feminism for men

Elizabeth Esther On How to Recognize Unhealthy Personal Boundaries in Yourself and Others After Surviving A Cult

Posted by figleaf on Tue, 2013-02-26 23:58

One of the things I've been realizing over the last year, something that's shaken me up quite a bit, has been the way my nominally normal if somewhat libidinous upbringing was overlaid with wide, thick layer of third-hand, second-hand, and sometimes, in retrospect, first-hand abusive culture.*

Because I grew up in the extremely disrupted culture of the 1970s with it's hippie and sexual revolution rejection of unquestionably socially repressive, conservative barriers it's taken me a very long time to realize that thrown into that mix was indoctrinated... and in retrospect sometimes actively groomed rejection of boundaries.

I suspect that of my generation I am not alone.

For this reason I've really got a soft spot for recovering fundamentalist-cult survivor Elisabeth Esther, who today shared a wonderful list. Check it out. If you find it recognizable share it with your friends and loved ones. (I've numbered the list so I can refer to specific items in the rest of my post.)

I had a total epiphany moment when I read “Signs of Unhealthy Boundaries” on page 171 of Take Back Your Life. Here is an abbreviated list:

  1. Telling all
  2. Being sexual for others, not yourself
  3. Being nonsexual for others, not yourself
  4. Going against personal values or rights in order to please others
  5. Not noticing or disregarding when someone else displays inappropriate boundaries
  6. Not noticing or disregarding when someone invades your boundaries
  7. Giving as much as you can for the sake of giving
  8. Taking as much as you can for the sake of getting
  9. Letting others define you
  10. Letting others describe your reality
  11. Believing others can anticipate your needs
  12. Believing you must anticipate others’ needs
  13. Practicing self-abuse (cutting yourself)
  14. Being deprived of food or sleep
  15. Being unable to separate your needs from those of others

It was pretty eye-opening for me to realize I could check off almost all of these signs.

Source: Elisabeth Esther

I've been there for a lot of that too. Sometimes even when I thought I wasn't! Fairly often I'd even impose some of those things on myself. (This being classic sign of what the 12-step people call co-dependence: imposing on yourself conditions you only believe to be required to be with someone else, for instance.)

For instance tolerating anger or even violence from an early partner on the assumption that a) she needed to express herself, b) I could "take it," and c) love requires "give and take" (itself of course a perfectly true thing) that I turned into "if I couldn't 'take it' I wasn't cut out to be in a relationship in the first place." Call that fallout from items #7, 9, 10, 12, and 15.

For instance the older youth "leader" who in "rap sessions" would make the perfectly valid point that most people are at least a little bisexual... while regularly "demonstrating" his point with egregiously inappropriate touching of young men in the group and often leading to "private sessions" with them to help them "work out their inhibitions." And to the extent the rest of us wondered if it was ok we were all desperately afraid of appearing too "uncool" or "sexually hung up" to mention it. See items #4, 5, and 6, above, topping that chart with a bullet. And see, worse, that coming away of those sessions we tended to question only the degree of the leader's behavior, believing "it's ok to do that, you just shouldn't go so far." Maybe with a little bit of #2 and/or #3 depending on whether you felt you could or couldn't be "cool" and participate in what pop culture was referring to at the time as "bisexual chic."

Others were imposed or assumed by others.

Throw in turmoil and shame if a woman wanted to fellate her partner (let alone if he asked her to), or if in those pre-g-spot days she preferred penetration to clitoral stimulation, or if a man wasn't "respectful" during sex, a.k.a. was anything but slow and basically worshipful, or if a woman (perhaps impatient with the neo-victorian pace) wanted to be active, or... or... or... etc. #6 and/or 7, numbers 12 and 11, numbers 2 and 6 and 15, and pretty much all the rest except maybe #13 and 14 (with maybe a mashup of choosing to "altering your reality" on your own by depriving yourself of sleep while staying up sometimes for days to travel or "rap" with each other.

