So the biggest thing that happened to me this year, the biggest that might ever happen, was figuring out (for myself at least) exactly what the “dominant paradigm” we used to talk about subverting might really be. I had little glimmerings about it, and then it just sort of poured out this summer, and ever since then my posts have been far more purposeful and, sorry to say, quite a bit less erotic.

So it’s kind of fitting that today, on the last day of this memorable-for-me year, that I’d read just a marvelous, affirming chapter in a 37 year old book.

I mentioned back in September that it looked like Germaine Greer might have anticipated my idea back in 1970 in The Female Eunuch.

How about her chapter called Puberty then? She fiercely lays out her side, women’s side, of the conundrum…

...all that we are constantly aware of is that puberty is hell. It is hell for boys as well as girls, but for boys it is a matter of adjusting to physical changes which signify the presence of sex and genitality… For the girl it is a different matter: she has to arrive at the feminine posture of passivity and sexlessness. No sooner does her public hair appear than she has to learn how to obliterate it. Menstruation must be born and belied. She has been so protected from accepting her body as sexual that her menstruation strikes her as a hideous violation of her physical integrity.

...

The growing girl is encouraged to use her feminine charm, to be coy and alluring, while ignoring the real theatre [i.e. sexuality] in which such blandishments operate.

...

In this critical period a girl is expected to begin her dealings with men, dealings based upon her attractiveness as a sexual object, dealings which can only be hampered by any consideration of her own sexual urge.

One more quick quote that I needed to read a couple of times before I recognized that she isn’t simply regurgitating a common put-down of women who “put out” to be popular (it’s in the final clause.)

It is not uncommon for a girl seeking ‘popularity’ or approbation from boys to allow boys to take extraordinary liberties with her, while neither seeking nor deriving anything for herself.

In other words, says Greer, puberty is a particular kind of hell for girls because that is the time that, first, they become present to “sex and genitality,” and second, that, unlike boys, this is taken away from them so that, to be “normal” and “well adjusted” they must become female eunuchs.

So that’s Greer’s side — the consequences of what I’m calling men’s dominant paradigm of women as the “no-sex” class. Unlike Greer, however, who focused so much on the aftermath, what I’ve been trying to plumb is the origins of the thing. And it’s consequences for men. Which, as I occasionally hint is of a deeper and more souls-conquering nature than the routine carping about “getting drafted” or “having more heart attacks” or just generally being “more expendable than women.”

While it’s perfectly possible to have rapturous and rapturously contented relations with any number of sexual partners, one at a time or in large groups, if you find yourself wondering why the partner or partners you have are never enough, here’s one of the clues that altered the way I thought about potential partners… which had till then meant pretty much anybody with two X chromosomes.

You can never get enough of what you don’t need.

Source: Not at all sure, actually.

The point being that if you use sex as a proxy for validation then you can never have enough.

There are, of course, countless other applications of that little aphorism, but in terms of sex, of the“pornification” of everything short of hemorrhoid cream advertisements, and, say, of the disaffection of men having (for instance) a “midlife crisis,” it explains mounds.

It’s not to say we don’t need sex and certainly doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it immensely. Exactly the opposite, actually.

The preceding has been a reflection on one of the consequences of men being indoctrinated to perceive themselves as the “sex class” inside the dominant paradigm that also assigns women to the “no-sex” class

Update: Terminology update: I’ve started referring to the two gender issues of worthiness and beauty as traps rather than myths, because I think it’s more descriptive and it puts the emphasis on what happens when we get stuck in them.

So last night I almost didn’t go to a local Seattle meetup put together by Holly and Jill from Feministe because I was sure being a man, and twice (almost) everybody’s age, and not having a graduate degree in anything, and not really being connected with a lot of people, and, and, and… and I was talking with my partner about it and mentioned that it always seemed like my story is that I don’t quite belong here, or that I won’t quite fit in there… and she said “well, all the more reason to go then.”

