I gotta say I’m less enamored of this whole gender business, as distinct from more tangible qualities like biology, body, identity, and orientation. But people like Bond of Dear Diaspora or Sinclair of Sugarbutch argue passionately and often very well that no, there is such a thing, and what’s wrong with that?

It still gives me hackles. Especially when it sure looks like (as turned up in conversation with a friend today who’s struggling with her relationship with male partner) the gendered female trope of “disappointment” and the gendered male one of “resignation” sure… look awfully similar. Except for the names, of course. And the genders they’re ascribed to.

In fact I think one big clue came today when I was talking with my friend and she asked me how it can be that the person you can be almost sick to death of being different than could have been so rivetingly appealing when you first met. And it occurred to me that that’s one more domain where over time all the stuff you have in common — maybe 99% or more — just cancels out from familiarity, overuse, complacency, and especially confidence and comfort… and therefore take up only a very small percent of effort and energy. Compared to that nagging 1% difference that, because everything else fades figuratively into your literal background that… the difference takes up nearly all your effort and energy. With the result that you’re saying “irreconcilable differences” when externally friends and loved ones can’t imagine what the problem is.

Well. I think it’s the same with gender. A lot. Human beings aren’t 100% alike. (That’s a common but moronic straw-person argument often held up by gender essentialists.) But we are 99% alike. Even when we’re biologically different we’re very often still functionally alike. (Consider for instance that in many parts of the world both sexes squat to pee even though with practice nearly all men and most women can pee perfectly well standing up.)

So like I say, there are very clearly differences between heterosexual cis-gendered biological sexes. But just the fact that I have to add all those qualifications is a reminder of just how small those differences can actually be.

Small differences, however, aren’t the same as no differences. And while I’m not persuaded that the difference is big enough to bring in a whole ‘nother social institution called “gender” to help explain those differences, stereotype those differences, or police those differences when people go “astray” from them I’m willing to accept that they’re there and they might even be unavoidable.

Especially if other people seem to believe they’re there it doesn’t even help if you don’t. Consider that if men look you in the chest instead of the eyes you’re being gendered, like it or not. Consider that if women cross the street rather than walk past you after midnight you’re gendered it doesn’t really matter how long you’ve spent deconstructing gender in yourself.

So…

So I got a big epiphany the other day that it’s not actually gender itself that bugs me. Like Sinclair I feel comfortable wearing pants, for instance, nor am I inclined to skirts. On the other hand a number of bio-women and at least one bio-man who just strongly prefer conventional skirts or dresses.

In fact Sinclair and I are really quite a lot alike. In gender terms we have quite a lot in common! In fact, even though she’s thoroughly and even cheerfully not a man in a lot of ways she’s better at being “masculine” than I am. Or at least more consistently so.

Which gets me to that sticking point again. Because the way gender is constructed it’s “good” when I do some of the gendered things I do because I’m biologically male. But when she does it it’s “bad” because she’s not. Except that, as I just mentioned, she’s really good at it.

So my epiphany was that I’m actually not so much down on gender as I’m really down on the 50/50-split, yin/yang, I’m hairy so you must be hairless, you’re nurturing so I must be aloof, Mars/Venus, everything-about-us-must-be-opposite two-sphere model of gender. I’m seriously impatient with the exclusivity that goes with gender essentialism.

In other words I’m fine with gender… as long as it’s completely independent of sexual biology, or anatomy, or identity, or orientation.

Cool discussion related one of my earlier posts, On Learning to Recognize “Gray Area” Sexual Pressure Where You Least Expect It, going on over at Feministe

I’ve been posting a lot of comments over there. I may sort them out into a proper post here but for now here are some rough notes. The references of the form “Chava #181” are to other (numbered) comments in the thread.

—- #110 —-

What Natalie #93 said a couple of comments back!

If we didn’t tell ourselves that men always want sex and are always ready for it, and if he’s not it’s a judgment on his partner, then men would feel free to say no and women would be able hear no without feeling judged. If we didn’t tell ourselves that women always want sex less often than male partners and that sex is always a bargaining chip to get something else then women wouldn’t feel humiliated for wanting sex at a time when a man doesn’t want it.

Yes! Those two scripts seriously distort the hows and even whethers of consent. Because in that construction a man “can’t be raped” because if he doesn’t want it all the time our transactional ideology of heterosexuality breaks down. Similarly straight-up sexual aggression is invisible in women because sexual expression is culturally defined as predicated on men’s initiative.