And, for instance, the overwhelming sense that since sex should be "natural" you really shouldn't check in with each other during it, not to see if this felt good ("but the Joy of Sex said it should work!"), not to see if that was what was actually wanted since we were all supposed to be able to read each other's "vibe." Not really having any boundaries about drug or alcohol intoxication. And when it came to young men and boys, while there was (mostly homophobia-driven) understanding that they could say no to men nobody could even comprehend that it was even possible that a boy wouldn't be "ready" if a woman came on to him. (In a most unfortunate, deeply misunderstood, but widely repeated phrases from the era I think it was Susan Brownmiller who said men were so incapable of self-control sexually they would "even" have sex with women who were dead!)

And eh, more numbers in there somewhere.

Sigh. Yes, it was the 1970s. And almost everything about the era that wasn't bitterly tense was almost heedlessly nihilistic. And they really were trying to break down the giant zit of Western Civilization that had come to a (eww) head in the Mad Men era of the 1950s and 1960s. And mostly people were making it up as they went along. And everyone had to make their mistakes while they learned from them.

But here's the thing, and how it relates to Esther's post:

Unlike Elizabeth who escaped from her 1950s-holdover cult, a lot of my peers were more like 2nd-generation cult survivor. My parents were both raised very strictly but I was exposed to their parent's church cultures only through early elementary school.

But I've got to say that being the children of escapees had its own perils. In my own generation, which coincided with the hippies and the nominal sexual revolution, there's a not-even-unnatural possibility of mistaking rejection of oppressive barriers with maintenance of healthy boundaries. And wow am i learning -- sometimes after way too many decades -- what a huge difference there is between the two!

I'm going to order her cult-survivors book, Take Back Your Life. Using her Amazon link instead of mine. The 1970s, from its Viet Nam-era lyrics like "If you can't be with the one you love (honey) love the one your with" to the catastrophically sexually unsafe anonymity of New York and Bay Area bath house culture, to the hellishly triggered first wave of 2nd Wave feminists to their naked-woman-in-a-meat-grinder Hustler-cover antagonists in porn, amounted to a cult of its own. Even if it was only a rebound one after the preceding cult of the 1950s. But I get the impression we could learn a lot from that too.

* Footnote: I don't want to leave the impression I'm now dour or sour on what's become of sexuality after the 1970s. Or at least since the 1980s. Nor do I feel a need to recant much of anything I've said on this blog, although I think some my earlier posts show strong overtones of those unrecognized unhealthy boundaries. It definitely what I've learned or advocated is itself wrong.

Instead I think the way most of my writing stands up well indicates the problem I'm trying to illustrate here. The sexual ideals people were working on were just really different from the often toxically dysfunctional social context I and a lot of other suburban and exurban children of the Silent Majority generation were exposed to. To consider a (only slightly) less volatile example from current events, it's more like the case where you might hear mild advice like "well, it's a good idea for people in remote areas to be able to protect themselves." Only where for most people that just means have a dog, a baseball bat, or (as Joe Biden suggests) a shotgun, for the people you grew up around it meant machine guns, bunkers, explosives, bullet proof clothes and cars, the occasional confederate and nazi flags or white hoods, etc. The basic ideas can make sense even if the implementation and local influences are unhealthy in the extreme. Or look at Elizabeth Esther's example: it can be a good thing to be of religious faith even though it turns out you grew up in an almost insanely violent, repressive, terrified-and-terrifying cult.

Well, same sort of deal with the world of gender, relationships, tolerance, boundaries, and sex in the 1970s. All things considered now I think it might be nice to try on being a survivor. Because wowzie!


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Um, I'm Launching Another Blog Called, For Various Reasons, "The Bad Men Project"

Posted by figleaf on Tue, 2013-01-01 02:01

Photo by Flickr user intvgene. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo by Flickr user intvgene. Used under a Creative Commons license.

It's not ready for prime time, and maybe never will be. But for reasons great and small I'm going to go ahead and mention that I'm starting a new blog that'll focus more specifically on the subject of men and feminism for men.

