Image from the Babeland product page for the
“Monkey Spanker” toy for men.Megan of Jezebel brings up a great point!

A male colleague of mine remarked to be recently that writing about vibrators is a Jezebel scribe’s rite of passage. And, it’s true, we totally write about vibrators a lot; in fact, I popped my own vibrator-story cherry not that long ago! It is a rare day, however, that any of us writes about male masturbatory aides — and, when we have, we usually focus on Real Dolls and how vaguely disturbing we find the men who are into them. But then I saw this article in The Independent today about the surge in men purchasing all sorts of things to their dicks into or up their butts, and I realized that it wasn’t just sex dolls I find vaguely disturbing… and that that’s kind of sexist of me.

I mean, why is it that the mental image I have of a guy who utilizes sex toys is someone kind of creepy? Is this fleshlight any stranger-looking than a rabbit, really? Why is it that I am fine with a guy jerking off with his hands, but if he’s jerking off in something I’m vaguely disturbed? Why is it not remotely strange to me that men would buy things to shove up their butts — or to have their partners shove up their butts — but, still, looking at this picture of something the would stick their dicks in, some reptilian part of my brain goes “Ewww.”? Even the author of the article, Tanya Gold, admits to masturbating with mechanical aids, but seems to find male sex toys — from the pocket pussies to the pussy-in-a-jar devices to the blow-up and real dolls — disturbing in their appearance and what they say about the men who utilize them.

She discusses the issue further here.

I’m not sure sexism is the right word for the impulse for judging men’s masturbation, ahem, differently from women’s but she’s right about the double standard.

“Blossom Sleeve” toy for men.I’m the first to agree that the, um, highly stylized attempts at representing disembodied vulvas is disquieting and probably disturbing to people with the actual parts. That could be projection on my part though because I’m disquieted by the no-less “realistic” disembodied erections you see in a lot of sex toys for women. Fortunately many sex toys, for both men or women, aren’t really anatomical at all — consider the very novel, but allegedly quite effective “Monkey Spanker” toy for men in the photo, above.** But I digress…

I can think of two other reasons why we might feel more squeamish about male masturbation than for women. The first being that for many mainstream cultures, now and through much of history, have (believe it or not) placed a huge emphasis on male chastity. Several major religions and related medical traditions.*** (See Ayurvedic medicine, for instance.) In the West, from roughly 1825 to 1975, doctors were convinced that ejaculation in general and (male) masturbation in particular were the root causes of tuberculosis, insanity, curvature of the spine. The original Boy Scouts was founded to help divert young male minds from “self pollution.” John Harvey Kellogg invented corn flakes, Charlie Post cooked up Postum and Grape Nuts, and Sylvester Graham invented Graham flour and Graham crackers because they believed bland, whole-fiber foods temper hot lust. And the tradition of non-religious male circumcision was introduced and successfully promoted by physicians because it was believed to inhibit masturbation in boys and men. It was as much an article of medical faith in the late 1800s that “excess” ejaculation was as life-shortening as the (much more well-founded) belief that smoking is life-shortening today. That’s a lot of propaganda, and the late 20th Century, when the idea that masturbation-as-health-hazard was finally put to rest. And, well, perversely it really was the case that due to convention and social pressure those who did masturbate, or admit it, really could be seen as marginal or socially suspect. (Compare it to the reaction today to people who won’t wear seat belts or won’t car-seat their children — at this point if you haven’t gotten the safety message, and can manage to ignore all the dashboard lights, there really is something else going on.) And the late 20th Century just wasn’t that long ago — some of us still remember it quite distinctly. :-) Anyway, that’s one good reason.

“Fleshlight” toy for men.The other is that (soapbox here) the classic feminist construction of women as the sex class has it backwards. In fact it’s more accurate to say women are (prescriptively and proscriptively) supposed to be the restrained, chaste, non-sexual “no-sex” class, whereas men are held to be the reflexive, relentless (every seven minutes!), think-with-the-little-head, fuck-anything-that-moves, fuck-anything-that-*doesn’t*-move (Megan mentions “Real Dolls,” for instance, but drunk-date rape is a lot more problematic) sex class that perpetually threatens the chastity and propriety of “delicate flower,” “hey, my mom was a woman!” femininity. And so male sexuality, while considered utterly predictable, is also a commodity produced in quantities that far exceed demand.

