[This is a comment left by Shiloh on a previous thread. I’ve edited it a bit to make it “stand-alone,” rather than quoting other posts. The post title was suggested by Kim (basement variety). –Amp]
I will agree that sexual power is about one’s “value” in the world of dating and relationship. What [some people] seem to be missing, however, is that the higher a woman’s sexual power, the lower her value as a person. Female sexual power, by definition, is dehumanizing. Female sexual power silences women.
First example – when I was fourteen, I took a summer class in typing at the local high school, because it wasn’t offered at my jr. high. One day, as I’m halfway to school, crossing this big field, a guy I’d met precisely twice before grabbed me and started kissing me and feeling me up. He informed me that he was a star wrestler, and that I was going to be his girlfriend. I informed him that my tastes ran to skinny bespectacled geeks who read a lot, and I had no interest what-so-ever in being his girlfriend, thank you very much. He insisted that I only said this because of a “poor self-image,” that he was going to make me popular and happy, etc. etc., ad nauseum.
No matter what I said, this guy “translated” it to fit his preconceived notions. “No” meant “yes.” “Not interested” became “interested but won’t admit it.” “You’re not my type” becaome “she’s just shy.” Many feminists argue that pornography “silences women.” This is what they mean. The woman is only allowed to say what the man wants to hear – even if what she actually says is completely different. Pornography that plays with the rape myth tells the story of a woman who says no, but ultimately means yes. That is what this guy was doing to me. He was insisting that whatever I said meant what he wanted it to mean.
Another real life example of how a woman’s sexual power silences her. I was not one of the “popular kids,” partly because I had little interest in being one, but one of my good friends was exactly what you describe when you are discussing a woman with a lot of sexual power. She was a cute, feminine blonde, popular, intelligent, cheerleader, upper middle class, dressed conservatively but was perceived as sexy. The guys I hung out with – who, like me, were NOT socially powerful – said she was the most beautiful girl in the school. What did all this sexual power get her?
Well, in 10th grade it got her raped by most of the guys on the football team. She was dating one of them, he slipped her something stronger than she was used to, then passed her around to his buddies. When she told people about it, most of her friends basically said she got what she deserved – if you’re going to be beautiful, them’s the hazards. Mind you, she did not disagree – she accepted that this is just the way the world is. When I pointed out that being pretty is no excuse for rape, she said I was probably right, but what can you do about it?
Nothing. There is nothing a beautiful woman can do about it. From her perspective, and in her experience, woman’s “sexual power” means that she does NOT get to choose her mate. If she was not interested in the most “alpha” guy around – tough. If said alpha guy laid claim to her, she was stuck, because he viewed her as his property, and any guy hanging around too close would be chased off. In high school, at any rate, if said alpha male was on a sports team, not only would he monitor her activities – his buddies would monitor her activities. If she was interested in another guy, she had no chance of talking to him or getting to know him.
Of course, once you get past high school (and college, in some cases, but she deliberately went to a college that did NOT have any sports teams), this male control is less blatantly obvious. But it’s often still there. Look at Kathleen Parker’s story (on the web). J*** R*****’s harrassment of his ex-wife’s family. Paul Corey. Eric Bleicken. A dear friend’s husband, who called everyone on her side of the family (including me, a non-relative) to tell them what a whore she was when she left him – this despite the fact that his adultery had so destroyed her reproductive system she had to have a hysterectomy and ovariectomy at 27.
Another friend, whose husband used to rape her when she was unconscious from the drugs they were using to help her sleep – this despite the fact that she was undergoing radiation treatments for her cancer and despite the fact that she was in constant pain and his rapes only exacerbated it. Yes, she’s blonde, long-legged, charming, and popular. What did all this “sexual power” get her? Abuse, plain and simple.
Most of the kids at my second high school were upper middle class. I used to hang out with actors, artists, engineers in the aerospace industry, millionaires who owned their own company. I’ve talked to the “beautiful people” of both sexes. Men who are beautiful complain that “she dumped me because I shaved my head” or “I never know whether she likes me for my self or for my looks or for my cash.” Women who are beautiful worry about being raped, about being abused, about ending up in a marriage to someone who will try to completely control them.
Again, men have access to sexual power, too – more access, through more channels, than women do. And the risk of sexual power for men is minimal. For women, sexual power is often outright dangerous. For women, sexual power is as disempowering as it is empowering. A woman weilding sexual power is easily silenced.
[…]
Rape exists primarily because a man decides that his version of reality is more important than the woman’s – he decides he gets to tell her what reality is. Whatever his motives (sex, power, anger), a rapist’s reality is that the woman’s sexiness somehow justifies his treatment of her. Everytime a male non-rapist treats a woman as a sex object, rather than a person, he is supporting the rapist perspective.
Arguing that a woman’s sexual power in any way “evens things out” between the sexes is to miss the point entirely. A woman’s sexual power is used to justify rape; a woman’s sexual power is used to silence her; a woman’s sexual power is used to dehumanize her. The fact that some women manage to use their sexual power in some instances to their benefit doesn’t change any of this.
*clap clap* I don’t think I’m a great beauty but I’m pretty enough and there’s no doubt that it’s exacerbated the problem of men who just refuse to get it when they are being turned down.
Real power is as collaborative as it is competitive, but power that is controlled by others is always competitive. Women’s sexual power in a Patriarchy is like working class economic opportunity in a highly class consious society. The stricter the class structure, the less economic power the average worker holds. Likewise the stronger the patriarchy, the less sexual power women in general have.
As a result of all this, women’s sexual power is also used to break the bonds of sisterhood, crippling our abilty to capitalise on our social power.
So, on that note:
Samantha, I’ll see your Ani DiFranco and raise you a Dar Williams:
“You point, you have a word for every woman you can lay your eyes on,
Like you own them just because you bought the time,
And you turn to me, you say you hope I’m not threatened,
Oh — I’m not that petty, as cool as I am, I thought youd know this already,
I will not be afraid of women, I will not be afraid of women.”
Right on, Jenny. Women are encouraged to internalize their oppression, and direct it outwards also against other women. So, with rape that manifests as treating rape survivors shabbily, or thinking that the rape survivor somehow didn’t do “enough”, since she was raped, or that she somehow brought her rape on herself. It’s all a way of saying “I’m the special one….I’m not like those other women…I wouldn’t have been raped.”
It translates into other arenas too, like the “lavender menace” of the women’s movement in the seventies—the abandoning of lesbian sisters, or the enforcement of beauty standards and harsh treatment of women who don’t/refuse to meet them. The act of trashing other women masks an anger at the their own treatment.
I follow the argument until here (from the original post):
I understand the point if it is an unwanted and aggresive advance, but what if there is a consensual sex act involved in which the woman is the sex-object to the man (say nothing more than a one night stand) and the woman sees it as something more? What if the role is reversed (one night stand to the woman and something more to the man)? My view would be that the act of consent to the act implies that both people have entered an agreement (even though they may not end up agreeing on what happens afterwards — lets assume there is a cordial departure) in which they are treating each other as “people” and not objects. The scenario is a gross oversimplification, but I am curious to hear a viewpoint on the subject.
A one night stand is not necessarily objectifying someone. The point is respecting women as people. I can see a sexy woman and think, “Man I’d like to have massive amounts of hot monkey-sex with her” without forgetting that she’s a person, so that were I to ask that woman if she wanted some hot monkey-sex and she refused I could say, “cool” and leave it at that.
The thing is with sexual power, besides, and I’m sure that this has been brought up in the other posts as well, is what sexual power amounts to is manipulation, which is really just a latching on to real power of men. A hot blonde who marries a rich CEO solely for his money does so because she has given up hope of earning that sort of money herself. And such a state of affairs skews the perspective of the powerful to think that the best they can offer a woman they’re attracted to is the chance to latch onto their power. (as illustrated so well by Shiloh’s story of the wrestler)
Ted,
I see your point, but life doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Taken outside the context of a patriarchal society, treating someone as only a sex object may not be sexist (although it still seems a little inhumane to me) but within the context of the world we live in it is.
The differences between a single act of sexism, acting in a sexist manner, and being an outright sexist is generaly a matter of aggregate actions and specific circumstances. This is true of society as well as individuals, thus the theory behind labeling “hate crimes” as such. An act a vandalism or an insult may just be an insult, or it may not. Circumstances and history matter, and not just individual circumstances and history. A burning cross is rarely just a burning cross, and the convention of referring to female students as co-eds is insulting even if that isn’t the intention.
Besides, there is a difference between treating someone as a sex object and treating someone as a sexy person that you respect because you are a decent person, but still wish to interact with only for sex. A one night stand in which all parties involved are cordial and honest would fit into the latter catagory IMHO.
Great post, Amp and Shiloh.
“Sexual power” is such a misnomer, isn’t it? It’s sad how language gets distorted by the prevailing power relations. Normally, we don’t attribute a power to a person unless we assume that they can wield that power to get what they want.
Ted,
The issue, to me, is how the partners treat each other, not necessarily what they think of each other. Maybe one partner, meaning no malice, sees the other partner as primarily a source of sex, rather than as a person interesting in his or her own right. My question then is, did the person objectifying still treat the objectified partner with care? Did they make sure the other person agreed to the various acts? Did they do their best to give no impression that this act of sex was intended to lead to bigger and better things?
Say I tell a guy I don’t believe in sex outside of marriage. If he then tries to pressure or seduce me into a one night stand, then he’s objectifying me, no matter how “considerate” a lover he may be. I’ve told him that sex means more to me than it does to him, and he ought to respect that and not try to make me conform to his views on sex. But if I tell him casual sex is okay with me, and do not tell him that I think he’s special and hope we can have a long term realationship, and he wants a one night stand, then going on the information he’s got, if he pushes for a one night stand he isn’t objectifying me.
I’m really wary of anything that requires either partner to mind read. I personally don’t think you can have many one night stands (and certainly not many with strangers) without objectifying people, but I know plenty of people who’re happy to have one night stands without feeling objectified. Who am I to say? But I do believe that with any new partner, however long you hope or intend to hang out with them, people need to be extremely careful to make sure the partner wants what they’re being offered.
I personally think the polite and considerate thing to do is to say, up front, “Hey, all I want is sex; not looking for a long term relationship and don’t want any misunderstandings.” Some people who don’t want just a one night stand might go for it anyway, because they hope it’ll work out differently. Sometimes it does work out differently. I’ve known people whose relationship started out just that way – they originally had sex, a series of fairly isolated one night stands, just for the sex. But because of their careers they ended up running across each other a lot and it became something more. It happens.
One concern I would have with someone wanting a one night stand is if they end up with someone who freezes up. Some women do freeze up when they feel sexually pressured, especially, in my experience, if they were sexually abused as a child. They cannot escape the situation, even if the guy is not being particularly violent or even terribly aggressive, because they’ve dropped back into that experience they had as a kid where they were pinned down. That’s one reason I cannot understand why people protest to the idea of the more aggressive partner asking “Can I do this?” “Is it okay if we do that?” and waiting for a “Yes” before moving on.
If asking the question would so “wreck the mood” that sex would be “ruined,” then maybe the mood should be wrecked. If this couple is so irresponsible that they cannot literally name what they are doing, even euphemistically, without one of them calling a halt, then how can they be responsible enough to consider STDs, pregnancy, or birth control? I just don’t get that.
And I’ve wandered, I’m afraid. In terms of “supporting the rapist perspective,” anyhow, I think if someone makes sure to be honest about his intentions and to ask permission to do whatever, he is at least treating his partner as a person, whatever he may be doing to her in his head, so he’s not supporting the rapist perspective even though he may be guilty of objectifying a wee tad. I’m not sure it’s possible to never objectify someone you’re attracted to, particularly early in the relationship, because of course you want them to be what you want them to be. The issue is whether you expect them to conform to your fantasies, or whether you work hard to treat them as a real person, even if they don’t turn out to be what you hoped.
Not that the rest of the thread is chopped liver, but I really, really like this part. One of the major recurring themes in every thread everywhere about rape seems to be the perception that consent needs to be given only once. After that, it’s tacit. Unfortunately, most of us know where that leaves women. :(
The idea of asking permission to do specific things up to/during sex got such a huge ribbing in Chapter #560,003 of the Mainstream Media P.C. Backlash Follies, and I’ve never understood why. Are people just so brainwashed by those Olympic Marathon sex scenes in beach novels, bodice rippers, and what have you– that they believe in their souls that every act in bed is going to turn out just perfect without any discussion if we’re just “worthy” enough ? “Compatible” enough ? Whatever ?
Ugh. No, thanks.
I’ve always been puzzled by the myth of the sexual encounter without dialogue. I don’t know who does that — but I’ve always shared plenty of words with all of my partners about what I wanted to do and what they wanted to do. I do a lot of S/M, but I’m talking about vanilla sex, too. In fact, some of that talk is pretty hot.
