dominant paradigm

The No-sex Class: Guilt, Shame, and Anxiety Are All Part of the Permitted Half of the Conversation

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2010-06-21 13:32

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.

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Reflections on Feministe Repost of Rachel Hill's and Pluralist's Post About Women and Sexual Asault

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2010-02-26 11:38

Cool discussion related one of my earlier posts, On Learning to Recognize “Gray Area” Sexual Pressure Where You Least Expect It, going on over at Feministe

I’ve been posting a lot of comments over there. I may sort them out into a proper post here but for now here are some rough notes. The references of the form “Chava #181” are to other (numbered) comments in the thread.

—- #110 —-

What Natalie #93 said a couple of comments back!

If we didn’t tell ourselves that men always want sex and are always ready for it, and if he’s not it’s a judgment on his partner, then men would feel free to say no and women would be able hear no without feeling judged. If we didn’t tell ourselves that women always want sex less often than male partners and that sex is always a bargaining chip to get something else then women wouldn’t feel humiliated for wanting sex at a time when a man doesn’t want it.

Yes! Those two scripts seriously distort the hows and even whethers of consent. Because in that construction a man “can’t be raped” because if he doesn’t want it all the time our transactional ideology of heterosexuality breaks down. Similarly straight-up sexual aggression is invisible in women because sexual expression is culturally defined as predicated on men’s initiative.

That’s what’s so cool about Pluralist and Rachel Hills posts, and why Jill and others are reposting them: they confront those assumptions from a direction the usual scripts aren’t at all prepared for. With the result that [rote] apologetics and absolutism sound reflexive rather than reflective.

When you dig a little deeper into the question of consent you stop looking at its nature (was it enthusiastic, grudging, resigned, gradually warmed-up-to) and reach the more fundamental question of whether the person making the decision is being respected. There’s clearly quite a bit of room for thoughtful people to debate whether Pluralist’s acquaintance’s overtures to her long-term partner were coercive. (I say yes she was, for instance even, though he eventually consented. But for their own nearly opposite reasons S.L. or Olo might credibly disagree.)

There’s no question, though, that she failed to respect his decision when, whatever her reasons, she decided to continue pressuring him.

Sexual consent is bogglingly important. But it’s also only a legally-definable and -determinable proxy for a much more complex human decision-making interactions. Recognizing this expands rather than refutes what we know about who can rape and be raped.

—- #137 —-

Chava and ThankGoddess [see #128.] I think a good way to resolve your current impasse would be to say that while everyone needs to be equally attentive we also need to be particularly wary of the gendered scripts our respective sexes are exposed to.

For instance because of scripting women are inclined to assume rejection implies personal inadequacy. (See for instance Marle’s assumption it must be ugliness in comment #1) with the result that something about them must be especially bad about them, if they fail. The alternative, which I think may have fueled Pluralist’s friend, is the assumption that if a woman is rejected there must be something wrong with the man. Obviously neither of these things need to be true.

Meanwhile men’s scripting assumes rejection is universal and therefore something has to be really special about them if they succeed. (The telling line there is men call it “getting lucky.”) Or else something has to be really wrong with the woman (“fallen,” “crazy,” or “wild.” Or else “easy,” as if that was a bad thing.) None of this needs to be true either.

The result for both men and women can be identical failures to respect a partner’s decision to decline that nevertheless come from very different social conditioning.

Point being that Chava’s right that straight men need to be particularly careful, but ThankGoddess is right that so does everyone else.

—

Quick note to ThankGoddess — I really, seriously admire your willingness to identify and rewrite scripting. I’m skeptical that they can be rewritten as easily as you make it sound in part because social scripts sort of by-definition can’t be changed unilaterally. One of the things I like about posts like this, though, is that the reconsideration of roles it forces creates openings for new, more realistic narratives about gender to emerge.

—- #176 —-

Butch Fatale #157

Many people who have non-standard rape experiences have difficulty identifying what happened to them as rape – including people whose experience was actually pretty common, because what we hear about how it has to happen to “count” is a pretty limited set of circumstances.

If you also add “any people who have non-standard rape experiences have difficulty identifying what they did as rape” then you’ve got the crux of this post — of why Pluralist, and Rachel Hills, and Jill, and I think this is such a crucial topic.

We’re all aware… some of us tragically so… that there are individuals who are conflicted about, or even oblivious to, rape because it wasn’t a “jump out of the bushes with a knife” scenario. There are people who think it didn’t happen to them, and people who think what they did couldn’t have been.

This might sound like a slight digression but earlier this year we had an incident of girls beating up another girl in a local Metro transit center. Just the other day I overheard, I think, Rachel Simmons on a local public radio show talking about assumptions what were made about what defines bullying. She made the point that “as usual” researchers initially focused only on bullying by socialized boys-to-boys, which tends towards direct physical violence, with the result that socialized girls-to-girls bullying, which tends towards emotional and social rather than physical violence was ignored or disregarded.

