Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Oh man, I’m always complaining about this. Men think of all the situations where they would want to have sex, and it’s up to some hot girl to decide if she’s interested; they don’t think of all the cases where they ignore all the women whom they don’t want to approach. A dude once actually told me that when it comes to sex, “women choose, men are chosen.” It was insane.

[”...they don’t think of all the cases where they ignore all the women whom they don’t want to approach” Exactly! It’s a classic wind-at-your-back situation for men. Thanks, Emily. —fl]

You discount the social invisibility of the average man in dealing with the average woman (who is not as socially invisible.) Approaching/engaging someone depends on non-verbals and a readiness to be approached that is generally conditionally broadcast only to certain men even in a supposedly social situation. One of the things that feminism emphasizes is that ASKING someone for sex outside a consensual context of potentially-romantic social interaction you’ve already established is itself a form of entitlement, and one result of this is that naturally-attractive people only need to show up and breathe to create this context, and PUA mimics/triggers that reaction and the acceptable creation of the context that makes the romancing A-OK.

By the time you ask, you are either reading positive non-verbals that give some hope of a “Yes” or deliberately ignoring the non-verbal signals of No Way In Hell. (In my younger years I have done plenty of punitive male-initiated touch, lather-rinse-repeat of the touch to the back of the hand in passing, because it didn’t work the first time.)

Holly of The Pervocracy has a few excellent posts on rejection, including one that is indirectly about treating other people as means to an end, through the dynamic of “This THING is broken, it wont’ do what I want!”

I get that you’re dealing with a concern for female agency that “consent” doesn’t allow because “consent” is reductionist, but one very good post on sexist advertising once said “For young, insecure men, ‘female sexual agency’ is ‘NO’, repeated again and again.”

[“For young, insecure men, ‘female sexual agency’ is ‘NO’, repeated again and again” Right. But the question is is that the message from feminism or from advertising? Because those are two really different things. Commercial media aimed at young men, like similar media (like Cosmopolitan) aimed at young women, is consciously or unconsciously designed to create displacement anxiety in order to, um, sell that which the commercials in commercial media are trying to sell. So yeah, an ad is going to imply strongly to young men that you’re going to get no so either a) buy this product and then get a yes or b) so buy this product as solace for never getting a yes. What actual feminists object to is that this sort of exchange-value attitude towards sex makes them commodities. Instead of, perhaps, actual active participants. Finally, where do you get that average women are more visible than average men? In fact average women are precisely as invisible as average men (see former term “wallflower.”) You’re doing some really good work, Eurosabra, and I think we both seriously have a lot to learn from Holly. Thanks. —fl]