidate for governor yet, but he’s been pretty supportive of Entenza thus far, which is a feeling that I, ahem, do not really share.

But that’s fine. Fallidin is allowed to like Entenza, just as I’m allowed to dislike him. I don’t know, ultimately, who he plans to vote for (I’m leaning toward Rybak myself, but am still persuadable). And he’s allowed to dislike Margaret Anderson Kelliher, a candidate who definitely has her flaws (as does, to be honest, every DFLer running).

But Fallidin crossed the line in his latest post criticizing Anderson Kelliher. Part of the post was about minor, inside-baseball type stuff (Anderson Kelliher claiming a supporter who apparently had previously indicated support for Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner, a second-tier candidate), the sort of vaguely embarrassing mistake that hits every campaign. That’s not the part I mind. No, the part I mind is this:

It seems that Margaret Anderson Kelliher is doing a MAK-Attack on pretty much everyone these days. Her gossip girl comment originally reported in the City Pages where she said “You’re going to have a lot of fun doing a fact-check on what he says….” about Matt Entenza reminds me of that one girl we all hated in high-school–you know the one that desperately wanted you to like them, and when you didn’t they’d say nasty things behind your back?

Okay, quickly disposing of the substance of Fallidin’s complaint: Matt Entenza has a history of lying. It’s the reason I’ve vowed not to support him. Anderson Kelliher is allowed to raise character issues, especially as they relate to a candidate’s public conduct (and spying on your party’s endorsed gubernatorial candidate — while you’re running for Attorney General — is public conduct). Just as Entenza is allowed to raise the fact that Pawlenty drank the DFL’s milkshake last legislative session. These are legitimate issues for voters to discuss, and frankly, issues that should be brought up.

So it’s an absurd complaint. But more absurd is the way Fallidin frames his complaint. Here, reread the paragraph again, this time, with some emphasis added to the relative parts:

It seems that Margaret Anderson Kelliher is doing a MAK-Attack on pretty much everyone these days. Her gossip girl comment originally reported in the City Pages where she said “You’re going to have a lot of fun doing a fact-check on what he says….” about Matt Entenza reminds me of that one girl we all hated in high-school–you know the one that desperately wanted you to like them, and when you didn’t they’d say nasty things behind your back?

Now, Brian has told me via email that he didn’t intend to write anything sexist. And maybe he didn’t.

But damn, that’s pretty sexist.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with decrying Anderson Kelliher for brining up character if, for some reason, you don’t think character should be brought up in a campaign. But when you choose to focus on “gossip,” twice in two sentences, and when you compare the highest DFL officeholder in state government to “that one girl we all hated in high-school–you know the one that desperately wanted you to like them,” you’re not making a comment on Anderson Kelliher’s behavior. You’re making a comment on her gender.

Because women gossip — amirite, fellas? They just love to pick-pick-pick at people in the out crowd, not like men who get all brawny and manly and stuff. So girly, that gossip. Except, of course, that men gossip more than women, and also, nobody more fits the idea of a gossip than the guy who hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on Mike Hatch. But that, of course, wasn’t “gossipy,” because Entenza’s a dude.

But we’re not dealing with reality when we compare the Speaker of the Minnesota House to a high school sophomore. We’re dealing with stereotypes. And stereotypes are all about putting people in their place. Anderson Kelliher couldn’t be attacking Entenza for lying because she views him as a liar.¹ She must be doing it because that’s what girls do. And she’s a girl. A girly, girly girl.

I’m sorry, whether Fallidin intended the post as sexist or not, it was sexist. It belittled Anderson Kelliher and belittled women generally. I don’t care if you support Margaret Anderson Kelliher for Governor or not — as I said earlier, I’m not leaning toward her at the moment. But one should make that case based on her record as speaker and as a state representative, her positions on issues related to the state, and on her perceived ability to win the governor’s mansion for the DFL for the first time in nearly a quarter-century.

But Anderson Kelliher’s gender is not a reason to malign her, subtly or overtly. And while I dearly hope this is the last time I have to write a post like this, I know all to well that it will not be. If the 2008 primary fight between now-President Obama and now-Secretary of State Clinton taught us nothing else, it is that many progressives, sadly, are as willing to traffic in hackneyed, sorry stereotypes as the staunchest teabagger — if it helps their candidate win.

