alienation

One of My Few Grammar-Police Complaints: "Male" and "Female" as Nouns (Usually Indicating Hostility)

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2011-08-10 22:53

I'm usually pretty sanguine about the sort of harmless verbal tics that drive people to file complaints with the grammar police. Autumn Whitefield-Madrano tackles one of the few that really sticks in my craw.

Inevitably, when I hear the word female repeatedly used as a noun in speech, it’s either from someone who isn’t used to talking about sex and gender issues (in which case I try to look past it, assuming the person is in good faith)—or, more frequently, from a card-carrying misogynist who, intentionally or not, manages to make every utterance of female sound like he’s spitting directly onto our collective ovaries.

Source: Feministe

"Man" and "Woman" are nouns. "Male" and "Female" are adjectives. Whitefield-Madrano makes a pretty good case for why it's not just a grammar issue, it's a respect/contempt issue.

She cites some pretty hard-to-blame-on-Gloria-Steinem sources to back it up.

“Why should a woman be degraded from her position as a rational being, and be expressed by a word which might belong to any animal tribe?” wrote critic Henry Alford in 1866. The Oxford English Dictionary is more succinct on the matter: “Now commonly avoided by good writers, exc. with contemptuous implication.”

What really grates is when someone says "men" and "females," as nouns, in the same sentence. Of course that gate swings both ways -- when you hear someone say "women" and "males" in the same sentence you can be pretty confident that the hate men every bit as much as those who say "females" hate women.

Whitefield-Madrano does make a mild attempt to "rehabilitate" the word "female," pointing out that etymologically speaking "female" is not a derivation of "male" the way "woman" is derived from "man." Furthermore, the earliest versions of "female," "femella" and "femelle" not only emerged separately (the corresponding word for "man" was "masculus") it originally designated human women and was extended to other species only much later.

Fun stuff. Anyway. Good guideline to follow: directly indicating men or women as "males" and "females" is a pretty good clue to your misogyny and/or misandry. Fine if you're not ashamed to advertise it. But if you do it you are advertising it.

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Married Men (and, I Suspect Nearly Everyone Else) Often Just Need to be Touched at Least as Much as They Need Sex

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2011-08-08 23:41

Ms Inconspicuous, who's blog is generally NSFW, has a lovely post about the transitions between touch and sex.

In a relationship where the sex is broken (for lack of a better term...I could say desires are mismatched but that doesn't convey quite the gravity of the situation), touch becomes a perverted and twisted thing as well. I've noticed this with the married men I've been with. They want to have sex, yes, but that seems wholly secondary.

The want to be touched.

They ache for touch. Want touch. Need touch.

My hands graze their back and chest and playfully rifle through their hair; they drink it in like a man days without water in a desert. And, sometimes, the feeling of being touched in contrast to the typical absence of touch makes them break down a bit. It is an emotional thing, to get what one so desires.

Source: The Anatomies of a Marriage

She writes in the context of the married men she's had affairs with. And when it comes to married women (she's in a sexless marriage of her own) she's only got herself as a frame of reference. And that's probably not enough of a sample. But I suspect it's often the same for women as it is for men: sometimes it's not the sex you're starving for, it's human touch.

I remember years ago staying at a single friend's apartment, already friends too long for either of us to have illusions of romance, danger, or lust for each other. I was going out and while she was brushing her teeth and getting ready for bed so I jokingly offered to tuck her in (she was wearing flannel pajamas so no funny ideas, ok.) She took me up on it and so I went into what I sort of imagined at the time was parental mode and pulled the covers up for her, tucked her in, and then offered to scratch her back the way my parents did when they put me to bed. She said yes and rolled her back to me. I began scratching between her shoulders and she started crying quietly. Staying in pure caregiver mode (hey, that crisis-center training in high school pays off sometimes) I just patted her back, stroked her hair, and said "there there, it's ok" and other mutter-y shushings. Then I got her a kleenex, she thanked me, said it had just been too long, and I let myself out.

Anyway, One of the most important lessons I learned, very, very early on in my career, was the difference between needing sex and needing plain, ordinary contact with other people.

You forget that and you end up spending a lot of time thinking you gotta get more of one thing and really you're still not getting enough of what you really need.  Maybe for men more than women, I dunno but I still don't think so.

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More on Rhetoric and the Creation of Social Expectations: Prostitutes Are Not The Jobs they Do

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2010-11-14 10:07

Sex-worker activist Amanda Brooks of After Hours says

Though I repeat (ad nauseam) that you pay for my time/energy, I have now figured out how to prove it! I don’t sell my body — it’s still with me when I leave. Though I have occasionally left possessions behind, I’ve yet to leave behind any bit or piece of me.

