gender assumptions

Candice Wing (and Me) on Myths of Why Older Men Leave Their Older Partners

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2012-01-14 00:22

Candice Wing says

I’ve met a good many mature men looking for affairs and divorced men looking for a second wife. None of them have said – “oh dear me, my wife is old and fat and thus unattractive and therefore I feel compelled to seek a younger and therefore more attractive option”.

Source: Candidly Candice

She goes on to list real reasons men have told her for separating from their partners

  • Wife does not want to have sex with me or wife does not want to have enough sex with me.
  • Wife does not like me and does not have sex with me.
  • We are not compatible and I am looking for more than just boring sex.
  • Wife is not affectionate.
  • Wife is boring in bed and generally boring.
  • Wife is a cranky harpy.
  • Wife is lazy and boring with poor grooming and presentation.
  • I (or wife) want to divorce.

You can read the whole thing yourself, and if you do you'll get her simple one-paragraph explanation of why the vast majority of men remain perfectly attached to their partners.

Candice has been writing a lot about her own experiences sex, love, and aging. This is another great post along those lines.

While, sure, some people (not just men) really do lose interest specifically over their partner's looks, it happens at any age. And if it happens at any age then emphasizing one age over another is just stereotype reinforcement.

Meanwhile the other reasons you list are much more plausible, particularly for very long-term relationships. Although, hmm, now that I'm thinking about it even that shows up more predictably at certain points in a relationship than at certain ages. For instance I seem to recall there's a spike in divorce rates at the 21-22 year mark whether the couple marries in their late teens or mid 40s. And if you just think about it for a minute, if some people in their 40s find their flames going out while others in their 40s find themselves igniting, then age probably isn't the cut-off factor young people, hack novelists, and pop social scientists keep claiming it is.

Either way I agree with Candice that it's way more complicated than the popular but too-pat stories about husbands leaving because their partners "lose their looks" post-menopause. In fact it's so complicated it might not be happening for specific age-related reasons at all.

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Why Adding Men to the New DOJ Rape Reporting Standards Will Increase the Number of "Gray Area" Victims and Why It's a Good Thing

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2012-01-09 15:19

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

One more thing about the DOJ's belated decision to remove gender of perpetrators and victims from its definition of rape.

I'd just add that there's more than a "completist" benefit to more uniform reporting and response to sexual assault and rape committed by men against women, women against men, men against men, and women against women.* One glaring problem over the last three or four decades has been that apples-to-oranges reporting has made it difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons.

A lot of the so-called "gray areas" of sexual assault and rape -- the social pressure, emotional bullying, taking advantage of the intoxicated, misuse of authority and other power gradients, domestic-partner assault and intimidation, etc. -- have been even more poorly understood in the context of male victims than of female victims.

For years women's groups have struggled to have crimes committed in these so-called "gray area" taken seriously.  It's been even harder to get similar crimes against men taken seriously.  Imbalanced records keeping have exacerbated this, with the result that the extent of the problems of sexual coercion, for both men and women, has been hard to clarify.

We understand pretty clearly that, for women, sexual assault is a lot more than strangers getting the drop on their victims and committing violent penetration (or, in some states, attempted penetration) in the canonical points of entry.  For instance it's generally (if not quite universally) understood that women can be victims of date rape and acquaintance rape, that they can be assaulted while incapacitated, that they can be peer-pressured in ways that amount to coercion.

If nothing else anti-feminists and other boys-will-be-boys apologists demonstrate sophisticated understanding when denying that these non-jump-out-of-the-bushes assaults should be considered assaults.

But outside certain parts of the law-enforcement and assault-awareness communities most people still think of sexual assaults and rape of men in terms of... strangers getting the drop on their victims and committing violent penetration of the canonical points of entry.

Even when it comes to something seemingly as clear-cut as prison assault and rape the narrative relies heavily on the "trapped in a cell with a giant prisoner... his name is 'Bubba'" narratives.