In the midst of an otherwise unexceptionably sensible post I read, and literally winced:
Again, men have access to sexual power, too – more access, through more channels, than women do…
I am a fifty-year-old unhappily-married man without a lot of money. I find the notion of renting a prostitute grotesquely depressing (“Can’t Buy Me Love” and all that.) Also I have a positive irreversible disinclination to rape anyone – I bathe, too. Whatever anyone means by “sexual power” I have absolutely none of it. I’ll guess there are tens of millions of losers like me in this country; how can women have less than I, we do? Have you ever read James Tiptree’s story “The Women Men Don’t See”? That’s how – we don’t exist.
Okay, so everyone answered my example but not really my question. Clearly that was my fault as my example was not a very good one. Thinking, thinking…
I guess what I really wanted to know is if a male non-rapist objectifies women and perpetuates and confirms the rape culture, what is a woman doing if she does the same thing to a man. I suppose that she would also be perpetuating and confirming the rape culture, but it seems to me that this would go against the original argument. That being that the rape culture is instilled in her by the teachings of her submissive gender roles before she has an opportunity to establish a sexual identity (as well as other facets that were also raised). Now I’m sure many more men objectify women than men, but I’m certain that this practice in women is not isolated to a few individuals.
I don’t wish to deny the rape culture arguement because I think it is compelling in certain circumstances, but I’m not sure that certain type of objectification (most notably using others for consensual sex) are part of the argument. Maybe it boils down to a general disregard for the ethics of treating others with dignity under all circumstances and refraining from activities in which you do not have the will to follow that ethic? Then again, maybe I’m fussing about something that was not the intention of the author.
Well I’m not sure if that statement is true but what I meant to type was:
I’m sure more men objectify women than women objectify men, but…
I think if a woman objectifys a man she is confirming the rape culture in the sense that she’s treating sex as a commodity rather than an actitivity meant to bring mutual pleasure. I’m paraphasing someone else here, but in a rape culture sex is something that a woman has (or is) and that a man gets (from her). A woman who “sells herself” sexually (whether money is literally exchanged or not), or who condemns women for being promiscuous while praising promiscuous men, or who condemns the woman who is raped rather than the rapist, is in that sense endorsing the rape culture.
I don’t mean that the men or women who endorse rape that way mean to endorse rape at all – that’s just how it works. Assumptions people believe to be benign, aren’t. The rape culture puts the responsibility for the rape on the woman, even though in the actual event, it is the man who has all the power. He has the power; she gets the blame. One of my problems with the whole “women should learn self defense” argument is that most rapes are acquantance rapes, and most self-defense courses are aimed at stranger rape. I was a fairly good “street fighter”, in the sense that I could hold my own with guys bigger than me so long as we were both upright and I had some room to manuver. I used to take on bullies bigger than me and win. But in a date rape situation, you start out pinned down.
By the time a lot of women realize the guy isn’t going to take “no” for an answer, they’re in close quarters and he’s probably got her down. Street fighting the woman can make use of skill, tactics, deflection – but if you’re down and wrestling, your options are way more limited. Strength is far more of a factor; strength may be the only factor, and the average male is stronger than the average female. The woman often has no choice, no options, no power – but she gets all the blame.
I would say that, whenever someone points at the one who had the least power and gives them the most responsibility for what happened, they’re endorsing the rape culture. That may be so broad a generalization it’s meaningless, I dunno. But to me, what defines the rape culture is that practice of blaming the one who is powerless to prevent someone doing something to them that causes them pain. It’s blaming the victim for her own pain. It’s giving responsibility to someone who literally can’t exercise that responsibility when it comes down to brass tacks. And you bet women do it. Absolutely.
Objectification is a big part of it, but it’s not the whole story, IMHO. It’s not just dehumanizing someone – it’s also making them responsible for any pain they might feel through being dehumanized. In my experience, even women who “misuse” their sexual power don’t go that far, because they can’t. Society blames them when they misuse their power and the guy gets hurt. Why do some guys argue that “men may rape, but what about the damage gold diggers do in a divorce”? Because ultimately, the woman is responsible for the rape, and the woman is responsible for using her sexuality against the man. Ultimately, the woman is responsible, even when she’s doing what guys do without condemnation (objectifying, or using someone sexually).
Not quite sure what you were asking, Ted, to be honest. This is what you got me thinking on, anyhow, for what it’s worth.
::wonders if she can get the quoting right this time::
Ted wrote:
Ted, I agree. To me, the issue isn’t so much objectification per se as it is the cultural reduction of what it even means to be a woman to it being All About The Sex.
The aspect of objectification that I perceive as part and parcel of the rape culture (sorry, I know you don’t care much for the term) is the aspect that connects to a male sense of entitlement over women’s sexuality–a sense of entitlement which is often reflected in the belief that (female) reciprocation is somehow (male) attraction’s rightful due.
I do think that this is a particular form of objectification that we instill in our boys far more than we do in our girls as they are growing up. Women are not taught from birth to expect that just because they find someone attractive, that attraction necessarily should or ought to be reciprocated. Men, I think, are rather taught to expect that, and I think that we saw evidence of that expectation in the entire “women are obviously the privileged sex, because they can refuse a man’s advances – OMG The POWAH!” line of argument.
Although many people (especially the straight women) in that discussion tried to point out that to straight women, men are the more attractive and pretty and desirable sex, that women don’t like losing out in the sexual sweepstakes any more than men do, that desirable men absolutely have the power to reject an unwanted woman’s advances, and so on and so forth, none of it ever seemed to register very much.
My feeling was that the reason it didn’t really seem to register much was that the fact that men can refuse women is, well, so what? It’s a no-brainer. It’s okay. For a woman to refuse a man, on the other hand, reaps an “OMG The POWAH!” response because our society has constructed womanhood itself to be overwhelmingly about women’s sexual availability to men.
It’s not particularly notable for a person to fail to reciprocate sexual attraction, you see. It’s only particularly worthy of note when a woman does it.
Because what the hell else are women supposed to be for?
So yeah. It’s not the Gaze in and of itself that I consider so very problematic. It’s a Gaze that also carries with it an assumption of ownership, of entitlement and reduction. And sadly, I do think that it’s a type of objectification that we teach our boys at a very young age.
Johnny:
::sigh::
Yeah, I hear you, Johnny. That’s rather how I felt wading through the pages and pages of the reverse argument on the previous thread. As if “women” had been weirdly redefined to mean “that small subset of women who I think are hawt, but who don’t want me back.” And sorry that your circumstances aren’t happy ones.
People have a certain degree of personal power over those whose attraction to them is not reciprocated. Unscrupulous people who are so inclined can sometimes use that leverage to manipulate others into doing stuff they want. That is a form of “sexual power,” I suppose, but as you point out, it’s hardly one that everyone of either gender shares equally. In fact, I really can’t see how it’s dependent on gender at all.
I think, though, that what Shiloh meant by the line that made you wince was encapsulated in the sentences following it:
The point here, I think, was that to whatever extent the “power” of the femme fatale really exists outside of movies and television, it is more than mitigated by the host of cultural constructs designed to keep women “in their place.” Rape is one such construct. Community pillorying is another.
Desirable men who seek to use their sexual attractiveness to their own personal advantage aren’t taking half the same risks, nor does our society revel in quite the same way at the idea of such men being violently–even brutally–thwarted. The idea that rape is something akin to “just punishment” for sexually manipulative women, on the other hand, is incredibly, horrifically, depressingly prevalent (as, for that matter, is the assumption that any attractive woman must be consciously sexually manipulative).
As Elkins just commented, I think this whole belief of women being all powerful sex-goddesses does go back to Hollywood’s and the entertainment industry’s glorification of the femme fatale and the sexy black widow, and our culture’s lack of putting little or no responsibility on men for sexually based crimes committed against women. It’s “her fault for being too sexual and seductive–she manipulated him with her body,” blah, bullshit, bullshit, blah! The “men are weak against their own sexual impulses and sexy women” cultural syndrome strikes again!
Some guys see movies with the femme fatale, ultra-sexy woman getting whatever she wants from men in a movie or show, and say and think something along the lines of, “hey–look at all the stuff that hot chick is doing to those guys! Yeah women totally have all the power in sex!” How about Hollywood and the entertainment industry show what happens in real life to most women who try to be the femme fatale and sexy black widow? A couple of pictures of dead streetwalkers, murdered by their johns from the police archives? Reports of teenage girls who thought they were having a good time getting into a bar with fake ids, hanging out with “cooler” older men, and end up being enslaved in prostitution by those same “cooler” older guys?
I especially love “oh she wouldn’t give me the time of day, but I said she was sexy, so women MUST have all the sexual power” argument, which really shows how adult or not some guys are.
Our popular culture reinforces the notion that women have sexual power by establishing and promotiong those kinds of sexual stereotypes of the desperate man. Mainstream pornography runs up on these stereotypes and provides a fantasy of male power. But the “fantasy” merely reflects the reality. The whole system is just self-justifying.
Being seen as a sex object does nothing to empower women. It confines them and dehumanizes them. No, there is nothing inheriently wrong with sex. I’ll actually go as far as to say there is nothing inheriently wrong with pornography. What’s wrong are our cultural attitudes towards sex and the attitudes promoted in pornography.
I think I have a somewhat unique position in men, in that growing I didn’t raid my fathers porno stash like all my friends were doing in middle school. I was heterosexual, but my attraction to fat women meant that mainstream pornography meant nothing to me. I had no interest in it. I don’t think I really sat down and watched a real porn film until just a couple months ago. This gave me a different perspective in seeing how it affected the men I was growing up. Trust me, these attitudes that plague men and dehumanize women aren’t inherient. They are absolutely learned. I see these boys go from having female friends they liked and respected transform into sexually obsessive misogonists. I was there for the lockerroom talk. It horrified me to see the change in my friends. In people who in all other ways were still good and smart people. And the change happened as they became more and more interested in porn. They became adversarial towards girls. They were crassly insulting, but it was also minimalizing themselves. I don’t think we can say that men, in the position of sexual power, are any better for it. No when that power is so often used in such dehumanizing ways. The whole system is awful for everyone, as far as I’m concerned, and its in everyone’s interest to change things. The trouble being that these attitudes are given undue value. Boys will boys, they tell us. Everyone looks the other way and meanwhile women are being abused and demoralized. Men are being made bitter and resentful. Sitting back and calling this parity does no justice.
johnny uxor said,
Well, I would argue that, at minimum, “sexual power” means the ability to attract some small portion of the opposite sex. By that standard, unhappily married or no, you did at least have enough “sexual power” to get married in the first place. My sister, and any number of her friends, never even weilded that much sexual power. Nor have many men, of course.
I would argue that considerable sexual power, in the sense of being able to attract numerous partners of the preferred sex, is not available to many people, male or female. But, as Elkins points out, my main point is that, for women, possessing much sexual power at all is problematic. A man is not endagered by his own sexual power, while a woman’s sexual power makes her a prime target for preditors.
And, of course, a woman’s sexual power tends to be limited to the physical – to physical beauty. Men can more easily develop sexual power in other ways – although a lot of those “other ways” are, again, things most people probably won’t have access to; prestige, riches, etc. I never meant to say all women (or all men) have access to sexual power. I’m sorry if I was unclear.
Elkins said;
Interesting that we went opposite directions in our response to Ted – I broadened the issue beyond objectification; you defined that objectification more precisely. And correctly, I think. I would add that men’s “right” to a woman’s sexuality is limited only by other men – she’s off limits only if she “belongs” to someone else. Some guys also accept that women who are virgins are off limits (or used to back when I was dating), except they defined virginity very differently than I did.
I defined virginity as a person’s choice – as an internal thing, as an expression of self-control or direction. The guys I’ve known who chose to be virgins defined it much the same way – as a personal choice, as a deliberate approach. But most guys define women’s virginity as a physical attribute. I’ve only had one friend tell me about being stranger raped (everyone else was raped by someone they knew) – she was grabbed and raped in the classic “dark alley” scenario, except she passed out and doesn’t remember the actual event. She’s also the only one reported her rape to the police (although two friends reported incest to social workers), because she was found by somone before she came to.
She was a virgin when she was raped, and her boyfriend at the time argued that, “since she’d been popped”, she should start having sex with him. His response certainly didn’t help her trauma any, but I get the impression it’s typical. While she by no means chose to lose her virginity, he acted as if she was now available. She was “on the market” through no choice of her own.
A lot of guys consider a woman’s virginity a personal insult – like the t-shirt that says, “To all you virgins; thanks for nothing.” But at the same time, they don’t quite recognize a woman’s virginity as a personal choice. I understand a lot of girls are reluctant to accuse someone of rape because doing so will expose the fact that they aren’t virgins, and then it’ll be “open season” on them. If a woman feels empowered by her own virginity, that’s great – but I don’t think guys really see her as owning her own body somehow. If they honored a woman’s choice to be a virgin, she wouldn’t be considered available just because she’d been raped.
I don’t know what guys are respecting when they quit pressuring a virgin for sex, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t her right to own her own sexuality.
