gender roles

A Man Who Doesn't Boink?!?!? Weighing In on Tim Gunn's Relatively Ordinary 29 Years of Celibacy

figleaf — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 07:40:16 +0000

Kind of weird what you get when you run that L.A. Times article about Tim Gunn's 29 years of celibacy" through Regender.com.

The original article is kind of a piece of work. The reporter (and, evidently tens of thousands of people querying Google) are somewhere between shock, fascination, and denial that the Project Runway co-host hasn't had sex since the early 1980s. All the more so because Gunn says it hasn't been a very big deal for him.

The real hoot is that people who (correctly) don't bat an eye that Gunn's last relationship was with a man nevertheless disapprove of his failure to be sexual at all for three decades.

Another weird thing about the original article is that the reporter asked, of all people, a surgeon who specializes almost exclusively in women's health and sexuality to opine on Gunn's "condition." (You'd think they could find at least one psychologist or urologist in LA who regularly sees gay men. Or men period.)

Even weirder, or more like unpleasant, is what the surgeon, Dr. Jennifer R. Berman, has to say.

...Gunn's 29-year, self-imposed dry spell was "not a natural state."

[and]

Berman said that, if she were treating Gunn, she'd like to know: Does he continue to be celibate by choice -- or out of fear? For example, she said, if we lived in a magical world where sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS were not an issue ... would Gunn still abstain from sexual intimacy?

"It's not a natural sort of decision, nor is it biological or physiological -- we are not wired that way," she said. "It sounds like there are issues relating to trust," she added.

Source: The Los Angeles Times

Or, as Jill of I Blame the Patriarchy put it

"If she were treating him for this “illness,” she says, she would get to the bottom of his debilitating trust issues, for Man Must Boink!"

She said it here.

Look, I don't want to single out Berman, or even the reporter, and certainly not all the people who think this is just earth-shattering news. Imagine, a man! Who doesn't have sex! Inconceivable! Almost intolerable!* But that whole "man must boink" business is as clearly socially constructed as a Windsor tie. What's really chilling is that a man who doesn't "boink" isn't just weird, he's broken and wrong and by gum we'd better fix him or else really break him!

Call it the opposite of the other obligatory gender construction, "slut shaming." A man who, when given a choice to take it or leave it picks "leave it" ought to be ashamed of himself. And the only reason people don't shame the crap out of them is there are just a whole lot more places to hide, and a whole lot fewer witnesses (how does one witness not doing it anyway?)

There are a lot of really bad consequences to this assumption that "man must boink." Really bad. And given that, going back as far as the late 1970s researchers have notice that as many as 15% of adult men really would rather not, that's a lot of potential bad stuff. For instance you know that eternal "joke" about how 90% of men masturbate and the other 10% are liars? If you're not one of the 100% who everyone "knows" wants sex then you're going one of a couple of ways, none of them very good and some really bad. For instance you might do really ugly stereotype-ish things because you're trying to "pass." Or you might take the prim/prudish path and say all sex is sin and should only be done "for reproduction." If that. Or you might just lie a lot. But since we live in a misogynist culture pretty much all the ways of "passing" involve misogyny, and since people trying to pass tend to be over the top then, yeah, you can end up with a lot of over-the-top misogyny.

Most of which (though not all) could be mitigated (though probably not eliminated) if the asshats at USAToday and "experts" from the L.A. Times would keep their ignorant, stereotype-enforcing pie holes shut.

A few years ago I got a brainstorm from one of Twisty Faster's posts and decided that in a lot of ways it makes more sense to say that men are the "sex class" (meaning they're the class constructed to be reflexively, uncontrollably, obligately sexual) while women might be better designated as the "no sex" class where it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable that a woman would ever experience, let alone admit, sexual interest. In either case, people who don't fit their respective stereotypes aren't just thought to be somewhere on the normal bell curve, and they're not just considered maybe a little quirky, and they're not maybe just in a less-obvious part of the population, they're broken, sick, wrong, and actually kind of a threat. One that needs to be "mended," or explained away or even outright denied.

