Photo via Sociological Images.

Hey, far be it from me to give men a complete pass for mucking pond sludge or other substances on their faces in hopes of "replenishing" their skin. For one thing there's still approximately zero evidence that stuff like that really works! Or makes you actually look younger. And it's often unconscionably expensive. So all in all, compared to good soap and a washcloth it's kind of stupid.

That said, facials for men (with or without cucumbers) is no stupider than bass fishing, and it it's far less expensive. And yet you don't see men's perfume companies running around saying men should be slapped for bass fishing.

And let's not even start with men's perfume company taking potshots at male vanity.

But you know that slapping business? That's called policing. It's a form of sexism for men by men.

And it's not a trivial issue. A heck of a lot of what's really fucked up about gender in contemporary society boils down to men's fear of being policed. From misogyny to homophobia to the peculiar pressure PUAs are under to "prove themselves" not with thousands of pickups but with their first, most men learn -- either the easy way or the hard way -- that the consequences of not passing for four-square straight manly-man is often a lot more painful than a mere slap.

As George Carlin famously quipped, "The difference between a fag and a queer is, a fag is a guy that won’t go downtown with you beating up queers." With the implied threat that if they want to beat someone up, and you won't go downtown with them, well... then they can save themselves a trip downtown then can't they? That's the consequence of ignoring policing for most men. What's worse is that a lot of the time the aggressors feel driven to prove that they themselves aren't "queer."

So fuck you, Brut.

Via Gwen Sharp

I always feel a little uncomfortable complaining about the differences between men's and women's clothes. On the one hand, "fashion" or design esthetics not withstanding, the quality, cleanability, and practicalities tend to be much lower than comparable articles for men, and stich for stitch and seam for seam they prices tend to be higher. On the other hand it doesn't seem to be true that women lack agency in their purchasing decisions, nor probable that women's actual buying habits have no correlation with the products designers, manufacturers, and retailers make available.

But when I go shopping with my 11-year-old daughter, compared to what was available for my son three years ago when he was 11 (he's now 14), I... gotta chafe about it. A lot.

Case in point, both my kids have ipod-sized hand-me-down smart phones. These fit effortlessly into the front pockets of my son's jeans. The same size phone sticks out of my daughter's jeans pockets because for some incredibly baroque reason girl-jeans pockets are only about three inches deep.

Anyway, since I don't feel comfortable about carping about it stand-alone I'm really, really happy to endorse the following post by Suzanne Reisman , who says

Dear Women’s Athletic Apparel Manufacturers:

I appreciate that you understand that women should be active and earn your livings by producing clothing to enable us ladies to engage in physical fitness. However, what is wrong with you? Most of you seem to produce clothing for men and women, and of course, the men’s gear is a jillion times better.

First off, almost all shorts made for men have pockets. You seem to understand that men carry shit with them – like keys and ID and money and music machines and maybe even inhalers or tissues – when they run. Guess what? Women need those items too! Especially asthmatic ones! Those little “key pockets” are nice for a key, but otherwise they are fucking bullshit. I need to carry my inhaler with me, just in case. Where shall I put it in your pocketless shorts?

This brings us to the length of shorts. Men’s shorts come in a variety of lengths, from the short running kind to straight legs that extend to their knees. Women’s shorts, on the other hand, come in two sizes: short and even shorter.

Source: Cuss and Other Rants

I know, I know, the theory is that it's just a waste of time putting pockets in women's slacks because everyone knows All Ladies Carry Purses Anyway. Except, you know, when they run or do sports. So WTF is the deal with women's athletic shorts then?

Via Geek Feminism Jess McCabe of The F-Word points out that the cartoon character Lois Lane got the same "makeover" treatment in the 1940s and 1950s that models for classic "pin-up" paintings did.

Original photo of pin-up model plus "corrected" painting

Images via UFunk.net.

Early Lois Lane

Image via the F-Word Blog

"Corrected" Lois Lane

Image via the F-Word Blog

The suggestions for "correcting" the way Lois Lane should be drawn are... well, funny's not the right word but maybe interesting is. Check out the details, including the 1941 opinion that Lane "looks pregnant" in the first image, Jess's blog.

While reflecting on a male friend's persistent questions about whether another acquaintance's breasts were "real" or "artificial," Brunettes Blog blogger Ginny comes up with a much more plausible... and mundane... explanation for beauty standards (which are remarkably plastic over time and culture) than simple "evolutionary fitness signaling:" scarcity. (Emphasis mine.)