And anyway, so I went, right? And the first thing someone else said was “I was so nervous I almost didn’t come,” and then a bunch of other people nodded, and I said hey me too, and then suddenly we all had something in common after all.

And at least two things came to mind over that. First of all I don’t know if we ourselves are always the best judges of where we do and don’t fit in. Second, I sort of hate to think of all the other people who, for whatever reason, went the other way and didn’t show up because they made the decision they wouldn’t fit in.

The point being that for all of us there are probably some dimensions that we really really don’t fit into, but the chances that nobody will take us are so slim that, past a certain point, we have to start asking who’s really keeping us out.

—-

It felt really good to meet Jill and Holly. Feministe was maybe the second or third feminist blog I ran across when I first started reading blogs nearly three years ago now, and between that and Pandagon and Feministing (the other feminist blogs I found first), especially, I finally kicked myself out of the rut I’d been in since maybe the mid-1980s. So that was great, and it was great to be able to put faces to at least some of the names of their commenters too.

Image titled “Skepdate” from Cectic.com. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Jess McCabe of The F-Word Blog inadvertently points out that controlled studies are more useful social indicators than random journalism assignments:

A woman carries out a speed dating experiment. She goes to one such event as a human rights lawyer, interested in economics, politics and Proust. She strikes out: the men are terrified. She goes to a second night as a ditzy, brain dead florist who says things like “why is water wet?” The men love her.

The conclusion? According to Tanya Gold, the dating guinea pig in question, men are much more interested in stupid women:

Everything my mother has ever told me about men is true. They didn’t care that the florist couldn’t recognise a chair. They liked it. The feminist revolution didn’t pierce their hearts; it only made it into human resources. If you want to be loved, just scoop out your brain and act like a child. After 40 years of feminism we shouldn’t really burn our bras. We should burn our men. Love may be dissembled but statistics never lie. Reader, let me tell you: men want me – and you – to be lobotomised.

Read the piece in context here.

Well, that sounds pretty horrible, right? Well, it is horrible. But also horribly sloppy. First, check out the methodology of the author, Tanya Gold of The Guardian

I decided to attend a speed-dating night as a fabulously successful, dazzlingly literate human rights lawyer, and then another as a gibbering idiot who works as a florist. Who would the men fall for?

As a lawyer, I walked into a Soho bar. My first date appeared. I smiled at him, and said: “I am a human rights lawyer (grin).” “I work 60 hours a week (grin).” And watched him shrivel up. “I’m an engineer,” he said (no grin). And then he was silent, so I told him I was reading Heidegger. He stared at me as if I had told him that I boil men’s heads.

...

Then came Robert. “I’m a florist,” I smiled. The reaction was instantaneous, passionate and almost molecular: “Can I buy you a drink?”

Then came Harry. “Let’s not talk about me,” I said. Bang – he asked me out. Just like that. On the spot.

...

I could have been engaged by 11.17pm. But instead I went home and sifted through the evidence. Only one in 20 of the men I met on the Soho love coalface wanted to date a woman who had heard of Proust (19 of out 20 cats don’t prefer it). Yet eight out of the florist’s 12 men wanted to be gibbered at again and again and again.

Read the original article here.

Ok, call me an unlettered lout, but pretty much all I know about Proust is that every time I bite into a madeline I think about what kind of nightmare it would be to have to read all seven volumes (I had to look that up too) of Remembrance of Things Past… since that sort of thing seemed to have driven the Steve Carell character to attempt suicide in “Little Miss Sunshine.” :-)

This is not, incidentally, an intended dig either at Proust or Scholars thereof. The point being that I’m not sure one out of twenty people, men or women, at a “So-Ho love coalface” would have heard any more about Proust than I have.

Which sort of brings up my next concern: if she’d recruited a male colleague to repeat the experiment as closely as possible how might he have fared with women? Let’s look at that first paragraph, m’kay?