Elkins said:
That assumption really irks me – particularly when it comes to teenage girls (and, more rarely, when it comes to children, but I’ll skip that for now). I had a friend who wore pants so tight to school she wouldn’t drink anything all day because couldn’t use the bathroom – she had to lie down to zip her pants up. But she was deeply offended by the idea that she was advertising herself sexually – she dressed that way because she believed it was attractive, but what she wanted was friendly attention, not sex. She was always furious when guys assumed she wanted sex – her attitude was, “If I want sex, I’ll let you know.” She was completely oblivious to the idea that her clothes might be sending a different message – and to be honest, so was I. I thought she was stupid to wear clothes that tight, but I never connecting it to guys making assumptions about her. I think a lot of teen girls really haven’t processed that connection.
Then again, I’m still irritated by the fact that guys can pull off their shirts on a hot day and most people won’t think twice – but if a woman wears a halter top, “she’s advertising.” I hate heat, and sulk about this every summer.
The thing about the “power of sex appeal” is that it is almost completely in the eye of the beholder. It’s not a case of a woman being sexy, like it would be if she were being smart or strong or creative, it’s a case of some man or men finding her sexy. The power is not hers; it is dependent on them, and therefore can be used against her. Unlike various traits that are there for one’s own benefit, such as intelligence, sex appeal benefits the people who find one sexually appealing. A woman’s attractiveness might influence the amount and type of sexual activity she engages in, but has no real effect on how much she is capable of enjoying that activity, the way a person’s intelligence would affect how much of a concept he or she is capable of understanding. Rather, attractiveness affects other people, it affects how much they want a sexual relationship with somebody. And sadly, the world is all too full of assholes who think what they want is more important than what another person wants.
So they try to control the woman who has what they want (namely herself). And here we have a problem. By posessing this thing, attractiveness, which is supposed to be so wonderful, we become targets; they try to control us, to subvert our wishes when they don’t coincide with their desires. On the other hand, if we downplay our attractiveness in order to avoid such attention, they are still controlling us, denying us the use of what should be our power by threatening to use it against us.
So what is the solution? Get power of other types; get power that they can’t turn against us. Get strength, get knowledge, get courage, get determination. Strength to oppose them, knowledge to learn how to best use that strength and to assess risk, courage to stand up to them, determination to refuse to let them win. Guard against both overconfidence and despair. Take a self-defense course. Consider what forms this sort of harrassment might take, and how you would respond to it. If you have to defend yourself physically, don’t half-ass it. If you take someone to court for rape or other abuse, the defense lawyer will make all sorts of attacks on your character. Don’t let it get to you. And always remember that being raped or harrassed is never your fault; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
BTW, my favorite way to deal with the type of guy who thinks his desires override someone else’s wishes, is to ask him, shouldn’t he be hitting on women he actually finds attractive? When he protests that he does find you attractive, or is interested in you, tell him, obviously he doesn’t/isn’t, because if he did, he wouldn’t be treating you like trash, like your feelings are secondary to his. ‘Cause that’s how you treat an enemy, someone you hate, not a potential lover.
Or just tell him that you don’t sleep with/date guys who treat you like what you want doesn’t matter.
Anyway, discretion might be the better part of valor sometimes, but it seems to me that downplaying your attractiveness to avoid their attention is letting them control you in order to avoid the risk of them trying to control you. These people may exist, but it’s my world too, and my solution is to shine so brightly that they can’t touch me for fear of getting burned. It’s my body and my right. No arguments from the cro-magnon crowd will be tolerated.
I think in all circumstances, it seems like societies come up with some argument that claims that men and women are equal in power, just in different ways. In Victorian times, there was the doctrine of “seperate spheres:” men have power in politics, business, law, etc. Women have power over the domestic domain, and are angels of the house. See? They’re really equal!
Now we have the argument that men have power in politics, business, law, etc. but women have power in sexual relations. See? They’re really equal!
I’m not sure if this is true, but I’ve read reviews of Marjane Satrapi’s new Embroideries that suggests that, even in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a far more patriarchal society than ours, Satrapi thinks it’s an open question whether men or women are more powerful. Because in Iran, men have power in politics, business, law, etc. but women have power in their sexual and emotional relations with men. See? They’re reallly equal!
I’m never keen or apathetic upon hearing stories of sexual abuse or rape, but for some reason, this particular story just tears my heart out. It’s yet another example of condoning rape, via playing up or down the circumstances that surround it, or are affected by it. Yet another way of blaming the victim, and reinforcing the idea that she’s simply a piece of meat – regardless whether someone see’s her as prime-rib, ground beef or spam. In the end, it’s all just more bullshit justification from people who wish to remain entrenched in a culture dominated by men that live in terror of losing the privileges they supposedly don’t have.
Kyra Writes:
I spent all of high school a-sexualizing myself as much as I could, and while I still think that it was a better choice than trying to “compete” with the popular girls, I really regret letting sexism, and my own fear, dictate so severely how I presented myself, and how I perceived myself.
At the time I thought that I was hiding my body because I thought the whole popularity contest was bunk, and because I couldn’t hope to compete with the popular girls anyway. Looking back, and considering how other things that happened to me when I was entering puberty affected me (including breasts at age 10 and a persistent peeping tom a couple of years later) I realize that that isn’t the whole truth.
My sexuality became a weapon to be wielded against me almost before I knew what it was. It’s strange now to look back and realize that the boys and men who tried to control me through my own sexuality were able to do so because my sexuality was powerful; so completely had their derogatory actions convinced me that I was nearly undesirable, despite my fantasies.
Which is why the whole “women have the power ’cause you get to say no” argument just pisses me off. I didn’t have the power to say stop! to the budding mysigonists who whistled and yelled and me as I walked down the street (and don’t even try to convince me that they were trying to be flattering – not with what I was wearing and how much I weighed) and I didn’t have the opportunity to turn anyone down. How can I have so much power, all of which comes from my being able to say no, if I never got to do so? But of course, its not about me, because if it was, being able to say no wouldn’t be considered a special power.
Interesting discussion. I just wanted to throw in another element that perhaps is an even clearer example of how ambiguous that definition of “sexual power is” (for those who haven’t realised that already, that is). The amount of children who are victims of sexual molestation or abuse, of all degrees, within the family or from non-related acquaintances. Is that sexual ‘power’? Of course not.
Before puberty, children do not even realise they can have sexual appeal until they’ve been objectified, molested, or abused. Which is the worst way of realising anything about sexuality, having it forced on you, before you even care or know about it. People who molest or abuse children sexually claim that it’s the children who are just irresistible, it’s the children who hold this power over them, they just “can’t help it”. (Much like a stalker thinks it’s the person he stalks that holds this irresistible power over his perverted behaviour.)
Almost everybody, except the abusers and molesters, will recognise that is wrong, abnormal, sick, and that the “can’t help it” excuse is a perverse attempt at justification for an objectification and projection that is entirely in the abuser’s head.
But so often, when it comes to women, the fact that, unlike children, they’re adult individuals with a developed sexuality and personality must mean, paradoxically… not that they have a right to be considered as such and their own preferences and person respected!, but that they must be the source of any sexual response, they must have provoked it, so that’s their power on the person having that sexual response, and this person’s responsibility is diminished, because they’re so overpowered by that sex appeal that she, obviously, knows about…
Of course when the sexual response is simple attraction that does not objectify and does respect the ‘target’ of attraction as a person, not an object, nothing wrong with it, it’s what happens when people feel attraction to someone else, requited or not. But when it is not like that, then there’s this shifting of the cause/effect, of the source/target elements of that attraction, of the responsibility factor. Nevermind the rapist, even the arrogant jerk who thinks that a woman he has set his eyes on is just expected to be her girlfriend and/or sleep with him and why would she even refuse his sexual advances, he uses the very same justifications for his behaviour as paedophiles do for theirs, only to him it’s not as perverse as that, because hey, she’s a grown woman and she is sexually attractive and probably even sexually active, she obviously not just wants it, but wants me, because I’m a man and she’s a sexy woman. I’m just powerless, I can’t help it!
He believes that the difference between children and grown women, younger or older, is that the latter must be responsible in some way for his sexual reactions (which he’s not responsible for, he just can’t control them); but he acts as if the woman is even less of a person with her own rights than a child, and as if he himself is even less responsible of his own actions than a child…
Don’t know if I’ve explained it well, it’s such an obvious thing, I guess, but it does strike me as recurring in these ‘women have all this sexual power’ refrains, of the likes we’ve seen in previous threads… The very same behaviour that these guys would consider abusive to any other subject, is justified with women being irresistible.
Thanks for the responses to my enquiry. I think I understand the point of veiw now. My concern was that if women often objectify men (but not as frequently as men do to women) isn’t this contrary to the idea of the rape culture. I now understand that I was looking at the question from the wrong perspective. While the frequency of the objectification might be due to the pervasive rape culture, the act of objectification itself is more of a moral fault on the part of the individual. When men or women participate in such an act it perpetuates the rape culture insofar as they are imposing objectification on the other party. This is more dangerous when it happens to women because it perpetuates the idea that it is her fault that such a thing has happened to her (due to her “sexual power”) and reduces her percieved or real control over that power as it relates to men or society in general. Hope that makes sense
No matter what I said, this guy “translated”? it to fit his preconceived notions. “No”? meant “yes.”? “Not interested”? became “interested but won’t admit it.”? “You’re not my type”? becaome “she’s just shy.”?
I had problems with a guy like this last year. He was the president of a student society I joined, and right from the start he singled me out. At first, it was kinda nice to have someone talking to me and asking me to social events, as I just got to university, but as time went on he became very presurizing. I had a boyfriend, but he “wasn’t good enough for me”, according to P and I’d “be much better off with him”. Refusing him brought accusations of “hating him” and deliberately making him fallin love with me just so I could hurt him. He’d cry and say it was because he was ugly/I didn’t like “nice guys” (hah!)
I tried to stay friends with him at first, because we had a lot of friends in common and went to the same social events. Eventually I had to stop this, as he became increasingly upset with me, and even dragged his friends into the game. Once after popping into an event on my way back from a friends concert, I was accused of “deliberately wearing a backless top to torment him with what he couldn’t have”. When I broke up with my boyfriend, and went out with someone who was not P, he said I was dating the new guy just to show P how worthless I considered him, and that any other guy was better than him (the idea I might want to date someone because I liked them was not considered). He’s left uni now, and all contact between us has ceased which is rather a relief.
During all this, he had a bizzare image of me in his head – he’d tell me I shouldn’t wear make-up because that wasn’t the sort of girl I was (I’m a make-up artist in my spare time, I’m obseessed with make-up and how it chances a person’s look). He’d tell me not to wear slutty clothes (in summer! when high necked tops and long skirts make so much more sense!), or that I was doing it just to attract him. He believed I was some sweet angel virgin type, and even when I gave him a descrption of my social life he honestly believed I was acting against my character just to maliciously hurt him. He’d ask me “why do you keep hurting me, you know we should be together, I know how you really feel about me”
It was really hard to realise what he was doing was wrong, since he always painted himself as the victim of my feminine attractions – I felt so guilty! I’d taken a nice boy and hurt him terribly -and not even realised how much I was upsetting him just by being myself. It got for him becoming really unacceptable (telling my friend he was only friends with her to find out stuff about me, sleeping with another friend of mine, constantly comparing her unfavourably to me to her face, getting upset when i held hands with my boyfriend in front of him, becuase I was flauting my happiness to make him upset, forbidding me to bring my boyfriend to socials etc.) for me to realise that it wasn’t my fault – that he just needed to grow up and realise sometimes girls just don’t want to sleep with you *shock* there is no need to obsess over them when they don’t.
This was all compounded by another guy this year, who asked me out, was turned down so he first ran around telling people I was a slut and then got really drunk, pinned me down in the kitchen and tried to force me. Ask him now – it was my fault. I’d flirted with him, I’d turned him down, I’d dressed in the sexy dress. How was he expected to control himself? I’d led him on…
They link together in my head really strongly because they both did the exact same thing when I turned them down for a date “but… why not? I think we’d be really good together” and then proceeded to guilt me with how upset I was making them, and how I’d really made them belive made them believe I wanted them. And the really sda thing? It worked! I’m now worried I give guys the wrong impression just saying hello to them, terrified I am leading people on if I smile at them, horrified I may be upsetting someone by not fully considering the effect my actions may have on them.
Men, especially repressed private school types, can be complete bastards when it comes to realising sometimes what they want isn’t the overriding control on the universe.
>>Interesting discussion. I just wanted to throw in another element that perhaps is an even clearer example of how ambiguous that definition of “sexual power is”? (for those who haven’t realised that already, that is). The amount of children who are victims of sexual molestation or abuse, of all degrees, within the family or from non-related acquaintances. Is that sexual ‘power’? Of course not. >>
Right. Possessing something–in this case, I suppose, a sexualized body–is not the same as having power over the people who want it. As even someone was willing to admit, it can be incredibly dangerous, particularly when you have no recognized sovreignity. I mean, look at the people who were in possession of this country before we moved in. Did they have power over us because we wanted their land?
It’s also incredibly troubling–and I know that a bunch of other posters have gotten at this point, too–to see that ownership of one’s own body as an advantage, a _disparity_. It’s a basic right, and one possessed in theory by both the man and the woman involved.