In fact in prison, as in the outside world, sexual assault of men by other men, and of women by other women, are more likely to be "gray area" assaults than the violent assaults of stereotype.  (And obviously "gray area" assaults can be as socially and psychologically as problematic for victims as violent assaults.)

This double standard has been particularly frustrating for men's activists interested in prison reform -- on the one hand they've had to confront stereotypical indifference (or juvenile-humor-like glee!) about rape in detention while simultaneously wrestling with nominal allies who dispute that so-called "gray area" rape is rape at all.

The new, revised standards should help clarify that considerably.

It should also help clarify the nominally eternal argument that sexual predators are almost exclusively male and that victims are almost exclusively either female or minor males.

I imagine that now that the major statistics-gathering institution has correctly broadened its definitions we'll see first, an increase in overall numbers of rapes and assaults and also, second, a fair amount of convergence on the numbers of male and female victims and perpetrators.

I believe these new more clear and more universal acknowledgment of the field of perpetrators and victims is important is that it'll enlarge the pool of people interested in doing something about sexual coercion.  It's been too easy to treat it like a "women's rights" issue (as if that was a bad thing) or a "prison rights" issue (as if that made it better) and into a human rights issue.  The sooner people start getting that anybody can be a victim the sooner we can seriously begin to reduce the overall rates of sexual assault and rape.

And finally, as I've often said, since shocking numbers of perpetrators turn out to themselves have previously been victims taking all forms of rape seriously will help reduce a much-overlooked pool of potential or future perpetrators.

* Recall that most trans people identify as men or women.

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Hmm... Despite the Androgynous Voice Siri is Still a Boy

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Fri, 2011-12-02 09:45

Jamelle Bouie hits the nail on the head when it comes to why, exactly, Apple's artificially "intelligent" voice recognition software is more adroit about finding strip joints than reproductive health services: it's got a lot to do with who provides the data-combing infrastructure, and the online data infrastructure, the Siri engine relies on.

In all likelihood, Siri was developed and optimized by a team of all dudes or mostly dudes. And while they made sure to include things that were gender-neutral (like mental health services), there was no effort to approach Siri from the perspective of a woman user. Indeed, reproductive health is a classic male blind spot — it’s women who are “supposed” carry the responsibility for contraceptives. Men, in general, get a pass. The problem with Siri isn’t that the programmers hate women, it’s that they weren’t even on the radar.

Given the extent to which women are underrepresented in the tech industry, you could almost say that this — or something like it — was bound to happen. What’s more, we can expect it to happen again. It might not be Apple, but as long as the background sexism of Silicon Valley remains undisturbed — and reinforced by the industry’s illusion of meritocracy — we can assume that some company will do something else to alienate women.

Source: TAPPED

 

All the lip service in the world, in fact all the good will in the world, won't help the gender blind. Another good example, a software company I worked for in the 1980s paid a branding company on the order of a million dollars to come up with a name for one of their flagship products, one that had been carefully selected for its positive, all-business connotations in multiple languages across multiple continents.

Minutes after they announced the result of their months-long effort the two or three women on the 30-40 person team sent email around saying something like "you realize that's almost exactly the same spelling and pronunciation as a major American tampon brand, right?" No one else on the team had noticed, probably because, being men, none of them had ever consumed those products or even likely shopped down the grocery store aisles where such products are sold. The company went with a different name.

I can't vouch for the consulting firm but whatever else you could say about my employers, neither the company nor the product team leads were malevolently misogynistic. Instead they were just desperately clueless about a thoroughly ordinary element in the lives of roughly 60% of their target demographic!

Anyway, Bouie's right -- as long as women are underrepresented in the production side of the tech industry the industry's going to continue giving itself these unforced errors, own goals, and public-relations black eyes. Fortunately there's a relatively easy way to fix the problem, and at least to some extent it's slowly fixing itself. But even with the best of intentions this is a great illustration of how in the absence of active initiatives institutional inertia will continue to weigh the industry down.

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A Not-Recommended Solution to Writer's Block, Oh, Plus Reflections on Gender and "Crotch Shot" Self-Photography

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2011-11-13 12:53

It's often observed by college students that one is most inclined to clean one's room when one should be writing one's term papers. Similarly ones term papers urgently demand attention to the precise degree that one's room needs cleaning.