If I’m speed dating in London’s Soho District (”...an entertainment district which for much of the later part of the 20th century had a reputation for its sex shops as well as its night life and film industry. It has a long history of providing a range of eating places.) and I was to plop down and say I was a workaholic pro-bono lawyer who unwinds by reading Heidegger… I’m not sure how many people (women if it was hetero speed dating, men if it was bi or gay speed dating) would take me up on it either.

But that’s not really what I wanted to talk about. Ok, maybe, a little. As I read about Tanya Gold’s little unmonitored human-subject experiment I did start out wanting to mention that I thought men would fare about the same as she did. But!

As I continued reading it occurred to me that Gold had been (whether intentionally or not) mimicking the Before and After characteristics of “pick-up artists” (PUAs) in the “seduction community” (SC) who run around supporting each other’s efforts to “pick up” women.

And trust me, if your standard approach to dating is to brag about how much overtime you pull and how many Nazi-endorsing German philosophers you read, then, yeah, pretending to be a florist who says “Let’s not talk about me” is going to get you someone else’s phone number way, way, way faster, m’kay?

And to be honest, that brings me to what I really, really wanted to talk about. Something germane to both Gold’s article and the whole PUA business: only one in 20 people (male or female) are really going to be interested in a tremendously dull tosser who likes to break the ice by talking about work or dead Germans whereas three out of four people respond well when you pretend at making undemanding but playful conversation that’s more about them than it is about you. I get that. That’s pretty much the core of good pickup/seduction/icebreaking conversation, and so if you’re naturally inclined towards the first then learning how to manifest the second is going to work wonders.

But the one part I wish Gold had tried — the key to most good first-approximation experiments — would have been the “control group” experiment of pretending to just be herself! Y’know, an intelligent, outgoing, humorous and adventurous, professional woman. Because I could be mistaken but I’m guessing that in any given situation that way more than one in twenty men, and maybe not that much fewer than one in four, might have given her their phone numbers. And that’s the point I think a lot of would-be pick-up “artists” need to think about. Because when you’re shy, and you’re worried that you’re not going to be able to “score” with someone else unless you can say something interesting, and so when given the opportunity you either sit there silently stewing over “what can I say, what can I say, gawd her eyes are drifting towards her watch, I’ve got to think, got to think” or else spout out the first thing that comes to mind, like

[I got a PhD in economics at Cambridge.] It was incredibly rewarding. Are you interested in economics, Eric[a]?

... then, yeah, it’s not going to work out so hot. But here’s the deal. If you’re shy it’s easy to decide that it’s the being-an-economist-which-is-dull part that turns prospective partners off when in fact it’s the trying-to-think-of-something-interesting-to-say-which-is-dull part that’s the problem. Sure, being an economist isn’t terrifically interesting, but instead of throwing around subtle digs (PUA “negs”) or wearing aviator goggles in a bar in order to seem interesting, it’ll work wonders just to say something entirely non-clever like “Let’s not talk about me…” Even if you’re “just” an economist. Or florist!

Anyway, points to Jess McCabe for the (literally) thought-provoking link, and half points to Tanya Gold for a half-baked, massively stereotype-polishing, but still productive opinion piece.

Following up on this post about the messages a “pro-virginity” billboard is (or was) inadvertently (or not) sending to men.

There’s ordinarily a problem in advertisement criticism where the response to too much scrutiny is “well, it’s just an ad — “real” people just won’t spend that much time thinking about it.” All well and good except CoolVirginity’s ad was a billboard and those typically stay up for a month, giving the average local driver who sees it plenty of exposure to it.

That said let’s just take another look at that “Ultimate Wedding Gift …Your Virginity” billboard.

First of all, it’s not so great that an abstinence-promoting billboard…

Image, and post inspiration, from Feministing.com.

...reminds us of the iconic erotic album cover from the pre-consent era.

