No win choices: perverts vs. sluts

So I mentioned yesterday that I went to see Susan Mernit lead a discussion about Sex & Longing & Web 2.0 with a room full of heavy-duty alternative tech people at Gnomedex.

There were three or four hundred people in attendance -- mostly men as you might expect, and I'd say mostly over 30. Susan broke the ice by saying she'd considered two possible topics when she'd first been invited to speak: sex and relationships on the web or Web 2.0 microformats for browsers. The thaw didn't last for long, however, because when she asked how many people browsed sex or relationship sites the majority of hands remained frozen to their desks or keyboards. :-)

And here's the kicker: Of those who did raise their hands half were women... despite the 9-1 imbalance between men and women in the room. Same was true of people who later stood up to speak: maybe 50-50% women when the room was 90% men. (Also: I happened to be sitting in the back of the auditorium and so of the 300-400 laptop screens I could see, exactly one of person -- couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman -- seemed to be following any of the links in Susan's talk.) One more thing: the women who spoke seemed (for the most part) both comfortable and pretty familiar with the topic at hand. The men who spoke were (for the most part) unclear or anxious about it.

You can draw a couple of conclusions about this: first that (at least in the technical world) men are just geekier than women. Or maybe that women are conditioned to be more comfortable discussing relationships and so it's an easier leap for them to talk about sexuality. Or you could say that men's aversion to "kiss and tell" conversations makes them more reluctant to discuss sex at all. Or you could pull out the old saw about men preferring erotic pictures and women preferring erotic writing so men have less experience and/or interest with blogs since they tend to be text heavy and light on photos. Or, or, or... [insert your theory here.]

I think all those things are probably true to one degree or another but I'd like to explore another possibility. I'm not saying it's true. I'm not saying it explains what was happening in the auditorium. I'm just saying it occurred to me afterwards and I'd like to try airing it out. Here goes: for better or worse, men have to worry more than women do about being called perverts and women have worry more than men about being called sluts.

It doesn't matter that (considering what most of us really worry about) either charge is particularly a) appropriate, b) accurate, or c) even all that likely to be leveled. What matters is what we've conditioned ourselves to worry about.

And here's the problem with that: for all the hell that can rain down on women who are perceived to be sluts, they don't have offender registries for sluts but they do have registries for perverts. And rightly or wrongly that freaks men out: being a pervert is worse than being a slut.

[Disclaimer #1: This isn't an either/or situation. Just because I'm saying it's worse to be called a pervert doesn't mean it's somehow better to be called a slut because there's no zero-sum equation here. When used in their common, non-kink-community senses they're both pretty bad. --fl]

It gets worse than that, you know, because the same asinine patriarchal construction of the word slut also includes (also rightly or wrongly) the idea of redemption: a slut isn't a slut for life. Meanwhile perverts are perverts are perverts. One can say "Well, I used to be a slut" (though not everyone would want to) but you can't say "Oh, I used to be a pervert."

And it gets even worse: When women "go astray" sex-hostile activists of both left and right blame their departure from decorum on men. Enjoy giving blowjobs? Men's fault. Enjoy a good spanking? Men again. Lose your virginity before marriage? You were seduced, weren't you? Yeah, it might be slutty but it's men's fault. On the other hand, when men are perverted it's... well, men are just that way aren't they? (For gosh sakes, we'll go to prostitutes, have sex with animals, hollow out pumpkins, or, in one particularly derogatory construction "we don't even care if she's still alive!")

Or, putting it another way, most of our assumptions both old (patriarchal) and new ("difference" feminism) are built on the assumption that both men and women will revert to their true natures... and that women are naturally chaste/monogamous/virtuous and men are naturally bestial/promiscuous.

The final tough thing about men and perverts is the rather startling array of things you can be accused of being a pervert about. It *really* wasn't that long ago you faced arrest not only for sending Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover or Nin's Delta of Venus through the U.S. Mail but for *receiving* it! Even after that cooled off erotic photos were still off limits for another decade or so. And as far as I know, in California men who were convicted of homosexuality back in the 50's and 60's (when it used to be considered a sex crime to be gay) are still required by law to register as sex offenders. Historically very, *very* few women have found themselves in that position.

Now! Is it true that a man's a "pervert" if he reads M's, or Monmouth's, or Monk's, or Miyou's, or Mistress Matisse's, or Mike & Michelle's, or Melinda's, or Meg's, or Mara's, or Magdala's, or Madeline's, or Madame X's blogs (to pick a few?) Of course not!

But I guarantee that concern, or possibly memories, of the accusation was weighing their minds and thus on their hands. Which is a shame. I remember at the time thinking about the dynamics of self-fulfilling prophesies -- if nobody talks about it then nobody talks about it, and if nobody talks about it then you can't talk about it and... and... and...

I think it's one of the best reasons there is for blogging anonymously about sex and relationships. In this environment it's a secure way to build critical mass.

[Disclaimer #2: This post isn't about how men have it as bad as or worse than women. This isn't a zero-sum game though people who attempt to make (or refute) those claims often behave as if it were. Instead this post was just an attempt to explain the differential responses in an auditorium full of technology conferees and to illustrate two points, one that occurred to me at the time and another that occurred to me just moments ago. First, that there are reasons in addition to cluelessness, inexperience, or embarrassment that inhibit men from admitting they cruise sex-related sites. Second, that that the ability to blog anonymously gives most of us, men and women, a chance to bypass the impact of the sluts n' perverts labels and still speak and be heard in public. --fl]