Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Making a rare slip while correctly condemning arguments in the strip-search-for-Motrin case at the Supreme Court, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, confuses “what patriarchy says it’s ok to do to boys” with “what it’s not ok to do to anybody.” First some excerpts (emphasis mine.)

The court was looking at the case of 13-year-old Savana Redding who was traumatically strip-searched … because some little brat who was actually caught with drugs on her claimed, falsely, that Redding had ibuprofen on her.

—-

One of the major problems with lack of female representation in Congress and the courts is that even when men are generally liberal and try to get it, the boys club mentality seems to set in and infect their ability to act like compassionate adults who grasp that women are full human beings instead of slightly comical pieces of meat.

...

“Nobody but Ginsburg seems to comprehend that the only locker rooms in which teenage girls strut around, bored but fabulous in their underwear, are to be found in porno movies. For the rest of us, the middle-school locker room was a place for hastily removing our bras without taking off our T-shirts.”

...

One wonders if a boy had been required to pull his penis out of his underwear and shake it in front of the teacher if that would have seemed different than the practice of using public urinals to Breyer. I think it’s quite likely. What’s traumatic about strip searches and sexual assault isn’t that someone touched or saw something previously untouched or unseen. It’s the horror of having someone use your nudity and your sexuality as a weapon to degrade and humiliate you.

She said it here.

Amanda gets so close to the point… before buying into the patriarchal frame that only middle-school girls are insecure, humiliated, indoctrinated, or adversely affected by body modesty. Particularly in middle school.

It’s commonly held that gender is created by construction. I’d like to make the bold assertion that in fact gender is created through demolition. You take whole, complete, and perfectly ordinary human beings, look at their pee-pees, and then start discouraging everything that doesn’t fit your expectation of “masculine” or “feminine.”

What Amanda misses, as do Justices Breyer and Ginsberg, as does almost everyone else, is that middle-school boys don’t exactly begin life as paragons of locker room bravado either. I remember extremely well the ashen faces of my fellow 7th-grade boys in our first day of gym in what was then called Jr. High when we were handed 12 × 18 inch terrycloth tea towels and informed that we’d be “stripping down” for showers. Nor, today, can you tell me that the claims of most of the 6th-grade boys in my son’s class that layering their street clothes over their gym shorts in the morning is just a way to “save time before gym.” Because, seriously, they all look like they back in diapers!

The difference is that body shame and modesty in girls and body indifference or arrogance in boys does not happen naturally. In each case the differences are carved away from normal/neutral. Beginning generally some time just before or during middle school. Which is, of course, the period of time under discussion in the

And so to answer Amanda’s rhetorical question about whether it would be different if middle-school boys were made to shake out their underwear the answer is yes and no: No, because such treatment is humiliating for any child since that’s the age we really begin to develop consciousness of bodily self and therefore we’re vulnerable when attention is drawn to our bodies. Yes, because that’s also the point where class imposition begins, with girls as the no-sex class are indoctrinated to experience not just natural vulnerability of body space but damage by forced nakedness, and… boys as the sex class are indoctrinated not just to ignore an equally natural vulnerability in their nakedness but indifference to… or even outright pride or aggression in… their nakedness!

Sigh.

Another commonly-held assumption outside of feminism is that “equality” is the goal of feminism, because gender “equality” can only mean “everybody gets treated like men are treated now.” And considering the unmitigated crap we put girls and women through that degree of equality would certainly seem like an improvement. But whereas carving off the same half of humanity from both men and women constitutes equality in one sense, we’d still be talking about equality of damage, of amputation, of systematic disempowerment. Not equality of potential, nor equality of possibility.

Just to be clear this post is not about “whut about Teh Menz.” It’s not about “but men get hurt too.” Typically when one encounters “whut about Teh Menz” it’s an attempt, usually by men, to derail scrutiny of sexist imposition on women by raising usually disproportionately milder red herrings. Instead this is a plea to critically examine the way we indoctrinate not boys or girls but children, how we groom them, humiliate them, and exploit their uniform vulnerabilities so that they can grow up to play the NiceGuy/Rapist/Virgin/Whore roles that are critical to the soap opera of patriarchy.