Photo by Flickr user eppleart.

Again, the album cover might not be familiar to the young women the designers think they’re trying to reach. But that’s not really relevant since I’m talking about the branding and marketing influence the billboard would inadvertently (or not) have on men, including considerably older men.

Furthermore, the ostensible “bride” in the photo looks disturbingly young. For instance in comments Heather Corinna pointed out the billboard is also reminiscent of 12-year-old Brooke Shields who played a pre-pubescent prostitute in “Pretty Baby!” And this is where it starts to make a difference how recent the website might be. Despite its recent discovery by the blogosphere, the copyright info on the site itself is dated 2004-2005, and based on a pretty quick browse it doesn’t look like any other dates are later than 2004. I mention this because the text of the site mentions the model’s name. A little bit of Googling puts her at age 16 in 2003 (in an article citing her teen abstinence activism.) So anyway, if the billboard is new then no problem — the model is now a college senior an an adult. If the ad is old she not only looks “barely legal” but she would have been barely an adult. Which, like the movie “Pretty Baby” would just be really creepy.

Again, the young women the billboard is supposed to be aimed at might not be aware of Brooke Shield’s role in a 1978 movie (though it does seem to still be in rotation on some cable networks.) But that’s beside the point since I’m talking about the perhaps unintended message the ad sends to men, including-but-not-limited-to much older men.

Another point: Like the recent Huckabee bookshelf/cross brouhaha, the billboard designers may argue that they used photo-studo props designed to fit the format, that ain’t no marriage bed she’s sitting on — it’s a single or, at best, double, and very much a single girl’s room rather than a married woman’s. Perfectly fine, you say, for very young women to identify with when inviting them to see their virginity as a “precious gift” for the “right” man. Sure. But since more than very young women would be likely to see the billboard you want to pay attention to what other sorts of invitations it might be sending to men who are already reeling from the general pornification of the universe.

And then there’s the direct symbolism of an underage (or underage-looking) girl, in her bedroom, in a sexually receptive posture, contemplating “giving” someone sex *all wrapped up with a big you-deserve-it-big-guy ribbon. A red ribbon, no less! As Holly said, also in comments, “interesting point about the message to guys — ‘Taking a woman’s virginity is the best thing EVER!’ That’s kinda creepy.” Uh-m’yeum, kinda really creepy.

Bottom line, though, is that if one was serious about abstinence one wouldn’t go about eroticizing virginity! Not eroticizing it to girls. Not eroticizing it to women. Not eroticizing it to men.

—-

Final note: When I talk about messages or invitations being sent to men, I’m not asking that such messages not be sent because we’re all poor old sex-class, hormone-addled, can’t-help-ourselves men. I happen to think we can help ourselves just fine. I’m thinking more along the lines of, hey, shit like that is kind of insulting, y’know?

Image, and post inspiration, from Feministing.com.

So… I… I gotta say I always feel a little conflicted when it comes to abstinence-promoting programs like Sherry Cline’s CoolVirginity.com. On the one hand they have perfectly mild advice like

First things first. Best advice is wait to date, 15 and under is just too young. Those years are about discovering who you are as a person first and gaining the maturity to handle the intensity of a relationship.

Which is fine. Really! I happen to agree that, developmentally, it’s best to wait to date, let alone have intercourse. (Just as a virtually all smokers start out as kids who wish they could look more grown up, I think an awful lot of kids rush sex in order to feel grown up. And by rushing or, worse, being rushed, you really do miss out on a lot of cool experiences that really do prepare you not just for handling the intensity of relationships but also handling giving and receiving considerably more enjoyment once you do start having sex.)

So like I say, I don’t really object to the abstract sentiment of promoting abstinence as part of a comprehensive sex education curriculum.

The problem I get into with A-O groups is that they get so focused on virginity as a vehicle for waiting till later that… well…that they come up with absolutely psychotic messages like the image above that, allegedly, is appearing or has appeared on billboards in the Waynesboro, Pennsylvania area.

