The No-Sex Class incarnate on Craig's List
Jill of Feministe takes apart a particularly well-articulate (though clearly un-self-recognized) defense of the "no-sex" class as the dominant paradigm.
Women are not actually attracted to men. There is a vague idea of what a man is physically, and some are better than others aesthetically speaking, but the purely physical appearance of a man is almost inconsequential unless he is horribly ugly or outrageously attractive.
Women are attracted to status, money...
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A woman basically is a greedy materialistic prostitute. Although that sounds vulgar, it’s true. She trades her physical self to buy into the success a man has created for himself.
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It seems to me that women almost cannot think for themselves.
He also presses men, suffocatingly face-down, in the corresponding sex class. (The last snippet demonstrates the force with which we press ourselves down.)
As a man, I fall in love with how a woman is physically. I fall in love with simple parts of a woman. Like the way her hair falls around her face, the line of her neck, her shoulders. They way her ears might peek from her hair. Her eyelashes. The size and shape of her hands, her fingernails. The way she walks, the way she looks when she is tired or annoyed, the sound she makes when she sneezes, coughs, or cries. The way she sits in a chair. The way she breathes while experiencing different emotions. The way her lips move. A million little things.
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Sure, a huge part of my attraction is mental, but the powerful seed of love that builds within me and crystallizes is based greatly on visual things that set off torrents of emotion and need.
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Someone needs to invent a drug which has no hormonal imbalance side-effects but is able to erase a man’s sex drive and attraction to women. It would increase productivity rates to incredible heights. I’d be free and happy. I’d feel complete. I’d be able to concentrate on my biochemistry studying.
In other words, as befits a member of a class with no identity outside it, his sense of his sex-class identification is so deep he imagines only drugs or perhaps surgery can cure it.
And finally, with utter unconscious self-parody, he calls the kettle black
I’m completely unable to reconcile the differences between men and women. It seems like success with women is equal to spending half of your life working to create a giant illusion, something vastly tiring and annoying, while sacrificing your own true self and your own interests. We construct our lives around nest-building. We’re like male birds building nests and showing them off to attract mates. It’s pathetic. Everything we do is to get women. It is a fucking shit deal.
*Women* go around creating giant illusions that they're beautiful unlike us *men* who go simply strive to prove that we're worthy enough to earn those silly creatures.
The horrible thing about social anguish is that while the anguish is absolutely real the *cause* can be 100% lie, a society-wide game of crack the whip that requires not stronger arms so all can spin fast enough (the MRA/"The Rules" strategy) or to let go so everyone else goes flying (the slack-dude/separatist strategy) to win but instead to simply *stop where you are* and learn to play a game that's more fun for everybody.
Incidentally I think the young biochemistry student's screed illustrates nicely how the sex/no-sex class paradigm is a dominant *male* paradigm. Yes, sure, non-feminist women also go off on screeds of their own but "men are shits who only want one thing," while fairly clear, is more a reaction than an advancement of a countervailing agenda.
The "no-sex" paradigm: it's not just a bad idea, it's not even the law.
I swear to god I'm gonna have a heart attack one day, my heart will actually break from reading everywhere, everyday about what I *am* as a woman.
"A woman basically is a greedy materialistic prostitute"
I mean the temptation is to just cast this guy off as one lone gun extremist. But I've read this same sentiment several times in the last couple of weeks, in a mainstream Sydney (Australia)newspaper's "blog".
I just don't comprehend how people can think like this. I am exhausted by the fact that everytime I read another vitriolic piece of misogynistic bollocks I have to articulate the billions of ways in which it is wrong, illogical, filled with hatred, violent and upsetting.
It is everywhere - what a woman *is*, what a woman *should be*. Every time I pick up a magazine or switch on the tele there's another ad pointing out another deficiency, another joke about women, another gender stereotype for kids to take in. Every day, everywhere I go, I am getting bombarded with the message that I am not *woman enough* because I am not a model for a men's magazine. And then those that fulfill that sort of role, the Paris Hilton's of the world, get attacked for being sluts/morons etc, when they are doing exactly what is required of them and being a decoration.