Source: After Hours

It is absolutely true that some customers think of prostitution as buying a person instead of contracting for her time. And it’s absolutely true that patriarchy’s virginity fetish creates the impression that by “taking” someone’s virginity you’ve actually taken possession of the individual herself. And it’s also absolutely true that anti-prostitution activiest of all stripes from evangelical to radfem insist with almost Catholic faith that sex transubstantiates activity into flesh.

In this construction the abstinence-only clowns with their metaphors of socks, gum, roses, and sticky tape are actually closer to the mark: they see sex merely as a depreciation of property, not an outright transfer of it.

I think it’s really important to get that. Because, even more so than patriarchal rhetoric so much of anti-prostitution rhetoric invites dehumanization. It encourages it. It creates an expectation of it.

If you’ve followed my blog for very long you know my call to action on sex-worker’s rights was a horrified realization that serial killers in my region, city, and possibly even my neighborhood were able to get away with murdering between one and two hundred sex workers (you read that right) not just because they’re easy marks (they are) and not just because society thinks they’re less than human (it does) but because they themselves buy the line that sex workers are less than human.

For this reason if no other reason I think it’s really, really, really important that even well-meaning opponents of sex work stop creating the social expectation that they’re literal, transubstantiated, diminished, dehumanized quantities of meat. They’re not. They’re people, not things.

And to return to Amanda Brook’s point, they’re people, not their jobs.

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Echos From Abroad: An Englishman's Observation About Gonzo Porn and Displaced, Self-Defeating Male Resentment

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2010-10-23 05:36

I just stumbled across a post about porn from a long-dormant blog called The London Exhibitionist. It’s old but wow does he have a great take on the state of American-originated porn! I’ve been digging into the intimate link between male insecurity and “empowerment“lately. This guy illustrates the point nicely. (Emphasis mine.)

Gonzo type porn, seems to regard the women as the enemy and the act of sex is punishment (for what?). When you see the idiot with the camcorder talking the woman into bed, their ham-fisted, mono-syllabic sledgehammer approach usually has the women rolling her eyes, even when it’s fake and the woman is a pornstar guaranteed lay.

The men in these pornos always externalise their arousal: (This bitch has turned me on). In doing so they put the woman on a pedestal and then resent them for being there (now she’s gonna get it). It seems to me that sexual attraction isn’t about how a woman looks, but is more about how we look at a woman. Women don’t turn us on, we turn ourselves on.

My take on all this crap is this: Inadequate men who know they cannot exist as equals to women then validate themselves through dominating them and belittling them.

Source: The London Exhibitionist

Ka-sheesh is there gold in there!

The biggest part being about the way men end up indoctrinated to believe that arousal comes from somewhere else. That’s an idea, by the way, that goes waaaay back. It’s roots break the surface back with the myth of Eve as temptress and they’ve been buckling pavement on and off ever since. For instance the nominally saintly Leo Tolstoy bitterly blamed his wife for his repeated failures to practice celibacy. (Her anguished, fearful diaries suggest a… different reason.) And while “women as temptress” has largely gone back underground in favor of the “men as remorseless horndogs,” London Exhibitionist reminds us the earlier notion is obviously still there.

The problem with imagining the source of our lust is someone else’s responsibility is that it leaves us thinking it’s a problem we’re helpless to deal with.

I also really appreciate his point about the two-fold injustice of first elevating women to etherial objects of worship… and then resenting them for that too. It’s kind of a pattern in the dominant paradigm. See also “women see us only as providers,” “men just need a place to have sex, women need a reason,” etc.

The ugly problem in each case is that we’re creating our own powerlessness. That we’re the ones giving it up doesn’t make us any less powerless. But, dudes, you can “get back” at women as much as you like, be as angry at women as you wish, write whole epic Tolstoy novels about how evil women are if you’ve got the patience for it, but at the end of the day if we don’t get that we’re responsible for sense of powerlessness no amount of fuming women females in general or feminists in particular is going to get it back.

When you’re drowning in knee-deep water panicky thrashing and yelling won’t save you nearly as well as standing up.

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On Alienation, Creepiness of Men/Females, Women/Males Language Choices

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2010-07-02 07:27

While we’re on the subject of sex-related vocabulary, Holly of The Pervocracy reminds me of a tic that annoys me to no end.

I hate it when people call women “females.” I have one friend who does it because she was in the military and it was standard practice there, and occasionally I’ll say it when I specifically mean biological females rather than women, but 98% of the time it’s douchebaggery. Rule of thumb: if you say “females and males” it’s okay, but if you say “females and guys/men,” you’re probably a douchebag.