The point being that just as it was an error to make assumptions about bullying it’s almost certainly as large a mistake to assume that everyone will commit rape using the same methods stereotypically used by the most stereotypical perpetrators. Date- and domestic-partner rapists got away with that for generations.

With that in mind what’s important about Plurality’s friend’s action isn’t whether the degree of what she did was actionable — even though that seems to be the focus of a lot of the discussion here and elsewhere. Instead it’s interesting for indicating one corner a whole domain of coercion that has been overlooked because it didn’t conform to our (highly gendered!) assumptions about what rape, and rapists, and rape victims look like.

A corollary of that, by the way, which really shows up in Plurality’s story and which I saw as the point of Butch Fatale’s comment, is that we also have incomplete assumptions about what non-consent looks like, and therefore of what victims look like.

The man in Plurality’s story felt conflicted enough to have not gotten over what happened even months later. That’s a big clue that non-consent was involved. I’m reluctant to go further into that because this really has nothing to do with “what about the men.” Instead I’ll point out that the woman in Plurality’s story also felt conflicted enough about it to tell Plurality about it, instead of, say, to blow it off. That’s another big clue.

There’s a lot of 2nd- and 3rd-person conversation in this thread, for instance, along the lines of “well if this man…” or “well a cis-person might…” And there’s (probably for obvious reasons when you think about it) an awful lot of comments by people who are confident about having been victims. There have even been digressions into what constitutes privilege. All of which are of course perfectly relevant.

What Pluralist’s story suggests is that what we’re not hearing are whole classes of comments that would be even more relevant: the cis persons, the trans persons, the straight persons, the genderqueer persons… the women or men who like Pluralist’s friend can and may have been perpetrators — and who therefore might be able to contribute cautionary perspectives — are silent.

Though not, I ardently hope, silenced. Because this very large, very important bottle wouldn’t have been uncorked in the first place had Pluralist’s friend not disclosed her own conflicted feelings about her own assumptions that led to her own inability to respect her partner’s decision when he declined her overtures.

Bottom line is that addressing Butch Fatale’s broader point about identifying who can be victims and perpetrators undermines the two-sphere model of gender. Even if, as, say, Bond of Dear Diaspora argues, we should have tolerance for some degree of gender construction, the exclusivity of the two-sphere model, and the denial and lies needed to maintain it, leaves everyone vulnerable.

—- #196 —-

Following up on [my previous comment, #176] I really want to add that rather than absolving men with some kind of “but women do it too” shenanigans (as if two wrongs had ever made a right), breaking down gendered notions of what constitutes coercion and/or consent leaves less “gray area” for men to hide it. For instance no matter who you are it really is questionable at best do to one’s partner what Pluralist’s friend did to hers. Understanding that takes away cancels any form of “it must be ok because women do that too” defenses.

—

Richard Jeffrey Newman #178: I can’t speak at all to cultural Korean values so I can’t assess whether that’s really how couples in that situation are expected to save face. Instead I’ll just emphasize again that the critical distinction between role-playing and reality is recognition and respect for each player’s decision to participate or to decline.

Chava #181. Similar to #178 the measure is whether we recognize and respect each player’s decision. For better or worse, we probably can’t unilaterally make the assessment of our effect on others or how far over the line we’ve crossed. That’s not an indictment, by the way. It’s great that you stepped up. Grounding dialogue in how we have acted and how we act now makes dialogue about how we could act more practical and a lot more powerful.

Sailorman #184: I’ll keep stressing that the objective isn’t to create ever wider definitions of rape and assault. But neither is it to engage in further hairsplitting at the margins. In your “can I get you interested” scenario the question would be whether your partner was respecting your decision and, in particular, whether she was seeking to clarify it (ok, especially in a trusting relationship) or to disregard and override it (not at all ok.)

And for Natalie #175 and Faith #188: Yes, absolutely. I grew up believing women and girls couldn’t commit sexual assault. I believed it so thoroughly that I even said it to the director of a local Rape Relief program when I interviewed her for a college newspaper story. When she gently but with considerable authority corrected me I had an almost cinematic sense of perspective shift. It resolved a coercive sexual childhood experience when I was very young that I grew up thinking shouldn’t have bothered me, and that I’d thought I maybe even should have felt lucky for (one of the dads who was in on the rescue said something to another adult about me “getting an early start”) that had nevertheless affected me. Victimized? No, social scripting about male gender might have, for once, possibly unfairly, helped mitigate some of that. Traumatized? Any consequences were nothing compared to the consequences ruthless, sustained, but non-sexual bullying I experienced later. But just those few words from the shelter director were exactly what I’d needed to get resolution.

