Julie of of This Time It’s Just Julie has a lovely insight about the foofaraw around the Twilight series. (Emphasis mine.)

[A] good friend of mine sent me this link about the teams. You know, Team Edward or Team Jacob. Most Twihards have picked a boy they’d prefer Bella to get with. So this article is about why Jacob is doomed to lose (“lose” because as we all know, love is a contest. It sort of is, I guess, though if it’s that much of a contest I can’t say it’s love…something else perhaps.)

He said it here.

If love is the kind of contest laid out in the Twilight series then it’s a contest lodged firmly in the socially constructed male worthiness trap where if women are allowed to chose a partner at all, their decision is supposed to be not just a judgment but a validation of of the “winner’s” overall quality or worth.

Because, really, if women don’t pick “winners” then, well, duh, they pick “losers” and wow do people come down hard on women who pick losers!

It’s paternalism in almost all the classic senses of the word, of course. Traditionally speaking women are expected to choose among suitors but never to initiate a relationship with someone she’s chosen in advance of their initiative. It’s paternalism in the sense that women are viewed primarily as rewards for men’s accomplishment (the “prize” the “winner” takes home with him.) It’s paternalism in that we expect women to share and even defer to qualities we recognize and approve of rather than, say, her personal sense of identification or compatibility. And it’s paternalism in the sense that anyone could opine that “she could do better” or “I don’t see what she sees in him,” as if our opinion ought to override hers. Oh yeah, and paternalism in the sense that she’s expected to rise above, say, personal horniness or loneliness or curiosity and choose rationally. And finally, paternalism in the sense she’s supposed to rise above her immediate circumstances and chose neither Edward nor Jason in favor of holding out (alone with her cats or vibrators or whatever) for even more suitable long-term husband material.

And yes, that would be true even in fictional situations like Twilight or True Blood where the choice seems to be between dead or animal partners.

And finally, by the way, it’s fine to suspect that a particular relationship isn’t going to turn out well for one or both of the parties involved — sometimes we don’t understand what people see in each other and sometimes we see it all to well. But that’s an assessment of a particular relationship, not color commentary on a competition between men.

Great keyboard-thumping example of the two-sphere model of gender run amok. Plus the Two Rules of Desire run wild. Plus the “no-sex” class paradigm in full bloom. Echidne of the Snakes says

One misogynist comment in that place where they now gather (the Atlantic Monthly) stated that women are useless creatures because the only reason they feel the faintest sexual desire is testosterone. And testosterone belongs to men!

She said it here.

M’yeah, and since nipples belong to women any man with nipples is gay. But I digress.

What was I going to say? Oh yeah — Great sweet mother of pearl!

Would a been nice to get a link but…

Clearly I’m a bit speechless. Not at the misogyny of course, but of the blunt misunderstanding of anatomy, physiology, and endocrinology. Not that I’m a huge expert but that’s the whole point — I learned most of what I know about it in a berloody 10th-grade “applied chemistry” class!

Anyway, from the Wikipedia entry on testosterone (emphasis mine)

Testosterone is a steroid hormone from the androgen group and is found in mammals, reptiles, birds, and other vertebrates. In mammals, testosterone is primarily secreted in the testes of males and the ovaries of females, although small amounts are also secreted by the adrenal glands. It is the principal male sex hormone and an anabolic steroid.

In men, testosterone plays a key role in the development of male reproductive tissues such as the testis and prostate as well as promoting secondary sexual characteristics such as increased muscle and bone mass and hair growth. In addition, testosterone is essential for health and well-being as well as the prevention of osteoporosis.

On average, an adult human male body produces about ten times more testosterone than an adult human female body, but females are, from a behavioral perspective (rather than from an anatomical or biological perspective), more sensitive to the hormone. However, the overall ranges for male and female are very wide, such that the ranges actually overlap at the low end and high end respectively.

Source: Wikipedia

Yup. About that last part? Based on testosterone production-decline curves the sort of cranky 50-year-olds who, well, crank out testosterone uuber allies malarky are quite likely to have lower testosterone levels than many healthy women in their 20s.

Unlike healthy 20-year-old women at least healthy low-testosterone middle-age men can thank testosterone for the nice big manly erections they can still get, right? Oh wait!

...an appropriate amount of estrogen is required in the male in order to ensure well-being, bone density, libido, erectile function, etc.

So presumably men are also useless creatures because the only reason we can ge erections is because of estrogen. And estrogen belongs to women. Right?

I mean right?

Stupid gender essentialists!