The opprobrium heaped on Gunn just makes the case. He's male but not obligately sexual and he's suddenly weirder than if he had three buttocks.

More proof, by the way, that society's patriarchal. And classed. And gendered.

Me? I'm not on the same part of the bell curve as Gunn but since my first trip through a gym lockerroom in 7th grade I've experienced intense pressure not just to "be a man" but to be compulsively sexual. Sexual's fine -- I like being sexual -- but compulsively? No, that's not been good at all -- it pushed me into places I'd rather not have gone, before I was ready to go there, and I'm just continuing to confront, over and over, the places that pressure told me to go that I really should never have gone and wish I hadn't.

I wish Tim Gunn and all the other asexual and unsexual people in the world the best of luck, sure, but even more I wish they got a little more understanding too. Actually, more than that, earnestly hope someday they'll be as tolerated and accepted as "not broken" as anybody else.

Ugg. Sorry about the rant. Hope it doesn't sound like man'splaining, it's just... I've got a lot of frustration about this. And I'm really glad you brought it up, Jill, because if we're ever going to get out of the patriarchy/gender trap (I know we have different opinions about whether we can) we're going to have to get people to stop contemplating psychiatric "fixes" for men who don't fit the "and the other 10% are lying" stereotype.

* Where have I used that kind of language before? No, I probably won't make it Rule #3. But...

Note: I lightly edited this post for clarity and a couple of more glaring typos when Andrew Sullivan linked to it. There are bound to be plenty of other typos and general grammar failures. --fl

Red Herring Alert: Covering Viagra Didn't Inspire Church-Employee Orgies So Neither Will Contraception Coverage

figleaf — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:00:15 +0000

Image by Flickr user Mark Klotz. Used under a Creative Commons license.

In a review of historic opposition to contraception in the face of President Obama's directive that (virtually) all employee healthcare plans fund contraception for women the way they fund Viagra and Cialis for men E.J. Graff first reviews the biggest standard, historic objection to contraception

Late-19th- and early-20th-century pundits said that the nation would become a bordello if anyone could have sex without consequences and warned of the death of the American family.

Source: TAPPED

And finds it wanting (emphasis mine)

In other words, women can work for Catholic hospitals, colleges, social-services groups, and so on—and still have the same rights to sexual health coverage as men, under the same plans. All that Viagra needn't lead to either 19 children and counting; to abortions; or to impoverished women.

Ouch!

The Viagra-but-no-pill argument actually cuts two ways with hidebound institutions such as the Catholic and many Protestant churches. Their argument against contraception is that it interferes with women's "natural and normal" functioning, and thus constitutes an unnatural intervention in human reproduction.

The problem, of course, is that even if one were to argue (as the Catholic hierarchy in fact still does) that "virtuous" men could use Viagra "only" for reproduction there's the issue of the Church's ban on other forms of "unnatural intervention" like in-vitro and artificial insemnation. Sort of by-definition if a guy can't get a woodie without medication then "nature" has decreed he should do without.

And yet to the very best of my knowledge there is no Church doctrine forbidding its employee insurance plans from covering, or indeed its healthcare facilities from dispensing, Viagra or Cialis.

But I digress...

At the end of the day, neither Viagra or Cialis have created catastrophic baby booms, orgy outbreaks, upticks in divorce, or any of the other bugaboos projected by opponents of contraception. Certainly not among the kind of people willing to become employees of the Church.

Therefore prior evidence suggests that contraception availability will also not produce similar licentiousness. Nor, as we have seen, above, is contraception any more of an "unnatural intervention" in fertility than is Viagra or Cialis. Both claims, therefore, are red herrings. There may be <em>some</em> legitimate reason that conservatives object to giving women control over their own fertility. But if so they don't seem very comfortable saying it. Thus the prevarication.

Wise Guys Reply: About Introducing Sex Toys to an Insecure Male Partner

figleaf — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 08:08:10 +0000

Last week I posted a comment I added to Em & Lo's regular "Wise Guys" feature. This week I'm in the rotation as Em & Lo's "straight married" Wise Guy, answering the question...

