Alpha males and cock-blogging
At some point I'm going to need to write a post about Halley Suitt's How to become an alpha male lessons. (She's one of the women who spoke up at Susan Mernit's Gnomedex talk.) Anyway it's a cool series of essays on confident masculinity from her perspective begins lightly and then burrows deep.
For now though I'd like to point to Lesson #14: All about size
I guess there is a point to my rambling here. First, why are we flooded with so many naked pictures of women and find so little in the way of equally lovely pictures of male anatomy? And as for heterosexual male photos, yes, there are videos with rather explicit action shots, but simple beautiful still pictures of straight men -- prove me wrong, show me that gallery. Maybe this is the real dirty little secret of alpha malehood. For all the jockeying for position and mega-aggressive sports behavior, for all the competition at work for heirarchy and position, for all the competition to get the best looking babe and even after the many times men are accused of playing "my dick is bigger than your dick" -- is it the case that most men do not want to compare their actual dick to the next guy's dick and avoid it at all costs? What gives? Do straight men feel their penises are not ready for the light of day? Do they think they don't look good? Do they feel insecure that they don't look as good as the next guy?
...
Of course, my naive fantasy of the availablility of men's penises for viewing in the men's room ... turns out to be completely inaccurate and I've been well informed that taking a leak is all about NOT showing your stuff. Still, can I say, thanks to a few stone hard Greek statues and a few real flesh-and-blood men I've been lucky enough to KNOW well, the male member is a beautiful thing, flaccid or erect, it's time to give it the credit it deserves.
Read her entire essay -- which I'm mightily resisting quoting in full -- here.
Suitt wrote this early in April, 2003, before I discovered blogging and also before I started asking the same questions, and trying to answer them with photos of my own. I'm still not sure if there are many galleries like the ones she asked for more than three years ago now -- simple beautiful still pictures of straight men."
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Doh! And here's her announcement of The Penis Blog Project that, I think, prompted her to write Lesson 14 this way.
Well, if you haven't seen the Penis Blog Project [the link now seems to be defunct --fl], you better go check it out. It went #1 on Blogdex, so someone sure is checking it out. It's about time we even up the score on the Net. That makes about 25 pictures of bare penises and 25 million pictures of bare girl bottoms, tops, fronts, backs, sides and insides. Thanks to Jonno for doing it and thanks to Niek for pointing it out.
i think that, to some extent, the sapir-worf hypothesis is translatable to this. sapir-worf: your worldview is shaped by your language, right?
well, our visual language of sex is about the beauty of women. occasionally we see men's backs, or buttocks, or bare chest - but almost never their cock itself, even as an incidental part of the picture, unless they are actually in the act. and even then, as shay over at the s spot said in a post about hentai (iirc it was her) - positions are chosen so that men's role is limited. only in gay porn do most pornographers/erotic photographers pay attention to the penis as something other than a means to an end (i.e. the money shot), and that world is hostile to a young woman, if only because one doesn't see themselves in it. at all.
so growing up, i recall thinking of penises as gross things, and when i started looking at softcore there were almost none of them. women were the beautiful focus of the photography, and when i looked at hardcore, they were still generally the focus - until you got to the ejaculation point. still thinking of penises as gross things, and women as beautiful things.
i think this is an (as usual, personal, anecdotal) example of that sapir-worf hypothesis, in that my visual language (and, i would imagine, many women's) just didn't have a 'word' for a beautiful, non-threatening penis (because i'm sorry, it is threatening to see a man's cock amid words like 'ram' and 'slam' and 'pound' and all the other words that porn videos use to describe their action. i like it, often, but it's still threatening.) and i still don't think i do. over time, i think i've managed to get over it - mostly with real world experience. but if i hadn't had some encouraging lovers, and run into some internet resources, it wouldn't have happened that way.
anyway, i guess my point is that this isn't just strange from a man's perspective - it is from a woman's too.
There is a lot of wisdom in those eighteen essays on masculinity written by Halley Suitt. There's also a sincere appreciation for men and their bodies, which was long overdue. During the 1950's one would never find an article in Ladies Home Journal or McCall's extolling the virtues of the penis. With the advent of radical feminism, the penis received even more bad press. So if Halley and her ilk are moved to right this wrong, may their writings be read and linked endlessly.
No doubt Suitt is media savvy, and knew that entitling her essays, "How to Become an Alpha Male," would ensure innumerable hits from the various search engines. Unfortunately, the term "alpha male" is a piece of psuedoscience and should join phrenology in a collection entitled "Even Smart People Can Believe Really Stupid Things." Using terms applicable to animal behavior to categorize human beings will generate as many false assumptions and stereotypes as the study of cranial bumps. But that is a gripe which deserves a separate post.
Leanne Bell penned one hundred essays under the title And They Lived Happily Ever After. Her views on marriage, divorce, and cohabitation do not belong to any one camp, liberal or conservative. But like Suitt, she does express an appreciation for men and ends her essay, "His penis," with these words:
If you love your husband's deep voice, or the hair on his chest, or the breadth of his shoulders, if you love the fact that he is attracted to and in love with a woman, with you, and if you cherish the children he's helped you create, be aware that all of these things are due to the one thing that ultimately defines his manhood: his adorable, sexy, wonderful cock.
When Hallmark starts putting quotes like that in anniversary, Valentine's Day and Father's Day cards, -- that's the day when the sexbloggers will finally be vindicated.
[Oh you are just *SO COOL* Kochanie. That's a sweet, sweet comment that needs to be in its own blog. Thank you. --fl]