social expectations

Chart: The Goldberg Spectrum of Sexual Violence Denial, From Bad Men Project

Posted by figleaf on Sat, 2013-03-02 22:35

Over at my other blog, The Bad Men Project I wrote

Goldberg Spectrum of Sexual Violence Denial
Click for larger image

In remarks both here and on my other blog I've made snarky references to what I've been calling "The Goldberg Spectrum of Sexual Violence Denial."  I'd like to explain what I mean with this chart.

In a nutshell the chart shows that what constitutes most people's people's notion of "sexual violence" rattles somewhere between Todd Aikin's so-violent-organ-failure-shuts-that-thing-down "legitimate rape" standard and Whoopi Goldberg's egregious Roman Polanski didn't commit "rape-rape" standard.  Anywhere to the right of Goldberg's standard on the spectrum and denial first creeps in and then roars.

First there's the infamous "gray area" of denial. Further over even if people concede the "gray area" isn't so gray they may still deny that catcalls or "stolen" kisses count. Then there's denial about whether boys or men can be victims. By the the time you get to still-on-the-spectrum epithets and slurs ("flat chested," "bad in the sack," "cocksucker," "fuck you," it's almost all denials because the violence is basically completely emotional rather than physical. And we're all still coming to grips with the idea that emotional bullying constitutes violence at all.

One consequence of leaving things up to Goldberg and Aikin is that over at that end of the spectrum victims really are overwhelmingly female and perpetrators overwhelmingly male. Unfortunately while the reality blurs the further one gets from the extreme edge of denial (see above) the stereotype is already set.

By the time you get to epithets, for instance, targets and recipients so varied it's basically impossible to characterize them.

Meanwhile if like too many people you're still rattling back and forth between Aikin's and Goldberg's standards you're still denying almost the entire range!  Much hilarity does not ensue. :-P


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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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How the Dominant "No-Sex Class" Paradigm Complicates Sex-Work Acceptance

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2013-02-20 16:47

Via Miri at BruteReason there was a bit of a kerfuffle at Jadehawk's Blog over a post about sex work by Jill Filipovic at Feministe called Supporting Sex Workers’ Rights, Opposing the Buying of Sex.

You can follow the links to see who said what. Here's my take on the conflict.

The fact that full-service sex work has declined nearly 90% since the beginning of the post-modern, feminist, "sex-positive" era suggests that Jill has a point about the likely role of sex work in a feminist future: while it won't go away any more than ballroom dance instruction has gone away, it will no longer be considered the necessity (literally the "necessary evil") it once was. The reason being, according to economists, that as legal, social, and economic barriers to women's equality have fallen women have been more able to choose to have sex when they want to, without worrying about ruining their "chances."

That tends to reinforce Jill's point that after feminism sex work as we know it will all but disappear. It already has! It already is! I'll go a step further here and say that for all our tolerance and/or advocacy of sex work (and while I'm a curmudgeon about it I'm still an advocate) I'm... pretty sure nobody thinks we should go back to, say, the 1940s when between one in three and one in four men regularly went to brothels or otherwise hired sex workers.

So if those particular bad old days are gone and if perfectly credible free-agency sex workers are able to advocate for themselves and their professions what's the problem?

The sticking point, I think, with sex work as it continues to be constructed in popular culture (and consequently in much of feminist culture) is that it's seen as one end of a continuum of heterosexual sex as transactional sex where there are women (only women sex workers count in pop culture) who men can marry for sex, and other women men can pay cash for sex, and maybe somewhere in the middle there are women who will or at least are expected to trade sex for dinner and a movie.

Oh, and inside the paradigm of transactional sex there are the reviled-by-pop-culture "sluts" who screw everything up by "giving it away." Them and assault victims who are eternally scrutinized and blamed for somehow "asking for it." Them, and assault victims, and men who "resort to" all those demeaning, deprecating euphemisms for masturbation all screw thing up "for the rest of us." And finally inside that paradigm it's almost impossible to imagine women (it's always women in the popular imagination, remember) doing it of their own free will, without being enslaved, induced, degraded, addicted, abused, broken, or otherwise appearing to themselves and the public as "damaged goods."

Inside the dominant paradigm wherein men may desire sex and women may only be interested in what they can get for sex with men (cough), no matter how interesting, intentional, or freely chosen sex workers and their customers are still going to be part of the problem. In other words, like a lot of the rest of patriarchy the problem isn't individuals, it's the system.

It doesn't have to be that way. And obviously for a lot of individual participants it's nothing like that at all! But for too much of the rest of contemporary civilization (let's not even start talking about "traditional" civilization!) it's still not like that at all!