Because if they’re trying to promote abstinence with that puppy they’re just going about it all the wrong ways!

Quick digression: Maybe 20 years ago I was at a conference in Washington D.C. and a naturalist friend and I decided to visit the National Zoo. We were sitting by the cat exhibit and for the most part the animals were all just lazing around. Except for the mid-size cats. There was this little boy running back and forth with some kind of jingly boots, laughing and making a lot of noise and just generally being a cute little rascal. And all those leopard/cougar-sized cats were chin down, eyes focused intently, and tracking that little boy like house cats track birds through a window. I didn’t notice until my naturalist friend pointed it out. She said “he’s exactly the size of their preferred prey and they trying to stalk him.” Yikes! Creep city!

Anyway, that billboard image up there? Holy cow but that’s just “why wait” stalker bait! An underaged or nearly-underaged girl, curled up submissively, talking about her pussy as an ultimate gift? (Whether because, perhaps, being a woman she doesn’t really have any use for it herself? Or because she just hasn’t yet figured out that she could have expectations and desires of her own. Or even “who cares, if she’s never done it before maybe she’ll think I know what I’m doing.”)

The point being that assuming girls even focus on the marriage part instead of the “ultimate gift to a man” part (and thereby over-romanticizing an early relationship and consequently prematurely “gifting” herself) the overall message is just an open invitation of lust not only to individual women’s individual prospective marriage partners but also to boys who aren’t yet ready to be responsible in their relationships either, and also older, possibly married men as well.

In which case those save-your-cherry,-sweetie lessons better be darn effective because the branding messages in that billboard sure are going to encourage men of all stripes to try overcoming them.

Which, if you were to ask me, is exactly the opposite of giving girls the time and space they need to figure out what they want, when they want it.

Oh, and can we just talk about boys for a minute here? i still don’t see anything in that message (or on that website) about either the benefits of waiting or the consequences of not. (And hmm… one of these days you should ask me about how ready I was the time I was given a “perfect no-strings-attached opportunity” to lose my virginity in 7th grade. And not just me but all the other equally young paperboys in our neighborhood. And how rattled we were. And how, as far as I know, every one of us “chickened out…” a.k.a. weren’t ready.)

Anyway, that billboard? Not ok if you believe in abstinence, and definitely not ok if you don’t.

Image via Silent-Porn-Star

Just for the record, the impression that “radical feminists” are sex negative might be mistaken, and is certainly misinterpreted, but it’s not completely insane.

While doing a little due diligence for my previous post (no, I don’t always do due diligence) I ran across this quote from 60’s/70’s feminist activist Ti-Grace Atkinson

If feminism has any logic at all, it must be working for a sexless society.

Source: Wikipedia

Perhaps not coincidentally, both the quote, and the “Take Charge” camera ad predate the work of radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin to define sexual consent for women as a valid social, let alone legal, concept.

Hard to believe since, today, he looks like a 1970s version of Austin Powers, but when that ad was current the man in it was a dead-serious male archetype! But when you hear, especially, feminists talking about male privilege, he’s embodying exactly what they meant.

Now. Are there feminists in the world today who take Atkinson’s stance on sex? Sure, just like there are still men who take the Vivitar man’s stance. Is Atkinson’s the dominant stance in feminism? Um, that would be a pretty unambiguous “no.” Is the Vivitar man’s the dominant stance among men? Err, best we can say is “we’d like to hope not.” And, if so, then is attacking feminism for positions held back when Austin Powers would have been current events the most logical possible use of anyone’s time? Me neither. But I digress…

The real big deal for me, though, is that when taken out of context, statements like Atkinsons tend to be picked up and used to reinforce the daft, dominant male notion that women as the “no-sex” class, innately disinterested in sex and from whom, therefore, sex must be… extracted. But Atkinson is not the only source of that conceit. Notice Vivitar man’s look of determination? Notice also his partner’s amused, if-you-say-so body language? So does it really matter what else Atkinson might have said?

