Michelle Cottle of the conservative New Republic, trying perhaps to be funny, ironic, or else maybe careless, points to an impractical product (a very heavy push-up bra “and matching barrette!”) from an underwear company and says…

Here is the gift that taps directly into the lizard brain of pretty much every straight man in America.

She said it here.

(Note also the set of awkward, defensive, offensive, and baffled remarks in the post’s comments section.)

Look. This isn’t even one of those cases where “if it’s not ok to say X (or, in this case, XX) then it’s not ok to say Y (or XY) either.” We call people who go beyond all expectation “heros” because as human beings we almost always rise only to what’s expected of us. Set those expectations low — declare that straight men would love, or that straight women would love to receive, gold-plated, $4,500,000.00 brassier, barbecue tongs, “Manolo Blahniks”, or toilet seat lid — and that’s pretty much all you’re going to get out of them. And if the expectations you set are gender expectations then so much worse.

Yes, Cottle’s remark, whether in jest or not, reinforces a highly sexist stereotype and every instance of that needs to be called out. It doesn’t really matter, though, whether it’s a stereotype against men or women because all such stereotypes reinforce a system of sexism that alienates not just men and women (and men and men, and women and women) from each other but also alienates us from our own sexuality. (I’ll leave for another day the problem of dealing with gender when in the aggregate we can’t even deal with sex.)

Let me reinforce that last point: sexism against either gender strengthens sexism against both. Sexist jokes about men reinforce sexist assumptions about women. Sexist slurs against women bolster sexist attitudes towards men. Unless we really, really enjoy the status quo we need to find some other way to talk about this stuff.