Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Following up on my previous post about problems with blaming the victim: You might have noticed that throughout the post it looked like I was assuming all rape and sexual assaults are committed by men.

Actually, no, I’m not making that assumption at all — if for no other reason then because when I was roughly pre-school age I was physically sexually assaulted by a roughly middle-school aged girl. (And, of course, there are plenty of other reasons.) I also wasn’t making that assumption even the vast preponderance of sexual assaults really actually happen to be perpetrated by men. I wasn’t even making an assumption because narratives about male predation are even more prevalent than actual male predation.

Nope. I made the calculated decision to speak about men in the context of “she asked for it” victim blaming because…

you ready?...

When a woman sexually assaults or rapes someone — a man, another woman, a child, whatever, you know what they don’t say?

They don’t say “well, the victim was asking for it.”

They don’t say “well, she just couldn’t help herself.”

You know, the way they do when a man sexually assaults or rapes someone.

What do they say instead when a woman does it? That she’s mentally ill? That she’s traumatized from her own abuse (as, incidentally, I strongly suspect was the case with the girl who assaulted me.) That, in other words, she was broken, damaged, crazy, or otherwise not an otherwise perfectly normal person who’s hormones just got away from her in the face of irresistable provocation.

In other words when a woman does it there’s never any question about who’s at fault. No question that she deliberated, made a decision, and then acted on that decision. No question that it’s the assailant’s fault and not her victim.

Yes, yes, if you thought about that for very long you notice the bitter irony that whether as victim or assailant rape is always held that the woman is at fault. Believe me that hasn’t escaped me but while it’s not a small issue it’s one that’s heavily dependent on the main point of this post:

Notice how the characterizations of women perpetrators do not mitigate the assumptions about men’s inherent weakness and sub-human dependability and responsibility inherent in the standard “blame the victim” scripts mentioned in the preceding post: in one important regard women are held responsible for their victimization because men aren’t expected to be responsible in the first place.

And, once again, they say feminists hate men!

Julie Bindel, writing in The Guardian has a number of interesting points about a research project she participated in by interviewing men who volunteered and/or otherwise agreed to discuss being customers of prostitutes.

The most interesting point in her article, by far?

One of the most interesting findings was that many believed men would “need” to rape if they could not pay for sex on demand. One told me, “Sometimes you might rape someone: you can go to a prostitute instead.” Another put it like this: “A desperate man who wants sex so bad, he needs sex to be relieved. He might rape.” I concluded from this that it’s not feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself who are responsible for the idea that all men are potential rapists – it’s sometimes men themselves.

She said it here.

One really, seriously cool thing about Bindel’s article? She links to an ungated copy of the research report(pdf)! That’s very cool.

One reason it’s cool is that if you read the report you can see stuff like, oh, say, who the co-authors and sponsors of the study were. And one of whom was the not always exactly correct activist Catharine A. MacKinnon. Which lets you know to pick up a grain of salt while reading.

Skepticism notwithstanding, while there’s a distinct possibility that the quotes were cherry-picked there’s no reason on earth to doubt they found men who actually said those things.

Not least because it’s close to conventional wisdom: lots, and lots, and lots of people believe men are such borderline-criminal, verging-on-rapist, impulse-control-of-a-three-year-old-child animals.

Oddly, as Bindel points out, a demoralizing number of men believe it.

Lest one leap to accuse contemporary feminists for spreading that belief I’ll just point out the idea substantially predates contemporary feminism, which only really cropped up in the late 1960s. Whereas the idea that prostitution prevents rape was already current in the 1360!

Anyway, Bindel’s quotes nicely illustrate that whatever minor problems feminism might have with men it’s usually nothing compared to the abiding misandry of non-feminists and anti-feminists.

(Clue: Of course most men are actually perfectly capable of controlling their urges. Hello! Masturbation?)

Wow. So I’ve been bumping into more and more MRA/Pickup-Artist/anti-feminist bloggers with sites named stuff like “Misandry Review” and “Rebuking Feminism.” All I can say is they see the world really, really differently from me.

What’s particularly funny, or would be if it wasn’t so breathtakingly tragic, is that for all their anger and, often, anguish they go to enormous lengths to uphold the paradigm that with their own words, over and over, is crushing them.