She said it here.

It really isn’t exclusive to misogynists: for instance the otherwise perfectly accessible bell hooks has the same completely annoying tic going the other way, and as Holly says they do the same thing to both genders in the military and, to a lesser extent, in police organizations.*

In the military or police it makes a little sense to put that layer of abstraction — it’s way easier to see or say (or, yikes, do!) when you can say something like “minor female down” rather than “a little girl is badly injured.” But whereas that sort of psychological separation might make it easier for soldiers, police, firefighters, or EMTs remain dispassionate in emotionally-charged situations, that kind of distancing is problematic in the extreme when you humanize one sex but “animalize” or objectify another.

At the very least it sounds alienated. At worst it sounds ominously creepy.

* While walking through a shopping mall I once overheard a mall cop pretentiously instructing a janitor that there had been some sort of disturbance “in the females’ restroom.”

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Polanski Defenders, Hollywood, and the Use of Unwanted Sex as Currency

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2009-10-15 16:37

Jill (formerly Twisty) of I Blame The Patriarchy takes on the peculiar cast of characters defending convicted rapist Roman Polanski has an aura of childlike naivete. She says the answer is that basically all the nominal progressives who called for him to be left alone are all just really bad people and we’ve just been too dumb to notice. Taking aim at Whoopie Goldberg

Wait! No! Not Whoopi, the affable Center Square who’s black enough to be hep, but not so black that she scares the honkys?

...

Possibly Whoopi views Polanski’s violent crime in this seriously fucked-up way because in Hollywood — patriarchy’s primary misogyny propaganda unit — rape is nothing but a plot device

She said it here.

I think that’s going both a little too hard but also way too easy on them.

Instead I think it’s because in Hollywood people use, um, “leveraged” sex as even more of a medium of currency than most other places do. It’s not just about the “casting couch” thing but an outright demonstration of a combination of power, fealty, and “committment” to a person or project. Where it’s sort of a given that giving a producer a blowjob when it’s known you like giving them or even just don’t mind isn’t nearly as valuable as giving one when it’s the last thing on earth you want to do.

And so by that way of thinking, which I’m guessing Goldberg just sees as the cost of doing business, what Polanski did to a 13-year-old was just “over the line” and not “rape-rape.”

And I’m just thinking that unusual suspects are standing up for him not so much because they like the system or look forward to being on the receiving end themselves but because to acknowledge it in Polanski’s case would mean having to confront what they themselves have submitted to, or at least steeled themselves for in case they had to, as their own “cost of doing business” in Hollywood.

And by the way, that’s not to excuse the “rape as a plot device” business they grunt out on a daily basis. Quite the opposite. You see a lot of the same sordid plot devices in regular print and comic publishing, but you don’t see that “if you want it you’ve got to show me how badly you want it” sort of thing that goes on in Hollywood.

Bottom line: it’s not so much “rape-rape” culture as a culture of sexual harassment on an industrial scale. For an insider to stand up to it requires acknowledging that he or she has participated in, and possibly “benefited” career-wise from it, as aggressor or victim or both.

%@!#%W

For the record I think sex is just great. And while I’m not a fan I’m not opposed to fee-for-service sex. I seriously have it in for sex as leverage or obligation of any kind, though.

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WTF With "Hate Fucking" Anyway?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2009-06-02 17:27

Sounds like it happens every time Playboy’s Guy Cimbalo jacks off alone.

I mean, seriously, hate fucking?

I’m not naive, I just don’t get the appeal.

Unless it’s more of that alienated thing where people… mostly but not exclusively men… use sex for something besides enjoying sex. Like keeping a score. Or “getting lucky.” Or otherwise measuring one’s self not by the actual, you know, sexual enjoyment one brings one’s self or one’s partner but… establishing one’s worth.