1. As further proof that women are not the only ones who gossip, let me just say that several little birdies have told me that there is no love lost between Margaret Anderson Kelliher and Matt Entenza, and that the two are bitter enemies going back to before the time when Entenza was Minority Leader and Anderson Kelliher was Assistant Minority Leader. But you didn’t hear that from me. (back)

From The Huffington Post:

An amendment that would prevent the government from working with contractors who denied victims of assault the right to bring their case to court is in danger of being watered down or stripped entirely from a larger defense appropriations bill.

Multiple sources have told the Huffington Post that Sen. Dan Inouye, a longtime Democrat from Hawaii, is considering removing or altering the provision, which was offered by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and passed by the Senate several weeks ago.[...]

“The defense contractors have been storming his office,” said a source with knowledge of the situation. “Inouye either will get the amendment taken out altogether, or water it down significantly. If they water it down, they will take out the Title VII claims. This means that in discrimination cases, they will still force you into a secret forced arbitration on KBR’s (or other contractors’) own terms — with your chances of prevailing practically zero. The House seems to be very supportive of the original Franken amendment and all in line, but their hands are tied since it originated in the Senate. And since Inouye runs the show on this bill, he can easily take it out to get Republicans and the defense contractors off his back, which looks increasingly likely.”

This is possible because the bill is now in conference committee, where the House and Senate versions of the bill are merged into a single bill.

Kos has lots of contact info for Inouye, and more information (including the claim that various congressional staffers have anonymously accused Inouye of sexual harassment and in one case rape).

One of the more bizarre sub-plots from the bizarre story that is the faked balloon voyage of Falcon Heene is the YouTube video in which Falcon and his brothers claimed to be “not pussified.”

It’s a lovely video about how three young boys aren’t being “pussified,” and also, how they hate gay people. Hard to see how a family where dad has his children opine about how much they don’t want to be girls could go wrong, and so surprising that there have been, at the very least, allegations of domestic abuse against Richard Heene, the boys’ father.

Now obviously, this video is all about hating on the soi disant “feminizing” of American men, but it was the title of it — “Not Pussified” — that caught my eye. Because that links Heene back to one of the great moments in blog history.

Those of you who are newer denizens of the blogosphere may not be familiar with what is perhaps the ur-Men’s Rights screed, Kim duToit’s “The Pussification of the Western Male.” It is glorious in its awfulness, and I still hold to my initial response that it is the worst thing I have ever read, an opinion shared by many.

I don’t know that Heene read du Toit’s screed, but it seems pretty likely. At the very least, he picked up the word pussified from one du Toit’s readers, and then cheerfully passed it along to his sons. And that says something — for du Toit’s ideals are, to be blunt, awful.

The essay really should be read by anyone seeking to understand the mind of someone like Richard Heene, although I caution that it should not be read without a vomit bag by one’s side. It can’t be summarized, but here are a few choice passages:

We have become a nation of women.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time when men put their signatures to a document, knowing full well that this single act would result in their execution if captured, and in the forfeiture of their property to the State. Their wives and children would be turned out by the soldiers, and their farms and businesses most probably given to someone who didn’t sign the document.

[Several other examples of manly manliness deleted]

There was even a time when a President of the United States threatened to punch a man in the face and kick him in the balls, because the man had the temerity to say bad things about the President’s daughter’s singing.

We’re not like that anymore.

Quick interjection — du Toit is from South Africa. Yes, he now lives in America; still, I can’t help reading this and thinking, “who are you calling ‘we?’”

Now, little boys in grade school are suspended for playing cowboys and Indians, cops and crooks, and all the other familiar variations of “good guy vs. bad guy” that helped them learn, at an early age, what it was like to have decent men hunt you down, because you were a lawbreaker.

Now, men are taught that violence is bad—that when a thief breaks into your house, or threatens you in the street, that the proper way to deal with this is to “give him what he wants”, instead of taking a horsewhip to the rascal or shooting him dead where he stands.