Oh, see also the universally degrading “why buy the cow when the milk is free” philosophy advanced by the patriarchy as a means to induce men to marry… once they’re deemed “worthy” to receive the woman’s father’s consent. Given that Patriarchy functions not only by treating women as domestic livestock but also as a system for controlling men via access to sex, then that system is overridden by what author Neil Stevenson wryly termed “manual override.”

“Aneros Prostate Stimulator”
Oh, and one last thing. Recently, in the last year or so, several women have confided to me that they’re running into more and more men who now prefer masturbation to sex. With them. And whereas tradition, not to mention the “no-sex” class paradigm, says they ought to be relieved not to have to endure men’s lustful advances, reality says women desire and enjoy sex no less than men and consequently a “I see you as just a friend” isn’t so, well, hot. No, obviously the plural of anecdote isn’t data, nor am I ready yet to accept the generally breathless claims that, say, Japanese men are losing interest represents a real trend. But if it really does become a trend, and if toys for men become as sophisticated for men as they’ve become for women then I wonder if at some point traditional disgust or distress at male masturbation would flip over into resentment.

[** Note: Clicking the images in this post will take you to the corresponding pages at Babeland. I’m not at all affiliated with Babeland but that’s where I’ve nicked all accompanying images so it only seemed fair. They’re a good company though and the original store’s here in Seattle. Worth a visit if you’re in town. —fl]

[*** Male chastity being distinctly, well, distinct from male virginity. —fl]

Photo “Pickton pig farm #1” by Flickr user SqueakyMarmot’s. Used under a Creative Commons license.

S.M. Berg of Genderberg, an anti-pron/prostitution blogger who may have been speaking tongue in cheek solidifies an idea I’ve been mulling over since I first started recognizing that the dominant male paradigm holds women not in the sex class of classical feminism but instead in the “no-sex” class, from which, thanks to your passive disinterest in sex, your sexuality must be somehow leveraged or else it will go completely unused (oh yeah, and men are the sex class wherein we’re reflexively, instinctively, compulsively, and animalistically incapable of controlling our libidos.)

Berg’s idea, in brief, is that we need to improve the world’s johns.

The old prostitution paradigm sees prostitution as a women’s problem and thusly suggests fixing women as the solution. Identifiers of the old paradigm that circles around prostituted women are: permits for prostituted women, STD & AIDS checks for women, condoms for women, panic-buttons for women, bad date lines for women, unions for women, government registries for women, “whore college” for women, etc. In my less gracious moments I call proponents of this Victorian, women-as-moral-gatekeepers attitude towards prostitution the Build a Better Whore Brigade, and in generous moods I call them sex worker rights lobbyists.

Read the quote in context here.

Can’t argue with anything but the last clause of the last sentence.** Oh yeah, and the term “prostituted” bugs me but as it turns out we’ll get to that in a minute. Next Berg says

The average age of entry into Portland [Oregon] prostitution is 13-years-old not because there’s a lack of adult prostitutes here, but because Portland johns frequently, willingly choose to rape 13-year-olds.

[A] new john-centric paradigm is needed because prostitution legalization has failed to protect children and women from men’s violence. Legalization should have resulted in decreased male violence against women, decreased sexual slavery, decreased child prostitution, decreased drug dependency, and decreased STD & AIDS. Legalization has not borne out these theorized promises in places like Germany and The Netherlands, where politicians who originally supported legalization have since changed their minds because organized criminals continue to control prostitution despite legalization.

Again a mere quibble: any account of prostitution in Europe that doesn’t take into account it’s tantamount-to-racism xenophobic distinctions between native and immigrant and, especially, undocumented and too-often involuntarily trafficked immigrants. The laws are shitty, the natives are shitty, the anti-prostitution activists there are shitty… but above all the customers who generally knowingly frequent trafficked/undocumented prostitutes because they’re less expensive are shitty. And while I’ll actually quibble all day about the dire unsuitability of prostitution models in, especially, Western Europe, we’re now looking at two counts: too many men really are paying for 13-year-olds in Portland (and the rest of the world) and too many men really are knowingly frequenting coerced prostitutes in Europe (and the rest of the world.)

Oh, and elsewhere in the blog Berg quotes a Vancouver Sun editorial

It’s a terrible indictment of our society that prostitutes are 40 to 120 times more likely to be beaten, raped or killed than the general population.

And Vancouver (even more than Seattle and Portland) has had it’s share of beaten, raped, and killed prostitutes.