“What would you tell a guy who was intimidated by the idea of his partner bringing sex toys into the bedroom?”

Source: Em & Lo

Here's how I answered (slightly reformatted since, hey, now it gets to be a second draft):

The dead cliché answer would be to remind him that they’re only called “toys” and “novelties” to get around puritanical blue laws.In reality, you could tell him, sex “toys” are tools for sex. Guys like tools.

But here’s a more original approach: Tell him, if someone brings a Monopoly board into the den it would be a pretty good sign she’d like to play [Monopoly] with you, right? So if your partner brings a sex toy into the bedroom that’s an even better sign she wants to play with you.

Yeah, we men are under a lot of social pressure to feel inadequate or even jealous about... well... all kinds of things. But, seriously, once you give up on the idea that sex is a test it can be a heck of a lot of fun. Whatever you want to call them, sex toys are pretty much always going to make sex even more fun. For both of you.

For Those Who Aren't Sure If the Bogus Two Rules of Desire Still Apply, "Frontrunner" vs "Whore" Edition

figleaf — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 22:41:34 +0000

Tweet from @LOLGOP.

Objectively speaking, Britney Spears is more likely to be a competent President than Newt Gingrich. Yet nobody's calling her activities "leadership."* Meanwhile, objectively speaking, Newt Gingrich has had more sex partner than Britney Spears.* Yet nobody's calling him a "whore."

This observation isn't particularly limited to the GOP in particular or even conservatism in general -- in non-partisan terms Gingrich is just a poster child of a much larger phenomen. The bogus Two Rules of Desire are alive and well.

* Note: Rumors and tabloid headlines about her private life notwithstanding, Spears is an adroit public performer, choreography, producer, and impresario.
** Note: Rumors and tabloid headlines nothwithstanding, Spears' total "life list" of sexual partners still isn't that much higher than the number of Gingrich's marriages, let alone his other affairs, dalliances, hookups, or casual/commercial sexual relationships.

Tragedy #204 From Things Could Be Worse: Questioning the Brains vs. Beauty Stereotype

figleaf — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 18:52:49 +0000

Image by Benjamin Dewey of Things Could Be Worse. Order a print here.

Benjamin Dewey says draws

Do You know a ravishing scientist who deserves more attention for her mathematical derivations than for her aesthetic wonders? Show her you understand how vexing the veil of comeliness can be when it masks an equally exquisite brain for which no one shows a primary concern! This illustration is available as a keepsake from my emporium.

Tagged: For Lisa Randall. Steph Levi. Saskia de Vries and Hedy Lamarr Beauty Great Thinker Lady Scientist Cupid Brilliant often overshadows work Deriving Maxwell's Equations for the Potentials chalk top hat love

Source: Things Could Be Worse

It's kind of a big deal. There was a sort of lowlife blogger years ago who'd preface many of the images he'd repost with comments like "With a body like that she should never have to work a day."

Leaving aside the insane idea that supporting one's self with sex or "beauty" isn't work, where does anyone get the idea that it would be fun to have a brain and never fucking use it?

In my socially checkered past I've managed to live in a number of situations where one occasionally encounters "kept" women: higher-end rock music culture, cocaine-dealer culture (closely related to the preceding), middle-upper-class and upper-upper-class neighborhoods (where I was a paperboy), and country-club culture (related to the preceding.) And near as I can tell, a almost-synonymous word for people (mostly women) who not only aren't expected not to work but are outright expected not to work is "alcoholic."

Human beings don't make very good pets.

Years and years ago a friend my age, a nursing student who had grown up in country-club culture, said she had to get out because what other girls from her neighborhood were going through was either making them insane or driving them to drink. She said, yeah, it might sound like fun to "do nothing but lie on your back eating bonbons and drinking Cutty Sark," while your husband worked, the gardner and maid took care of the house and the nanny took care of the kids, but, "Frankly I'd be happier changing bedpans for a living." (I lost touch with her decades ago, before she finished nursing school, but she was on track to become a Nurse Practitioner rather than a bedpan changer.)