[Several paragraphs of "proof" that modern men are weaklings deleted]

And finally, our President, who happens to have been a qualified fighter pilot, lands on an aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit, and is immediately dismissed with words like “swaggering”, “macho” and the favorite epithet of Euro girly-men, “cowboy”. Of course he was bound to get that reaction—and most especially from the Press in Europe, because the process of male pussification Over There is almost complete.

How did we get to this?

Remember, this was back in 2003, when our President was at his apex of manliness. Still, it says something that du Toit was swooning at the Mission Accomplished landing, doesn’t it?

In the first instance, what we have to understand is that America is first and foremost, a culture dominated by one figure: Mother. It wasn’t always so: there was a time when it was Father who ruled the home, worked at his job, and voted.

But in the twentieth century, women became more and more involved in the body politic, and in industry, and in the media—and mostly, this has not been a good thing. When women got the vote, it was inevitable that government was going to become more powerful, more intrusive, and more “protective” (ie. more coddling), because women are hard-wired to treasure security more than uncertainty and danger. It was therefore inevitable that their feminine influence on politics was going to emphasize (lowercase “s”) social security.

Yes, ladies — it’s your fault! Your fault that men no longer fight duels! Your fault that we no longer engage in fisticuffs, or drink until our livers explode! Blast you, and your belief that maybe it’s okay if drunken bar fights are not a daily occurrence in one’s life!

Kim du Toit whines for several more paragraphs about how television commercials show men as big doofuses, and therefore women are castrating bitches who deserve to be lonely (no, seriously: “What this guy is going to do is smile ruefully, finish his cereal, and then go and fuck his secretary, who doesn’t try to cut his balls off on a daily basis. Then, when the affair is discovered, people are going to rally around the castrating bitch called his wife, and call him all sorts of names. He’ll lose custody of his kids, and they will be brought up by our ultimate modern-day figure of sympathy: The Single Mom. You know what? Some women deserve to be single moms.”) and ranting about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (”A bunch of homosexuals trying to “improve” ordinary men into something “better” [ie. more acceptable to women]: changing the guy’s clothes, his home decor, his music—for fuck’s sake, what kind of girly-man would allow these simpering butt-bandits to change his life around?”) and embracing misandry (”Yes, the men are, by and large, slobs. Big fucking deal. Last time I looked, that’s normal. Men are slobs, and that only changes when women try to civilize them by marriage. That’s the natural order of things.”) Oh, and also supporting sports like dog- and cock-fighting. And claiming that George W. Bush is a real man who doesn’t have to prove it. And making racist statements. And then comes perhaps the most asinine four paragraphs ever written in the English language.

Speaking of rap music, do you want to know why more White boys buy that crap than Black boys do? You know why rape is such a problem on college campuses? Why binge drinking is a problem among college freshmen?

It’s a reaction: a reaction against being pussified. And I understand it, completely. Young males are aggressive, they do fight amongst themselves, they are destructive, and all this does happen for a purpose.

Because only the strong men propagate.

And women know it. You want to know why I know this to be true? Because powerful men still attract women. Women, even liberal women, swooned over George Bush in a naval aviator’s uniform. Donald Trump still gets access to some of the most beautiful pussy available, despite looking like a medieval gargoyle. Donald Rumsfeld, if he wanted to, could fuck 90% of all women over 50 if he wanted to, and a goodly portion of younger ones too.

This is what Kim du Toit called for: the manliness of Donald Rumsfeld, and the condoning of rape — for rape is understandable, given how mean women are. And only the strong propagate — those strong enough to take by force what is not given.

That is what manhood is to men like this. Compare with the “pussification” seen by sneering troglodytes like Heene and du Toit: men taking responsibility for themselves. Choosing to think before acting, talk before fighting. Picking up the floor, maybe washing the dishes. Cleaning ourselves. Not putting our children heedlessly into harm’s way. Behaving, in short, like civilized human beings are supposed to.