Another possibility ... is that exacting standards of beauty are not primarily about evolutionarily-coded fitness signals, as we’re so often told these days. Instead, they’re about status and acquisition. Women with lovely faces and perfect bodies are rare, especially as today’s “perfect body” is tiny with large breasts, not a common naturally occuring combination. Anything rare can be assigned a high value, and gaining possession of a rare valuable grants status to the possessor… especially when competition comes into play, as it seems to do with partner-choice. If a naturally-perfect body is a diamond to shine on the arm of a victorious male, then a surgically-enhanced perfect body is cubic zirconia: just as lovely, but easier to come by and therefore less valuable.

Source: The Brunettes Blog

You know what? Even if the stwatistical correlations of hip/waist ratios and ovulation detection were true it still wouldn't explain the much, much larger (but usually very much more critical to local cultures and times) distinctions of skinniness in women when food is abundant, corpulence when food is scarce, flabbiness in women when physical labor is obligatory, buffness when most work is done at desks, pale skin when most women laborers do field work, tans when most labor is factory or office work, and, especially, blonde women when blondes are scare or "exotic Asian women" in those parts of the world where... there are nearly two billion other Asian people. Oh, and women with clear, flawless skin when insects, acne, and sunburn was prevalent, and women with lots of tattoos, brandings, and piercings once sunblock, benzoyl peroxide, and sunblock become de rigueur.

Feel free to point out that evolution might have biased humans to equate that which is scarce with that which is beautiful. We're certainly evolved creatures (as opposed to what? Spontaneous generation?) But a preference for that which is rare is a very different matter than straight up sexual selection.

Holly Pervocracy carves deeply into another asinine foray into female beauty and its consequences (this time from Psychology Today) so we won't have to.

Yet, if you're a woman who wants to land a man, there's this notion that you should be able to go around looking like Ernest Borgnine: If you're "beautiful on the inside," that's all that should count.

Fun fact: Ernest Borgnine is married. It's almost like he has something interesting or appealing about him besides his decorative value! Oh, but wait, he has a penis, so all the rules are completely different for whatever reason.

Also, if you look like Ernest Borgnine--if you literally look like him, rather than just looking like an average woman who's a bit slovenly and a bit overweight, which I'm sure is what the writer means here and is expressing in the most schoolyard-bully terms possible--ain't no beauty regimen in the world gonna change that, so you're not "going around" that way, you're stuck with it, and for the writer to rub it in that you can't possibly deserve love is just a pointlessly assholish move.

Source: The Pervocracy

Nicely said. Also, funny how Rule #2 pressures women to prefer personality over appearance but it's merely "harsh" for men to scorn any woman less conventionally beautiful than Megan Fox, no matter how personable.

Scott Adams knocks it out of the park on tolerance, ethics, and the knee-squeezing twittery of "hipster" media.

I've been thinking about this because a new breed of media has popped up that takes evil to a new level. Today, for example, spewed across the Internet is the report that Rachel Maddow believes some members of the broadcast media who are closeted gays should come out, as she has. Gawker - ironically named after a vigorous form of self-satisfaction - helpfully lists some broadcasters that they believe should come out.

The thin cover for this evil is the notion that when a public figure reveals his or her sexual orientation it is a form of honesty that helps others by example. By Gawker's view, keeping your private life private can't be a legitimate personal decision, and it can't be the sort of image management that every human with a paying job engages in. We humans are always spring-loaded to judge most harshly any form of information concealment, no matter how victimless. How dare our public figures not disclose what sort of genitalia they prefer! Those lying bastards! How can I trust the news about Libya now?!

By my standard, the allegedly gay broadcasters in question presumably work hard and they don't hurt anyone by reporting the news, unless you count dictators and other scoundrels who try to avoid direct questions.

Source: Dilbert Blog

Yeah, he disgraced himself with sock puppetry, and his attempt to punk MRAs completely blew up in his face, but even if he doesn't always live up to his proposed secular standard for distinguishing good and bad* he's right about this.

* You're a good person if you work hard at something that is useful to society and you try to avoid hurting other people when it's practical.

Matthew Yglesias raises an even more chilling reason why anti-abortion extremists persistently refuse to jail or execute women for seeking abortions: they don't consider women to be legally people at all! (Emphasis mine.)

There’s something very ethically and metaphysically weird about the hesitance to legally sanction women who abortions. LaBruzzo and his fellow travelers seem to believe, quite sincerely, that a fetus is a moral person and that killing it is wrong. They’re also hardly unwilling to punish women who find themselves with unwanted or unplanned pregnancies—they’re eager to punish them via laws mandating that pregnancies be carried to term. And obviously it’s not the case that women typically get abortions by accident or because they’re somehow swindled into it by unscrupulous doctors. It’s almost as if he doesn’t take the moral personhood of pregnant women seriously. On the one hand, they have no legal right to control their own bodies, but on the other hand the state has no legal right to hold them personally responsible for their conduct.