I dunno. I've been catching up on my reading this morning and running into a lot of commentary by women scientists, women skeptics, women in medicine, and even little girls trying to go to school. The theme is just...

You know what, it's just dumb! Not to mention just an unbelievable assault on human potential. Not to mention an even bigger insult to half of all of humanity! But mostly just really fucking dumb. Richard Fineman was attractive enough but no one ever suggested he couldn't be attractive and also win a Nobel Prize in physics. Anderson Cooper is attractive enough but no one ever suggest he's "too pretty to do real reporting." And even though the first President George Bush selected the sorry-assed J. Danforth Quayle for his good looks ("women will be throwing their underwear at him at campaign stops"), and even though he was never smarter than a bag full of golf balls, there was still never any question that he was also going to work. Heck, even Mitt (Mittens) Romney, who was born with both a silver foot in his mouth and a full head of hair continues to work even after making further piles of money putting other people out of work. And while a lot of people believe he shouldn't do the job he's looking for, nobody deplores his basic interest or desire in working, period. So where's the fucking contradiction in women being attractive and working? Brilliantly or otherwise?

"Angry" Feminists Echidne and Amanda Marcotte Stand Up For Men and Boys, Condemn Male-Bashing Anti-Feminist Caitlin Flannagan

figleaf — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 06:30:23 +0000

Y'know, Echidne of the Snakes is a pretty four-square feminist. So check out how she "hates" men.

It's hard for me to address [anti-feminist Caitlin] Flanagan's theories as they are based on such an odd concept of what adolescent boys and adult men are all about. At the same time, she refuses to even look at the question what the culture might be teaching adolescent boys (this is very evident in the interview, the way she slithers away from any attempt to move the question to both boys and girls).

Source: Echidne of the Snakes

Good for her! She approvingly cites Amanda Marcotte's assessment of Flannagan's notions of what boys are all about (in the process doing an excellent job of capturing Flannagan's complete investment in the bogus Two Rules of Desire:

[F]or all the puffery about girlhood fascinations and diaries, Flanagan is really only making one argument, one we know really well, that goes like this:

Boys and men only care about sex, and mainly see girls and women as these tedious obstacles between them and pussy.

Girls and women only care about romance---the more princessy, the better---and see sex as this filthy ritual they have to perform in order to get it.

Therefore, women should use sex as a bartering chip to get men to pretend to like us.

Amanda said it here.

So what have we got going on here? Two died-in-the-wool feminists, Echidne and Amanda, standing up pretty vigorously for men and boys, and desperately anti-feminist Flannagan blithly running them into the dirt.

Look, are there women out there who really, genuinely, truely hate men's guts? Yeah. But they're not exactly feminists are they? Stereotypes notwithstanding, feminists mostly rock when it comes to men. And yeah, they get exasperated when men fall for the kind of bullshit Flannagan shovels. But that's not quite the same thing as hate is it? Not a bit.

Since Most Girls Get it From Boys, and Most Boys Get it From Girls, a Suggestion for Reporting on Adolescent HPV Myths

figleaf — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 04:18:14 +0000

I'd like to suggest one small edit to Reuters health and science reporter Julie Steenhuysen's otherwise commendable article on young people's misunderstanding of HPV vaccine protection, based on one of her own previous, equally commendable article on HPV vaccine recommendations for boys.

Some adolescent girls adolescents who get the HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer wrongly think they no longer need to practice safe sex, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

The study, published in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, shows the need for better education about the vaccines and their limitations.

Merck's Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix vaccines protect against strains of the humanpapilloma virus or HPV that cause cervical cancer. Gardasil also protects against some strains of the virus that cause genital warts.

But neither vaccine can prevent other forms of sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis, gonorrhea or human immunodeficiency virus or HIV that causes AIDS.

And HPV vaccines can only prevent HPV infections; they do not treat active infections.

Most girls young people who get the vaccine know its limitations, the researchers said, but the vaccines are recommended for all girls young people aged 11 to 12, and overestimating their effect could increase a young woman's person's risk of contracting other sexually transmitted diseases.