I'd been brewing the idea for years, actually, ever since Twisty Faster taunted some guy or another (I don't think it was me) that if he wanted to do feminism he should go do it with men instead of bugging her about it. The most proximate cause was a post by Amanda Marcotte called Why Progressive “Men’s Movements” Are Bound to Fail, about the latest, shark-jumping blow-up at the Good Men Project (which at one point Amanda and a bunch of others posted at.)  Also while I used to blog a lot about actual, you know, real adult sex on this blog I've sort of been derailing that subject here for years. And there are a bunch of other reasons.

The reason I decided to call it "The Bad Men Project" came out of a conversation in comments on Amanda's post.

Men shouldn't have to be "good" to participate in feminism. Instead, once he starts to see the full impact of gender expectations on men and women you'd expect even very self-serving men to be as invested as the "goodest" man.

Oh, and one final thing about that "good" men business? One of the biggest gender constructions on the planet is the "good" man as Sir Galahad: the strong, virtuous arm lent in support of "the little ladies" who've been so oppressed by those other men. Who therefore aren't as "approval-worthy."

I'd add that another good reason for calling it that is that the more I've reflected on  subjects and the longer my conversations with memoir groups, a councellor, and other people, the more I've watched my own children grow up compared to the toxic fire swamp of a society and immediate culture I grew up thinking (sweet mother of pearl!) was normal or even "progressive" the more of a bad man I've been over all.  I haven't wanted to be.  And I mostly haven't been.  But when I have they've been doozies. 

My worst transgressions, incidentally and maybe not surprisingly, have often been when I was trying my best to be a "good man."  And imagining myself a "good man," and while doing genuinely good things incidentally considering the toxic sex and gender wasteland I grew out of, I've managed to pull some seriously bad-news shit. While thinking I wasn't.  And yeah, again, a heck of a lot of it was somewhere between tame and lame at the time but, wow, getting back to my children and their peers, if any of them were to do any of that shit today their friends would be shocked and I'd be horrified.  The most difficult part is feeling pretty sure that if I were to wander around still thinking myself a "good man" it wouldn't be long before I was pulling some other kind of crap.  So... forget that.

A final note on that subject: I'm so not alone in having thought myself a "good man."  Which really, to paraphrase Mark Twain, is just a NiceGuy™ with a liberal arts education."  Which in turn is another way to say you're probably fooling yourself.

And since the whole challenge of subverting the dominant paradigm is learning not to fall for it in the first place when it's as invisible to you as water is to a fish is to get over the idea that it's even possible to be a "good man" in the first place.  At least not in this generation.

So anyway.  That's the background for the project:

  • Subverting the idea that only a "good man" can a) not block progress on feminism, b) contribute to feminism, or especially c) benefit one's self from feminism.
  • Acknowledging that I personally have not been and therefore can't declare with confidence I ever will be all that great no matter how repentant or reparative.
  • Communicating to other men who've been raised to be "good men" that... well... pretty much everything we're taught to believe makes a man "good" is patriarchal indoctrination.

Wish me luck!

Update: Doh! Here's the URL: The Bad Men Project.


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More Evidence Misandry is Real But That It Predates Feminism

Posted by figleaf on Sat, 2012-12-08 22:03

If one Y (male) chromosome is bad two must be worse, right? Well, no, but it's taken a while for the once very-popular notion to fall out of favor. I've argued frequently allegedly "man hating" beliefs attributed to "radical feminism" generally pre-date feminism. Here's a great example, from a sympathetic post by genetics researcher Ricki Lewis (emphasis mine)

A battered paperback entitled The XYY Man, by Kenneth Royce, leans in a corner of my bookshelf. It’s a spy novel that chronicles the adventures of “Spider” Scott, an ex-felon who wants to become law-abiding, but finds that he is genetically predisposed to criminality because he has an extra chromosome. Unlike most men whose XY sex karyotype imparts their maleness, Scott has been endowed with an XYY karyotype by his novelist creator.

This condition is not fanciful.

...