So here's the metric I've used to think about sex work for about the last five years: sex work will stop being problematic from a feminist/gender-consciousness perspective when as many women hire sex workers as men... and when men's motivation to hire sex workers are the same as women's. To the extent that metric seems impractical, idealistic, outrageous, or ridiculous sex work will continue to be problematic. And further, until we get there I don't necessarily agree that Jill's right... but those who disagree with her won't be right either.


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The Bogus Two Rules of Desire and That Study About Couples, Sex, and Household Chores

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2013-01-31 19:29

Photo by Flickr user marsmet462. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo by Flickr user marsmet462. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Echidne says

Not a single popularization I saw suggested this:  Women!  Do more traditional female chores and you get more sex!  But that's also the implied conclusion of the study.

Source: Echidne of the Snakes

That's because we all know why no woman would ever do anything to get more sex!

The very idea is inconceivable!

Echidne also notes the consistency with which men doing any kind of chores is referred to as "helping around the house." Because, you know, that's the only reason women ever "give" sex -- as payment for help with their job around the house: housekeeping.

In my necessarily anecdotal experience, doing all the chores, half the chores, the "manly" half of the chores, doing the "womanly" ones, or or doing no chores around the house whatsoever has never had any effect on the frequency of sexual activity with any of my domestic partners. Nor the enthusiasm level. Nor, when there was a lack of it, the lack of enthusiasm.

And while my experience might be anecdotal it's also noteworthy: if I recall correctly from a radio interview with one of the authors the other day, the difference in frequency is only about two percent. Various decidedly non-sex-related studies including time motion, industrial, and marketing research suggests the average person has difficulty noticing anything less than a 5% change in the frequency of pretty much everything.

Probably not worth the additional aggravation of letting a coffee cup sit next to a sink or leaving a lightbulb un-screwed just because a) it's not your gender's job and b) doing the "wrong" chore might reduce your frequency of having sex, on average, by once every 10-25 weeks.


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Upon Seeing Joe Wright's "Anna Karenina"

Posted by figleaf on Sun, 2013-01-27 22:56


Anna Karenina - Dance with me by teasertrailer. I wish I could have found a better clip. Forgive the opening commercial --fl.

Loved the "waltz" scene with all my heart.  It was evidently absolutely fabricated by the choreographer, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui -- neither Russians nor anyone else in the 1870s (or any other time) engaged in such fluidly graceful ballet of the hands -- but it was amazing to watch.

Actually, the choreography was the best part of the show.  No, it wasn't terriffically faithful to Tolstoy's text but then a ballet based on the novel wouldn't have either, and I doubt many would have objected to that.

Actually I think the worst part of the movie was... it was still faithful toTolystoy's text!  Geez what a creep!  By all accounts it was horrible enough being a part of his real life, particularly if you were female.  To be a character in his novel would leave one completely at his mercy!

In one of her best known works, Intercourse , Andrea Dworkin dwells on Tolstoy at length.  The guy was a complete asshole to his wife -- nearly killing her with repeated pregnancies while also repeatedly excoriating her for "forcing" him to backslide into sexuality despite his public yearning for pious celibacy and male chastity.  (Her diaries tell a story different enough that even if you average the competing claims he's... still an asshole.)

Early in the story Tolstoy has the title character, Anna, travel to Moscow to persuade her brother's wife to forgive him for his affair with their nanny.

The brother, Stiva, is presented as an affable, emotionally content, and ultimately simple man.  His take on his affair? (emphasis mine)

And then he suddenly remembered how and why he had been sleeping, not in his wife's chamber, but in the library; the smile vanished from his face and he frowned.

"Akh! Akh! Akh! Akh!" he groaned, as he recollected everything that had occurred. And before his mind arose once more all the details of the quarrel with his wife, all the hopelessness of his situation, and most lamentable of all, his own fault.

"No! She will not and she cannot forgive me. And what is the worst of it, 't was my own fault — my own fault, and yet I am not to blame. In that lies all the tragedy of it," he said to himself.

Clearly not his problem -- he was tempted, end of story.  His own fault yet he was not to blame.

Tolstoy wrote the sister-in-law, Dolly, as a saintly but tormented soul.  An epitome.  An ideal madonna.  Anna, frightened by this woman's determination to let her own virtue overcome (cough*patriarchal*cough) duty to her husband, manipulates her by suggesting first that she's not there to condone Stiva or to make excuses for him.  Instead, after letting her vent a bit, Anna turns the tables on Dolly's virtue, saying only she could have enough love to forgive him.

A few pages later Anna, herself married, falls in with a wealthy, noble cavalry officer. And despite urging it on Dolly she herself, lacking the ability to maternally submerge herself in her husband's welfare, generally makes everyone's lives miserable before jumping under a train.

Aah, but the dancing in that movie, choreographed to perfection with the music, was supernal.