Source: Reuters

Given all the hype, and given how recently the vaccine has been recommended for boys it's understandable that people are still thinking mostly in terms of HPV vaccines and girls. But the fact remains that boys as well as girls are at risk of HPV-related cancers (it's linked to penile, throat, and rectal cancer, for instance.) And it further remains the fact that (statistically speaking) by definition boys are as likely to receive HPV and other STIs from girls as girls are likely to receive them from boys. That's sort of how heterosexual disease transmission works.

Finally, call me a rebel here but while I understand the researchers surveyed only adolescent girls and so it would have been inappropriate for them to extrapolate... it's a safe bet that a comparable survey of adolescent boys would find they're at least as likely to make the same mistake.

So if it was me, while composing educational outreach materials on the matter I'd drop the adolescent boys or adolescent girls language and just make sure I was trying to reach adolescents, period.

Homophobia-phobia Has Consequences Too

figleaf — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:20:15 +0000

Image from Someecards.com.

I've joked in the past about the unreflective fear that touching his wife's purse might make him gay. Or even just the fear of lookinggay (which, in too many sub-cultures, amounts to the same thing.) That's just funny in a sad sort of way. This comic reminded me that there are other scenarios where the consequences of homophobia and homophobia-phobia can be more dire.

Note: I'm giving this post a "no-sex" class tag because I think part of the flip-out about homophobia-phobia is tied to the dominant paradigm's conviction that (heterosexual) men are all and always reflexively and obligately sexual who are therefore incapable of resisting any potentially sexual activity. And thus must studiously police themselves in order to resist "turning gay."

This Three Year Old Girl Has No Problem Getting It -- So What's Wrong With Grown-ups?

figleaf — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:54:50 +0000

Lisa Wade says

Her Dad corrects her, saying “Boys, well, boys want both…”

But her Dad is wrong. Boys in the U.S. are taught from a very early age to avoid everything associated with girls. Being called a “girl” is, in itself, an insult to boys. And the slurs “sissy” and “fag” are reserved for men who act feminine. So, no, boys (who have learned the rules of how to be a boy) generally reject anything girly. (Indeed, this was one of the themes of Jimmy Kimmel “bad present” prank played by parents on their kids.)

The girl’s Dad, however, articulates a symmetrical analysis. The idea is that there are gender stereotypes — ones that apply to boys and ones that apply to girls — and that both are inaccurate, unfair, and constraining. His mistake is in missing the asymmetrical value placed on masculinity and femininity. Boys and girls are simply not positioned equally in relationship to stereotypes of femininity and masculinity.

Source: Sociological Images

What I sort of want to know is... given how totally full of awesome this kid is at, what, age three or maybe early four, why on this big blue marble would anyone mind being associated with girls, being a girl, being mistaken for a girl, admiring the dickens out of girls, and so on. And why would anyone waste an average of .5 liters of tidal volume wishing they had more sons instead of daughters, or selectively fucking aborting daughters, etc.?

You know what's really great about that video? She could have been my daughter at that age, who certainly made observations that astute. And you know what's great about that? Neither the girl in the video nor my daughter are curve-bending prodigies -- they're perfectly normal, perfectly sensible human beings who are special as possible to their loved ones but nothing like unique. Which is good because if they were prodigies there might be some excuse for excepting them but still grubbing every other human with XX pairing at the 23rd chromosome.*

Instead girls rock because people rock. Sure, some rock more than others... because some people rock more than others. Still no cause for culturally drowning girls... and only girls, naturally... in a deep pink sea.

* For starters. There are plenty of other ways of designating "girls" for the purpose of discriminating. But XX chromosomes are pretty representative so let's start there.

Ouch! "Christopher Hitchens Saw WMDs in Iraq but Missed the Humor in Women"

figleaf — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:33:27 +0000

What Katie Halper at Feministing said!

The ouch factor is even higher given that Halper's post gives a fair hearing to what Hitchens might have been referring to when he made the blanket statement that ~~girls suck at math~~ women aren't funny.