One guy, who seemed to think I had to be a woman because I was boosting feminism, was doing this weird self-defeating gloating at the fact that the more equality “us” women got the fewer partners we were going to get. Because, if I understood him correctly, a 2003 paper he cited on what I call the “Maureen Dowd effect” proves that well-educated, successful women can’t find partners “better” than them and so… they don’t find partners at all.

The paper, Education and Hypergamy, and the “Success Gap” (pdf) by University of Washington economics Prof. Elaina Rose, does mention the effect, and cites Maureen Dowd in particular…

But nowhere in the paper does Rose say women want it that way. One particularly chilling reference in her paper:

[A]nthropologist Barbara Miller [1981] studied areas of rural north India and found that strong pressures for hypergamy implied a lack of
suitable husbands for high caste girls. This created a disequilibrium that was resolved through female infanticide.

Which sort of leaves you wondering why these guys are angry at women and not, say, the parents who think so little of their own daughters they’ll murder them to boost the resale value of those who survive. Because wow, it ain’t feminism that supports that.

On a far cheerier note, Rose points out that the tendency for women to practice “hypergamy” (defined as “the tendency for women to marry up with respect to education or other characteristics associated with economic well-being”) isn’t as immutable as… MRAs, sociobiologists, pickup-artists, and other anti-feminists seem to think it is.

[E]conomic theory can explain hypergamy as the outcome of a model of specialization and exchange of the traditional form – i.e.,
one in which men specialize in the labor market and women specialize in home production. Gains from marriage will be greater for couples who are hypergamous with respect to labor market productivity, or characteristics associated with productivity.

...

[F]indings in a number of recent papers suggest that the role of specialization and exchange in marriage has declined. As the source of gains from marriage shifts from specialization and exchange to production and consumption of public goods, hypergamy, and the associated success gap, would be expected to decline. Moreover, transformation of social norms from those that encourage hypergamy towards those favoring more symmetric matchings will tend to reduce hypergamy, and the success gap, as well.⁵

⁵ Goldstein and Kenney report that women with college education are more relatively more likely to be married in 1980 than in 1960.

In other words what Rose is saying is that yeah, when the entire economic system is geared to keep women economically and socially dependent on men women tend to try and maximize economic well-being by the only mechanism available to them. But a page later she points out that that system appears that that kind of “marrying for money” diminishes as women become more economically and socially independent. (And, indeed, that marriage rates actually rose as more women completed college!)

And yet these MRA guys are so sure invested in the “marry for money” status quo that crushes them down to the dimensions of wallets that… they’re actively opposed to anything like feminism that might make life better for them, more fair for them, and make them more likely to experience loving relationships with their equals instead of resentment-based relationships with artificially-subordinated human property.

I don’t get it.

In fact, don’t get it? My life is almost the opposite of that whole “women only ‘buy’ up” meme!

For one thing the mythic male/money/seduction thing never really worked for me. I had more sex, more often back when I was an always-hungry, homeless, long-haired, unemployable, usually-needing-a-shower high-school dropout — with a Gomer Pyle hillbilly accent no less — that at any other time in my life. Back then every woman was “high-status” compared to me, but… none of them seemed to mind. Including a statewide “Junior Miss” pageant winner, a diplomat’s daughter, girls from lower, middle, and upper-class families, or girls who were as down and out as me.

You know what they almost all had in common though? (Besides bad taste in men I mean?) They all had the idea that they’d be able to live independently some day and so they generally weren’t as fretful about picking the “wrong” guy who might not turn out to be on the “right” track to support them.

Oh yeah, and since they had ambitions of independence and partnering with the men of their choice instead of driven to choose “walking wallets” out of necessity they weren’t worried so much about their “reputations” and so they tended to be a lot wilder in bed. More experiemental. More up for new stuff. More willing to say what they liked, and more willing to try it again if they did.

Sure, I occasionally was short-term partners with women who seriously joked with each other about marrying someone rich so they could “lie flat on my back drinking Cutty Sark and eating bon-bons for the rest of my life.” And they’re fun in bed too, don’t get me wrong. But they were way more likely to say “I’m not that kind of girl” than “nah, that doesn’t turn me on.”