But here’s where a major, major quibble with the prospect of licensing only customers comes in: it’s not just customers who rape, rob, beat up, and turn their backs*** on prostitutes. In fact even (and possibly especially) if the prostitutes don’t have pimps there are ordinary mafia “protection” types, corrupt police who shake prostitutes down for sex to avoid arrest, suburban “bum thumpers” who recreationally prey on vulnerable street people including subsistence prostitutes, and, of course, thanks to their vulnerability especially in the face of their need to avoid detection and arrest prostitutes are the primary victims of serial murderers (who’ve killed up to 400 between, roughly, Vancouver and Portland since the late 1970s.)

So licensing johns? Eh, you might have to license a hell of a lot more men (and, face it, they’re virtually all men) than that.

And that ultimate quibble brings home Berg’s final point

We need to unstick from the idea that men’s desire for sex is an immovable force of nature so uncontrollable that all we can do is “fix” prostituted women to withstand the frequent violence johns inflict. ...Men’s violence is not about prostituted girls…it’s about communities confronting the male privilege that lets them get away with abusing prostitutes or any women.

As always when I raise this point, if you’re a sex-worker with only great clients and has never in his or her life has ever felt endangered by customers or non-customers, or if youre a customer who’s never been abusive well… obviously none of this applies to you. And congratulations, by the way. I know there really are some of you out there. Although somebody killed those sex-workers in Vancouver and fed their bodies to pigs. Somebody’s shaking down prostitutes in exchange for “protection” either from other criminals or from arrest. And somebody really is beating the black eyes and limping walks out of the subsistance/street prostitutes I occasionally see when I’m driving from my nice urban-neighborhood home to the nice, practically antique shopping mall with its Target and Nordstroms and California Pizza. I’m pretty sure it’s not their moms.

The point being that licensing, legalizing, and even lauding sex workers really does go only so far, as does training women to avoid sexual survival situations at the hands of men. At some point you’ve got to begin outreach to um, men/us/you/me. Because to the extent we have a right to sexual self-expression at all, and to the extent some men really prefer prostitutes to other partners, we also have rather high self-interest in encouraging self-responsibility in ourselves and our peers. We typically perceive ourselves as the primary victims of “sexual scarcity.” And yet we’re also the primary contributors to the conditions that create the real scarcity (of trust, for instance, or sense of safety, for another, of peer-respect, for a third, and the list goes to at least 104) that’s responsible for the perception of sexual scarcity.

(Via Louise Livesey at The F-Word)

[** The going line amongst anti’s is that it’s clinically and possibly genetically impossible for women to participate in sex-worker rights advocacy. (Sorry Dacia, Amber, Ren, Elizabeth, etc., etc.) —fl]

[*** Why I’m given to understand that even anti-prostitution activists contribute to the de-humanization of prostitutes by resolutely announcing as far and wide as possible that such individuals practically sub-human thralls with neither agency nor self-sufficiency nor (speaking of Victorians!) the gumption nor decency to avoid their fates… and whereas I’m sure most anti’s aren’t outright gleeful any time a new prostitute turns up robbed, hurt, or killed I’m also sure they appreciate the extinction of another human being more for the rhetorical weight than the, you know, cost to humanity. —fl]

Riffing off Ezra Klein’s column on prison rape Dana Goldstein of TAPPED makes an excellent case for perhaps finally taking prison rape seriously (italics mine)

It’s very important to tackle the issue of the sexual assault of men behind bars. But what often gets lost in even the most well-intentioned discussions of prison rape is that — just like rape in the free world — prison rape is a crime that disproportionately victimizes women. As I’ve written before, although women make up just 10 percent of the prisoner population, they account for half of all reported cases of prison sexual assault. While male prisoners are often assaulted by other inmates, female prisoners are more likely to be assaulted by guards.

Read the quote in context here.

Klein joins others in observing that prison rape is a “cherished source of humor.” We keep hearing that but what’s the source of that kind of humor — what is it, exactly, that makes the topic safe even for the soporific, unguent Tonight Show’s monologues?

I’d like to posit that responsibility lies in the dominant paradigm of women as the no-sex class and men as the sex class. Inside the paradigm it’s impossible to rape a man because inside the paradigm men are incapable of declining sex. Therefore, since prison is perceived as a concentration of individuals who can’t say no even when they want to then all you have to do is throw in a bar of soap** and cognitive dissonance practically writes the jokes for you.