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One More Reason I Stopped Posting Erotic Male Self-Photography

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2013-01-10 16:21

Photo via Tumblr user GeekyVamp. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
Photo of someone else via Tumblr user GeekyVamp. Reblogged 3,188 times so I'm sure a 3,189th reblog won't hurt.

Years ago I used to add naked photos of myself to my posts.  This post is about why I felt more comfortable about stopping than continuing.

When I stopped I lost more than 75% of my regular readers. 

Australian self-photography and snark blogger Geekyvamp things have changed since... well... ok, mostly since she and others like her have started being able to curate Tumblr blogs of erotic and pornographic imagery she wants to see.

When I was a young indignant feminist with fire in my eyes, I would regularly enter adult shops and demand to know where the “porn for women” was. “I want to see naked men! show me them!”. the bemused male shop assistant would proceed to point to the gay porn section, and I would respond “NO! they’re still posing for the male gaze. I want to know that they’re posing for me. why should I have to appropriate them!”

invariably the shop assistant would give me a lecture at this point on how “women don’t like porn. they prefer reading romance novels.” 

That was 20 years ago. Thankfully the internet has provided a space in which that binary can be shaken up a bit. 

Source: banter-tits

Yup.

I'd always felt more activist than erotic about posting my own photos, so while I never felt bad about doing it I felt less... well... exposed when I stopped. 

One of the reasons I feel a lot less urgency about blogging is that a heck of a lot of stuff that used to be drastically overlooked about sex is... well... at least a lot less overlooked. Back in 2006 I wasn't voted the DirtySpoke Reader's Choice Best Male Blog because I took the best erotic photos of my naked, hetro-male self.  

I actually wasn't the best, and I certainly wasn't the best looking. Instead it was more like the old Grateful Dead bumper sticker "He might not be the best at what he does but he's the only one doing it."

Instead I tried an experiment of making erotic photographs of hetero men based on what hetero women said interested them.  As opposed to what, like GeekyVamp's pornshop operator (and everybody else) said women were "supposed" to be interested in.

And back then there really weren't a lot of people doing that.

Now? It's a whole 'nother world out there. A lot of women are posting visual imagery of what turns them on, not what the same bunch of guys responsible for pretty much all porn until maybe 1990 thought women ought to might like.

Enough so that the uncompromising, Andrea Dworkin quoting author of STFU Fauxminists can still answer "how do I wean my boyfriend away from what pornography has taught him sex is meant to be like" this way

First off, have you told him straight up that he doesn’t make you come? If you’ve tried hinting around and you find that’s not working for you, it’s time to be direct. And maybe you could direct him to some things that you like. Tell him what you like and what makes you come. Or, in order to kind of direct him away from porn, you could show him some feminist porn or some erotica? Something more centered on women’s pleasure? I mean, I tend to read smut for that, so I probably won’t have many helpful recommendations as to what you could offer, but I’m sure my followers might?

Source: STFU Fauxminists!

Even 10 years ago it would have been hard to answer the question that way. (Not impossible. But hard. Nothing like what women are able to curate for themselves today.)

Oh, and for the record?  When I stopped posting those photos my readership dropped about 75%.  And dropped nearly another 75% when I took down the ones in my archives.  Now I'm wistful but relieved to say the numbers wouldn't go back up if I started posting again.  There's now, maybe finally, too much able competition.


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A Long Answer to the Question "How Can Someone Enjoy Lots of Sex Without Shame?"

Posted by figleaf on Fri, 2013-01-04 22:17

Photo by Flickr user Richard Cawood. Cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy

So the question over at Em & Lo's "Your Call" this week is "How Can a Woman Enjoy Lots of Sex Without Shame?" Specifically:

How does one go about feeling better about a very sexual personality? I realize I’m human and I accept sex and all that comes with it with open arms. However, our society does not. Obviously I’m not saying I sleep with the masses, but I do enjoy sex and I don’t feel I should have to hide that without being labeled “whore.”

Source: Today on EMandLO.com

I’m going to be a little contrarian here (especially for me) and say rather than be completely open about her sex life she might approach it the way a lot of wealthy people approach conversations about their money: proudly, without embarrassment, but also quietly.

If it comes up in conversation consider being non-defensive but indirect: “I’m just lucky to meet such wonderful people.” “Well, it’s not as big a deal as people say it is.” “I’m sorry, I’ll be busy next weekend.”

You’ll never please everybody and some people are going to be in a snit no matter how one frames it, but for lot of people the resistance lies somewhere their own obstacles and “must be nice” envy. Which is how most people also feel about other people’s financial good fortune. And based on the advice most often given to those with financial fortune, downplaying (without lying or denying) is probably the best way increase comfort levels all around.