This morning I have been doubly productive -- not only cleaning to the uttermost depths of the refrigerator but also knocking out posts with aplomb. I have not, however, made an inch of progress on a project that a) I'll actually get paid to do that is b) due Monday morning. :-P

Meanwhile, though, I might as well mention something I've been meaning to write about in greater detail for several weeks. In one of my whirlwind patrols of the Tumblr erotic self-photograpy circuit I've started to notice more and more women seem to be picking up the vulva equivalent of male cock-shot syndrome. While increasing numbers of women seem to be engaging in this allegedly exclusively male behavior I don't know if they're yet emailing them to random recipients on dating sites. But I sort of imagine that as time passes and social permissions equalize we'll probably start seeing a little more of women doing it.

Another observation about the male-cock-shot syndrome. Just as not all women are likely to start exclusively posting 8x10 color glossies of their vulvas, it turns out that neither do most men!

It also occurs to me that, gender narratives notwithstanding, a lot of men may have been sending out those photos for the same reason women seem to have started doing it. Because they can, sure. But also not so much because they're aggressive or even utterly, esthetically clueless. I think instead it's because they imagine that everyone else will be as fascinated by the poster's locus of erotic pleasure as the posters themselves tend to be.

Well.

Duty calls.

Oh, not that duty though! I can't work on my paid, near-deadline project now, oh no. Now I have to go shopping for the week!

After that I may have to mop the roof! :-P

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Rejecting No-Shave November But Not the Cause it Was Originally Meant to Benefit: Prostate Cancer Research

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2011-11-02 17:11

Cartoon from XKCD. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo Randall Munroe of XKCD. Used under a Creative Commons license.

According to this much up-voted (1488 up, 496 down) Urban Dictionary entry for "No Shave November"

No Shave November

To not partake in the use of a razor for the entire month of November.

This month has the effect of categorizing men, most of whom will have a girlfriend who disapproves and will counter by offering "No Sex November" as well. The pussies will cave within the first week and shave. The candidates will go the whole month without shaving. But the real men among us will not only not shave but will have sex anyway, once again proving the theory that women are always wrong.

Source: Urban Dictionary

The cool thing about no-shave November is the original idea was necessarily intended to benefit men: a fund raiser pledge for prostate cancer research.  And that's really, really great.

I mean prostate cancer is still kills 30,000 men a year. It killed Frank Zappa. It killed Egyptian mummies. It's highly problematic in the detection phase and treatment-choice phases. There are appalling side effects for both male victims and their partners.

The bad thing is how weird people get about whether women (who in much of the world shave far more of their ancillary hair than do men) are held up to either scorn, as in the above (unofficial!) definition, or else held up as "ew, gross, legs only, no pits" or "women should do no-makeup November" or "LADIES, please DON'T" to...

eh, just a bunch more unnecessary crap for...

what, again, was intended to benefit a genuinely worthy cause.

So just because I'm taking a pass on the "holiday," and recommending that others do likewise, I just donated $100 to the Institute for Prostate Cancer Research Fund at the University of Washington instead. And I recommend that others, including you, do likewise. Thanks!

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Problems With "Ownership" in Relationships: How the Concept of "Your Boyfriend" Amplifies Not Only Arrogance but Insecurity

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2011-09-04 16:32

Holly is talking about not just the down and outers emergency room patients who, as she picks beer-bottle glass out of their scalps drunkenly tell her "Gosh, ain't you as sweet thing... do you have a boyfriend?"

I just say "yes." But that's a partial answer, because they asked the wrong question. They asked something like five different kinds of the wrong question.

The full answer is: "Yes, but he doesn't care who I sleep with, but I bloody well care who I sleep with!"

Perhaps I'm reading too much into the drunken advances of the sort of guy who tries to hit on the person who's picking glass out of his wounds, but it unnerves me that my boyfriend's right to my body is counted as more important than my own, even when he's not around. They're trying to establish whether I'm owned, not whether I'm interested.