The downside of all this hilarity is a systematic failure to examine, confront, or deal with what really goes on behind bars. In men’s prisons and, as a consequences, in women’s prisons either. That’s obviously not to say “oh, well, if women prisoners are getting raped too then maybe it’s important after all.” (In fact if you’re into overturning the dominant paradigm that would actually be counterproductive on multiple levels.) Instead it’s just an indication of how thoroughly our dominant ideologies blind us.

[** See how easy that is? —fl]

I go on and on so much about interconnected webs of dominant paradigms, agency, worthiness, beauty and paleo-marxian “classes” that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume I don’t show my face because I’m always wearing the classic tinfoil hat of the conspiracy theorist. Not unreasonable but also, theoretically anyway, not true.

I also ought to mention that while I think feminism is the cutting edge of humanism, and while I passionately agree with classical radical feminists that domestic gender relations are the model for all other forms of oppression, I’m not trying more to establish my NiceGuy™ credentials, I’m trying to talk other men out of this millennium-long hostage crisis called patriarchy where the tragedy is that the alleged “feminazi” enemies of the guy way out on the ledge really would, really do wish him only the best while his anti-feminist nominal allies are yelling “Jump, jump, jump like a man!!!”

So if you’ve read much feminist theory, or you’ve taken women’s studies classes, or already have egalitarian heterosexual relationships, or if, say, you’re an actual woman and therefore not at all mystified, awed, baffled, or willfully in denial of your own sexuality then an awful lot of what I’ve got to say here is probably somewhere between boring, patronizing, distorted, off point, and sometimes wrong. None of which I particularly mind unless I appear to be a) actively mischaracterizing other living people’s words b) missing an opportunity to state the case in a way that resonates with men who aren’t yet on board.

Even my photos, which I know a lot of people really enjoy, are about getting the point across that humans are “visual,” and not just men, that men can be the objects of heterosexual erotic desire and not just consumers. (A point your wonderful and wonderfully confidence-building comments reinforce over and over.) Even the increasingly rare erotic posts I write are efforts to break through the traps of the beauty myth for women and the worthiness traps for men, the traps of passivity in women and aggression in men, the traps of scarcity and disinterest and androcentrism.

So anyway, everybody’s got a windmill to tilt at and I feel remarkably fulfilled tilting at mine. And if I seem a particular and myopic old man and you think you could do better? Woah, that would be deluxe! I may be the only one doing it at the moment but I promise I’m not the best.

And actually? Turns out while I might be the only one trying to get the word out to other heterosexual men, I’m just so not the only one examining these questions. Just one for instance that I want to blog quite a bit more about is Michelle Fine’s concept of the Missing Discourse of Desire. So far at least her actual paper appears to be behind for-pay firewalls but an excellent summary can be found in Jennifer Logue’s tongue-twistingly titled but easily read A Contrapuntal Analysis of Discourses of Desire in Education (PDF) which can be read as HTML from Google’s cache

In a nutshell:

Dominant Discourses of Desire: “Have Sex and Die”

When asked to reflect on how their experiences in sex education classes in high school informed their understanding of gender and sexuality, undergraduate students in my Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies class responded with similar scenarios of scare tactics used to reinforce notions of individual responsibility that depicted sexual desire as dangerous and needing to be repressed. The first student to comment raised her hand and said “my school did not do abstinence-only sex education, but our teacher told us ‘have sex and die’ and meant it. She told us that sex leads to HIV, STIs, unwanted pregnancy, and social stigma, and repeated, ‘have sex and die.’”

Another student reported that she was also from a school that did not have an abstinence only policy but her introduction to sex education consisted of a teacher passing around a cauliflower and imploring female students to take a good look at what their genitals could look like if they engaged in sexual
activity.

Source: Philosophical Studies In Education – 2006/Volume 37

In other words, as Fine and others have pointed out, our discourse of sexuality fails to address ideas related to the possibilities of heterosexual women’s sexual desire and the possibility that heterosexual men have either the interest or capability of participating in the satisfaction of those desires. Instead it’s all, as Logue’s female student put it, “have sex and die.” With its unspoken corollaries about the relative worth of men. That the bulk of the discourse of male undesirability comes from anti-feminists, and only a tiny fraction from generally-shell-shocked, abuse-surviving separatists should not be lost on anyone. But usually is.

In other words I’m tilting at windmills, yes, but they’re real windmills.