---

So I think this approach appeals to me in part because it makes an active sex life normal and unremarkable when there's overwhelming to make it extraordinary and noteworthy. Think about it like other normal and unremarkable things people do a lot of, like canning, golf, contra-dancing, couponing, scrap-booking, travel, and so on. On Monday mornings are you particularly interested in hearing someone else going on and on and on about their particular extracurricular activities?

Chances are that unless you share the same hobby you're going to be somewhere between jealous and bored stiff by a colleague going on and on and on and on about the rave they went to, their hang gliding workshops, their book club gossip, and so on. For all the slavering lather on magazine covers, cable TV programming, and, yes, blog posts, our sex lives just aren't that different from bass fishing or suduko tournaments: fascinating to us because... well... we're fascinated by it, but not really that fascinating to anyone else.

---

Another point along these lines: People are generally quietly tolerant of things like a big appetite for money, sex, or travel, front-row season tickets, or (who knew) 1915 Cracker Jack baseball card collecting they don't like the feeling of having it rubbed in their faces.

---

Final, most important figleaf-approved point: People have a surprisingly strong tendency to project our own disapprovals on others, with the result that, say, we may assume others disapproval is about the amount of sex we're having when instead a) they don't actually care one way or another and we mistake their indifference for disapproval, b) we mistake their wistfulness or envy for disdain, or c) they, again, we mistake their disapproval for getting their nose rubbed in it with disapproval of your sex life. Oh, or d) they actually don't much care for you but that's not why! One way or another we should be careful not to confuse how we think people "probably" feel for how they actually feel unless they tell us directly that, no, that really is what's bugging them.


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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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Silence and Socrates: Speaking Out Makes It Harder to "Unknowingly" Do Evil

Posted by figleaf on Sat, 2012-12-15 10:31

So. About the various debates about "knowing whether action X, Y, or Z is wrong" going around the world lately. Over on Ozy Frants's new blog a commenter named Joshua Bennett nails the general case.

Socrates admonished us that no one knowingly does evil. Everyone has a reason for what they do, even if it’s a ridiculous, selfish reason. Our actions seem like a good idea at the time. Only in retrospect do we realize we were wrong. We all do this, so some measure of empathy is in order even for those who hurt others.

But this doesn’t mean we should just say, “Oh, your heart was in the right place,” and let shit slide. Condemnation is a powerful social tool to change people’s behaviors. People who are shamed or otherwise punished for their actions are more likely to avoid doing the same thing in the future, especially if they can see in retrospect why their actions were wrong.

Furthermore, when society makes a Big Deal™ about things like the importance of consent, we’re less likely to think our own reasons make our actions okay. The more we talk about this, the more it sticks in people’s brains: “Having sex with someone without their explicit consent is never okay! No, not even then.”

Source: Ozy Frantz's Blog

He was talking in the context of a post about "date rape," (a.k.a. "rape") but like it or not the same metric applies to countless other contexts both larger (shooting up a school in Connecticut, piloting a drone into a school in Pakistan) and smaller (grabbing the parking space someone else was clearly waiting for, grabbing the nice gloves in the lost and found that "nobody will miss.")

What I particularly like about Joshua's point about making things a "Big Deal™" is that it really has worked in other realms of crime and violence -- assaults, murders, and even domestic violence are way down compared to 50 years ago and waaaaayyyy down compared to 150 years ago or further. In particular it'll continue making it harder to blow off other people's or our own excuses. For that reason I agree that continuing to make a Big Deal™ about "date rape" (again a.k.a. "rape") will continue to make a difference.


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So. Spanking. Is It Really So Much a "Girl On the Bottom" Thing That That's Why It's Always Framed That Way

Posted by figleaf on Sat, 2012-12-15 10:28

I’m still so trying to wrap my little brain around the idea that it’s 99% hetero women’s partners spanking them rather than the other way around.

No knocks on Em & Lo, who's post about their new book (150 Shades of Play: A Beginner's Guide to Kink ) prompted this post. They lean heavily though not completely men-spank/women-are-spanked.  But the mix for heteros seems so common as to make generalizations like that fine.

I’m just curious about the physics, or anatomy here. Because even doing non-”spanking” tapotement (those kind of “karate chops” with the edge and flat of the hands massage therapists use) seems to get way more women’s motors running than men’s. Or is it the psychology? I’ve almost never heard of gay men routinely spanking each other outside the context of more intentional BDSM. And it’s almost never mentioned by lesbians. And, maybe even more perplexing, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of bi men carrying spanking over to male partners, nor bi women requesting spankings from their female partners.

Do I just not get out enough anymore (entirely possible?) Or is this really an overwhelmingly majority-hetero activity?

And don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with it being majority hetero, if that’s what it is. What gets our motors running in bed is or should be entirely separate from what motivates our conduct elsewhere. I’m just curious about the source of the apparent differences.


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