I mean, look at the people who were in possession of this country before we moved in. Did they have power over us because we wanted their land?
That is a really interesting angle. I’d never thought of that in that way.
piny, that is a most excellent point. Paula Gunn Allen and other Native American feminists have been making that comparison all along; that the theft and rape of the land is parallel to the rape of women, and of acts of brutality and genocide against whole peoples. Other feminists of color have been making note of this, and so have ecofeminists. White ecofeminists influenced by Wicca, Paganism, or other Traditional European Religion (pre-Christian) have been saying this.
That’s why feminist critique of imperialism, colonialism, “Manifest Destiny”, ecological destruction, etc. is so important, and why internal critiques within feminism, like recognizing and challenging white privilege and class privilege is so salient. “Rape culture” doesn’t just involve the Female Body, but the Peoples who come from the Female Body, and the land which sustains us. The motivation to rape any and all of the above stems from the same sense of entitlement, of greed and control.
Whatever anyone means by “sexual power”? I have absolutely none of it. I’ll guess there are tens of millions of losers like me in this country; how can women have less than I, we do?
Wouldn’t you guess that there are “tens of millions” of fifty-year-old women who aren’t married, can’t or won’t see a prostitute, and aren’t inclined to physically force themselves on anyone? Or do you really believe that merely having a vulva guarantees an easy path through life? If so, you’re turning your resentment into delusion.
I would further say that it stems from objectification; putting a false and arbitrary “value” on an “object” while at the same time stripping away autonomy or integrity.
Noodles, despite having just talked about being objectified when I was emotionally and socially still a child (if developmentally already into womanhood) I actually had not made that connection, so thanks and good point.
Ted, yeah, that sums a lot of it up for me, and the same ideas hold true for a lot of other types of discrimination as well.
I’ve written and deleted comments 4 times over the course of this 3-thread discussion. I keep getting bogged down with all my emotional baggage. Memories of the loneliness, desire, despair, misunderstanding, and resentment have really come to the forefront of my consciousness and prevented me from focusing on the general issues. I spent the better part of 2 decades being pretty screwed up, knowing I was screwed up, but not being to improve my thinking much. I dealt with it by mostly remaining celebate because being a jerk felt worse. I can relate to many of the men’s issues, but a fair number of the women’s as well. I’ve had several Aha moments.
So rather than contibute a perspective, I wish to thank Amp & the commenters for a really thought-provoking, soul-searching discussion. I mean it, you are smart & perceptive group. I wish they had blogs when I was 18, perhaps I would have come around sooner. I hope many others have a better perspective as a result fo this discussion too, especially the younger men.
Does anyone think that some women fall for the idea that they have real sexual power? I’m reminded of this anti-feminist piece I found via Mouse Words a few months ago.
I wonder why it does not occur to Ms. Chunko (her real name!) that real power is independence. Real power is buying your own drinks and having complete control over your own self. This woman is just lazy and will be very unhappy when she no longer find herself ‘powerful’ as an older woman.
I have had male friends tell me that women have the power because they can get laid whenever they want. To them, it isn’t about being able to say no, it is about being able to say yes. And I suppose it is easier for women to get laid, but there are more repercussions for us. Our reputation, for one.
Then, as others have pointed out, there’s the idea that we should be obligated to say yes. Men have this pressure too, but I think it’s usually greater for women. Like VK, I have allowed myself to feel guilty for not reciprocating a guy’s feelings. I have no problem telling off the good looking, high status guys. For me, the unattractive ones are able to play on my sympathies until it’s too late and I realize I let them manipulate me.
I think what it comes down to is this: Perhaps attractive women have it better than unattractive women. Not in every situation, but (to repeat myself) the ‘net benefit’ is greater. But no woman has the luxury of having her sex appeal not matter. And that’s what sucks. That’s what I think real power would be.
Part of my reasoning for the above statement comes from other feminists. I have been told how easy I have it because I don’t “have to” watch my weight. I’ve been told about discrimination against those who are overweight or not pretty. So please, correct me if I’m wrong.
Also, you don’t have to be attractive to be raped. But I’m not going down that road or else I’ll write a novel.
VK, I had a similar experience in college, but alas, I dated the jerk. He built up this whole image of me (quiet, “ladylike”, less smart) based on my appearance, and never amended it in the nearly 4 years we dated. He would berate me when I didn’t live up to his idea of me, and, yeah, he didn’t take no for an answer in bed, even if I was ill. Whenever I asked anything of him (sex, a ride to the emergency room), he would get insulted and sulky.
Sadly, he’s far from the only guy who thinking I ought to be someone I’m not just because of my physical appearance, although I stopped putting up with it after boyfriend #1. I have gotten reactions of shock – shock! – when I have done something assertive in front of men like this solely because I am shorter than average. And a tall and curvy friend of mine has gotten the same sort of reaction when she has been quiet or uninterested in flirting. What sort of mental model leaves you so unarmed for reality? I guess one for a society where there really is no need to see women as actual persons with thoughts and desires of their own.
Yeah, I’ve heard that one too. These are guys who don’t realize that your average standard-issue bout of vaginal intercourse isn’t an orgasm-fest for most women (and don’t hear you when you attempt to explain this to them). And these are also guys who are deaf when you list all the times that you’ve been turned down for sex.
Isn’t Rachel Chunko a pseudonym for a male college student?
I have had male friends tell me that women have the power because they can get laid whenever they want.
Your male friends can get laid whenever they want, too. Anybody who is willing to set their standards low enough can get a warm body to lie on, if that’s all they’re after.
Going all the way back to the original story about the teenage gang rape and cover-up by adults:
One of the things I was able to recognize really early on was that part of what messed me up about being a victim of voyerism was never seeing the other kid (and he was a kid, younger than me, actually) get into trouble. I can’t imagine what kind of a message that sends to the victim and the perpertrator when the crime has escalated to rape, and such an obvious case of rape.
After I told my parents what he was doing the first time, the kid stopped. But then he started again months later, and in the meantime, I had seen no evidence of him being punished. Obviously, he was very young himself and couldn’t be held accountable in the same way even a kid my age should have been, but still, we both needed to be taught that what he was doing was wrong. When I finally told my parents he had started again, after months of it going on, they were shocked that I had waited so long and asked me, almost angrily, why I had done so. I essentially responded with “What difference did it make the first time?” At which point they finally told me that the whole incident had been taken very seriously indeed, to the point of the kid going to the doctor to see if he need further counseling. (Why no one wondered at any point during all this if I could use some counseling myself, I have no idea.)
The idea that adults would not only fail to see the need to punish teenage rapists, but go so far as to cover up the incident, is just appalling and goes a long way towards explaining why so many women and girls still feel the need to conform to sexist ideas.
Shiloh:
Sometimes I agree that it makes sense to view virginity as a choice. Sometimes, though, I think it makes more sense to consider it an accident of circumstance.
After all, for someone who would very much like to have sex, but who has not been successful at attracting a suitable partner, the “choice” to remain a virgin is not really much of a choice at all, is it? I mean, if your options are to (a) hire a prostitute, (b) lose your virginity to a partner who may not be a safe partner, or (c) grit your teeth and have sex with someone who repulses you…well, yeah, I guess you’re still making a “choice.” But not, to my mind, in any terribly meaningful sense of that term.
Holy Christ, what a thing to say to a rape survivor. Yeesh.
Agree with Kim here: it’s not that rape stories aren’t always horrifying, but that’s a truly stomach-churning anecdote.
No. Far too many men don’t. Then, of course, traditionally a woman’s virginity doesn’t belong to her at all. It belongs to her father, and thereafter to whomever her father gives or sells her to.
Ever had a guy refuse to have sex with you the instant they found out you were a virgin, even though they had previously seemed a willing and eager partner, because they didn’t want the “responsibility” of taking your maidenly virtue, or some other such patriarchal bullshit?
But. Anyway. Let me put my personal baggage back in the overhead compartment, shall I? Point is, I think that the entire virginity issue can cut both ways. Either way it cuts, though, it comes down to exactly the same perception: a woman’s virginity isn’t her own. It belongs to men, and it is men who determine whether she “should” keep it or not. Her own ideas or preferences on the issue just don’t matter.
Holy Crap! I need to know where you went to school and where you live now because if it is anywhere near my daughters I am getting them out of there.
What awful stories. I am so glad I went to a boarding school for disadvantaged children. We did not even have half those problems and many of the kids at my school had been sexually molested as children, beat by their parents or were living on the street before The Chocolate Man took us in.
Redneck Feminist:
Yeah. Thanks for saying it, though, because although I suppose that I could be seen as one of those responsible for that implication in this discussion, it had sort of been bothering me too.
There’s a nice little lose-lose dynamic built into the way we view the intersection between sexual power and rape, though. If an attractive woman is raped, she must have been “asking for it.” If an unattractive woman is raped, then she must be lying about it to gain “prestige” or “status” or somesuch by claiming a sexual connection with her higher-status rapist – the whole “she’s lying, ’cause why would the football star bother to rape a dog like that?” line.
Which I seem to remember was the one that got whipped out in the original story that prompted these threads. Those “normal” popular boys surely wouldn’t have orally raped that disabled girl! She must have offered herself to them in the hopes of gaining social status!
Blechh.
The other one that has always struck me as bizarre, with regards to unattractive women is ‘She should be happy someone wanted her’, in essence turning the rape into some sort of public service.
Kim (basement variety!) wrote:
Mine, too. I’ve had a lot of friends tell me their rape stories over the years, and all of the stories make me angry and sad, but that one really breaks my heart – it’s like she not only had to go through the horror of stranger rape and dealing with the cops (who fortunately believed her) and all, but she ALSO had to go through what is practically a date rape the next week! What a profound betrayal.
Precisely. Thanks for summarizing it so succinctly. The rape culture does not really justify rapists or sexual abusers of any stripe – it doesn’t make what they do right – but it does excuse them from any responsibility. It provides excuses, so they can more easily fake themselves out. It teaches them that they have the right to abuse, yes, but I think the fact that so many men recognize what’s being done is wrong tells us that the rape culture does not truly confuse people about what’s right or wrong.
IMHO, guys who act this way would not react with such anger and ridicule when flatly challenged if they didn’t know, in their heart of hearts, that what they’re doing is wrong. I would hazard a guess that the rape culture exists in the first place to justify what some men have done, and that it is perpetuated most strongly by men who need to excuse their own selfishness.
VK wrote:
Rape culture, to me, is when people hold the woman responsible for the man’s choices – particularly, it seems, when the man is being most childish or most selfish.
La Lubu writes:
If you read the documents of the time, there were also parallels in the way the powers-that-be would characterize the Indians; as helpless and weak and unable to make their own decisions, just as women were helpless and weak and unable to make their own decisions. The solution, in both cases, was for some white man to make the choices for them. American black slavery followed the same rules – the people being dominated “needed” someone to dominate them, for their own health and happiness.
And, of course, when any of these groups denied this need and fought for autonomy, then the oppressed group was “in the wrong” and deserving of punishment they “brought on themselves.” No power; all the responsibility.
Redneck feminist (drumgurl) wrote:
I think it depends a lot on the personality of the attractive woman. An attractive woman who is also kind of low key and tends to “go with the flow” is at a great disadvantage, I think, because she’s more easily abused and attracts more abusers. OTOH, an attractive woman who is pretty forceful and/or selfish can get considerable mileage out of her attractiveness. The lady you quoted (if she’s real at all) is powerful more because she’s manipulative than because she’s beautiful, would be my guess.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned in the sexual power discussion is the fact that self-confidence can be attractive. Everyone, I believe, is more attractive when they’re relaxed and at ease, and self-confident people are relaxed in more situations, so they come across as more attractive. They are also, if women, more likely to “accentuate the positive,” so if they are moderately attractive (physically speaking), they’ll make use of that, learning the skills and tricks of makeup and costume. Manipulative women are quite likely to accentuate their appearance, because they want power and that’s one way to get it.
Manipulative men do the same, I’m sure, but they usually have more ways to exercise power so they probably don’t expend as much energy on attracting the opposite sex. And, there’s less a manipulative man can *do* to improve his physical attractiveness – he may exercise and chose his clothes with care, but he doesn’t need such a broad selection of clothes and he’s not likely to spend hours every day applying make-up and doing that routine. What would be “seriously paying attention to his looks” with a guy would be considered “the bare minimum/just getting started” for a woman.
Elkins said:
Yeah, I should have clarified, but heaven knows I’m wordy enough as it is. I was discussing virginity when it is chosen, not when it’s an accident of circumstances. If a guy choses virginity (or celibacy, or restored virginity, or whatever you want to call avoiding sex during a specific period of your life), it’s his choice. People may think he’s nuts, and if he’s a teenager he may get teased (although I’ve never known a teenage male virgin who’d admit to it in public), but that’s about the extent of it. But when a woman choses virginity, she gets grief for “not putting out,” or for being a tease, or heaven knows what.