Agency Identifies 3,000 Sex Trafficking Victims in the U.S. -- Conservative Anti-Traffickers Unlikely to Care Because...

figleaf — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 09:03:08 +0000

Photo "Adelaide Zombie Walk 'Shotgun Wedding'" by Flickr user badjonni. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Now here's a topic you don't hear (nominally) anti-trafficking religious conservatives and neoconservative feminists talk much about -- forced marriage right here in the United States.* Anyway, Pamela Haag mentions a class of human beings you're not likely to see on milk cartons any time soon... but really should be looked for. (Emphasis mine.)

One morning three years ago, [the Tahirih Justice Center] received a call from a family attorney who was struggling to help a teenage girl. She was a U.S. citizen whose south Asian-born parents threatened to beat her into submitting to a forced marriage. She’d taken the “courageous step of running away to a domestic violence shelter,” Tahirih writes in a new research report. “The shelter gave her temporary refuge, but was unsure how long they could keep her there. Her parents were threatening to sue the shelter, her attorney, and anyone else who tried to help her.” In the end, the girl was returned to her parents after children’s protective services declined to get involved, seeing it as a “cultural issue.” Tahirih doesn’t know what happened to the girl after that.

But her story and an increasing number like hers was “a definite catalyst,” says Heather Heiman, a Senior Attorney at Tahirih, to turn their attention to the “serious but hidden” problem of forced marriage in the U.S.—marriages that occur “without the full and free consent of one or both parties.”

As part of their new Forced Marriage Initiative, Tahirih conducted a national survey this summer of community organizations and leaders who may have encountered forced marriages, to get a sense of the problem. Over 500 agencies in 47 states responded.

Through this and other work Tahirih has identified 3,000 known and suspected cases in just the last two years. And that’s likely the tip of the iceberg. Two out of three respondents on their survey felt that there were forced marriage cases not being identified in the populations they work with.

Source: Big Think

Just to be clear we shouldn't assume that women from alt-cultures who seem to be coerced from our perspective would agree with our assessment. And living as we do in a nominally civilized culture where "shotgun weddings" are still remembered by older but still-living generations we shouldn't assume it's only and always an issue alt-cultures in America. But the girl in the opening paragraph, above, definitely didn't want to be part of it and as best we know her parents jacked her into it anyway. And I think it's safe to say most of the 3,000 names collected by the Tahirih Justice Center fall in the same unambiguous category.

* My guess is ultra-conservative religious groups oppose anything to do with trafficking of commercial sex workers but don't give a living fuck about forced marriage because, hey, if it ends in marriage then all's well that ends well. Meanwhile anti-trafficking nominal feminists, who've effectively sold themselves to religious-right and neocon funding sources, don't care to rock the boat. It's still human trafficking though, and it's still sex trafficking.

If You Leave Out Enough Details and Squint Just Right Men Think About Sex More Than Women

figleaf — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:11:55 +0000

So even if you only read USA Today you may have heard about yet another variation of the how-often-men-think-of-sleep study. Where (naturally, it's always strongly implied) almost all men think about sex more often than almost all women do. Lassoing popular press accounts and bringing them back to earth, Emily Nagoski passes along the following five points.

My favorite part is on page two of the Psychology Today article, where Brian talks about problems in the media’s coverage of the study, which parallels my thinking on mainstream journalism reporting science:

1. Writers were either confused or deliberately choosing the more extreme, less representative central tendency (the mean rather than the median) to report.

2. Writers emphasized the central tendency, to the exclusion of standard deviation, when one of the most compelling results of the study was the wide variability among subjects.

3. Writers also emphasized the sex part, paying inadequate attention to the fact that thoughts about sleep and food were as frequent as thoughts about sex.

4. Writers emphasized population-level differences between men and women, neglecting to clarify that there was lots of overlap so that, even though the men on average reported more thoughts about sex (and food and sleep), many of the individual women had more thoughts about sex (and food and sleep) than many of the individual men.

5. Writers generalized the results to All People, rather than recognizing the delimitations of the population studied: college students, who are likely to be WEIRD.

What can we really conclude about frequency of thoughts about sex? We think about sex about as often as we think about food and sex, and we vary a great deal from each other in all three topics.