I am supposed to be working - yes contributors of Craigslist, I work, I support myself and my child, I haven't remarried, I do not have a sugar daddy, I do not want one, I do not give a flying fig about power, about money and about assets. I like men who make me laugh, who show an ability to think for themselves, who have a sense of ethics and compassion. I am attracted to many men, for their smiles, the sound of their laughter, the shape of thier arms, the colour of their hair, the width or narrowness of their torso, their hair or lack of. I do *not* understand the need to make out like I am a member of another species, an apparently uniform species with automated, concrete, identical and unchanging desires and attractions.
I am SO SO sick of having everyone else define me and tell me what I should be all because I have a vagina and not a penis. I mean when all is said and done, go fuck yourself misogynists. You clearly prefer your own company to a woman's.
[I think the biggest issue is that they see people as object of *reward.* I reward you with a house, you reward me with blowjobs, and no matter what, to get what we want we have to give something we (imagine, or at least pretend we) *don't* want. Yes, I think there are women who participate in that dynamic but I still think it originates with men. Or at least, since *I'm* a man, that's the side of the equation I can influence. Thanks, HE. --fl]
Okay, fl, I'm fascinated by the way people's "mental maps" become the "territory", and it seems to me that this man is reacting to ONE very real piece of information and extrapolating ad absurdum: ceteris paribus, women in the aggregate really DO react to male displays of dominance/achievement with attraction signals. (www.feministcritics.org has links to the academic studies on traditional masculinity and attraction.) (Caveat: here and in all that follows, I'm speaking of hetero attraction.) And like most young men, he's attempting to understand a situation in which he's attracted to many, many women and very, very few of them (absent shocking good looks on his part) are attracted to him. Tack onto that a system where HE has to initiate virtually all romantic overtures, and you have a system where the perception of the average man is that he has to work hard to earn rejection, which leads to memes like "women just have to show up and breathe" and "women can get laid any time they want." It's not entitlement issues so much as a perception of having to work at rejection. And there really is no cure, except learning to go out and try, and try, and try again, possibly through the SC, while avoiding the negativity that constant rejection builds.
It seems to me that he's depressed and discouraged, and that this colors his perception of women and his work: he feels he's on a treadmill because he's still in the formative stage of his work, where everything is both high-intensity (because you're training for a lifetime in a few years) and rote. One of the key factors in depression is the feeling that A)this is the way things simply ARE and B)they can't change. Since this was posted to CL in Pittsburgh, I'd be REALLY concerned that CMU biochem/chemical engineering departments have a guy in SERIOUS need of intervention before he becomes another Marc Lepine. FEW of the posts on the issue EVER address this guy's potential as a schoolhouse/workplace shooter, because slut-shaming repressed men is so much funnier, ha, ha, and I'm only pointing it out because I think certain elements of his diagnosis are correct--it's just that he's in such a painful place he can't do anything about correcting it in a mentally healthy fashion. So if any of his female colleagues are reading this, I encourage them to save their own lives by giving him some hot biochem lovin'. If they can identify him, that is. Nothing he's done is an actionable threat, so sexing him might be the best option.
/sarc.
The flip side of "nobody owes you sex" is "you owe no one exclusivity unless agreed upon" and I'd be really interested in a sociological survey of whether/if/how people who never had sex as adolescents/young adults wound up polyamorous. NONE of this addresses the interesting subsidiary issues of attractiveness and who winds up with the stereotypically-attractive people, either, which is another interesting mind-flip in itself.
[Yeah, just thinking about sex and romance in terms of owing (whether it's sex or exclusivity or anything else) is kind of fraught with peril because you run into "magic penny" issues where the more strict the accounting (not *job* accounting which is ok, but relationship accounting which isn't) the more everything is begrudged. But if I was willing to single anyone out I'd point to women who are echoing back the same self-defeating bitterness this guy was, only pointing back the other way about how men are shits who don't cough up what *they* owe. So it's not an exclusive-to-men problem. But it *does* all happen inside a broken paradigm. The worst part (based on bartendering experience in popular college-town bars) is that even the guys who score frequently aren't any more satisfied because, again *inside that paradigm* any woman who'll sleep with you doesn't count. Any more than inside that paradigm any man you sleep with turns out to be a disappoinment in the end. Thanks, Eurosabra. --fl]