And if the woman is raped or simply is not a virgin when she decides to take a sabbatical from sex, guys treat this as a positive affront. Way back before the Internet there were these sex activity surveys (they’re still around, I’m sure), and guys would quite literally put their girlfriend through it “as a joke,” but then expect her to do with them anything she’d done with anyone else. The fact that she’d done it with anybody made it part of their “rights” over her.
Yeah. That.
This happens among adults, too. I can’t remember ever hearing a story about being harassed on a train or a bus or on the street and seeing someone step in to tell the harasser to stop it.
Right. Both groups have been compared to children.
Wow. This thread is amazing. Painful to read, but amazing.
BStu, I think you’re spot on about pornography. I keep going back and forth on whether porn is “okay” or not, and after something I read last night, I was forced to see that the stuff I’d been reading that I thought was weird but harmless was actually brutally misogynist. Part of what’s creepy about porn is the ever-recurring insistence that one cannot refrain from acting on impulse. We’re getting trained to treat sexist and misogynist behavior as inescapable and the basis of our sexuality.
The thing that’s getting me most about this discussion is the way men seem to regard their own suffering as an excuse to completely ignore anyone else’s feelings — particularly women’s feelings — rather than learning from their suffering to feel compassion for the suffering of others. I have to admit I’ve been guilty of this more times than I can count. Women, by contrast, seem to be trained to ignore their own suffering and pay more attention to that of others.
Yet, oftentimes when we no longer ignore it, we are told we are being uncivil because of our anger and tone.
Kim (basement variety!) said:
I finally read I Never Called It Rape last year, and she discusses that some fraternities have what’s called a rude hogger award – given to the frat member who has sex with the woman they’ve voted most ugly. I have not the least doubt, having run across the concept in less structured groups, that the frat member who gets the award considers his act some form of public service, even if it involved force.
A somewhat off topic comment on the issue of feeling entitled – my sister went to the Boston Conservatory of Music for a while, and she lived next door to a frat. When hubby, brother and I meant to commiserate with her for this fact, she said it really wasn’t so bad – she said that the Conservatory frats were much less obnoxious than the frats around Colorado University. Her theory, and I suspect she’s right, is that the guys at CU frats considered themselves richer and more important than everyone else, which justified their more obnoxious behavior. But most people at the Conservatory and in that neighborhood were tolerably well off – without this class contrast, the frat boys were better behaved.
Studies indicate that guys also rate women who send “lower middle class” signals as less attractive – but also read “lower middle class” women as being sluts and sexually available. So less attractive women end up targeted as well. My friend who loved her tight pants ran up against that, I think. At her first high school she was apparently quite popular, and guys respected her. I’m fairly certain that her high school tended toward “lower-to-middle middle class” students (it was in the same system as my first high school and had that reputation), and her signals were mostly lower middle with a few upper middle mixed in. At our second high school, most of the students and pretty much all the “cool” students were upper middle class.
At our second high school, not only was she not as popular – when she did go on dates, the guys just assumed she’d “put out.” At her first high school, she didn’t face that problem – I think because the guys she was with “spoke the same language” when it came to unconscious things like clothes and how you stand and the words you choose in casual speech. But at the second high school, all of a sudden she was rated “low class” and thus “easy.”
She once told me I needed to quit giving her grief about her tight pants, because if it wasn’t for those pants she would have been raped – the guy couldn’t just push them off but had to move away from her to get leverage to try to pry them off, and so she got away. Heh.
Then again, while I “coded” for upper middle class in how I moved and talked, guys figured I was “easy” because of my bra cup size. Ya can’t win for losin’.
I do not at all argue that all hierarchy of any kind should be destroyed – but the fact remains that a lot of social hierarchy is used to excuse misusing those on another rung of the ladder. Women below a guy on the economic/social hierarchy are fair game because they aren’t worthy anything better. Women above a guy on the economic/social hierarchy are arrogant bitches who should be brought down a peg.
Every type of social interaction I can think of carries a “rape myth” to excuse mistreating the woman through some form of sexual harrassment. Our culture provides a myriad of excuses for dehumanizing women. It may be that in this culture it takes a very strong man to resist the temptation to make use of that power, particularly when the woman in question isn’t someone he cares about as a person in the first place.
I finally read I Never Called It Rape last year, and she discusses that some fraternities have what’s called a rude hogger award – given to the frat member who has sex with the woman they’ve voted most ugly.
Yes — as I mentioned on the other thread, basically in passing, women considered unattractive are either ignored or ridiculed, and they don’t have sexual power; their lack of attractiveness is used against them. As I’m not good at blogging my position on things in essay form, I wouldn’t want to tackle this subject — and I wonder if there’s really much more to add, since it’s pretty quickly summed up — but I think it rarely gets addressed, and I’d like to see it mentioned more often under this topic.
Let’s put it in simpler terms. The sexual power that a woman wields (in theory) is totally dependent on the man being unable or unwilling to rape her.
The idea that a woman has more sexual power than a man is based on the idea that men on average want sex more than women do, and so they have to work for the woman’s approval so she will allow him to have sex with her. Obviously, if a man is willing to take what he wants without consent, then the female’s “sexiness” does not give her any power.
So that ultimately means that the more rape occurs in a society, the less that a woman’s “sexiness” can be seen as giving her any power over men.
Hm.
Rape isn’t the only form of sexual violence, or the only thing women have to be afraid of.
How about, “The power that a woman might have by virtue of her sexuality does not operate independent of other kinds of power or powerlessness. It cannot be analyzed without reference to other advantages and punishments. Nor can the (putative) ability to trade on a commodified body be separated from the question of bodily autonomy; you can’t sell something you don’t own. The less power women have in general, the less power they have over their sexuality.”
Plus, since when did having someone over a barrel translate to power on their part? According to this sex-bartering idea, women can trade on their sexuality for career advances, security, love/support….But I haven’t heard mentioned anything that humans can easily opt out of.
and
I’ve heard this before . . . guys who think that a woman has no business looking sexual/sensual if she doesn’t plan to be sexual/sensual . . . with them, naturally. Funny thing is, you never hear them making that complaint about the women in Playboy. These types of guys are the types who often look at porn, and those women are displaying more than any classmate in a backless top, yet they aren’t berated as “tormenting him with what he couldn’t have.”
Next time anybody tries a line like that to me, I plan on telling him he’s too arrogant for me to be interested in him, because it’s very arrogant to assume a woman has no reason to want to be beautiful unless she’s being beautiful for his benefit. Yeah, if she’s not trying to attract a guy, why should she bother to be anything? That almost sounds like there’s more to a woman’s life than getting a man!
Let me tell you something, it is incredibly liberating and empowering to stop worrying about how others see you and just focus on how you see yourself. When I choose what to wear, I don’t care what the guys at my school will think of it; all that matters is that I feel good in it.
PS: If a guy tries to convince you to go out with him by bringing up the reactions you “inspire” in him, or asks how you expect him to control himself, that’s yet another reason you can give him to justify your lack of interest: “You can’t even control yourself? What a wuss! I don’t date people who are too weak-minded to control themselves.”
I’ve always thought that attraction has nothing to do with sexual violence at all (I prefer ‘sexual violence’ rather than rape because it covers that and so much more, including non physical violence).
This is because I am lesbian, but yet am still expected to be available to male advances. Even when my lesbianism is revealed, this is not seen as me being able to have power in a particular situation to say that I won’t be definied sexually by a man, but rather is seen as evidence of my sexual nature; a sexual nature that, as a woman, can only be for him, for a man.
There have been times when I have been walking with my girlfriend of the time, hand in hand, and men have approached us, suggesting sex. And not in the “Oh, but I am just joking” way frat boys or jock boys do, or the “Woohoo, can I join in?” way that men driving by do, but rather drop dead serious, simply expecting us, as women obviously expressing ourselves sexually, by holding hands, that we are available for him.
Then, of course, my sexuality is denied. I can’t be lesbian because I dress so much “like a woman” or “too sexily” because I would wear a skirt, or a tank top. So, of course my sexuality must be directed towards the man, because he finds me attractive. My sexuality can not be defined on my own terms as his must have preeminence over mine.
That a woman would express herself sexually in a way that does not involve a man then becomes a situation where sexual violence needs to be used to ensure that I learn where my place is, where my sexuality should be. From the man across the rapid transit train that has seen the “Marriage for All” button on my tote-bag and taken it as a personal insult and attack on his masculinity by glaring at me with hate in his eyes, to the violence-swollen boys that drive past a group of me and my friends sitting outside a lesbian bar on a hot summer night yelling that they “would teach us what a real man feels like”.
The irony of sexual violence is that it isn’t even sexual. It’s about the use of a woman’s sexuality, taking it away from her, to be owned by society, by the men that would define her, objectify her, use her, in order to dehumanise her: to control her. Sexual violence is the epitome of our patriarchal society where sex is reduced to a tool of property and who has power.
And that includes me. Even as a lesbian. of course.
To say that rape, or if you prefer, coerced sexual activity (I am not using the term “sexual violence” because it covers situations that I am not addressing here, i.e. where the sex may be consensual but non-consensual violent acts occur collteral to the sex, e.g. someone pressuring his girlfriend to let herself be tied up before sex) is not about sex seems to me to be like saying that robbery is not about money.
Definitely there are some cases in which the sex is merely a tool to assert power over someone. But it seems to me in other cases (for example a lot of date rapes) that it is about sex. Specifically, one person wants sex and decides that nothing matters other than his own personal satisfaction; in other words, he may not have the intention of raping someone, but if that is what it takes to get sex when he wants it, he will do it, other people’s rights and feelings be damned.
Of course, even if rape in a particular case is all about sex, it doesn’t excuse the rape one iota. I don’t have the right to rob someone because I want money; I don’t have the right to rape someone because I want sex.
Sarah in Chicago wrote:
This kills me, because the only self-proclaimed lesbian I’ve known IRL told me she began “exploring the gay lifestyle” because she’d been raped. She no longer felt safe having sex with men, so she decided to explore having sex with women. The sex was just as good, so she wrote men off.
Some study discussed in an LJ group I hang around with indicated that most lesbians have had sex with a man, while most gay guys haven’t. The lesbians in the discussion speculated that gay women are more “sexually flexible” than gay men, more open to experiences, more willing to try both ways before making a definite decision. Maybe. Not having seen the study, but having read some books and articles on rape that mention female rape victims “switching” to female lovers after the rape, I’m wondering if they asked how many of the lesbians who’d had sex with males were pressured or forced into it.
One friend of mine tried getting rid of unwanted suitors by telling them she was a lesbian – she discovered that wearing a fake wedding ring worked much better. Which makes sense, I suppose. If a woman can’t own her own sexuality, how can she possibly own the sexuality of another woman? No wonder telling guys she was in a committed lesbian relationship didn’t slow them down a whit.
I once read somewhere and I’ve loved it ever since, “If it were truly possible for women to fuck to the top there’d be a whole lot more women at the top by now.”
Keeping the song quotes thing going, I listened to the Neko Case song “Pretty Girls” yesterday (get the album Blacklisted, it’s very good):
Your hearts are so tried and so innocent
Wind your flimsy blue gowns tight around you
Around curves so comely and sinister
They blame it on you pretty girls
Oh pretty girls, you’re too good for this
How you break my heart in this cold waiting room
Oh pretty girls, you’re too good for this
Don’t let them tell you you’re nothing
Don’t let them break your hearts too
Ooops. That should be, “Most lesbians have had sex with a man, while most gay guys haven’t had sex with a woman. Ahem!
shiloh –
I have heard and read of similar studies, and to be sure, I don’t doubt there are some lesbian women that have turned to being lesbian through ‘bad’ experiences with men. However, I also think those are rather small numbers. I would argue that the exaggeration of such numbers has more to do with the same things we are discussing here; namely that a woman’s sexuality is being defined by her relation to a man. In other words, if her default position (her natural position) of being with men is for some reason not available to her, then she will go to women.
Now, as to more lesbian women having been with men than gay men with women *grin* I see two reasons for that. One, femininity in our culture is a considerably more flexible space than is masculinity, the latter of which is easily lost by even minor ‘infractions’ (as an aside, an explanation for the more extreme responses to ‘get it back’). Two, if the sexuality of women is defined in relationship to men but yet for men their sexuality is about access to sex as we have been discussing here, then its only natural that lesbian woman have had more heterosexual expereinces than gay men, as women’s sexuality is not constructed in relation to their own desires, whatever they be.
But that’s just my 0.02 :)
Sarah in Chicago said,
Sorry about that; I didn’t mean to conflate women who were raped and then gave lesbian relationships a try with women who were lesbian per se. I was just thinking that, since I know some women who have come to identify as lesbian were raped, isn’t it possible that women who always identified as lesbian were raped or otherwise pressured? I didn’t mean to connect the two concepts that tightly, it’s just that one made me think of the other.
I also wonder how strictly they’re defining having sex with the opposite gender – I’ve known a lot of gay guys who’ll “make out” with women without considering that any indication that they’re bi-sexual or anything other than gay. Our culture has this weird obsession with defining sex as intercourse and nothing else, IMHO.
shiloh –
That is a really good question, and point. I know straight women, that after they have consumed a bit of alcohol, will go after lesbians (of course *cough* not speaking from any personal experience here *cough*) but yet do not consider themselves even remotely bisexual. One straight friend defines herself as “nondiscriminatory” but yet straight.