Source: Emily Nagoski :: sex nerd ::

Perfect. Nagoski says the actual paper's legit (within its constraints) and I'm inclined to agree.

Other than that I've got one question and one observation. First of all, why do I remember reading about an almost identical study a year or so ago (same basic shape: men think about sex more, but also think more about food and sleep.) Is this one a new study or is the old one just making the rounds again?

Second, I'm not sure who mentioned it last week, but someone referring to this same study pointed out that men don't actually think about sex every seven minutes. As I said I can't find the original source but I got that similar link via Em & Lo.

Anyway, bottom line. The study shows that men tend to think about bodily functions more often than women do; there's considerable overlap not only within sexes but between them. As always, good to know.

On Differences Between Appreciation of Beauty and Gendered Expectations of Appreciation of Beauty

figleaf — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:15:07 +0000

KinkInExile has this to say about beauty. It's not clear that she's talking about gendered beauty but it's clear she's talking about her beauty.

For all the time and money I spend on beauty, fashion and the like, this morning caught me by surprise. This morning, for reasons that are far too convoluted to go into right now, I ended up breaking down tents, dragging around easy ups, packing trucks, loading and unloading food, and generally scrambling to pull things out of the Occupy Oakland encampment ahead of an advancing police line in the mud while also smiling at and trying to be friendly and engaging toward the police. After what felt like a sprint of activity both in its intensity and its briefness, as I disrobed next to the washing machine in my apartment and stood in a hallway, sweaty, sore, and naked except for the bandana I had used to tie my unwashed hair out of my face, I realized I hadn’t felt that beautiful in ages.

Source: Kink In Exile

I raise that mostly to contrast with an anonymous correspondent to Em & Lo implicitly offered a substantially gendered view of beauty in general and hers in particular.

Why do guys cheat down? Meaning, picking a woman less attractive. My husband cheated on me with a woman twice my size. He said he found her unattractive but couldn’t help himself. Another friend of mine (she is a model) had her husband cheat on her. It was while he was out of town and all the women were less attractive. Of course these are just two examples. I was always under the impression that if you are going to cheat, at least make it worth it.

She said it here.

So the first question should always be who's idea of beauty are we talking about? Society's? The correspondents? Her partners? My guess is that there's a difference in her experience of society's philosophy of men's relationship beauty and her partner's actual experience of it. (Which is in collision with his experience of society's expectation of him.)

Second question: What makes so many people think that conventional/consensus beauty is the only reliable metric for male attraction? Especially when it so often isn't a very good metric?

Third question: What makes her think beauty for men is an apex rather than a threshold, such that no matter how beautiful one woman is men will inevitably prefer someone even more beautiful?

Fourth question: When woman A is less beautiful but still preferred to woman B, why is the assumption that woman A must "give better head?")

Fifth question: Where do so many people get the idea that beauty is like some kind of points system such that if you’ve got more you automatically win? Or else that it’s an entitlement such that if you’ve got more you should automatically win?

Next question: Would the correspondent feel somehow better if he instead cheated “up?” (If so… if one really would feel better… then stop right there and think about that! Because really?)

Final question: I’m… pretty sure the correspondent would feel insulted if someone suggested that she, like "all women," was attracted to men based only on the gendered masculine quality of income or worth. So why think that men, including her partner, are attracted only on the gendered feminine quality of “beauty?”

---

As long as we're on the subject of gendered notions of attraction, try running the numbers again for men, substituting worthiness for beauty. For question four, replace "must give good head" with "must have a big dick."

---

A lot of years ago a now-dark blogger named Sam Sugar, trying to make a claim about men's nature, said something like "given two women with similarly attractive personalities men will choose the more beautiful one every time." It's actually even true... but not particularly telling. First because what at least ought to be an obvious corollary: "given two women with similar beauty, men will choose the one with the more attractive personality. Second the same true but empty observation could be made about women's attraction to men.

I think the fallacy, which Sam Sugar was perpetuating and which I think a lot of people fall for, is the idea that men simply aren't aware of any qualities other than beauty in women such that they express deep surprise when men actually do enjoy and often prefer other qualities more.