Source: The Pervocracy

She doesn't say, but I'd like to imagine, that drunken women patients in similar circumstances ask Holly's male colleagues similar questions about whether they have girlfriends. Based on my experiences as a beer-bar bartender that catered to the young, hip, and alive crowd only at night, I'm guessing that too does at least occasionally happen.

Aside: This does not mean "oh well, then if women really do ask men then it's all hunky dory. In particular if you read the comments on Holly's post it's pretty clear that while women sometimes do pull the ownership card, even the drunken well-too-bad-you're-"taken" version, it's rarely done in the context of what amounts to an extension of street harassment.

That said, there really is a sort of general respect for relationship "ownership" that goes beyond respect for particular individuals in those relationships. Since gender is socially constructed I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge that different genders might have different reasons for honoring relationship "ownership." For instance it could be that men want to know because an angry boyfriend might confront him over messing with "his" partner. And it could be that women are just disinclined to mess with another woman's partner for fear that said partner would eventually just mess around with her. And no, seriously, it really could be those things.

I'd just point out that what makes it gendered isn't that men might respond more to one concern than another. What makes it gendered is that outside of gender thinking both concerns -- confrontation with a transgressed partner and the prospect of being run around on in turn -- are exactly equally probable outcomes regardless of the sex of either or both parties. (Because, seriously, relationship ownership transcends sex, orientation, identity, etc.)

Anyway, years and years ago, maybe as far back as the late 1980s, one of the local mainstream newspapers briefly carried a syndicated arts-and-leisure section columnist who focused on intentional single life. At one point he wrote a column about how the implications of saying "my boyfriend" or "my wife," or "my date for the evening," or even "my friend" are problematic in terms of presumption and ownership. He said it would probably be a better idea to just say "this is John, we're married" or "Joan and I went out last night."

I can't remember if the columnist said it outright, but I was really struck by the notion that speaking about your relationships in terms of shared experience rather than possession wasn't just excruciatingly "correct." Instead it also carries the implication that instead of being with you because, well, they're obliged to be because they're "yours," if someone's not a possession they're probably with you because want to be with you.

Call me crazy, here, but this seems like yet another lesson people with experience in polyamory and promiscuity can bring back to the culture of monogamy: in all but the most toxic relationships you're not partners with people because as "your" partner they have to be, any more than (again for the most part) you're partners with someone else not because you're "theirs" but because you actually kind of like, love, have the hots for, are interested in, like being around, and so on.

 

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The Mainstream Feminist Case For Not Tolerating Castration Jokes in the Catherine Kieu Becker Case

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2011-07-16 07:40

Ok, so this is fairly long post inspired by a NSWATM post. It's about the question of whether someone who thinks him or herself a feminist could ever imagine there could ever be a circumstance where Becker's actions could be justified in contemporary, non-fringe feminist terms. The answer isn't just no in humanitarian terms, nor is it just no in never-blame-the-victim terms. It's no in terms of 40 years of feminist activism!

While pondering the problem of blaming the victim in response to limited but loud reactions to the Catherine Kieu Becker, DoctorMindBeam said

You might’ve heard about Catherine Kieu Becker, the woman who recently attacked and mutilated her husband, apparently without provocation. If you haven’t, here’s the short version of the story: They were estranged, and he had filed for divorce. She drugged him, tied him up, waited for him to wake up, cut off his penis, turned on the garbage disposal, and threw it in.

...

We talk a lot about not blaming the victims of rape, sexual harassment, assault, etc. So why is it suddenly acceptable to assume that this guy cheated on her or did something else to provoke it? Not even mentioning that even then, this action is heinous and indefensible. But why are people making that assumption?

It started for me on Facebook. I wrote about the story, briefly, and one of my friends said something to the effect of, “Why do I think that he did something to provoke this?” This morning, it spread over to The Pursuit of Harpyness. Now, I want to don kid gloves for this section. I discovered the blog because they recently gave [NSWATM] props, and so I don’t want to assume ill intent and slap them in the face. But ladies, seriously…

The victim reportedly told the police that her husband—who had initiated divorce proceedings—”deserved it.” Maybe. Maude knows, I’ve been keeping a list of men I think deserve it for some time now (yeah, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, you’re at the top).