But I don’t think it is a coincidence that definitions of what sex is or isn’t becomes more and more narrow the more conservative the individual/group doing the defining is. This becomes particularly apparent with those religous groups pushing for abstinence until marriage vows amongst teenagers, and the statistics showing that those teenagers are highly more likely to participate in unprotected oral and anal sex as “that’s not sex”. How precisely that works in with our “rape culture” I’d be interested in discussing … hmmmm ….
Brian Vaughn wrote:
…and I have to make the same admission. Worse, I’m afraid I’m about to do it again. I’m not disagreeing with anything here, I just need information.
My sense is that any kind of usable power involves a difference that can be evened out across a barrier and a means of controlling that barrier (a dam’s power comes from both a difference of water levels and the turbine). Sexual power would arise from a difference between a sexual want and reality and the ability to control that difference.
The simplistic view of women’s sexual power is that men desire sex and women control men’s access to sex, therefore women have power. Both halves of that generalization are pretty thoroughly picked apart above, so the only thing I’ll add is that the more common formulation in the real world would tend to be that a particular woman would desire not to be approached sexually by a particular man, who controls whether or not he does so.
(In my mind, the healthy reformulation of this power would be that each person desires a certain level of sexual contact (or lack thereof), and the joint control over attaining that level makes sexual relationships powerful. This is hardly a simple solution — desires change over time and can be hard to know even to oneself. Call me a dreamer.)
Here’s where I (oh-so-predictably) need help:
Shiloh wrote:
I could really use a clarification: is this intended in the same spirit as “…anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” [Matt. 5:28], or is ‘treats’ meant in the sense of an outward action? To my ear, it’s the former, but regardless of whether it’s meant exactly that way here, it’s a message I’ve heard enough as part of femminist critique elsewhere that it causes real trouble for me, and I’d appreciate help resolving it. I’ll try to be coherent, if I can.
My experience has largely been of having a surplus interest in sex. I’m not whining about that — I hear lots of people have that problem, it’s part of life. My point is only that there exists a difference and a barrier between my sexuality and the real world.
I often have sexual feelings towards people I don’t know, towards people I know I wouldn’t really want to be involved with, towards people I know would not want to be involved with me, towards lovers when they aren’t in the mood — all of which, according to the reasonable definitions above, objectify those people. It would never be an outward action, but that’s not the point; internally, I’m treating these people as sex objects. Since I’m more attracted to women than men, this is a gendered issue for me.
I could go on — I feel there’s something to be said about having a deficit of power without someone else gaining power over you — but I think the problem’s pretty clear as it stands without further muddling: does this desire itself support rape culture?
A friend of mine worked as an exotic dancer for a while, a verifiable feminist stripper working her way through school and proud of her work. In conversations with her and a couple of her colleagues, I found that while they had excellent theory about their own roles and those of lesbian customers (of which there were a few) in the sexual power system, no one seemed to know how to fit the sexual desire of the male customers into that system. The best characterization they could give it was “sad,” sometimes “pathetic.” I admit that they probably saw some of the least respectable expressions of male desire, but I’m still looking for a good sex-positive feminist theory that rehabilitates het (or bi) male lust. Links appreciated.
Kind of an interesting aside with regards to the concept of society giving tacit approval to rape, I found this article earlier today and thought it definitely fell within the confines of what could be considered ‘condoning’:
Excerpt from Harvard Stumbles Over Rape Reporting
by Lorraine Dusky
What sort of corraberating evidence, exactly? Isn’t the very act of investigating rape reports to collect evidence? So basically what this said to me is that women that want to file rape reports (at least at Harvard) need to do the investigative legwork prior to coming forward.
Cranefly;
I think in the last thread, this was spoken of more thoroughly; in essence as you suspected, treats is used in it’s active tense – lusting but keeping that lust private is well – it’s natural! Acting on that lust, even if it’s only slightly, in a manner that objectifies the object of that lust (inappropriate comments, unsolicited touches, etc.) is where the line gets drawn. The biggest and most unfortunate drawback of this is that flirting too is natural, but the hypothetical do not cross line is arbitrary from person to person, and how can a person know every single indicator that their actions are crossing the line at all times.
It’s confusing and delicate to balance – I remember being involved at one point with a fella I worked with and the first month of our involvement consisted of covert smiles moving into appreciative looks that progressively got ‘bolder’ (not like staring at crotch bold, but acknowledgment of the other in a personal way bold), and finally culminated in me sending him an email and asking him to lunch. For me, I had to make the judgement call that my asking him to lunch was where the line would be established (after I’d made a calculated opinion on our prior flirtation that it wouldn’t be unwelcome), and accept and back off should he send me a polite, no thanks.
A couple of things…
Some people have mentioned the fact that the only “sexual power” women usually ever have is related to their appearance–namely, being beautiful; however, men can have sexual power for many different reasons: if they are wealthy, attractive, intelligent (especially in the humanities), artistically talented, or powerful…to name a few. I would like to point out that many of the characteristics that increase men’s sexual power are considered (by men) to be liabilities if possessed by women. According to this mindset, an intelligent woman is less attractive, as is a female artist or a woman in a position of (political/business/etc) power. I think this only reinforces the point that what is called “sexual power” for men simply means “power” alone–they are what one desires to be–whereas a woman with “sexual power” is what one desires to have.
Also…
I sympathize. I have a friend with larger than normal breasts in proportion
to the rest of her body, and she has been blamed for it far too many times–guys complaining about how her breasts move when she walks or comes down stairs, as though it is something she controls! As though she deliberately made herself this way to torment them!
And finally, regarding this:
That is because these guys do possess the women in the Playboy. They can open and close the pages, look at the women whenever they want, imagine them to be whomever they want. Within the pages of a porn magazine, women are contained. They can’t reject you; they can’t be smarter than you; they can’t disappoint you. They never change and never go away. How unlike real women. No wonder guys who are nursed on porn are so shocked to find that they can be rejected, that real women have opinions and desires.
Kim (basement variety!) wrote:
Hmm. I read through the last thread from the point after the comment that forked off into this one, and I didn’t really see anything about it. Thanks for the reply, though, and while I would tend to agree with you, I guess I’ve heard too much of the opinion that “lust is a male sin” from both the church I grew up in (“lust is male”) and the feminist theory I read in school (“male lust is inherently objectifying”) to be comfortable just casually assuming that someone doesn’t mean that when they sound like they might. Which is not to say that they’d be wrong, but if it’s so, then I need more help connecting the dots.
To atone in part for taking the thread on a tangent:
If anyone’s going to be serious about making an argument that being sexually attractive in the passive sense is a form of power, they should first make sure they’ve read and understand a bit of mathematics called the stable marriage algorithm. While it fails to model the changing landscape of actual human relationships (and only works for heterosexual pairings!), it demonstrates pretty clearly that the real power in mate selection lies in being the one to approach your intended, not in the more limited power to accept or reject a suitor.
The actual proof is clean and simple and for some reason I’m having trouble finding a link to it right now, but an intuitive approach makes it pretty clear, too: would you rather be in the position of approaching your #1 mate choice first, then (if rejected) #2, and so on down the list, or would you rather wait and see who comes to you (having not succeeded with their higher-ranked choices) and pick your favorite among this pre-selected set?
And this is even if you strip away all the many societal reasons why “being sexy” is not a usable power for women.
Has anyone been heard of the term “pity fuck”? I’m interesting of what you make of this phenomnon.
There’s this guy R, whom I kinda liked but after a couple dates realized that I wasn’t really all that attracted to him. But he was so sweet and kinda pathetic, so i slept with him anyway. Who had the power? Was he manipulating me into having sex, or was I leading him on?
Sarah in Chicago wrote;
Interesting. My experience has been precisely the opposite – when I was growing up, at least, Christian conservatives defined “sex” quite broadly. I remember reading Elisabeth Elliot angsting over a kiss she and her then-fiance enjoyed, feeling that they’d crossed the line somehow. Charles Shedd was more mainstream, but there were a lot of Christian conservatives arguing that sex is far more than intercourse, and that Christian teens should draw the line way before hitting the level of what most people call sexual activity.
Which makes the whole abstinence kids having anal sex even more bizarre, from my perspective. I’ve known people who practiced abstinence for any number of reasons, not all religious, but they were their own reasons. The abstinence contracts seem to be more an “imposed from above” or peer pressure sort of thing, so of course kids are looking for loopholes. Still, while I can understand a reluctance to tell kids, “Here’s where to draw the line,” I can’t imagine anyone reading some of the stuff I did assuming any form of intercourse but vaginal “doesn’t count” as sex.
I get the impression the abstinence program in question is presented as secular (wasn’t someone fussing that the program’s secular but the kids get a Bible as an award somewhere along the line?), which added to the fact that the Christian kids I know who are virgins and argue for virginity find the whole idea stupid probably indicates that, whatever it is, it’s nothing like what I was exposed to as a kid.
The current thing in the most conservative Christian circles is courtship rather than dating – courtship is defined differently every time I run across it, but the basic trend is to take the focus off sex and put it on the couple getting to know each other outside of having sex. The courtship movement tends to define sex much as Elliot did – pretty much anything beyond friendly kisses is considered “foreplay” and therefore sexual. So I guess I’m not seeing narrow definitions of sex being associated with conservatives.
Cranefly said,
I talked some about how “treats” is meant in the sense of outward action in post # 8 to this thread. My cousin’s an exotic dancer working her way through college, and having heard some of her tales I don’t think I can fit exotic dancing into any sort of feminist theory (although I know there are feminists who do). Stripping, like most pornography, is pretty much designed to objectify women, IMHO, and isn’t likely to function well outside of that.
I think everyone, male or female, tends to objectify their lust object – it’s natural to want them to be what we fantasize about. Not all feminists agree with me, but I would argue the feminist approach would be to fight against objectifying people and work towards treating people as individuals. To be honest, while on the one hand I’m really opposed to “policing thought,” I do think that if a guy’s having sexual fantasies about someone, while she’s right there, some women can pick that up and that’s part of why they characterize the guy as “creepy.” In that sense lustful fantasies can be an imposition – not only is the guy objectifying her, but she knows she’s being objectified.
I also think there’s a big difference between lust that’s just a visual flitting across your brain and lust that you sit there and dwell on and embroider and elaborate until you’ve got a whole scenario going where the person being lusted after does all manner of things they aren’t likely to do in real life. That, at any rate, was the conclusion of some Puritan(!) commentary I once read on the Matthew 5:28 passage on lust. It is not the fact that you experience lust that’s a sin; it’s when you foster it and cater to it and build on it.
Whether that has any meaning in a secular sense, I dunno. The Puritan guy connected it to, “But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” (James 1:14-15), which I found interesting because a lot of date rapists have pretty obviously planned the rape out before hand (setting it up so the woman is isolated and the like), so I would assume they’ve also fantasized about it. Except the “death” in that passage is no doubt spiritual death, so the parallel isn’t exact, but still…
Treating those we lust after as people does complicate things. If all women are just sex objects, then the rules are pretty easy. But if women are individuals, then what works with one woman may offend the next. Sex objects “bounce back,” so if you mess up, no big deal. Individuals get hurt if you aren’t careful. I sometimes suspect the people who protest to the idea of asking a partner, “Is this okay?” periodically are actually protesting the idea that they shouldn’t objectify someone. If they have to worry about what their sex partner thinks or feels, how can they relax and enjoy themselves? It’s a completely alien approach for them, and I suppose it’s pretty scary.
I wonder if the feminists who give the impression that lustful male thoughts are offensive in and of themselves are women who can sort of “tune in” to a guy’s thoughts. Although with some guys, it’s hard to miss. The old complaint of, “Hey, guy, Hello! My face is Up Here.” There’s a definite difference between a guy who’s too shy to meet your eyes and a guy who doesn’t meet your eyes because he’s too busy looking elsewhere. The line between “lustful thoughts” and “objectifying acts” does get pretty thin, sometimes.
I fear this post has not been very helpful in clarifying what I meant. Sorry about that.
Can I be a sexual being without being a sexual object? Can it be recognized that I LIKE sex and like being percieved as sexy without the mysgynist comments of me “using” my sexuality or the feminist idea the I’m being objectified if I belly dance?
Thanks for the clarification, shiloh. I’d read your comments in #8 but interpreted them as being a response specific to the question about one night stands, in which the sexual action line has already been crossed and it’s a question of how it’s carried out. Thank you for taking the time to expand on what you meant, it was very helpful.