Similarly, of course, it seems to perpetually surprise people when women fail to ignore beauty in men.

---

If you look at beauty in KinkInExile's terms I think it's a lot harder to have disconnects between social expectations and our actual experiences.

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Disclaimer: I know I sound like I'm all about heteronormativity all the time. Instead just think there's a lot more unconscious assumptions to question about heteronormativity, and that it takes a lot more effort to become conscious of them.

Hypocrisy, Irony, and Perspective Regarding Gendered Use of Two "C-Words"

figleaf — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 19:21:08 +0000

David Futrelle has the scoop.

The most common “critique” of the #mencallmethings hashtag that blew up on Twitter last week was that the women posting examples of misogynistic shit they got called online were making a big deal out of nothing.

...

It’s funny, then, that when MRAs find themselves described with less-than-flattering language they have a strange tendency to act like they’ve suddenly been struck with a case of the vapors. Witness the reaction of MRAs when someone calls them the “c-word.” No, not “cunt” – “creep.”

Source: Man Boobz

Now as it happens, I agree that calling a man a creep is a very, very rude thing. And implying that all men are creeps, as, say, the egregiously offensive Robert Jensen evidently routinely does is really, really degrading, demeaning, and very bad. (Not to mention, in Jensen anyway, extraordinarily self-hating.)

But, seriously, a little perspective here would be welcome. If you think someone is "thin skinned" or "can't take a joke" just because you called her a "cunt*" but when she turns around and calls you a "creep" you have a heavy metal breakdown? Irony. It's in the dictionary somewhere between "hypocrisy" and "perspective."

* or any subset of other gender-specific epithets Sady Doyle has conveniently cataloged in a single post.

Three Penn State Paradoxes

figleaf — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:36:18 +0000

Just how weird is it that nobody seems to be saying crap like "well, those boys had to have done something to get themselves raped." Nobody seems to be saying crap like "well, after so much teasing you can't really expect a horny man to control himself. Nobody seems to be saying crap like "well, they only 'cried rape' the day after because they regretted what they'd agreed to do the night before." And you sure don't seem to be hearing anyone brassing on about the need for awareness classes or self-defense classes or what-not-to-wear classes or 'don't walk alone' classes for boys. Not where the expectation is on boys to be on the defensive, to be perpetually vigilant, to be sure not to go around "asking for it."

You don't hear anyone opining that "sure, they're a little young, but since they'd have been 'giving it away' for nothing before too long anyway there's no real harm done."

Seems kind of funny to me, you know?

Kind of a paradox, really.

Of course there's a reason you don't hear any of that in the Penn State case.

It's because all that crap is an unreasonable expectation to impose on victims of sexual predation.

This evidently doesn't become clear when victims are women or girls.

So however horrifying the Penn State case might be, or the Boy Scouts cases, or the Catholic Church cases, or the Republican congressman cases, it seems like there's some kind of teachable moment there.

Know what I mean?

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I gotta back up here and repeat something I mentioned only in passing above.

Nobody seems to be giving this guy Jerry Sandusky a pass for "doing what comes naturally." Nobody's tisk-tisking about how he was just "thinking with his 'little head.'" Nobody's going "well what can you expect, a man can only handle so much temptation!"

Not the way they'd typically give him a shrug if it had been the more typical "coach treat:" cheerleaders.

Another kind of paradox, eh?

Of course there's a reason you don't hear any of that about this guy Jerry Sandusky.

It's because all that crap is an unreasonable pass to grant perpetrators of sexual predation.

This evidently doens't become clear when a perpetrator's victims are women or girls.

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And I gotta touch on one more thing I almost completely glossed over above.

Nobody seems to be saying "those boys have had their precious jewel flowers taken from them." They're not saying "nobody will want them now."

Which is kind of odd because, you know, when <em>people</em> are sexually assaulted and raped it generally has kind of a negative impact.

Another one of those paradoxes, only this one lands harder on boys and men in the sense that we have approximately zero social scripting for helping them work through that kind of violence.