That’s what’s so cool about Pluralist and Rachel Hills posts, and why Jill and others are reposting them: they confront those assumptions from a direction the usual scripts aren’t at all prepared for. With the result that [rote] apologetics and absolutism sound reflexive rather than reflective.

When you dig a little deeper into the question of consent you stop looking at its nature (was it enthusiastic, grudging, resigned, gradually warmed-up-to) and reach the more fundamental question of whether the person making the decision is being respected. There’s clearly quite a bit of room for thoughtful people to debate whether Pluralist’s acquaintance’s overtures to her long-term partner were coercive. (I say yes she was, for instance even, though he eventually consented. But for their own nearly opposite reasons S.L. or Olo might credibly disagree.)

There’s no question, though, that she failed to respect his decision when, whatever her reasons, she decided to continue pressuring him.

Sexual consent is bogglingly important. But it’s also only a legally-definable and -determinable proxy for a much more complex human decision-making interactions. Recognizing this expands rather than refutes what we know about who can rape and be raped.

—- #137 —-

Chava and ThankGoddess [see #128.] I think a good way to resolve your current impasse would be to say that while everyone needs to be equally attentive we also need to be particularly wary of the gendered scripts our respective sexes are exposed to.

For instance because of scripting women are inclined to assume rejection implies personal inadequacy. (See for instance Marle’s assumption it must be ugliness in comment #1) with the result that something about them must be especially bad about them, if they fail. The alternative, which I think may have fueled Pluralist’s friend, is the assumption that if a woman is rejected there must be something wrong with the man. Obviously neither of these things need to be true.

Meanwhile men’s scripting assumes rejection is universal and therefore something has to be really special about them if they succeed. (The telling line there is men call it “getting lucky.”) Or else something has to be really wrong with the woman (“fallen,” “crazy,” or “wild.” Or else “easy,” as if that was a bad thing.) None of this needs to be true either.

The result for both men and women can be identical failures to respect a partner’s decision to decline that nevertheless come from very different social conditioning.

Point being that Chava’s right that straight men need to be particularly careful, but ThankGoddess is right that so does everyone else.

—

Quick note to ThankGoddess — I really, seriously admire your willingness to identify and rewrite scripting. I’m skeptical that they can be rewritten as easily as you make it sound in part because social scripts sort of by-definition can’t be changed unilaterally. One of the things I like about posts like this, though, is that the reconsideration of roles it forces creates openings for new, more realistic narratives about gender to emerge.

—- #176 —-

Butch Fatale #157

Many people who have non-standard rape experiences have difficulty identifying what happened to them as rape – including people whose experience was actually pretty common, because what we hear about how it has to happen to “count” is a pretty limited set of circumstances.

If you also add “any people who have non-standard rape experiences have difficulty identifying what they did as rape” then you’ve got the crux of this post — of why Pluralist, and Rachel Hills, and Jill, and I think this is such a crucial topic.

We’re all aware… some of us tragically so… that there are individuals who are conflicted about, or even oblivious to, rape because it wasn’t a “jump out of the bushes with a knife” scenario. There are people who think it didn’t happen to them, and people who think what they did couldn’t have been.

This might sound like a slight digression but earlier this year we had an incident of girls beating up another girl in a local Metro transit center. Just the other day I overheard, I think, Rachel Simmons on a local public radio show talking about assumptions what were made about what defines bullying. She made the point that “as usual” researchers initially focused only on bullying by socialized boys-to-boys, which tends towards direct physical violence, with the result that socialized girls-to-girls bullying, which tends towards emotional and social rather than physical violence was ignored or disregarded.

The point being that just as it was an error to make assumptions about bullying it’s almost certainly as large a mistake to assume that everyone will commit rape using the same methods stereotypically used by the most stereotypical perpetrators. Date- and domestic-partner rapists got away with that for generations.

With that in mind what’s important about Plurality’s friend’s action isn’t whether the degree of what she did was actionable — even though that seems to be the focus of a lot of the discussion here and elsewhere. Instead it’s interesting for indicating one corner a whole domain of coercion that has been overlooked because it didn’t conform to our (highly gendered!) assumptions about what rape, and rapists, and rape victims look like.

A corollary of that, by the way, which really shows up in Plurality’s story and which I saw as the point of Butch Fatale’s comment, is that we also have incomplete assumptions about what non-consent looks like, and therefore of what victims look like.