In 1970 geneticist H. Bentley Glass advocated the relaxation of abortion laws to allow women to end pregnancies if the fetus was XYY. Speculation even ran that Richard Speck, the infamous murderer of eight student nurses in Chicago in 1966, owed his propensity to violence to an extra Y chromosome. That proved untrue. In one notorious case of the mid-1970s, a British court wrongfully convicted Stefan Kiszko of the murder of an 11-year-old girl largely because of his XYY karyotype, and it took more than 15 years for him to win release from prison. For further historical takes on the misunderstood extra chromosome see Y Envy.

Source: PLOS DNA Science Blog

Kennith Royce (born in 1920) was not a stalwart feminist when he wrote his gender-determinist spy novel. Nor was Hiram Bentley Glass (born in 1906) when he issued his prejudgment of "excessively male" infants.

Again, it's trendy in some circles to say there's no such thing as misandry. It's even trendier in even more circles to say there is such a thing as misandry but it's all feminism's fault. Both trendy circles are wrong: there is such a thing, and it's roots lie not in feminism but in the same bullshit culture that motivated feminists in the first place.

Oh and speaking of bullshit, while it turns out that about 1/1000 boys and men really do have an extra Y chromosome the modern scientific consensus is that the impact is minimal. As Lewis puts it in her concluding paragraph

Slowly, as the suppositions of the 1960s give way to current research, the public is changing its thinking on XYY syndrome. Few people today believe that an extra Y chromosome condemns its owner to a life of violent crime. Genetic counselors explain the condition to families and teach ways to nurture XYY boys. Men like the fictional “Spider” Scott can exercise their free will without fear that a sex chromosome has turned them bad.

I would have called it "the superstitions of the 1960s" but close enough. Good riddance.


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Anti-Feminists Hate Men, Feminists Not So Much - Item #2043883

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2012-11-28 20:45

Another example: Amanda Marcotte weighing in on Suzanne Venker's male-patronizing, anti-feminist screed.

Look, it’s absolutely true that there’s no evidence to show that men as a class hate independent women. Feminists believe in men and men’s potential, and do not accept as a given that men are monsters who will never treat women right. Just yesterday, I was battling with MRAs whose arguments rested on the assumption that all men are paranoid misogynists, a premise I thoroughly reject from both statistical and personal experience. I, like all the feminists above, also reject Venker’s argument that all men are babies who need women to recede from public life and act like unpaid servants in order to feel good about themselves. Seriously, no one hates men more than anti-feminists.

Source: Pandagon

Yup.


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Anti-Feminists Hate Men, Feminists Not So Much - Item #2043882

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2012-11-28 18:02

I believe I've said repeatedly that no "man hating feminist" has ever hated men as bitterly as your average run-of-the-mill antifeminist. Echidne takes note of the latest entry in the parade by the degree-holding media professional Suzanne Venker.

Venkers thesis boils down to feminism pisses men off because modern women's access to education and decent pay deprives men of the ability to pay sub-market wages for sex, housework, and sometimes childcare.

Because, right, somehow when there's equal social, legal, and especially financial status men are unable to compete with women. Or even interact with them. What's up with that?

And that's why now all men never want to marry any women. Which men always did before feminism. So feminism hurts women more than it hurts men.

Echidne pithily asks misandry much?

Men only want sex, so why bother buying the cow when milk is freely available.  Men only get married if they are hooked into it because of sex or if they get free housekeeping services and sex just by paying bed-and-board.  Men can't cope with women who have any skills or talents which are not purely complementary with those men are deemed to possess.  Men can't survive competition from women at work.  Men need a submissive partner.  And so on.

If I were a man I'd be insulted by all that.  But I'm quite adequately insulted by being told that if I only succumbed to my innate femininity (I do own makeup!) there would be a line of suitors at my door.  There's a line, in any case.