No. Just, fucking, no. No one deserves to have their genitals brutally mutilated.

Source: No Seriously, What About Teh Menz?

First of all this is an obvious point: no blaming victims, m'kay?  No speculating about why they should be blamed.  No assuming the victim must have done something to deserve it.

Secondly, as DMB points out, in civil society no individual acting alone has the right to render another person unconscious and then mutilate them even if their victim really is a very bad person.

But third of all?  Almost no matter how you look at it, even if you could construct a case where Becker's husband "deserved" it, in contemporary non-fringe feminist terms Becker's assault is no cause at all for feminist celebration.  In fact quite the opposite!

A few years ago I took a continuing-ed course that included a feminism 101 section (the other two were sex education and communications. Best non-degree course I've ever taken!)

Anyway, at one point the women's studies professor brought up the Lorena Bobbett castration case and pointed out that contrary to popular imagination and conservative Senator's wive's bravado (“I’m a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary,” Wendy Vitter told Newhouse News. “If he does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me.”) most actual feminists were horrified by Bobbett's act. Here's why, here's why this is relevant to the Becker case, and here's why anyone who claims to be a feminist yet celebrates rather than abhors husband castration is a really bad feminist.

My professor pointed out, correctly, that instead of trying to escape an abusive relationship by cutting off her husband's dick she instead could have contacted a number of hotlines, agencies, support groups, and shelters, and relied on a huge array of policies, procedures, and laws that were available and well-publicized in her area.

Instead, in keeping with her deeply religiously-conservative upbringing she didn't initiate divorce proceedings against her husband the first time he came home after sleeping with prostitutes. Or the second. Or the Nth. Because of her upbringing she didn't dial 9-1-1 the first time he physically assaulted her. Or the second. Or the Nth.

In fact, when she'd gotten literally to the end of her rope and began contemplating, and then fantasizing, and then resolving to violently disable her husband in hopes of being able to get away she didn't instead contact one of the many public or private resources that could have helped her non-violently divorce her husband. She didn't try to locate of the shelters that would have helped her quietly establish a new life.

Instead she took it upon herself to wait till her husband had incapacitated himself with alcohol, cut off his dick with a kitchen knife, jumped in the car with some belongings, and drove... not really all that far because she didn't have a plan, didn't have resources, and just plain had no idea there was any real way out to begin with!

In other words, said my professor, there were multiple points where a feminist would have decided she wasn't going to put up with her husband's shit, there were multiple points where a feminist would have known she didn't have to put up with his shit, and there were multiple resources that a feminist would have known she could have taken advantage of rather than put up with his shit, and multiple resources that a feminist would have resorted to long, long, long before.

In other words, Lorena Bobbett did was a triumph of anti-feminism and not a feminist act at all.

Now this long digression is relevant to this post for two reasons:

First, it invalidates any hypothetical assumptions that Catherine Kieu Becker's actions could somehow be "justifiable." Thanks to the hard legal cases, legislative action, social activism, and educational outreach of mainstream feminists the answer is no. Even if there was any substance to speculations or assumptions about abuse (so far at least there isn't) then Becker could, and should, have made use of any of those legal, accepted, and entirely non-violent ways to exit her relationship and protect herself from her husband. Instead her decision not use any of those resources but instead to commit violence invalidates any possible justification within a feminist framework.

Second, any actual feminist who imagines Becker or Bobbett's in terms of "delightful as the thought is of some particularly loathsome men having their junk cut off…” is at best alienated from or ignorant of the achievements of contemporary feminism, or, at worst completely contemptuous of it.

So!

Even if there was ever any justification for blaming the victim of a violent crime Bobbett or Becker's actions would still be a repudiation of feminism rather than a feminist act. Consequently anyone who entertains fantasies of justifiable castration rather than speculating instead about the long chain of missed opportunities to avail one's self of feminist resources is just looking at these cases from at least a pre-feminist and possibly an anti-feminist perspective.