It does not surprise me that a man who would raise his sons to declare that they weren’t going to be pussified would be the same kind of man who would beat his wife. Would be the same kind of man who would use his children to get ahead. Would be the same kind of man who would commit several felonies, and lie to the police, in a vain effort to get on television. It doesn’t surprise me at all, because the kind of man du Toit praised, and the kind of man Heene claimed to be, is at heart a narcissist, far more interested in himself than anyone else in the world, far more willing to risk himself and his family than to change course and admit fault. If the pussification of the Western male means fewer men like Heene and du Toit, then all I can say is that we can’t get pussified fast enough.

This is mainly a post addressing New Zealand domestic politics, but I think some of the points I make have a wider relevance. In 1972, New Zealanders gave up their right to sue for personal injury in exchange for a national system of accident compensation. This system has provided counselling for survivors of sexual violence.

**********

When writing about my analysis of sexual violence and prisons, one of the points I keep coming back to is how centred it is on the perpertrator. It’s not a new or original thought to point out that everything about the way a criminal law system deals with sexual violence is entirely focused on ‘the offender’. The follow-on from this is our society’s way of dealing with sexual violence revolves around the court system.

A few year ago, I wrote about a nursing student, who was raped by a fellow student, after a typical, ridiculous, defence, the rapist got off. She had to drop out of school, because the school wouldn’t do anything to ensure she wouldn’t have to see her rapist regularly. I think it’s important to understand how structural the problems within our justice system are. These systems are not designed to support survivors of sexual abuse, and therefore they will always fail at that task.

But…

But, in New Zealand, we do have a system that is set up to meet, to revolve around, what survivors of sexual violence need. There are many things it cannot provide - ACC will not help student find a way to continue to study without seeing her rapist. But it can provide counselling and income support.

I don’t have any personal experience, or depth of knowledge, of ACCs sensitive claims system. I am sure, as it currently operates, it has flaws, and some people fail to get the help that they need. But, at the moment, it can be centred around what a survivor needs, based on her relationship with her counsellor (or his).

If these changes go through, it will be much harder, maybe impossible for ACC to be survivor-centre. Currently, a survivor can have up to four sessions of counselling to disclose their abuse, but the changes will cut this down to one session (or maybe two, Peter Jensen, the person in charge of the proposal, was unclear on nine to noon).

At the moment a survivor can access up to 50 sessions with a counsellor before they have to obtain a psychological assessment. The changes will require psychological assessments much earlier in the process, and that process will be directed much more by clinicians. In order to get funded counselling, a survivor of sexual abuse will require a DSM IV diagnosis.

This is not a survivor-centred approach to sexual abuse; it is a clinician-centred approach.

ACC has already begun tightening the screws. And in doing so it has turned funded counselling into another area where a survivor has to prove her (or his) experience – maybe not beyond reasonable doubt, but close.

Dr Kim McGregor explained how ACC restricts access to counselling on an interview on 9 to Noon. ACC declined cover for a young boy who had been sexually abused as the behaviour described: mood swings, tearfulness, and sitting alone sucking his thumb, did not necessarily have a clinical link with sexual abuse. They said these behaviours could just as well have been caused by settling into school and a new environment rather than the sexual abuse events.

Imagine the difficulty of someone who has survived sexual abuse will have in proving that the difficulties she (or he) is experiencing are directly and only a result of the abuse. Those who had what insurance companies call ‘pre-existing conditions’, could find support denied – if they had previously been depressed, how can they know that depression after the sexual abuse is a result of that abuse? (not a question that could be asked by anyone who cared about the experiences of survivors of sexual abuse, but a question that is being asked by ACC). While those who do not seek help for a long time, will have to prove the effects the abuse has had on them, and the more complex their survival strategies in the intervening time, the harder it will be for them to access the support they need.

The parallels between the perfect victim of the court system and the perfect survivor of ACC are strong. In both cases the onus of proof falls on those have been abused to prove either that there was abuse, or that that abuse affected them. Just as previous sexual history is used against survivors in the court system, ACC can use previous mental health history against survivors.

My point is not just that the changes to ACC need to be fought (although they do – Monday is a national day of action – come along), but to show how important, and how fragile, a survivor centred approach to sexual violence there is.

As well as pushing against these threats to survivor support, I want us to push further. I want us to imagine what a response to sexual violence which prioritised survivors look like.