Source: Echidne of the Snakes

I love this line of (mainstream!) feminist argument against the antifeminist rear guard. It's the best evidence, by the way, that feminism is winning. And why, incidentally, it was probably always going to. It's not just that most men don't actually have that much trouble with non-dependent partners. It's not just that stories about "man hating feminists" persist mostly a) in the fevered imaginations of trolls like Rush Limbaugh and those who let him think for him, b) in the hormone-fevered, not-yet-gelled identity-formation stew of late-stage adolescence young women and men on college campuses. It's not even that, contrary to the no-sex-class paradigm-indoctrinated understanding of nearly all anti-feminists and small numbers of late-20th-Century-holdout "radfems," most feminists are heterosexual. Instead feminism was probably always going to win because unlike credentialled, professional, well-compensated career anti-feminists like Suzanne fucking Venker and her Aunt Phyillis Fucking Schlaffley, feminists don't actually hate men. Oh, and because once they stop charging at the patriarchal matador's red cape of "feminazis" men notice that maybe 98% of the outcomes feminism seeks are actually pretty decent outcomes for men too.

I mean, c'mon! Venker and her ilk keep insisting men not only want but out and out require that women be some combination of prostitute, domestic livestock, and parole officer! As opposed to a sex partner, a domestic partner, and life partner!

Did I already say what's up with that? I think I did!


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The Bogus Two Rules of Desire and "What Do You Wish You Had Known About Sex When You Were Younger?"

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2012-11-28 15:09

From time to time I'm asked to answer a question for Em & Lo's "Wise Guys" feature as one of their "straight married guys." The other day the question was "What do you wish you had known about sex when you were younger?"

Here's what I said:

Wow. There are probably hundreds of things I wish I’d known about sex when I was younger but the number one-with-a-bullet thing I wish I’d known when I was younger is that, contrary to the Santa Clause maxim, it’s actually as good to receive as it is to give. Really. No kidding! I grew up in the “she comes first” era which, while certainly an improvement of the earlier “she comes?” era, still had a big element of putting women on pedestals and treating them like dainty, passive, recipients rather than participants in sex. I remember being really, literally shocked* out of the mood when one partner pushed my knees apart, popped me into her mouth, then popped back up a moment later with this huge grin and said, “Oh, I just love doing this.”

At the time it simply hadn’t occurred to me that she might enjoy making me moan as much as I enjoyed doing the same for her.

Anyway, that’s the lesson: if you’re used to only giving, or only receiving, you’re missing half the fun.

Source: Em & Lo

There are so many other things I wish I'd known about sex back then. And relationships. And... ok, a bunch of other stuff too but especially sex and relationships. Because in retrospect there's so much to flinch, cringe, and outright make apologize for.  My old blog tagline remains depressingly true: "learning from mistakes so you won't have to."  Sigh.

* I know, I know, use of "literal" in the context of "shocked." Yeah, yeah. I was literally shocked in the sense of "experiencing an acute stress reaction," not "muscular convulsions induced by electrical conduction." And not literal shock as in "life-threatening medical condition that occurs due to inadequate substrate for aerobic cellular respiration" either. But I digress...


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Note To Angry White Guys: Since Entitlement Can't Buy You Love It Sure Isn't Going to Buy You Electoral Majorities

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2012-11-08 10:17

It has been much noted in electoral politics that demographics in the U.S. are changing. Said notations have come with much rending of garments by "traditional" right-wing extremists. Who for some reason imagine an overwhelmingly majority-white population would give them the conservative/libertarian paradise they believe they'd be able to enjoy.

As South Carolina Republican Lindsay Graham complained to the Washington Post last month

We're not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.

Source: The Guardian

The issue, according to a bunch of those same angry white guys, is that all "those people" are reproducing at rates higher than rates higher than angry white guys.

They think that's a problem.

I'm...

Gonna have to agree.

I'd just state the problem a little differently than they would.

Because... well... ok, quick question: who wants to reproduce with an angry white guy?

Or even more pointedly: Who wants to reproduce with an angry white guy willingly?

Not to grind this in too deep but this is yet another area where feminism would actually improve matters for the angry white guys who feel most threatened by it.