Source: Matthew Yglesias

Kevin Drum says nah, they want to start handing out sentences to women too and are holding back only out of political expediency. It sounds awful to say it but considering the degree to which hard-core anti-abortion deny political or legal autonomy to half the adult population it would be nice to believe Drum is right and Yglesias wrong.

Robin Marty produces yet another demonstration of the complete lack of seriousness of the "pro-life" movement.  (Emphasis mine.)

I've read enough anti-choice literature now to know that if you are against abortion, at the moment of conception you now have a separate and unique individual.  That's how personhood works, and those are the words that doctors are expected to recite to you if you want to obtain an abortion in certain states.

But that only counts inside the clinic.  On the sidewalk, it's a different story, one clinic escort shares:

"Yesterday, the clinic had to call the police (again) because the protesters had (again) violated the terms of the injunction. There were four women on the sidewalk and together they had three kids in strollers. In my world, four plus three equals seven. When told they were violating the injunction, they argued that "four people" did not include children."

Source: RHRealityCheck.org

Oh, and speaking of failures to take "life begins at conception" seriously, I still haven't heard back from the smug "fetal harm" vigilanties and "fetal death" execution proponents about whether their draconian penalties intended to terrorize abortion providers would apply to those who harm fetuses via dispersal of pollutants, pesticides, or manufactured products that cause fetal defects and/or death.

I wasn't holding my breath, of course, because their opposition to abortion has nothing at all to do with concern either for fetuses or (as in the case of the clinic demonstrators who don't even see their own, born children ad people) considerations of personhood.

This is actually perfectly consistent once you get that their opposition to abortion is all about confining and controlling women: Since children are literally the "wages of sin" for that crowd, and since abortion in their eyes is a way for women to avoid their just deserts, thinking of their own children as people instead of punishment isn't really part of their frames of reference.

The mistake, I think, is believing them when they say they're "pro-life."  Their utter disregard for born children as human beings is one example.  A more telling one is their complete and utter indifference to miscarriage, spontaneous abortion, stillbirth, and so on, which generally only "stops a beating heart" of wanted children.

Via Amanda Hess, Amanda Marcotte has a nice rundown on the bogus Two Rules of Desire:

If women are free from desire, straight men are free to see women as consumable goods for purchase. What name you call them -- wife, prostitute -- depends mainly on the price. Such a system means you're never really rejected. That peanut butter at the store doesn't look at you and say, 'Nah.' You either can afford it or you can't. Reducing women to that is comforting, I suppose.

Source: Pandagon

That's a good take on the logic of Rule #1 (It's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire.) I'd just add that Rule #2, which says it's intolerable and inconceivable for men to be sexually desired, helps men save face -- effectively insuring that Amanda's peanut butter on the shelf will instead say "yeah" when you're not able to eat it.

Now in the normal world of consent conversations, if a man’s partner asked for sex and he wasn’t interested and/or up to it, he could simply say no.  The fly in that ointment is that men are indoctrinated (mostly by other men) to be (or at least pretend to be) sexually insatiable.  And consequently men spend a lot of time bragging and/or complaining that they can never get enough sex.

Now, if the rules are that only men initiate sex, and that in fact it’s unseemly for women (or for that matter other men) to do so, then there’s never a question of a man being a) placed in a position to perform sex while also being b) unable or unwilling to perform it.

This would all be perfectly fine, of course, if the rules were true.  Being bogus, however, much hilarity does not ensue from their application.

Anyway, it's a good post with a lot more stuff in it.  The only place I quibble with Amanda is whether or not the rules are driven more by male sadism or male insecurity (especially in terms of losing face around other men... who can be very sadistic to each other about sexual ability.)  There's room, of course, for both but I think insecurity accounts for most of the pressure.

So I just stumbled across Jenny and Libby's The Brunettes Blog, subtitled "Two siblings write about religion, gender, philosophy, and sex." According to their "debut" post (which they actually wrote a couple of months after they began posting)

The Conversation: a beginning
August 14th, 2010

So my sister and I, after many years of writing and chatting about the subjects that most fascinate us, decided to finally get together and write a blog.

Source: The Brunettes Blog

The rest of the post is a dialog about what they care about and, more interestingly, how they care about them. It's not deep or insightful in itself but it is a nice window into their approach.

Anyway, they cover a lot of the same issues I do -- gender stereotypes, evolutionary psychology, men and desirability, and things like the difference between monogamy and fidelity. They talk a lot more about polyamory than I do, and they discuss religion more often as well -- mainly in the context of atheism. And finally, while they originally began blogging as sisters one of the two, Libby, now identifies as Lane William so now they blog as siblings. And blog about issues like gender dysphoria and acceptance. It's all good stuff.

Anyway, I don't usually blogroll people right away but I've enjoyed browsing their archives this morning.  You might too.