I mean, let's go waaay back up to the top of this too-long comment to that quote I pulled from Sen. David Vitter's arch-conservative wife Wendy Vitter:

I’m a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary,” Wendy Vitter told Newhouse News. “If he does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me.

That's not feminism talking.

Bottom line: do not ever assume that someone who either commits castration (or other violent assaults) on her husband is a feminist. Don't ever assume that someone who approves of such an act is a critically-conscious feminist either. For the most part the clowns and asshats we see on The View and elsewhere around the cable networks are going to have a lot more in common with Wendy Vitter than Shulamith Firestone. And not to put too fine a point on it but the trolls and "harpies" around the blogosphere who've been nodding approvingly have far, far more in common with Spearhead-style MRAs than they ever have or ever will have with mainstream feminism.

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"Everybody Knows" Men Think of Sex More Often Than Women. What We Now Know is More Complicated

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2011-06-13 14:31

Assuming you're a carbon-based life form you've probably heard the common wisdom that men think about sex more often than women. Common wisdom varies but usually it's every six minutes for men. And while common wisdom is pretty much completely silent on how often women think about sex it's always a foregone conclusion that it's not as much.

Anyway, like a lot of common wisdom that "everyone knows" because it reinforces common... um... stereotypes the actual difference was just too well-known for anyone to bother to go back and check.

Until now. Via Patrick Morgan a preliminary study titled "Sex on the Brain?: An Examination of Frequency of Sexual Cognitions as a Function of Gender, Erotophilia, and Social Desirability" tried to confirm what "everybody knows." And discovered instead that while men do think about it more frequently compared to women they also think about all their other bodily needs (food and sleep as well as sex) more frequently. The upshot evidently (again it's another study conducted by public employees with public grant money that's behind another private paywall) is "it's complicated." Men evidently do body check-ins more frequently than women do, and when they do they think about sex... but they also think about other body needs like food and sleep. Women evidently do check-in less frequently but when they do they think about sex, food, sleep, and other needs in proportions very similar to men.

Anyway, it sounds like in absolute terms men do think of sex more often but proportionately don't think about it more than women do. I don't feel a sufficient urge to know to ask someone to send me an ungated copy of the paper, but I am curious how they feel proportional need-based cognitions is a better metric than absolute numbers.

But they must feel pretty confident about it because the abstract ends with

Overall, erotophilia* was a better predictor of sexual cognition than was sex of participant. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that, although there may be a sex difference in sexual cognitions, it is smaller than is generally thought, and the reporting is likely influenced by sex role expectations.”

Source: Discover Blogs - NCBI ROFL

The next question, especially after a relatively small-scale study like this, would probably be whether there's much variation in erotophilia between men and women. But it's always great when someone takes a closer look at what "everybody knows." As Will Rogers said, "It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so."

* See Cory Silverberg's definition of erotophilia. It's a psychological term for, basically, comfort and interest in sex.

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Students in Co-Ed Dorms Slightly More Likely to Have Sex, More Likely to Have Healthier Sex Too

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2011-06-13 12:33

Photo by Flickr user Desalesuniversit. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo outside co-ed wing of Avent Hall by Flickr user Desales University.
Used under a Creative Commons license.

Reflecting on reactions to news about college students and sex Matthew Yglesias wonders what all the fuss would be about.

As John Garvey explains, “Students in co-ed housing are more likely (55.7%) than students in single-sex dorms (36.8%) to have had a sexual partner in the last year—and more than twice as likely to have had three or more.”

Except strangely Garvey presents this as part of an argument against co-ed dorms. Which is silly. College students are adults. It’s of course true that, thanks to technological change, it’s now important for a large share of young adults to dedicate themselves to additional schooling at an age when traditionally they would have been engaged in full-time back-breaking agricultural labor. But that doesn’t change the fact that a college student is a person fully equipped to enjoy having sex — a fun, affordable, and ecologically sustainable pastime.