Part of why they feel threatened is that if feminism wins then they will no longer be entitled to effectively coerce partners to reproduce with them.  If feminism wins, they fear, then women will be able to support themselves on their own incomes and consequently will not be obliged to couple with them in order to keep rooves over their heads and shoes on their and their children's feet.  If feminism wins, they fear, then women will be able to walk down the street or sleep in their own beds with no further need of angry white guys to protect them from "big, angry non-white men."  If feminism wins, they fear, women (as members of the sexually-indifferent "no-sex" class!) will have no interest sexual or even social intercourse with men.

In other words, they fear, if feminism wins then a) no one will want to reproduce with angry white men, and therefore angry white men are doomed to extinction.

 I dunno.

Seems to me that the issue is that sense of entitlement.  And a big source of the anger is over a sense of loss of that entitlement.

And yet...

I've noticed...

By and large hetero women (the vast, vast majority in other words) seem perfectly interested in forming relationships with non-angry, non-entitled men. Short-term relationships.  Long-term relationships.  One-night-stand relationships.  Even long-term let's have a family relationships!  No coercion, leverage, wheedling, required.  And defniitely no anger required.

Just something to think about.


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Check Out PeacockAngel's Lovely, Loving Rejection of Anti-Feminist Hatred for Men

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2012-09-20 07:51

Just stumbled across this awesome refutation of the bogus Two Rules of Desire and the entire array of social expectations that drives them.  It's by ThePeacockAngel on Tumblr. Have to repost the whole thing because it's... awesome. Sometimes you'll hear men's rights activists grouse about the way society hates men. Often they'll blame feminists of all people for somehow being part of it. Here's exactly why that's a mistake. Actually, she gives a whole bunch of reasons why it's a mistake.

The Patriarchy Even Denies Women The Right To Fully Love A Man

You know what pisses me off, even though women are supposed to be these passive creatures utterly devoted to their men, the patriarchy denies us the right to even fully and properly LOVE a man. It denies us even enough agency to be allowed to care for and about a man the way men are women.

  • We’re supposed to wait to be protected by our knight in shining armor, we’re never allowed to stand up and fight alongside our partner. Like if there’s a noise downstairs, and you actually CARE about someone, you don’t let them go down there alone to check it out, you grab a heavy object and you go downstairs with them, because two people are more capable of overpowering a wild animal or intruder than one.
  • We’re not supposed to care how men look, so we can’t think our boyfriend/husband/partner is the most fucking beautiful thing on earth, and we’re shallow if that was ANY part of the reason we chose to be with him. Because we live in a heteronormative patriarchal society men aren’t ever supposed to be “attractive” or “sexy”
  • We’re supposed to passively receive expensive gifts and not give the same in return (semi-understandable with the wage gap, but still)
  • We’re supposed to let our men protect us, sacrifice themselves for us, and are somehow castrating harpies if we lift a finger to stand up for them in return. It’s supposedly emasculating to be a man who has a woman who loves you enough to fight for you, and that’s REALLY fucked up, because if you really truly and completely love someone, you WILL stand up to help them when they need you.
  • We’re apparently “emasculating” our partners if we try to earn more money to help support them, or buy them nice things because we care about them.
  • We’re so fully objectified that we’re objects capable of receiving love and lust, but never giving them in return.

Instead we’re supposed to sacrifice our identities, our dreams in exchange for a white knight who will protect us from the scary world, and honestly, that’s not fucking romantic, that’s… if it were actually necessary the most purely mercenary thing I can think of doing. We’re told women don’t like “nice guys” if we don’t date a white knight (and punished) because womanly love is actually supposed to be coldly pragmatic according to society, and we’re breaking the script if we don’t choose an option society sees as “The best host for our benevolent parasitism” All we’re allowed to do (and therefore what we are ALWAYS supposed to do) is stroke wounded feelings and look pretty.

And fuck that, i don’t want to be forced to be a parasite, I don’t want to be the fragile pixie who’s character is defined be her romantic entanglement, I actually want to be allowed to be a person who loves another person, and is that actually too much to ask?