In other words, while MRAs seem convinced that men are such disagreeable life-forms that women will only hang with them out of freaking, shrieking greed or desperation, but never love, friendship, or pure, unadulterated horniness.

Shrug. If I was a woman, which once again (feels in pants… nope) I’m not, I wouldn’t want to hook up with a guy who felt that way about himself either, and I sure wouldn’t want to hang out with a guy who felt that way about women.

So. What I keep asking myself about those guys is what’s your plan? You can sit there and stew over how you can’t buy your way into a woman’s bed anymore, can’t force your way into a woman’s bed anymore, and aren’t allowed to lie your way into a woman’s bed anymore either. And you can fume and call that femifacism or castrating communism or whatever. Or you can look around and take a look at who’s the bigger threat to your manhood — the women who just want to be treated like people, or whoever the sam hill it was filled your brain with “no sex for you unless you earn it?”

Thing is they could “reprogram” every feminist on the planet and it wouldn’t change their self-imposed misery a single iota. In fact they could moon-rocket every woman on earth and it wouldn’t change a thing. Because it ain’t women creating their misery. And it ain’t feminism that’s increasing it. More than women ever will it’s in their power to open their eyes to who’s really at the source of their (self) oppression.

“HNT – Sheets 007” from my “Sheets” photoset on Flickr.
Also, why these photos?

Trolling for trolls in the comments section on a Salon.com article about synthesizing sperm from stem cells Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon uncovers incontrovertible evidence of the “no-sex” class mentality.

Misogynist #3 spouts the same line:

Let’s be honest. Women hate our guts. Always have, always will.

If we didn’t buy them stuff or pay their bills, they’d off us in a second. As I’ve said before, we’re just pack animals for them.

In the fantasy world of misogynists, women do not hold jobs, have checking accounts, or even quite understand how to use money.  There is also a strong suspicion that women have as little interest in sex as we have in having our own money. 

She said it here.

All I can say is bwahahahahaha, yeah right.

First of all do they have any idea how many hetero women financially support barkingly abusive deadbeat live-in husbands and boyfriends? Not to stereotype or anything but check out who shows up at AlAnon meetings. And, not to stereotype even more or anything but based on the clientele of the beer bar I used to work in just down the hill from a nursing school what kind of bastions of earning power do women nurses and nursing students tend to take up with? There’s gotta be something else about men besides bill-paying. And I don’t think it’s air guitar and channel-surfing. And I think it’s this thing called “heterosexuality.” Which includes the word “sexuality.”

The Two Rules of Desire show up as well.

Or, in Misogynist #4’s opinion, women have no real interest in sex with men, either.

When women get scar©e men want them more but I think if men were irrelevant to the functioning of the society women would lose interest altogether. It is not at all clear that a male body is intrinsically compellingly interesting to women simply because it is a male body (and mind).

Again, you see this insistence that all men are basically alike, which is their way of saying, “I cannot help being a megaton asshole.  That’s how men are.” That this single asshole personality for all men theory is not true is irrelevant—-we are talking about men who believe that women are seeking to eliminate men altogether, that women have no real interest in sex, and that women have no use for money of our own. 

If you note that in the by-far most popular photos my Flickr account there’s nowhere (definitely nowhere comfortable anyway!) to put a wallet I’m… pretty sure Amanda’s right and the headlines (and the trolls) she quotes are extremely wrong that

“A world without need for men,” “Sperm from stem cells put men on notice” and “British scientists grow ARTIFICIAL sperm in a lab (so who needs a man?)” and “Chaps doomed as lab grows sperm.”

Who needs a man? Like “who needs chocolate” or “who needs beer” or “who needs an iPhone” or “who needs a long, slow buildup to a toe-curling orgasm” that’s asking the wrong question. Yeah, yeah, “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” That’s just a refutation of the notion that society has to be structured so it’s basically impossible for women to survive, let alone thrive, without material, martial, and marital support from men. But the trap with that is that when they system’s rigged to make you need men you’re going to get anger, resentment, frustration, depression, depressed libido, “settling,” disappointment and… pretty much every other symptom of “the war of the sexes.”

The trick though, as Amanda has pointed out elsewhere, is that unlike fish, who not only don’t need bicycles but don’t want them, heterosexual women wh don’t need men have this shouldn’t-be-surprising tendency to enjoy us quite a lot.