Source: Matthew Yglesias

Recalling my own early non-college days and then later college days I'm going to accept the figures at face value but add the very strong caveat that at least as long as there's a choice different kinds of people choose different kinds of housing.  I'd go a step further and suggest that even in schools where only single-sex or only co-ed housing is offered different kinds of people choose different kinds of schools as well.  And finally I'd add that at schools that still have a tradition of in loco parentis younger students (freshmen at least and often sophomores) are probably more closely supervised and more likely to be assigned to single-sex dorms even when both types are available.  And of course contrary to popular belief roughly 50% of college sophomores have not yet had sex (or at least not intercourse) and so unless you're completely wild-eyed and squeamish about sex your studies should control for all of the above.

And finally, whereas there's some small number of students who enter college before age 18 there are scarcely any at all who are still 17 or younger by their Junior years.

I'd like to assume Garvey's sources controlled for obvious stuff like that (I can't tell because his op-ed is behind a Murdoch paywall), but like Yglesias I get the distinct impression that in keeping with Murdoch-publication tendencies Garvey himself sounds too panic stricken about the possibility of adults having

That said, Yglesias is of course 100% correct: the kind of college student most likely to live in mixed housing is an adult, is almost certainly better-socialized to both genders (regardless of his or her individual orientation), and is generally very well equipped to safely and conscientiously decide to have consensual sex with his or her partner(s) of choice when presented with an opportunity. And to both expect to have their decisions to be honored and to honor the decisions of others.

If I can just go one step further out on a limb about co-ed living situations, they tend to present more opportunities for between-sex contact while everyone's completely sober and while people are not likely to be in party/"hookup" mode. With the result that, all else being equal, students in co-ed situations are more likely that segregated ones to form... interesting but not necessarily well-informed opinions about the opposite sex. At least that was my general experience under three circumstances: while living in co-ed apartments with other starving hippies, when working in bars in a big-10 university district when the legal drinking age was still 18 and most students and the single-sex to co-ed housing ratio was around three to one, and much later when I went to college myself and lived in co-ed student housing.

And finally, particularly based on my experience of big-10 single-sex housing students vs later mainly co-ed housing college, there were still instances of sexually abusive situations (by men and women) in co-ed housing they tended to be waaay lower-frequency than with single-sex housing. Even considering factors such as big southern university vs. small northwest college and greater awareness of personal autonomy. The main determinant, in my opinion, was that in housing people of both sexes were in a position to monitor goings on and apply peer pressure and, if necessary, peer intervention when situations began to develop.

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And Rounding Out The Wedding Crashers Demolition: TVTropes.com is Awesome About Thoughtless and Cliche Uses of Rape in Media

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2011-05-29 14:04

ZOMG! While digging further into the convention that rape in popular media is ok when it's women raping men, as in The Wedding Crashers, I ran into a pretty cool, and awesomely level-headed website that deals directly with the issue. It's called, not quite correctly, Television Tropes and Idioms. Not quite correctly, I say, because it covers not just tropes in TV but also movies, comics, and advertising. Also, in a way even better, in anime, hentai, and fan-fic.

What's fun about the site is that while they seem pretty solidly informed about the realities of sexual assault and rape they don't treat the issues as a gender or moral failing, they treat them as the lazy, knee-jerk, graceless, and unskilled writing clichés they almost always are.

Rape Is OK When It Is Female on Male

Obviously if you're watching a scene with a woman tied to a bed while a man forces sex on her, the final act of that movie will involve said man getting shot in the face by Bruce Willis. If, on the other hand, it's a man being tied down and forced into sex by a pretty lady, well, you're watching a wacky romantic comedy. — C. Coville, 6 Romantic Movie Gestures That Can Get You Prison Time, Cracked.com

Rape is a cruel and evil act, beyond kicking the dog or many of the most villainous acts in media. Except when they fall in love with the rapist, of course.

In a number of works, however, there is one other exception: when the victim is a man, and the attacker is a woman.