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Insights into Privileged Thinking: Emily Zitek and Colleagues Research Paper "Victim Entitlement to Behave Selfishly"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2010-01-24 12:50

Via Tyler Cowen Eric Barker of Barking Up the Wrong Tree points to an interesting-looking social psychology paper on entitlement and selfishness as it relates to a sense of victimization.

Does feeling like a victim make you selfish?:

Three experiments demonstrated that feeling wronged leads to a sense of entitlement and to selfish behavior. In Experiment 1, participants instructed to recall a time when their lives were unfair were more likely to refuse to help the experimenter with a supplementary task than were participants who recalled a time when they were bored. In Experiment 2, the same manipulation increased intentions to engage in a number of selfish behaviors, and this effect was mediated by self-reported entitlement to obtain positive (and avoid negative) outcomes. In Experiment 3, participants who lost at a computer game for an unfair reason (a glitch in the program) requested a more selfish money allocation for a future task than did participants who lost the game for a fair reason, and this effect was again mediated by entitlement.

via Journal of Personality and Social Psychology – Vol 97, Iss 5

Barker said it here.

Quick note: Barker may have been citing the print version. For whatever reason, though, the the article appears online in JPSP Vol 98, Issue 2: Victim entitlement to behave selfishly Zitek, Emily M.; Jordan, Alexander H.; Monin, Benoît; Leach, Frederick R. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 98(2), Feb 2010, 245-255.

I’m not going to cough up ~$12.00 to read the gated version but while digging around for more information it looks like the same results turn up quite a few similar studies of selfishness, fairness, and sense of entitlement. I ought to add it makes sense because it’s been my intuition, stated repeatedly online and in real life, that privilege and entitlement (stereotypical male in particular, kyriarchal in general) derives more from insecurity and resentment than the stereotypical spoon-in-your-mouth aristocratic sense of “the peasants are revolting.” And finally makes sense because I’ve been around my children and their friends for 13 years now… although that experience might be unscientifically anecdotal. :-)

At any rate, assuming the research supports the conclusion, and assuming it confirms similar prior research, it’s going to supports my contention that those who exercise privilege tend to perceive their actions as defending themselves from unfairness or attack. With the result that asking, say, men to “give up” their privileges never seems to work (and, when it does sort of work, seems really wimpy, half-hearted, or passive-aggressive. Or chivalrous, which would be by far the least productive!)

I think it also supports my developing strategy of attempting to recruit “oppressive” classes with the entirely reasonable (and often easily-observed) point that conditions that are worse for someone don’t necessarily imply that conditions are better for you.

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Why Kelly Diels Blogs (Subversively) About Sex

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2010-01-04 10:06

For some reason I’m suddenly discovering all these cool bloggers who’ve been well known for years. To everyone except, seemingly, to me. Oh well, I’ve alway been a slow learner. For instance…

Kelly Diels of Cleavage recently wrote so passionately about why she blogs about sex that it made me wish it was why I did.

The first time I had sex, I said, Let’s do that AGAIN!

Read the quote in context here.

She talks about how unflappably happy she was in her newfound discovery of herself, of her partner… of what can be done, of her transformation.

Slings and arrows and fashion digs aside, I glowed all day. I wondered if it was obvious I was glowing. I glowed about glowing.

And all these flowing, glowing paragraphs of giddiness she writes of has a lovely, polemical, political purpose… to confront how uncomfortable societies can be with such newfound ecstasy.

Virginity, she says, can not be lost because there is no loss, there is only gain.

Feeling uncomfortable yet? I have to admit little winces here and caveats there — oooh, it’s not so wonderful for everyone. Oooh, he could get a disease. Ooh, she could get a reputation. Ooooh, they could be exploiting each other. Oooh, the first time isn’t so great for lots of people. You know what I mean, right? You read something as obliviously joyous as that and you find yourself thinking “that’s wonderful, hon, and sure it’s like that for some people but…”

And as if in anticipation, and maybe to illustrate on of her main points, she writes

This, of course, is why there are so many rules about sex. Sexuality is a basis for power and agency and awe. Stepping over the divine line into the miracles of body and self makes you wonder: what else is possible? What could possibly be impossible?

This is why cults encourage celibacy or polygamy. Dyads are dangerous to cult authority. They give you an ally. Directing your passion towards the cult with celibacy or fracturing your affection across multiple relationships is a great way to ensure that your first loyalty is your guru. Religions, too, encourage celibacy or monogamy or rigidly circumscribed polygamy. How would the Vatican get rich if priests had families? Families tend to accrete resources rather than direct them to the Church. In any case, in any system, the first order of business is to regulate sexuality.

Which gets to what motivated me to blog about sex: if you pay attention you begin to notice, as Diels does, that pretty much all the negative consequences of sex derive from our negative attitudes about sex. Even religious ones. Even feminist ones. Even irresponsible, over-the-top exploitative ones. Even 70’s-style mafia-tainted pornographer ones. Even mine. Even yours.

