Hugo Schwyzer has taken up the issue I raised in Unforseen Consequences of Men Believing Themselves Unseen.

In comments he ran into some perfectly legitimate but somewhat skeptical objections. The first being Lisa KS (of Punkassblog) who said

“I have lost track of the number of women of my acquaintance, now often in their thirties, who have a lot of bitterness and anger about the fact that no man has ever really intensely physically desired them–made them feel hot in the way you so eloquently describe above–no man has ever said such things to them. This same hurt and rage in women is absolutely identical, and anecdotally I’d say nearly as prevalent, as it is in men.”

Her point is interrelated to the point Hugo (and I) are raising but it’s really, really important. What Hugo is talking about is the different heterosexual gender narratives of desirability. What she’s talking about is the disconnect between gender narratives and actual real life.

In other words a) we have little vocabulary for discussing visual/physical desire for men and b) the vocabulary that exists for discussing desire for women excludes many or most actual women.

That’s not to belittle Lisa’s point. At all! I spend a lot of time thinking about it, and trying to work through it. In fact the lack of a narrative of desire for men first occurred to me while thinking about it. But they’re different problems. That both need to be addressed.

Frequent commenter Mythago said

Feeling that your body is ‘neutral’ – that men’s bodies are just sort of, you know, people bodies, but women’s bodies are the sexy ones – isn’t the same thing as “I have a penis so I’m ugly”.

And another commenter ElleDee said

“I’m having a hard time feeling too sorry for guys about this.”

and

“How about this? We (straight women) will tell you when we think you are hot if y’all (straight dudes) tell us when you think we are smart and funny and really interesting.”

Feeling sorry for men wouldn’t be all that helpful anyway. It’s at least part of a bed we’ve made and are laying in. So the most productive thing to do… for us and anyone who’s willing to help… is figure how to get us to get up.

I think that’s more critical than almost anything for getting over the next gender hurdle. The gendered beauty and worthiness traps are caustic in the extreme. Whereas Mythago correctly identifies male form as “neutral” men tend to perceive “neutral” as irrelevant. With the result that men imagine we can only be attractive in terms of material-accumulation or accomplishment. With the further result that we perceive heterosexuality as transactional. With the further result that we’re indoctrinated to see women’s accomplishments not just as competition but as an existential threat. Because, to paraphrase male-persona Red Green, “if the women don’t find you handsome, and don’t find you handy, they’re not going to give you the time of day.” And would that form a nice basis for ultimate self-hating misogyny? Why I believe it would!

So anyway, at least for me, the point isn’t to make us men feel better by broadening beauty narratives to include us. Instead it’s to further bend the gender conventions that say there’s only one way society assesses men just like we’re already working to alter the way society assess women. It’s about finding more ways to subvert the dominant paradigm wherein men are men, women are women, and never the twain shall be treated alike.

—-

Meanwhile… Mathilde Madden of Erotica Cover Watch (a blog wherein two straight women erotica authors are occasionally reviled as radicals and even lesbians for wanting to see more good-looking men on the covers of erotica written by and for straight women) reveals one of her “Man Candy Monday” sources

I was idly flicking through regular candyland Hunk du Jour and discovered I couldn’t choose between these two. I know, it’s a tough old life.

Read the quote in context here.

Most of the images at Hunk du Jour seem fairly work safe. Looks like you can find other, somewhat less work-safe sources in Madden and her co-blogger Kristina Lloyd’s blogroll.

If you’re an adult you can click here to see a possibly not-work-safe image.

Commons
Photo “Drue checks Heather’s pheromones” by Flickr user Brouhaha (Jonathan). Used under a Creative Commons license.

Oh Noes! Teh Pill! It affects Woemenz Nozez! ZOMG!**

Because you know what windup little smell-driven automatons women are. Because without that nasty Pill bollixing your nostrils you’d all go back to sticking with your partners no matter how big an asshole they turned out to be. Better outlaw them pills then.

Whatevs.

Actually, I heard about the study, or maybe something along the same lines, some time last Winter, before it got picked up and politicized as some kind of reason women shouldn’t be allowed to take the pill. Instead fellow classmate brought it up during her student research presentation on the effect of scent on sexual arousal.

The way she told it was that non-pregnant women are often more attracted to the smell of men who are genetically unlike them, but when they are they prefer the scent of men they’re more closely related to. She said that since hormonal birth control simulates pregnancy that going on the pill can alter one’s preference for the scent of one’s partner.

That actually made sense, and a number of women in the class nodded and said they’d noticed something like that when going on or off the pill during a relationship.

But here’s the deal: neither the presenter nor anyone who nodded their heads indicated it was a particularly big deal.

Which suggests, as with the stupid oxytocin-burnout argument for (only women, naturally) avoiding multiple partners***, the scent-preference-altering phenomenon, even if it does exist, can’t be all that strong, right? I mean think about how the ‘winger vision’s supposed to go

A) Non-pregnant women like the way unrelated men smell, so
B) They form lifelong, abstinenet-till-marriage, monogamous-afterwards relationships with these unrelated men, and
C) Become pregnant, whereupon according to these theories
D) Their scent preferences just as they would during pill-induced artificial preference change meaning… what?
E) While they lose interest in these genetically heterodox-scented partner for the duration of their pregnancies?

Except, well
F) I don’t think it works that way. Or
G) If it does it’s not a very strong effect, because
H) Pregnant women would always avoid their genetically heterodox-scented husbands and hang out with their genetically “homodox”-scented male relatives, which
I) We don’t, um, actually see because
J) Scent isn’t the only attraction criteria in the first place, nor
K) Even if scent was the only criteria items A-I suggest it couldn’t be terribly determinative because, y’know, most people stay together
L) Whether they’re pregnant, or on the pill, or not

[** In other words a lot of people have been commenting on the peculiar conclusion anti-contraceptive types have drawn about a very small, not-even-all-that-recent study about hormonal contraception and scent. —fl]

[** The claim is that repeated oxytocin release with multiple partners causes women to burn out on romance. The fly in that ointment is that pregnancy releases a gazillion times more oxytocin and yet after birth most women a) continue to harbor romantic feelings after birth and b) consider having additional children. Part b being, for me, the bigger deal breaker. If a little too much oxytocin is supposed to make one unable to form romantic attachments ever again then lots more of the same stuff ought to make women disinclined to get pregnant again or, especially, disinclined to love subsequent children. And not to put too fine a point on it, in most cases where we encounter women burning out on romance or childbearing the reasons tend to be a lot more clear cut than hormone-receptor exhaustion. But I digress… —fl]