And so, in honor of Q grrl not only being rightfully angry at someone in (one of the previous threads) for referring to women as girls, but also not being afraid or ashamed to show it, I’d like to dedicate the following lyrics from Shawn Colvin’s “Sunny Came Home” to her:
“Sunny came home with a list of names
She didn’t believe in transcendence
It’s time for a few small repairs she said
Sunny came home with a vengeance”
Kim (basement variety!) said:
I “heard” a more negative message – just don’t even bother coming forward. *sigh*
Antigone wrote:
There are feminists who argue that belly dancing is objectifying? How depressing. Never gone to a con or gathering or whatever you call it, but most of the people I’ve known who were into belly dance were female. I always thought of belly dance as very affirming of a woman’s sexuality – there is no “right” body type for belly dance; a woman can belly dance into her sixties and beyond; it’s terrific for pregnancy and labor; unlike ballet it’s very individualistic and constantly evolving, etc. In the 1970’s and early ’80’s belly dancing was seen as a feminist act, at least by the belly dancers I knew. It was a way of reclaiming your body and your sexuality.
I suppose women belly dancing in bars are or could be objectified (certainly they are in Egypt), but the only time I saw a belly dancer dance in a bar she gave a brief lecture first on the history of the dance and its meaning – like every other belly dancer I’ve known, she had considerable personal dignity, and certainly no one dared try a wolf whistle or otherwise treat her performance as anything less than art. Although I mostly remember that particular performance because I thought it so bizarre that she’d periodically throw in some Rockette-style high kicks…
Well, I used belly dancing because I’ve never talked to a stripper. But I do belly dance, and a lot of women who claim to be feminist have said it’s objectifying.
What the heck does “objectifying” mean, anyway? Treating somebody as though they have no worth beyond their sexual utility to you? It’s really awkward term, like “liberated.”
I understood it to mean treating a woman as an object only, and denying her as a subject.
>>To say that rape, or if you prefer, coerced sexual activity (I am not using the term “sexual violence”? because it covers situations that I am not addressing here, i.e. where the sex may be consensual but non-consensual violent acts occur collteral to the sex, e.g. someone pressuring his girlfriend to let herself be tied up before sex) is not about sex seems to me to be like saying that robbery is not about money.>>
I think that this is sort of a soundbite, albeit a profound one: a way to start thinking about a dynamic, but not a complete description. It’s not meant to imply that there isn’t a sexual element to sexualized violence, or that men who rape don’t get off on rape. I don’t think it’s inaccurate anti-feminist to say that sex, in our culture, is on several levels “about” rape.
One of the myths associated with rape–and one that anti-rape activists have spent a lot of time killing–is the idea that the existence of rape depends on the mediation of sex. That is, that rape exists because men aren’t getting enough sex, or because men are getting too much sex, or because women are making themselves too sexually available, or because women’s bodies aren’t available enough. This has been one of the historical rationales for legalizing prostitution: all that semen has to go somewhere.
Of course, this is bullshit. Rape doesn’t exist because men are horny and women are frigid. Rape doesn’t exist because sexual behavior is constrained or encouraged. Rape exists because men feel entitled to use women’s bodies. The causes of rape are misogyny and inequality. So, in that sense, rape is not about sex, but about power.
I suspect that “objectification” is an oblique reference to Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative: that we must treat rational beings as ends, and never merely as means. Like the other formulations of the categorical imperative, and the rest of Kant generally, what this means in practice, if anything*, is uncertain. It doesn’t mean that we can’t “use” other people as means to our own ends. It is possible to “use” other people as means to your ends while still respecting them as ends in and of themselves. This raises the question of what exactly it is to not respect someone as an end. I think that rape and sexual harassment are pretty clear-cut cases of not respecting someone as an end. Kant drew some weird conclusions, though: for example, he believed that masturbation was wrong, because it violated one’s duties to oneself, because when you masturbate, you’re treating yourself as a means to the end of your pleasure, rather than respecting yourself as an end. (?????)
I was thinking about the way that men take a woman’s dressing “provocatively” or “conservatively” as signal of her sexual availability. That seems wrong to me, because it might just be her personal style. At the same time, it seems to me that women (and men) are better off if they have some way of signalling their availability or not. One might say that people really shouldn’t start a relationship unless they’re already friends who know the outlines of each others personal lives in the first place, so there would never be a question of who’s single by choice, single but looking, in a relationship, in an open relationship, etc. Still, some people seem to prefer starting a relationship — or a one-night stand, or whatever — tabula rasa. I guess personals are one solution, or, if you’re a college student and kinda-sorta know someone you’re attracted to, but not well enough to know his relationship status, you could try to see if he has a facebook profile that says anything.
*My ethics professor, Candace Vogler, believes that the view that the categorical imperative is prescriptive at all is a misreading, and, in fact, Kant believed that people already knew what their moral duties were from common-sense, intuitive ethics, and that in those situations with true moral dilemmas, the categorical imperative can’t be used as a formula for finding the right answer: you just have to think about it in common-sense terms until you come to a conclusion about what’s right. The point of the categorical imperative is to explain why we have the morals we do, not tell us what our morals should be.
Well, I used belly dancing because I’ve never talked to a stripper. But I do belly dance, and a lot of women who claim to be feminist have said it’s objectifying.
Then they are Calvinists, not feminists. There is nothing inherently objectifying about a woman belly dancing, any more than a woman playing soccer or acting in a movie or dancing in a ballet. Of course, in all of these there is always the possibility that a viewer will see the body but never see the human being but that is the viewer’s problem, not the woman’s.
(I think people have more problems with stripping because it seems to be all about turning women into bodies. For a different view, read Lily Burana’s Strip City.)
I run in radical feminists circles and I have never heard or read of one saying belly dancing was inherently objectifying. I don’t who these feminist women you’re speaking to are and I don’t deny your expereience, but I haven’t encountered it in radical feminism. The well mannered men in the audience shiloh spoke of knew the differences between strippers and belly dancers and having seen both I know the differences too.
(I think people have more problems with stripping because it seems to be all about turning women into bodies
Or because it involves money. People are a lot more comfortable with women selling themselves when the terms of the exchange are not explicit.
To add to mythago’s point, I would be upset if my boss wanted to pay me by stuffing money into my underwear instead of with direct deposit.
Or because it involves money. People are a lot more comfortable with women selling themselves when the terms of the exchange are not explicit.
Perhaps but belly dancers also often get money from the audience. I think the difference in perception might be because belly dancers (at least the ones I know) do it because they enjoy dancing and especially enjoy becoming so sensual about and in control of their bodies. There is a great movie called ‘Satin Rouge’ that, among other things, explores some of these ideas.
Shiloh, on thinking about this overnight, I’m having trouble with using the Puritan idea that “it is not the fact that you experience lust that’s a sin; it’s when you foster it and cater to it and build on it” (from your comment #69) to describe the feminist problem with objectifying people — largely because my early religio-sexual education used exactly that line of reasoning to make the case that masturbation was a sin. According to them, the problem was not “spilling seed” (at least they didn’t misinterpret the Onan story in the usual manner) but that when masturbating one is likely to foster, cater to, and build sexual fantasies, which is committing adultury in one’s heart. Likewise reading books with sex in them, etc.
(Coincidentally, that was also their reasoning behind the other phenomenon you talked about in #69, the broad definition of the “sex” in “sex outside marriage” to include anything likely to spark arousal.)
I’m probably over-sensitive to that line of argument, seeing how much it fouled up my own sexual development. So it’s likely that the definition you give is a generally useful one and it’s my own baggage that keeps it from being useful for me.
I don’t think stripping, belly-dancing or even prostitution are INHERENTLY objectifying. I do think it’s possible to conceive of such professions/performances being done in such a way that the individuals involved are seen as active subjects, not objects (as a comparison, think of male athletes).
What makes them negative for women (on the whole, I’m talking about trends here) is that the women involved aren’t constructed as subjects in our society. They are objectified through the misogynistic cultural practises we have regarding women and their sexualities/bodies, those that we have been discussing for three threads now *smile*
There are certainly women out there that can use such occupations to garner a degree of power (or perform a resistance to their wider oppressions) in their situation – hell, I love belly dancing as it purposefully CAN’T be done by women who are twigs: you NEED curves to do that the right way (speaking as a woman athlete with a swimmers body, ain’t gonna happen for me, no matter how femme I am *smile*) . I’m even in favour of decriminalising prostitution, as that puts considerably more power and safety in the hands of the women that do it, but that’s a different discussion *smile*
Personally, I think it COULD be empowering to have women in control of their bodies and sexualities, it could be highly empowering. But such performances need to be placed in their sociocultural context, and right now, in our culture, this is hard to argue as being anything other than a resistance rather than any real empowerment.
We need to ensure that we don’t look at performances of self outside of the relationships they are placed in. And in a society where in virtually all situations of cross-gender interaction are women-as-defined-by-men, then women are going to have large issues in self-definition, particularly in those areas that involved considerable social stigma. NONETHELESS, I do think such spaces provide excellent places for actions, ones that could be used as deconstruction … but I’ll launch into Lacanian analysis here *grin* so to head that off, I’ll say it has to be quite strategic.
I think the difference between belly dancing and stripping is that the goal of stripping is to turn guys on; any artistry is secondary. A lot of strippers are good dancers, but when they dance “for themselves,” they don’t usually do a stripper’s dance. Belly dancers, OTOH, will do much the same dance for themselves or for a hetero female audience or for a mixed audience. The goal and purpose of belly dancing is artistic expression. The goal and purpose of stripping is to excite people (usually men) sexually; if the stripper hasn’t done that, she hasn’t done her job.
I think the feminist protest to stripping is that a woman is putting her sexuality on the market, which is problematic because it implies that women’s sexuality can be bought and sold.
Cranefly,
Well, as I said, I’m not sure that Puritan perspective does have much use in a secular world. I didn’t mean to connect it to the feminist perspective, necessarily, it’s just that you brought up that verse and I got to thinking of it. But I do think there can be a danger to guys fantasizing about having sex with a particular woman when they’re not actually involved with her, especially when it comes to sexually fantasizing about a woman they’re going to date, because I think it makes it harder for a guy to actually hear a woman’s protest to sex if he’s already “decided” she wants it.
Not all date rapes are deliberate on the guy’s side, in the sense that what he wants is consensual sex. It’s just that when she says “no” or tries to push him away, he does it anyway. Guys who rape and then blithly expect the girl to go out with them again have clearly not recognized what they did. I think in those cases the guy’s fantasy is blocking reality. He dreams of her being something else so strongly he can’t see what she really is.
My solution to the whole “fantasizing equals adultery” thing as a kid was to keep my sexual fantasies to fantasy people. I can’t agree with your early religious educators that Christians can’t read books with sex in them, because the Bible itself uses sexually graphic imagery on a right regular basis (Old Testament rather than New, but still…). I don’t think Jesus meant to say sexual fantasy per se is a sin – He is directly speaking of looking at a specific woman and fantasizing about HER.
And I’m conflating religious and feminist concepts again. Sorry about that. It may be my religious background influencing me, here, but even speaking as a feminist I would be uncomfortable sexually fantasizing about some man I knew who wasn’t my lover. Maybe it’s because I have a strong fantasy life in general, but I think it would influence my relationship with them, or my view of them, and I don’t think that’s a good thing. I want to recognize people as who they are and not turn them into what I wish they were.
“Free to be… you and me” implies, to me, that I allow the other person the freedom to be who they are, whether their beliefs and opinions fit with mine or not. Anything that interferes with that process I view with suspicion.
I think we objectify others when we expect them to subvert their personality to our preferences. It isn’t objectifying my husband to fantasize about him sexually – he loves that! It would be objectifying a Mormon guy or a conservative Christian guy to fantasize about him sexually, because he woud never do those things with me in real life. I suspect even the guys who say they’re doing a woman no harm by turning her into their sex object, on the grounds that they’d love it if she treated them as sex objects, would change their tune if they knew the woman’s sexual fantasy was to see them as the degraded sex slave of a half dozen barbaric homosexuals, ultimately saved by the love of a good man, who the slave then services sexually in a loving and submissive fashion….
Which, let’s face it, is the plot of many a fanfic written by a woman, written specifically because it turns her on. But that is not, I suspect, quite the sexual fantasy most hetero males would care to live out. I’ve been surprised to discover that people object (“What? I would never do that!”) to much more common sexual practices – I married a guy who is open to just about anything, but some of the guys I dated would never have done what I wanted in real life.
One of them actually did ask, “You didn’t imagine I would do that…?” and I was very happy to be able to say, “No, nope, not me.” Because from his tone of voice – yeah, the idea that I might have fantasized about him doing that bothered him. Should it? I dunno. Would it most guys? I dunno again – I tend toward geeks, guys who are probably more introspective than the average male, so maybe the guys I date are more sensitive to that sort of thing.
The “problem” with treating people as individuals is that they respond as individuals – what bothers you might not bother them, and vice versa. I try not to sexually fantasize about real people first because it would bother me if I knew they were doing that to me. I’m sure some women don’t care, while others would think it was great. And secondly, I feel sexually fantasizing about someone changes my view of them – again, some people might feel their fantasy life is completely separate from their real life and not consider this a problem. My problem with that is the studies that indicate people’s attitudes are influenced by fantasy (for example, the studies where guys exposed to specific levels of porn then considered women who’ve been raped as more guilty of inciting it and less harmed by the experience than they had previously). Our fantasies can influence us more than we realize, and personally I don’t care to risk it.