The man in Plurality’s story felt conflicted enough to have not gotten over what happened even months later. That’s a big clue that non-consent was involved. I’m reluctant to go further into that because this really has nothing to do with “what about the men.” Instead I’ll point out that the woman in Plurality’s story also felt conflicted enough about it to tell Plurality about it, instead of, say, to blow it off. That’s another big clue.

There’s a lot of 2nd- and 3rd-person conversation in this thread, for instance, along the lines of “well if this man…” or “well a cis-person might…” And there’s (probably for obvious reasons when you think about it) an awful lot of comments by people who are confident about having been victims. There have even been digressions into what constitutes privilege. All of which are of course perfectly relevant.

What Pluralist’s story suggests is that what we’re not hearing are whole classes of comments that would be even more relevant: the cis persons, the trans persons, the straight persons, the genderqueer persons… the women or men who like Pluralist’s friend can and may have been perpetrators — and who therefore might be able to contribute cautionary perspectives — are silent.

Though not, I ardently hope, silenced. Because this very large, very important bottle wouldn’t have been uncorked in the first place had Pluralist’s friend not disclosed her own conflicted feelings about her own assumptions that led to her own inability to respect her partner’s decision when he declined her overtures.

Bottom line is that addressing Butch Fatale’s broader point about identifying who can be victims and perpetrators undermines the two-sphere model of gender. Even if, as, say, Bond of Dear Diaspora argues, we should have tolerance for some degree of gender construction, the exclusivity of the two-sphere model, and the denial and lies needed to maintain it, leaves everyone vulnerable.

—- #196 —-

Following up on [my previous comment, #176] I really want to add that rather than absolving men with some kind of “but women do it too” shenanigans (as if two wrongs had ever made a right), breaking down gendered notions of what constitutes coercion and/or consent leaves less “gray area” for men to hide it. For instance no matter who you are it really is questionable at best do to one’s partner what Pluralist’s friend did to hers. Understanding that takes away cancels any form of “it must be ok because women do that too” defenses.

—

Richard Jeffrey Newman #178: I can’t speak at all to cultural Korean values so I can’t assess whether that’s really how couples in that situation are expected to save face. Instead I’ll just emphasize again that the critical distinction between role-playing and reality is recognition and respect for each player’s decision to participate or to decline.

Chava #181. Similar to #178 the measure is whether we recognize and respect each player’s decision. For better or worse, we probably can’t unilaterally make the assessment of our effect on others or how far over the line we’ve crossed. That’s not an indictment, by the way. It’s great that you stepped up. Grounding dialogue in how we have acted and how we act now makes dialogue about how we could act more practical and a lot more powerful.

Sailorman #184: I’ll keep stressing that the objective isn’t to create ever wider definitions of rape and assault. But neither is it to engage in further hairsplitting at the margins. In your “can I get you interested” scenario the question would be whether your partner was respecting your decision and, in particular, whether she was seeking to clarify it (ok, especially in a trusting relationship) or to disregard and override it (not at all ok.)

And for Natalie #175 and Faith #188: Yes, absolutely. I grew up believing women and girls couldn’t commit sexual assault. I believed it so thoroughly that I even said it to the director of a local Rape Relief program when I interviewed her for a college newspaper story. When she gently but with considerable authority corrected me I had an almost cinematic sense of perspective shift. It resolved a coercive sexual childhood experience when I was very young that I grew up thinking shouldn’t have bothered me, and that I’d thought I maybe even should have felt lucky for (one of the dads who was in on the rescue said something to another adult about me “getting an early start”) that had nevertheless affected me. Victimized? No, social scripting about male gender might have, for once, possibly unfairly, helped mitigate some of that. Traumatized? Any consequences were nothing compared to the consequences ruthless, sustained, but non-sexual bullying I experienced later. But just those few words from the shelter director were exactly what I’d needed to get resolution.

Well this is just amazingly, self-defeatingly dumb! While thoroughly shredding the International Olympic Committee’s determined resistance to letting women ski-jumpers compete (current record-holder on the main ski jump in Vancouver? Lindsey Van) Angry Mouse of Daily Kos unearths the following rationalization from David Whitley at a website called Fanhouse. Here’s Angry Mouse’s quote of Whitley

...once girls start performing as well as boys — or better — it’s not even a sport anymore. Just look at what women have done to bowling!

[Fred] Barnes was beaten by a woman, giving him immediate entry into history’s Male Ridicule Club.

How could a guy lose to a girl in an athletic event?

Simple, really.

Bowling isn’t an athletic event.

Rule No. 1 in determining whether an activity is a sport: If the best female in the world can beat the best male in the world, it doesn’t qualify.