Sarah Jaffe, of Season of the Bitch but currently guest-posting at Feministe talks about life on the receiving end of what I call the dominant male “no-sex” class paradigm and the way it pressures women not just to feel guilty not just about having desire but for even wanting to desire in the first place.

I want no guilt in desire. Sometimes the things we want, for various reasons, are not things we should actually have/do (see above promises and commitments, etc), but there’s nothing wrong in the wanting.

The last time I took on this subject at my blog, I wrote:

Sexual desire isn’t the only thing that women have been limited on. We’re expected to be restrained about food, about power, about love, about friendships, about everything. Even I worry constantly that I’ve crossed a line, that I’m bothering someone if I call too much or email too much, and I think that stems from the same place: feeling that I’ve made the fact that I want something too clear, too obvious.

One of the things that bothers me especially is the “He’s just not that into you” framing for women, particularly heterosexual women: we are supposed to worry about whether we are desirable, not what we want. The “No means no” model works the same way: we are consenting to something, not desiring it. The “she wanted it” rape excuse: our wants are not our own to define.

She said it here.

As it happens, 100 years ago most western, “civilized” men would have still felt the same guilt and anxiety about desiring sex since it was supposed back then that ejaculation (even “as many as 10 a year!”) destroyed men’s health and shortened their lives. Even more weirdly by today’s standards there was actually a little more tolerance for women’s desire… as long as that desire was couched in the acceptable framing of desiring children.

But even in those ostensibly halcyon days the paradigm’s bogus Rules of Desire #1 made it inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to express sexual desire. And even today it’s astonishingly difficult to discuss women’s sexuality without overtones (at least) or overt expressions of anxiety, guilt, and shame.

And as Jaffe points out earlier in her post the paradigm’s grip persists even in feminist debates about oral sex or fetishes or other sexual activities which, regardless of how individual women might feel about them, shouldn’t be enjoyed, let alone desired, but should instead be abstained from for everyone else’s benefit. The presumptions there being first that women have discretion over the behaviors they enjoy and that, furthermore, they can be obliged to alienate themselves from their enjoyment in service of someone else’s wishes. Problem being that those are effectively identical to the sacrifices demanded by anti-feminist institutions from the church to Cosmopolitan. (The irony is probably not lost on ultra-separatist blogger Jill, a.k.a. Twisty Faster, who argues passionately that the dominant paradigm is inescapable even as she insists all women should participate in a sex strike until her demands are met.)

My point here isn’t how women “really” experience their sexuality (which I couldn’t speak to authoritatively anyway.) Instead it’s how society — men in it and sometimes women — have constructed things such that we may easily converse only about a portion of that experience. The bad half.

Ok, first of all I’m a little wary about this post because it feels like the potential for misunderstanding is really, really high. So in anticipation I’ll say up front that I’m going to try and explain one reason I think men gravitate to, support, and even contribute to the idea of heterosexual sex scarcity in the face of considerable counter-evidence. A post titled “Outlet Malls: Location as Marketing Strategy” by Gwen Sharp of Sociological Images suggests that consumers who go to greater effort to purchase items appear to feel better about the “value” of those purchases even when the prices they pay are comparable or even identical to local prices. Because I’m feeling eek-y about it I just want to make clear I’m interested in how that might relate to men’s persistent conviction that a) women are “hard to “get,” but also that b) women who are “easy” instead of “hard to get” are somehow damaged, dysfunctional, undesirable, or otherwise wrong.

Those are part of the story. But there’s some interesting psychology going on, too, as Ellen Ruppel Shell explains in Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. It turns out that being difficult to get to is, in fact, part of the appeal of outlet malls. The fact that they often require a drive of an hour or more signals to consumers that they must have really good deals. That’s the payoff for inconvenience — it’s harder and more time-consuming than going to your local mall, but in return you’re getting a great bargain. Right?

Well… not really.

...

It turns out that the more trouble people go through to get to an outlet, the more they overestimate the amount of savings compared to prices at regular stores. The very fact that it was hard to get to convinces people that it must provide something fantastic; if you aren’t saving a lot of money by going there, why on earth would it be so far out of the way? And the more remote it is, the cheaper the products must be!

She said it here.

By itself Sharp’s post provides interesting insights into the way we value the things we obtain, with those things that take more effort to obtain being (or at least so we appear to believe) more valuable to us than those which are easy to obtain. The grass on the other side, in other words, appears to be valuable not for its own intrinsic “green-ness” but because of the effort required to get to the other side.

That’s fine, of course, for valuing and acquiring things.

People not being things, however, it’s a problematic way to value relationships.