More and more it seems to me what’s really going on, in dating, in so-called “pick-up artist” strategies, in relationship books, in expressions of feminist frustration and anti-feminist admonitions, is that women aren’t so much anti sex as anti-phony-bullshit-designed-to-get-sex. Until we, meaning us men, recognize just how hugely different those two things are, things aren’t going to get any easier. For anybody.

Here’s something I’ve been meaning to blog about since last fall.

In a post titled “Authority (not in the sense you think…)” Trinity of Let Them Eat Pro-Feminist Safe Spaces said

On a mailing list I’m on, someone mentioned old school radical feminism and brought up Ti-Grace Atkinson on BDSM. I haven’t read much of her on it, just whatever was in Against Sadomasochism, and eve there I don’t remember what exactly she said as opposed to the others. But what the person brought up was her idea that BDSM exposes, lays bare, shows up in stark contrast the power dynamics under patriarchy.

And I was just thinking about that, about how at least among anti-BDSM feminists, statements and theories like those are assumed to be authoritative. They’re assumed to tell the real truth about us and what we do and its meaning.

Read the rest here, plus an early version of this post as a comment.

I’ve been reading a ton of old-school radical feminists lately (Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, Andrea Dworkin, Germaine Greer) and… This could be a possible total brain fart here but I think one of the problems with trying to match theory of 40 years ago with BDSM as practiced today is that when they were writing there was no legal or philosophical basis for sexual consent. When those authors were writing their classics there was, for the most part, no such thing as dominance or submission. There was just “the way it is in heterosexual relationships.”

Now I happen to think that the work those early writers did, particularly the extraordinarily brusque (and possibly sexually submissive) Dworkin, to make “no means no” real (against resistance that still, unbelievably, has life in it) created the safe spaces for the total explosion of conscious BDSM and other forms of kink we’re able to practice today. (Consent lies at the basis of almost[**] all BDSM today.)

But! Because their work launched our contemporary understanding of the meaning of consent then by definition the classics can’t really address the post-consent environment.

To understand the new order we have to look at newer, not-yet-classic radicals.

[** Note: Most BDSM information sites have sections on identifying abusers so there certainly are some. But for the most part most domestic abusers aren’t savvy enough to bother pretending what they’re doing is D/s or S&M.]

I just noticed that Osbasso had requested that we post our own favorites photos from this year. Here are mine, chosen from the big list here.

You can click the photos to see the posts they came from and sometimes other and/or larger versions as well.

Also a lot of people really liked this video

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday) and happy new year to you and those you love.

Ann of Feministing writes about those “Choose Life” license-plate programs states have where the money theoretically goes to fund anti-choice programs.

Well, it turns out Florida is raking in money from the “Choose Life” plates faster than they can spend it. Why, you ask?

Women can’t receive help from the program if they plan to parent their children. It was established strictly for women who plan to give their babies up for adoption and need financial help during the pregnancy.

Wow. So despite the fact that the number of single mothers is on the rise, the state of Florida is won’t use the “Choose Life” cash to help them out. These license plates should really say “Choose Adoption.”

Original post here.

Can I just say right here that while I believe passionately in adoption for babies in genuine need, as when they are orphaned, abandoned, or when their parents are genuinely incapable of raising them. But… I gotta say I think the practice of encouraging otherwise healthy women to “give up” their babies to legal traffickers who sell facilitate their adoption for say, $10,000 the good feeling they get is pretty loathsome. Genuinely charitable people of faith would bend heaven and earth to make sure that the young, particularly vulnerable young or adolescent women had the support they need to raise their children in their own homes. That Florida and the adoption industry doesn’t even blush at its own brazenness disregard for the interest of either mother or child startles me, but doesn’t at all shock me.