There’s a (brief) discussion of feminism and belly dance here:
http://people.uncw.edu/deagona/raqs/feminism.htm
Among other things shes says:
Most belly dancers don’t wrestle with this too much, because either they’re not professional performers or they don’t perform in venues that make them feel objectified. I’ve never known a belly dancer who’d put up with guys tucking money in her hip band or that sort of thing, on the grounds that in this culture that’s objectifying. I understand other belly dancers have no problems with that – I’m reminded of the debates in families where one side has a “cash dance” at a wedding reception, where the wedding guests pay money to the bride for dancing with her (or for dancing with anyone in the wedding party, or for watching her dance…). People who’ve grown up with the cash dance think nothing of it – people who didn’t grow up with it find it objectifying, or hopelessly patriarchal, or money grubbing. Context is everything.
I think belly dancers are more able to control the context than strippers – I think my cousin went into stripping thinking she could control the context far more than she actually could. In our culture, the only audience for strippers is an audience that is looking to be sexually turned on, usually by seeing her as a sex object and not a creator. Belly dancers have a much broader audience – they can perform at ren faires, mixed-sex and all-age parties, festivals, dinners, retirement homes, etc. They have created a space within the culture where they are not automatically sex objects to be defined by others.
Strippers may be able to create that sort of space someday, too, but I can’t see it in this cultural climate.
I think the goal is making money. From my limited experience, it seems that the most sucessful strippers focus on the men who are least likely to get any attention from women. This is the part that bugs me; it appears to me that strip clubs profit by taking advantage of the weak. In general, I don’t think handsome, self-confident men spend as much on strippers as the socialy awkward, adverage looking guy.
If they had a flat rate to get in the door with no tipping, I’d have a easier time seeing with it. Also, I find actual dancing much more sexy than a lap dance.
I think Shiloh did a good job distinguishing the difference, I just had an additional thought when I initially considered the point – how often do belly dancers experience people catcalling and hooting to ‘show us yer tits!’ or ‘show us yer pussy!’, which seems to be pretty darn common from what I’ve seen in strip clubs. Granted I’ve only gone a handful of times, but from what I’ve seen that seems to be the general tone from the more boisterious audience members.
My Turkish friends who liked belly dancing were really aware of the quality of the dancer and when I’ve gone with them, the boisterousness of the audience really seemed to be a response to the dancer’s skill. I don’t think that their reactions (male and female) were that much different than those of fans yelling things at Mia Hamm.
What bothers me about the comments about context is that that approach seems to lead to denying women any agency. If the belly dancer is dancing because she wants to and she enjoys it, should the fact that someone else is objectifying her negate that?
AndiF –
Good question to bring up, and for us to do such here would be to bring us back to the bad old days of claiming ‘false consciousness’ of women, which is seriously something we want to avoid doing. What is meant by including context is not that women have no agency in their presentation, but rather to understand that the reality being constructed is not entirely of her making. The total ‘product’ as it were is a complex interaction between the woman articulating herself and the sociocultural context (also involving the other individuals around her). At leas that is how I view it.
AndiF wrote:
My point was that belly dancers have taken charge of context. At one time, in the states, belly dancing was “hoochie koochie” and it was considered about on par with stripping (strippers didn’t take as much off back then). It was considered something done for men, and for men’s enjoyment. Many dancers in the seventies and eighties deliberately worked to challenge that context, and to create a new context of their own.
Whether strippers can do that, I don’t know. I don’t think they can if strippers only appear in bars to audiences of mostly men who are more interested in their nakedness than their artistry. I think it’s possible for a woman to ignore the fact that she’s being objectified, but OTOH it’s a lot tougher to keep your head space clear when the guys are loudly demanding to see your pussy than it is when the guy is just sitting there thinking his own thoughts. I believe context demands that a stripper needs a much stronger sense of self to perform without feeling used than a belly dancer does.
I’m all for women having a strong sense of self – but I still think in a lot of areas we need to work to change the context. When the underlying assumption is that a woman’s sexuality belongs to men, then the woman refusing to believe that in her own mind is only the first step – that concept needs to be challenged in society at large.
I think there are more rapists than feminists because too many women already refuse to believe that most men think women exist for them, sexually and otherwise. I know I told myself what a badass sexy chica I was for fooling around with just about any guy in front of me thinking I was 100% their equal in this “post-feminist” age. Boy, did those boys prove me wrong about how equal I thought I was in my own head.
Without societal changes making women what happens in women’s heads doesn’t amount to much more than mental self defense. At the core of these conversations has been questioning real power as compared to percieved power. I’m not a physicist, but if what goes on in a person’s head is the extent of their power it’s bound to happen that pressure from outside exerts a force stronger than the weaker one inside and comes to dominates the space inside.
Men’s outside force is working overtime to pressure women’s inside forces into thinking they have gotten all the equality they need and perhaps a smidgeon more than is even good. Most women believe it; that’s how oppression works.
The sentence should read “Without societal changes making women externally more equal that happens in women’s heads doesn’t amount to much more than mental self defense”, and pretend I switched the i and e in perceived before submitting. :)
Interesting discussion, to include a little bit more on my PERSONAL experience:
I belly dance because I like to. I’m a very curvy women, in a society that seems to think that “thin is in”, so to me, this is a good way to experess my sensuality in a way that doesn’t conform to social norms. It feels very artistic, and natural (and I like the outfits :D). But many girls say something to the effect of “your just trying to turn guys on” and “you’re degrading women on the whole”. And men start doing this thing where their eyes glaze over their mouth opens a bit and I’m pretty sure they are having their own fantasies. I honestly get similar responses when I say I model nude for the art class.
I guess I can’t change anybody’s oppinion about it, but, in turn they can’t change it mine either. I know a lot of guys that think that women are the “lesser” sex, the weaker sex, the more vunerable, less important sex. (Go on a conservative blog if you don’t think this is a case, see how much they bitch about “self-righteous, uppity American feminist chicks”). But, if I know that I AM EQUAL, then I’m okay with letting them be wrong in their own heads. Which, I guess, doesn’t make me equal- it makes me better.
Antigone, I think that you can.
Jettisoning our sexuality because misogynists use it against us is letting them win. It all comes down to why you’re doing something. I belly dance for several reasons: it’s good exercise, I enjoy it, and it makes me feel sexy. There are no men in my class. No men have ever seen me dance. I don’t feel sexy because someone else is watching me and lusting after me. I feel sexy because I am fully inhabiting my body and allowing myself to love it. And I’m not giving that up.
We have the right to be sexual creatures. We have the right to want sex, and to dress to get it. But we also have the right to change our minds or to be selective in our partners. If I’m wearing a halter top in a bar, maybe I do want sex, but that doesn’t mean that I am in any way obligated to accept the creepy guy that’s currently hitting on me.
It is possible to mislead or hurt others, which is never a good thing. but sometimes misunderstandings are the fault of the other party. And in the case of the creepy guy in the bar, the problem’s definitely on his end and not on mine.
Lo writes:
Yes, we have that right.
I do think, though, that this touches on one of the issues that came up on the previous thread: the way in which the gender construct of “men attract partners by directed action; women attract partners by passive display” can contribute to the rape culture by fostering feelings of resentment and anger against women in men.
One of the big problems with the way in which we consider passive displays like costume and “beauty” as the only socially-accepted way for women to signify their sexual willingness and/or availability is that visual beauty is not a directed form of communication. You’re on display, sure — but for whom is that display intended? How is one to know?
Men put on visual displays too, of course, but traditional gender roles also offer them far more in the way of active methods for signifying interest in particular people. Furthermore, society teaches girls to look for and to interpret those methods as the signifiers of interest, while we teach our boys to look to the purely visual–beauty, certain body types, fashion, “how she’s dressed,” and all that–as the signifiers of female interest.
I’m not saying that’s hard-wired. We teach boys and girls to look for different things as the signifiers of interest — and we teach them to do different things to indicate their own degree of interest as well.
And I do think that this contributes to the problems that came up on the other thread. How, after all, is the “creepy guy” to know that the sexy outfit isn’t meant for him? He’s not been trained to notice how you look at him, or how you respond to his overtures, or whether when you smile politely at him, it’s a perfunctory “just being courteous” smile or a genuine flirtatious smile. He’s only been trained to look at how you look.
The problem with visual signals is that they’re generic, undirected. They signify availability and interest…but you can’t control to whom. So you end up with a situation in which the woman who, let us say, really went to the bar in the hopes of flirting with one particular guy she had a crush on ends up leaving feeling very annoyed at the way she was mashed on by all and sundry all night long. Meanwhile, “all and sundry” wind up feeling resentful and ill-used and, well, teased – because the signals they’d been taught meant “green light” actually got them an “ewwwwwww! Go away, you creepy beta male, you!” response.
Not, of course, that any of that excuses rape, or that it means the woman is doing anything “wrong,” or even that your particular creepy guy wasn’t just a, well, you know. A creep. I do think that it contributes to the rape culture, though, because it encourages the notion that the equation “men are horny; women are frigid” is somehow natural — it encourages men to think of women as both the obectified and as the sexually privileged sex.
Women aren’t the sexually privileged sex. I can understand how they might seem it to men sometimes, though, because I don’t think that men are generally aware of just how often women are similarly frustrated in their desires.
They aren’t aware of it in part, I think, because men aren’t taught to attract primarily by visual cues, and because women aren’t taught just to look. I think that women are therefore often in a better position to correctly identify the degree of a man’s interest in them and consequently don’t get smacked with the “ewwwwwww! Get away from me, you dog!” response quite as often.
(Instead, they just sigh and go home and think dire vengeful thoughts about how much they resent attractive men, and about how men are, like, so totally the privileged sex. And they remain invisible, a la Tiptree.)
Of course, I do think that this ties into the entitlement issue as well. Part of the reason that boys aren’t taught how to read signals very well is that they’re also taught that they shouldn’t need to do that: they’re entitled, dammit! It was not too long ago, after all, that women were legally little more than chattel. Social structures that weighty don’t just erode overnight. Alas.
[Note: Reading this over before posting it, I suddenly realize that it would be very easy to interpret this as harshing on Lo. Eep! Not at all my intent! So just to clarify: I wasn’t harshing on you, Lo, nor saying that dressing up to go out on the town and maybe find someone is a horrible thing to do, nor that your being pestered by the creepy guy was in any way your “fault,” nor anything else of that sort. I was just trying to point out some of the things about how we’ve constructed gender roles that I believe lead to just the sort of weird sexist assumptions we saw so much of in the last thread. It’s the gender disparity in how we teach people to read signals–and the gender disparity in the acceptable signals themselves–that I see as the problem here, absolutely not someone who looks good being sexually selective!]
Elkins wrote:
Men who rape are not good face readers – in studies, they’re unable to tell the difference between a woman’s friendly smile and a more seductive smile or expression. I think these are studies done on blitz rapists, incarcerated rapists, but I can’t remember where I read it so I’m not sure. But I wonder if they just never bothered to draw a distinction because of their sense of entitlement. If someone assumes women are there for his sexual enjoyment, he’s not worried about what she’s thinking.
But many girls say something to the effect of “your just trying to turn guys on”? and “you’re degrading women on the whole”?.
Do you use the Icy Stare, or merely point and laugh?
If they had a flat rate to get in the door with no tipping, I’d have a easier time seeing with it.
Because then you can avoid confronting the uncomfortable reality that the women are only interested in your money? After all, if you don’t have to tip to get their attention, you can happily buy into the illusion that the female attention is about you, you, you.
I have to say that as a stripper, I never noticed the “go for the losers” phenomenon you mentioned. “Go for the guy spending money,” sure. Handsome men, in my experience, expect to get female attention for their looks, and are puzzled or angered when that rule doesn’t apply–such as in a strip bar, where a pretty face always loses to an open wallet.
Men who rape are not good face readers – in studies, they’re unable to tell the difference between a woman’s friendly smile and a more seductive smile or expression.
The most intuitive explaination of this to me — which is not to say the right one, but the most intuitive one as I’m no psychologist — is that empathy, among its many functions, allows more accurate reading of facial expressions and prevents people from raping each other. Rapists have little empathy, which is the cause of both their rapes and their difficulties telling facial expressions apart.
With regard to women’s dependence on passive display signals, while men use directed action, I don’t know about women’s female friends, but men are generally not offended about women transgressing their gender prerogative by doing the asking. Generally, most guys I know think that the expectation that they’re the ones who ask is a burden, not a privilege (they may be wrong about this, because they don’t have much experience with creepy women hitting on them: the grass is always greener, huh?). I have read one account of a man who thinks that women should wait around for some man to ask them out, and men should do the asking: that guy who wrote He’s Just Not That Into You. Every other man I can recall would prefer that this particular construction were more equal. So, if you want some man, and the “passive display” signaling isn’t working, just ask. You’ll strike a blow for gender justice, you’ll avoid ambiguity about whether you were rejected or he just didn’t pick anything up, and you’ll possibly make that guy’s day too!
Of course, all of this is easier said than done, which is exactly why most of us males think of it as a burden in the first place :^).