Read Angry Mouse’s post here.

We’ll leave aside the whole daring provocateur trope so common in “journalism” (remember, all publicity = good publicity, thus no direct link to Whitley’s post from here.) Instead let’s examine the question in the context of other, similar “last stand” sort of claims.

If you ever had to read Karl Marx (along with Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman in a freshman survey course, as I did) then you may dimly recall (as I do) the story of a skilled laborer bragging to an industrialist that while he might be able to invent a machine for turning axe-handles on a lathe he’d never invent one that could turn rifle stocks as quickly or accurately as a skilled human. The industrialist quickly rose to the challenge and the lathe operator lost his job… as did, no doubt, every other lathe operator in the factory. This version of the “man can not be beaten by…” wasn’t very durable.

If you ever had to take a combined computability and cognition in the 1980s, as I did, you may dimly recall (as I do) the informed assertions and alleged proofs that a computer could never beat a human grandmaster at chess. That took a little longer to build Deep Blue, which beat Gary Kasparov in the 20th Century than it took the industrialist to beat the lathe operator in the 19th, but down Kasparov went. This version of the “man can not be beaten by…” was only slightly more durable.

If you had to read a newspaper almost any time in the 19th, 20th, or 21st Centuries you may vividly recall the assertion that not only are humans not a product of evolution but evolution itself never happens and indeed isn’t possible. This latter one seems like a pretty durable argument, but more because it’s pretty passionately held than because the accumulation of evidence hasn’t been drawing the circle of denial tighter, and tighter, and tighter. (Same, by the way, for the even loopier notion that the earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old.)

And now this “It’s not a sport of a woman can beat a man at it” business.

The problem with each of these assertions is that they diminish those who resist far more than they do their challengers.

Care to go on? Speaking of the Olympics, Adolph Hitler and his minions were diminished when Cornelius Cooper Johnson one the gold medal for the high jump in Munich. And goodness knows the tobacco companies were diminished (to the tune of half a trillion $!#%!@#% dollars) when their efforts to “prove” cigarettes are harmless finally failed. (Surely a fraction of that money would have been better spent developing a variety that was either not addictive or else not carcinogenic or preferably both.) And don’t forget the loopy, and sometimes still-prevalent notion that women are “naturally nurturing” and therefore ought to be consigned to all child-rearing duties during, and in the event of divorce, after marriage.

As far as I can tell (weather conditions — heat, snow, wind seem to alter where people start their jumps) the actual Olympic contenders this week mostly handily beat Lindsay Van’s earlier record on the hill. But many did not. For instance she finished ahead of most or all the men on the American team. Which, I guess, in David Whitley’s interesting logic means that ski-jumping is a sport for some men… but not the American ones who’s best wasn’t as good as Van’s.

Which is of course stupid. Again, the false premise driving his logic demeans and diminishes everyone.

Head’s up for Seattle-area readers: Rachel Kramer Bussel will be appearing with friends at Elliott Bay Book Company tonight, Tue, 02/23/2010, at 7:00pm. They’ll be reading from Rachel’s new anthology Best Sex Writing 2010

February being a month when eros is on the calendar, if not in the air (Valentine’s Day, Carnival, and more), editor Rachel Kramer Bussel being here to read from and discuss the anthology, Best Sex Writing 2010 (Cleis) is particularly apt. She is senior editor at Penthouse Variations, is the former “Lusty Lady” columnist for The Village Voice, and runs a New York City erotica reading series, “In the Flesh.” She also did the hard work of putting together an anthology that embraces many different takes on sex and sensuality—which adds to the pleasures of this book. Reading with Rachel Kramer Bussel tonight are two local contributors to the anthology, Michelle Perrot and Janet Hardy.

The Elliott Bay Book Company
101 S. Main St.
Seattle, Washington 98104

I like Rachel’s “Best Sex Writing” series. There’s nothing wrong with erotica either, of course, and Rachel’s no slouch when it comes to editing those. This series covers more of the nuts and bolts of sex, of coping with, say, complications of sex while pregnant or nursing, the contradictions of sex education in purity ball culture, the commonalities of political sex scandals, or the factors condom manufacturers must juggle to make their products safe, effective, and marketable.

Janet Hardy, who will be reading with Rachel, is co-author of the classic (and recently-revised) The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures.

Michelle Perrot is a pen name for Kerry Cohen, a therapist, writer, mother of an autism-spectrum child, and author of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity.

If I can possibly make it I will. I hope you can make it too.

Update: I’ll be there. I’m looking forward to it.