Consider the hypothetical conversation

Cimbalo: Hey, I finally I hate-fucked somebody on my list from my column!
Figleaf: Did you enjoy yourself? Did she enjoy herself?
Cimbalo: No, are you kidding?
Figleaf: So you had sex with someone but you didn’t want to?
Cimbalo: Well, yeah, that’s what hate-fucking is all about innit? Heck I had to flagellate my genitals just for wanting to!
Figleaf: Couldn’t you have just found someone on Alt.com or AFF who’d flagellate them for you?
Cimbalo: You don’t get it, I didn’t want her to flagellate my genitals!
Figleaf: So… why not just make an appointment with a “pro-dom?” They’ll flagellate you whereever you want them to.
Cimbalo: You still don’t get it, I didn’t want to have sex with her in the first place!
Figleaf: Oh, I think I get it. If you don’t want to have sex with someone why don’t you hire a financial dominatrix? They charge you money not to have sex with them.
Cimbalo: I didn’t want to not have sex with just anybody, I wanted to not have sex with one woman.
Figleaf: So you’re saying you’re too cheap to…
Cimbalo: (Interrupting) Actually I don’t want to have sex with anybody on my list. That’s the whole idea behind hate-fucking!
Figleaf: I think you’re getting a little ahead of yourself here. If you hate fucking why make a list at all?
Cimbalo: No, I like fucking it’s just that…
Figleaf: Oh, yeah, well, you’re a little young for erectile dysfunction but there’s nothing to be ashamed of…
Cimbalo: (Interrupting again) No! I can get it up!
Figleaf: I see, but you’re ashamed of your tiny penis?
Cimbalo: Dude, Playboy paid me to make this list and…
Figleaf: And you took the money so you could get something to enlarge your tiny penis?
Cimbalo: Shut up! My penis is plenty big enough to get the job done…
Figleaf: Wait! Playboy wanted you to write the column with your penis? What kind of job is…
Cimbalo: (Interrupting again) ...
Figleaf: Going back to this “flagellating your genitals” thing, would you rather pay a man or a woman to flagellate you before not having sex?
Cimbalo: A woman of course! You think I’m some kind of pervert?

I think the idea behind this hate-fucking thing is that men can humiliate or punish women they don’t like by having sex with them. Except the impression one gets over and over from Cimbalo’s remarks about his choices on the list (e.g. “You need to flagellate your genitals for wanting to fuck this woman” or “chemical castration has begun to look appealing”) one gets the impression it’s Cimbalo who would feel humiliated. Which again begs the question of why one would ever want to do such a thing. And meanwhile there’s no reason to believe women feel particularly punished or humiliated just from having sex with someone they’ve decided to have sex with. (And having sex with someone who didn’t decide to isn’t “hate fucking” it’s sexual assault, so no escape hatch there.)

Which leaves one back where I started: WTF with “hate fucking” anyway?

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Safety Lessons From Sex Workers

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2009-05-26 10:43

Via of Amber Rhea’s quote of the day, Born Whore says

I know you want me to be safe because you care about me. But when you say “be safe”, who do you think we sex workers need to protect ourselves from? Were you thinking about all the times we’re tokenized, treated like pariahs, refused visas, criminalized, researched like a bug, had others speak for us, caricatured in the media, asked totally offensive invasive questions, had our sanity and humanity questioned, our skills erased and ridiculed, risked arrest, deportation, eviction and (in my family) the threat of losing child custody? Were you thinking about the burden of secrecy from my family, or how many times I’ve tried to refute the same stereotypes over and over, and what it’s like to be told by a friend that I’m damaged? Is that what you meant?

Read the quote in context here.

It seems like the irreconcilable contradiction involves our assignment of blame to those human beings we ourselves insist are nevertheless only objects. To acknowledge sex workers as human beings obliges us to engage them as human beings.

One way or the other, though, the more you think about it the more clear it becomes that the biggest dangers sex workers face are consequences of our efforts to “protect” them rather than consequences of the work itself.

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The No-Sex Class: Male Self-Esteem... or Lack Thereof

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2009-03-28 12:06

Following up on my mildly controversial “she deserves better” post I’ve been thinking about how deeply, deeply “no-sex” class the mostly-male, entirely anti-feminist fear is that if women have parity in economic, political, and social power then men will become redundant, useless, unlovable, and unloved.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon runs into an instance of the sentiment and renders her own judgment. She’s entirely too generous.

Like check out this guy who commented at Hugo’s place:

How can (men) feel valued as a human being if there’s basically nothing only they can do that women cannot while there’s a lot of things men cannot do that women can’t[sic]? You either get detachment or service in this situation, but service, of couse, is requiring social checks on women – some kind of affirmative action for men, which one may call patriarchy. Which leaves a bit of a problem: reject patriarchy and you’ll get male detachment.

I’m not going to pretend to understand why conservative men are so damn jealous of women’s reproductive and sexual functions, though I can see why they’re scared that women will reject them if we don’t need them.  (Because I myself reject these men out of hand for sucking, and I’m sure they have every reason to believe the women in their lives would, too.) But there it is, in all its naked glory—-the belief that half the human race needs to be subjected to violence, coercion, and abuse to keep us as a permanent underclass so the other half can feel good about itself.  (Of course, as Hugo points out, it doesn’t even work that way and a lot of men don’t feel good about themselves in this circumstance.)

Read the quote and commentary in context here.