This kind of rape is often treated as nil since men are stereotyped as having nothing but sex on the brain, always eager for it and cannot be traumatized by sex if it is arousing. Consequently, a man raped by an attractive woman is considered a lucky man and a man being raped by an unattractive woman is comedy gold. Because of this, most examples are from comedies.

Compare Rape Is Okay When It's Female On Female, Rape Is Funny When It Is Male On Male, Rape As Comedy, and Rape Is Okay If It's Divine On Mortal.

Source: Television Tropes and Idioms (note: click through to see myriad links and examples)

So that's pretty straightforward -- right on the money when it comes to easy dismissal of sexual assault on men. (The Wedding Crashers is referenced in the lead quote and mentioned first under "Movies" in very-long list of examples.) And good for them.

But check out the scorn they heap on the fan-fic trope they call Rape Is The New Dead Parents (emphasis in 2nd paragraph mine.)

"It turns out that Darkness, Diabolo, Crab and Goyle's dad was a vampire. He committed suicide by slitting his wrists with a razor. He had raped them and stuff before too. They all got so depressed that they became goffik and converted to Stanism [sic]. —My Immortal

"The rape was thrown in there for good measure." — Bennett The Sage on the above

A lot of amateur writers out there find the tragic backstory appealing. After all, most of the interesting characters didn't get raised in Suburbia, USA with a loving, complete family that cared for them. That's just boring. But Character Development is hard... You mean you have to explain things? But it takes so long to establish mental illness, and physical handicaps would only get in the way. Can't you just say they got raped and be done with it?

Anyway, this is the tendency for writers who are just starting out, or for very lazy writers, often of fanfiction and role playing, but it can appear just about anywhere, to just casually drop rape into their characters' story for Deus Angst Machina or Wangst. Usually found in backstory, but it's not uncommon for rape to happen "on-screen" via two sentences that wouldn't qualify as IKEA Erotica. The writers want to add some dimension of frailty to their character and give a good reason for moodiness, but it's done in such a flimsy and unexplored way that it means... nothing. It's mentioned like mentioning a casual detail on a college application. Perhaps the hallmark of the Sympathetic Sue, this trope tends to evoke kneejerk righteous anger with its use. It takes one of those horrible things which take years to get over, if ever, and turns it into a rather cheap shock.

...

The classical line for this trope is "Jane once got raped when walking home one night [optional:and her parents didn't care]."

Note that this is not merely Rape As Backstory. While it often overlaps, that has its own page and is neutral. Also note that this is not just poorly handled rape; it has to be out of the story's attention within at most a minute and never show up again.

The trope name comes from the fact that Parental Abandonment used to be the stock "tragic background" of badly created characters. Perhaps due to a combination of dead parents being considered cliche by uncaring writers (and less common in Real Life) and the fact that they think rape spares everything short of the character's virginity, it has replaced the dead parents for lazy tragedy.

Physically abusive parents are quickly becoming popular as the go to tragic backstory. Then again, rape is often still involved.

Examples of this in amateur writing are too numerous to list and too forgettable to remember. It still occasionally makes its way into the more dubious works, however. Differentiated from Rape As Drama and Rape As Comedy in that its neither of these. It's just... there.

Before adding an example, please think of whether or not the trope could be removed without impacting the rest of the story any more than 2% requiring a rewrite.

See also how rape is dismissed in Rape Is Okay When It's Female On Female

"in large part based on the idea that lesbian sex is not "real" sex. Men, penises, and penile penetration are central to sexual relations; without a penis involved, there can be no sex, and without sex, there can be no rape. Therefore, anything a woman does to another woman is "not a big deal."

And check out Rape Is Funny When It Is Male On Male

But male rape is funny... At least to the guy doing the raping. — Theory of Everything

It's not.

A subtrope of Rape As Comedy. Usually played for laughs when a known straight character is hit on by another man, especially one that's physically larger.

Even when it's not supposed to be funny, it's still considered funny. Scenes like the outright rapes shown in films such as Deliverance, Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption are obviously supposed to be horrific; however they are routinely snickered at, rather than cried over as with male-on-female rape-scenes.

Anyway, it's a cool site throughout.

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