She said it here.

I mean, read through that post and see if you can see, anywhere, anything less than an enthusiastic, passionate, uncompromisingly feminist embrace of heterosexual partnership. In opposition to coruscating anti-feminist insistence that both women and men live inside the strangling gendered rules that capital-P patriarchy demands.

Seriously, I could write ten posts about each of her points and sub-points.  Actually, over the years I've written <em>about</em> many of them... but neither as succinctly or as passionately or as well.

(Via Lipstick and Ligature.)


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Who Benefits From the Myth That Men Can't Control Their Sexual Impulses?

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2012-09-19 15:33

Answer? Nobody.

In a great post titled "The Myth of the Boner Werewolf," Cliff of The Pervocracy points out that excuses about "blue balls" and other (mythical!) forms of male uncontrollability make women less enthusiastic about being sexual around men.

There's a pernicious myth out there that the male sex drive is unstoppable and irresistible--that once a man is aroused, he literally cannot control his actions. We tell jokes about "thinking with the other head" and "all the blood went out of his brain" that aren't entirely jokes. We have a cultural narrative in which sexual arousal makes a man into a goddamn werewolf.

And we expect women to tiptoe around this uncontrollable male sexuality. We tell them to watch how they dress, lest they wake the beast. We tell them "some guys can't control themselves"--not won't, but can't. We tell them to be careful what they start, because they'll be expected to finish it. Hell, way too often we outright tell them that they have no right to withdraw consent once sex has started.

My response to myths like this, more and more, is "shit, if I believed that, I'd never have sex with a man again." I wonder if the story would change if more guys realized that saying "if a woman gets me turned on, she'd better be ready to go all the way" is the same as saying "getting me turned on is dangerous, better not take the risk."

Source: The Pervocracy

Anyone here wish women felt sex with men was more risky rather than less? Show of hands here? If not then is it really worth perpetuating the dominant paradigm of men as the obligatory, reflex-driven, and therefore high-risk "sex" class." In exchange for what? A marginally higher chance of receiving grudging pity sex of some sort? Whee!


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"Do Men Know When They're In Love?" Seriously? On the Difference Between Knowing and Sharing What You Know

Posted by figleaf on Tue, 2012-08-07 18:33

Yikes! Check out this week's "wise guys" question from (justifiably) anonymous Em & Lo reader

Advice from three of EMandLO.com’s guy friends. This week they answer the following: “Do guys know when they’re in love?“

Source: Today on EMandLO.com

Do we know when we’re in love?

Is this a trick question?

There’s sort of a difference between feeling something and admitting it. But that’s not the same thing, at all, at all, as not knowing it at all.

So. Short answer? Um. Yeah.

More could and probably has been written about why men might be so reluctant to admit it. Even more could and should be written, preferably focusing on outside social, economic, and gender-convention pressures that overload such admissions with all manner of social expectations.

But actual love? Yeah, men know what that is, we know when we feel it. We definitely know what it’s like to feel it and worry that it might not be reciprocated.

I will say that one thing men, and women, don’t seem to know very well is that “love” is not the same thing as “validation.” You know that really, really over-the-top-stupid Eagles lyric from the 1970s that goes “I want to know if your sweet love is going to save me?” The one sung to a complete stranger in a truck? The one the singer would like to have become the eighth woman on his “mind?” At least in western civilization that little rascal’s the source of all kinds of interpersonal anguish, humiliation, and alienation from “bridezillas” to “no-strings” sex. But validation doesn’t really have anything to do with love.

Let’s put it this way. Pretty much all human beings, not just men, not just women, know when they’re in love. What we’re missing is knowing what to do about it when we feel it.

Note: See the corresponding, and equally goofy question "do women know when they're horny?" Some times you get the feeling it's gender construction all the way down. "No-sex" class much? (Remember, in the dominant paradigm of the "no-sex" class, men are assumed to be only about sex while women are assumed to be only about love or romance.)


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