As I said I think it’s mighty generous of Amanda to say it’s about jealousy and/or misogyny and/or power-hogging. I think it’s about astonishing self-pity, insecurity, and utter failure to recognize that, being human and all, and, having sexual and social orientations in pretty much direct proportion with men, women are going to want men around pretty much no matter what. And for approximately the same reasons men want women around.

Also, as Amanda hints, men who realize the no-sex class Two Rules of Desire was some weird shit we made up to make ourselves feel worse… and therefore realize we don’t have to be a) belligerently resentful b) pity-party mopers… women would be even more happy to have us around. I mean, seriously! Would you want to have sex with some dude with such absent self-esteem he calls it “getting lucky?”**

I mean, seriously, the only reason we even use the word “consent” in the context of is because men can’t get it through our heads that as autonomous human beings women might instead, you know, decide to have sex because they want to have sex.*** Instead of because they feel sorry for us.

I mean, seriously!

[** Believe it or not, yes. Because it happens all the time. That doesn’t mean it might not a) happen more often, or b) be more fun for all concerned, because c) it would be because sex feels really, really nice and not because men think they need women to (reluctantly?) “consent” sex with them in order to feel validated. —fl]

[*** I always feel a bit creepy talking about how much women do or don’t, would or wouldn’t want sex if this, that, or the other condition became true. Especially if the condition had something to do with men. Not least because the whole notion of sex and conditionality is a pillar of the no-sex class paradigm, but also because it sounds so presumptuously arrogant. In fact, as I hint in the preceding footnote, there’s very good reason to believe the chief outcome of dismantling the dominant male paradigm might be a net decrease in the amount of sex we seek! Because we’d only want sex when we’re horny instead of when we’re horny or feeling insecure. But if I say that to someone while he’s still inside the paradigm he’s likely get all wiggy about this men-and-feminerism business. So apologies to all concerned but that’s how I’m choosing to talk about it. For now. —fl]

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Blue Penis Blues

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2009-03-06 21:38

Political blogger Phoebe Connelly of TAPPED has a nice rumination on reactions to the Dr. Manhattan character’s blue penis in the movie The Watchmen, and on the penis itself. (All emphasis hers.)

Mainstream American culture is still fundamentally uncomfortable with male nudity. Amanda points out this is why the recent Vanity Fair spread with Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd failed:

If you challenged the strict gender stratification where women are for shutting up and being hot and men are for staying clothed and looking, and say, put lean, naked men in a picture to be gazed at by a famous lesbian, you’d have made the point, but it wouldn’t be funny, because there’s no gotcha there. And then a lot of people would be uncomfortable, because you revealed the lie of gender essentialism. But this isn’t funny, either.

In fact, when I thought about it more, it brought to mind another recent clunker, He’s Just Not That In To You. When one of the male characters starts wearing fitted, unbuttoned shirts and tight jeans, it’s in an attempt to appeal to prospective gay clients to his business. He’s made fun of by his straight, male bartender friend.

We’re comfortable with objectified male bodies when they are a joke, but not when it’s merely a part of a character — the way female nudity, particularly in action films, so often is.

So yes to the blue penis. Let’s hope it makes people pause to consider why it’s discomfiting to have male nudity displayed, not for laughs, and not part of some art house epic, but just as a side-bit character trait that no one seems to remark on.

She said it here.

As you know, basic discomfort with non-mocking, non-laugh-factor male nudity is a product of rule #2 of the no-sex class paradigm: it’s simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. And mockery of straight men who try to boost their visual sexual attractiveness (as opposed to their sex-as-reward worthiness) are mocked as a result of rule #1: it’s simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire.**

What’s particularly cool about Connelly’s point here is that the penis in question really is just a penis in the movie, there as a sort of necessary consequence of the character having been transformed into a semi-incomprehensible, almost literally etherial being. And therefore not really clothable.

Whether it arouses desire in women any more than the perma-nipples in the female hero’s rubber costume arouses it in men (this doesn’t appear to have been the direct intent***) is sort of beside the point. The expressions of discomfort are all about rule #2.

(Via Matthew Yglesias.)

[** I still can’t get over how thoroughly those two rules write actual straight women’s sexuality out of existence and into denial. I say the no-sex paradigm is so primarily a male-driven phenomenon precisely because it seems incomprehensible to women. Who, being, you know, straight tend not to find their own desire, nor the desirability of men, at all intolerable or, um, inconceivable. —fl]

[*** We are left with no explanation for why the Silk Spectre II character’s permanently prominent rubber nipples arouse neither mockery nor discomfort. Nor, for that matter raised eyebrows from reviewers otherwise too knee-squeezy about Teh Blue Peen. —fl]

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