STIs? Unwanted, unplanned pregnancy? Exploitation? Yep. “Love-em-and-leave-em?” Yep. Sexual assault and rape? Yep. The extraordinarily banal way that sex as selling is smeared across magazine cover after billboard after police procedural after liquor bottle? Yep, yep, and yep. (I’ve skipped the details but if provoked I can bloviate about them for… longer than you probably care to read about it.)

Even things claimed by “natural law” conservatives like that whole homophobia business are frowned on for exactly the same reason contraception and abortion are: it short-circuits sexual scarcity, without which… um… well, trust them when they say the end of sexual scarcity would be a Really Bad Thing. And, really, if you didn’t trust them there wouldn’t be anything bad about sex at all.

All of which makes Diels’ orthodoxy anathema even to people who grin grimly and assure us they’re “sex positive:”

Sex is a language. Kisses and touch and connection are the vocabulary of personal, heartfelt, libidinous expression.

Despite what our culture tells us – that chick flicks and chick lit and pursuit of romance and love are frothy and frivolous – relationships can provide a grammar for growth.

And that’s why I write about sex. I write about sex as an antidote to the titillate and condemn, titillate and condemn, again-and-again pornification of our world. I write about sex because sex is a school and love is an ashram. They are sacred sites for learning, laughing, growing, stretching, unfurling.

It’s ok if such unbridled exuberance makes you a little nervous. But if it does please take a little time to ask yourself why. Especially if you think it’s obvious why.

—-

Along similar lines see: Amanda Marcotte’s “The ‘Sex Addiction’ model isn’t harmless“ or Heather Corinna’s “With Pleasure: A View of Whole Sexual Anatomy for Every Body“

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The No-Sex Class incarnate on Craig's List

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Thu, 2007-11-01 06:59

Jill of Feministe takes apart a particularly well-articulate (though clearly un-self-recognized) defense of the “no-sex” class as the dominant paradigm.

Women are not actually attracted to men. There is a vague idea of what a man is physically, and some are better than others aesthetically speaking, but the purely physical appearance of a man is almost inconsequential unless he is horribly ugly or outrageously attractive.

Women are attracted to status, money…

...

A woman basically is a greedy materialistic prostitute. Although that sounds vulgar, it’s true. She trades her physical self to buy into the success a man has created for himself.

...

It seems to me that women almost cannot think for themselves.

Jill adds her own analysis here.

He also presses men, suffocatingly face-down, in the corresponding sex class. (The last snippet demonstrates the force with which we press ourselves down.)

As a man, I fall in love with how a woman is physically. I fall in love with simple parts of a woman. Like the way her hair falls around her face, the line of her neck, her shoulders. They way her ears might peek from her hair. Her eyelashes. The size and shape of her hands, her fingernails. The way she walks, the way she looks when she is tired or annoyed, the sound she makes when she sneezes, coughs, or cries. The way she sits in a chair. The way she breathes while experiencing different emotions. The way her lips move. A million little things.

...

Sure, a huge part of my attraction is mental, but the powerful seed of love that builds within me and crystallizes is based greatly on visual things that set off torrents of emotion and need.

...

Someone needs to invent a drug which has no hormonal imbalance side-effects but is able to erase a man’s sex drive and attraction to women. It would increase productivity rates to incredible heights. I’d be free and happy. I’d feel complete. I’d be able to concentrate on my biochemistry studying.

In other words, as befits a member of a class with no identity outside it, his sense of his sex-class identification is so deep he imagines only drugs or perhaps surgery can cure it.

And finally, with utter unconscious self-parody, he calls the kettle black

I’m completely unable to reconcile the differences between men and women. It seems like success with women is equal to spending half of your life working to create a giant illusion, something vastly tiring and annoying, while sacrificing your own true self and your own interests. We construct our lives around nest-building. We’re like male birds building nests and showing them off to attract mates. It’s pathetic. Everything we do is to get women. It is a fucking shit deal.

Women go around creating giant illusions that they’re beautiful unlike us men who go simply strive to prove that we’re worthy enough to earn those silly creatures.

The horrible thing about social anguish is that while the anguish is absolutely real the cause can be 100% lie, a society-wide game of crack the whip that requires not stronger arms so all can spin fast enough (the MRA/“The Rules” strategy) or to let go so everyone else goes flying (the slack-dude/separatist strategy) to win but instead to simply stop where you are and learn to play a game that’s more fun for everybody.

Incidentally I think the young biochemistry student’s screed illustrates nicely how the sex/no-sex class paradigm is a dominant male paradigm. Yes, sure, non-feminist women also go off on screeds of their own but “men are shits who only want one thing,” while fairly clear, is more a reaction than an advancement of a countervailing agenda.

The “no-sex” paradigm: it’s not just a bad idea, it’s not even the law.

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