Recognizing the impulse, though, does shed light on a couple of… interesting attitudes, assumptions, and behaviors of heterosexual men towards women inside the dominant paradigm.

• Why men so often dismiss women if they’re perceived as “easy.”
• Why it’s usually considered more of an insult to call someone a “slut” than a “bitch.” Or why even “whore” (i.e. someone who at least demands payment) is less of an insult that “slut” (i.e. someone who doesn’t even bother to charge.)
• Why men often profess willingness to cross burning deserts or swim shark-infested waters (though almost never to clean bathrooms) for love.

• Why men are consistently drawn to “attractive” women even though what constitutes “attractive” varies wildly from culture to culture and even decade to decade within the same cultures. (Hint: the standards that constitute “attractive” from culture to culture almost invariably also constitute features that are locally rare and difficult to achieve — weight in subsistence cultures, for instance, or slimness in cultures of nutritional abundance and automation, naiveté for the urbane and world-weary, worldliness when innocence is abundant, blonde-ness… or even better “natural” blonde-ness when fair hair is uncommon, or “exotic” “asian-ness” when hair coloring is common, someone who’ll give blowjobs when “sex” means almost exclusively intercourse, or someone who’ll have intercourse when blowjobs become mundane. You get the picture.)

Point being that since people really are pretty much uniformly alike, in the sense that what’s deemed most “valuable” in courtship is rarely what’s most appreciated in actual partnership, it’s a really bad idea to try and evaluate our relationships in terms of how much effort is required to form one.

- – -

Hmm…

As my disclaimer up top says I initially thought, and I still (I think?) think Sharp’s point about effort and assessment of value provide insight into men’s objectification of women in relationships I’m suddenly wondering whether the “Cosmo” effect, where women are encouraged and/or possibly self-motivated to go to extraordinary lengths to be “attractive” might not have a similar component. (It’s not that being attractive isn’t nice, but consider the 19th Century phenomenon of women having ribs removed so they could cinch their corsets even tighter, or, oh, say, Vajazzling one’s already waxed pubis with glue-on cut crystals.) Standard criticism of the Cosmo effect says it’s driven entirely by insecurity. And the general editorial stance certainly seems to encourage it. But while I’d no more endorse striving to maximize relationship-forming effort in women than I did in men earlier in this post, I think looking performance of appearance in terms of effort to achieve something rather than insecurity to avoid it is probably both more generous and more often accurate.

- – -

Oh well. I’m still not crazy about this post both in the sense that I’m afraid it’s really subject to misinterpretation and in the sense that I still don’t have a well-formed way to articulate how I think the very-real phenomenon of valuing relationships by the effort required to get into them dangerously alienates us from the actual people we form relationships with. But if I’m right that there’s something there, but don’t mention it, nobody will help move the conversation forward. And if I’m wrong but don’t mention it then nobody will say I’m being a knucklehead again and that I should drop it.

Update:

I wrote the above paragraph (and most of this post) on a plane bound for the east coast (I’ll be in D.C. and New York City all next week.) And since I wouldn’t have lot of battery left on this old laptop I also picked up Steve Johnson’s “The Invention of Air,” a biography of the 18th-Century scientist and philosopher Joseph Priestly that doubles as a very nice history of the late-18th-Century scientific revolution.

Anyway, while talking about the perceived importance back then of what we’d now call “open source” sharing of ideas Johnson quotes a letter by Ben Franklin about his own trepidations about sharing ideas before they’re properly incubated.

These Thoughts my dear Friend, are many of them crude and hasty, and if I were merely ambitious of acquiring some Reputation in Philosophy, I ought to keep them by me, ‘till corrected and improved by Time and farther Experience. But since even short Hints, and imperfect Experiments in any new Branch of Science, being communicated, have oftentimes a good Effect, in exciting the attention of the Ingenious to the Subject, and so becoming the Occasion of more exact disquisitions (as I before observed) and more compleat Discoveries, you are at liberty to communicate this Paper to whom you please; it being of more Importance that Knowledge should increase, than that your Friend should be thought and accurate Philosopher.

Pg. 71

Aside from sharing his tendency towards run-on sentences I’m no Ben Franklin, but that sentiment that somebody could make something useful out of it, even if I end up sounding like a bumpkin, is enough reason to press “submit.”

Men, like gravity in the 1600’s or air in the 1700’s, are woefully understudied. Like gravity they’re just assumed to be there, sometimes helpfully, sometimes to no purpose, and sometimes (as with gravity when you sit under an apple tree) under-studied effects can thump you on the head. At this point even tossing out new ideas that go beyond “they’re just there” might help.