[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.
Julian Elson,
I think your empathy comment is right on. I don’t know anything about these types of studies with rapists and response to facial cues, but in my field (pain neuroscience) empathy is a big deal right now and some of the neural correlates of empathy have started to be described in functional MRI studies. It would be interesting to see if some of these neural correlates are missing in rapists (although that might be used as another excuse for their abhorrent actions).
Quick comment on the “passive display”… As a terribly shy youngster I was usually able to recognize the “passive display” behavior but horribly incapable of acting on it. Thank goodness as I grew older women seemed to grow out of this ridiculous culturally imposed behavior and became forward with me because I never grew out of my shyness (although I guess they caught onto my “passive display” signal). As a man i can say that a forward (but not aggressive in the man sense) woman who knows what she wants and goes for it is hands down the biggest turn on I can think of. I can honestly say I don’t know any other men who don’t agree with that, but then again, the more I read this blog and its comments the more I’m convinced that my little science circle of friends is just about polar opposite from the rest of the world!
One thing that really undercuts the idea of ‘female sexual power’ is the advantage of being ordinary. I am very ordinary looking and have always been very happy about it. Even back in my younger days, I rarely had to worry about being hassled in bars or on streets; there were always plenty on much better looking women to get the attention. The guys I attracted were the ones I met in situations where we got to know each as individuals; deciding to date was a natural outgrowth of enjoying each other’s company. The advantage carried over into work where I also had the advantage of being taken (pun intended) at face-value.
In high school and college, I had a friend who had an absolutely gorgeous body. I was teasing her once about her lousy relationships when she got angry and said “Yeah, how well would you do if every guy you met said ‘nice to meet you’ and then did this” as she bent over so her face was level with my breasts and her hands were in the grope configuration.
Her anger and her situation made it very clear for me how bogus the notion of ‘power’ of women is when the best thing for a woman is to not be seen as one.
I’m always hestitant aboput accepting studies like these (can you find a link to some shiloh? I’d really appreciate it hon) because the vast majority of studies show no psychological difference between men who rape and men who don’t.
Why I am hesitant is that any study that shows those kinds of studies can be held up by anti-feminists or MRA’s as “See! They are sick! There’s nothing wrong with society, it’s all about the guys, all you feminists are wrong, we don’t need to change society”. It gives them a chance to distance themselves and not look at what they have done to contribute or continue a sexist culture.
You can really see this in the reactions to the school shootings that have been happening. The perpetrators were constructed as disturbed boys, somehow fundamentally screwed up. This allowed the societies and communities where this occured to a certain extent deny culpability in creating an environment where this could occur. Classic in this was the whole “blame the video-games” or “blame the internet” responses that cropped up, when perhaps … oh, I don’t know … maybe the fact that these guys were bullied and harrassed all the bloody time MIGHT have had something to do with it (but, of course, we don’t want to do anti-bullying initiatives, because that would increase tolerance for ‘lifestyles’ that are wrong and evil).
I’m not saying that these guys DON’T have something wrong with them, and niether am I saying they are just victims of their environment. But you see similar stuff in relation to hate crimes and racist behaviour (saying how bad the racist is allows us not to investigate our our racism, for instance). The overwhelming evidence shows that the majority of these guys that rape aren’t any different, and we need to be wary of anything that stops people from stepping up to the plate and taking a personal stake in that.
(but then, of course, this kind of framework is quite prominent in my dissertation, so I’m kinda biased too *smile*)
I’ve never been able to confirm this, but my suspicion for some time has been that in most decent heterosexual relationships, the first move was made by the woman.
I’ve really never seen any other way around the problem that when men try to initiate things, it’s almost always unwelcome, and usually makes women uncomfortable at best.
I find an “your-so funny” laugh and a patronizing pat on the head works best for this.
Actually I just avoid strip clubs altogether now because they make me uncomfortable.
I don’t have a problem with stripping in theory. If voyeurs want to pay exhibitionists to get naked, then good for them. I was just thinking about the differences between watching belly dancing (and I forget the name for them, but those cabaret, sexy song & dance shows that are gaining popularity) and going to strip club. My thinking was that strip clubs contribute to the rape culture in the way other shows don’t by making the money transfer direct and frequent. Maybe having men be able to purchase attention in such a direct way contributes to their sense of entitlement. An average guy is more likely to have an open wallet. I was not trying to say that you or any other strippers were greedy bitches only interested in a man’s wallet, but you are there to make money. I do think that economics of the transaction does reinforce an attitude that women are there for men’s enjoyment as long as the men are willing to part with their cash over and over and that that can be damaging. So that led me to think about how the economics could change. Perhaps if stripping were more like other entertainments with a flat entry rate, they’d be less misogynistic and the exhibitionists could just enjoy making their living entertaining the voyeurs w/o re-enforcing that sex object/wallet problem. Maybe it wouldn’t work. You’d know better than me.
You are perfectly right to point out that my opinion is influenced by the fact that I’m pretty turned off by the whole atmosphere of strip clubs. When I went in the past I found myself wondering who had kids, who was paying for school, who was supporting their shitty boyfriends coke habit, etc. Then there’s that detached look in the eyes of half the women, so the whole thing is depressing to me. In the best routines I remember seeing the women could dance, showed a lot pf personality, and after a few songs still wasn’t completely naked; it was more about her and not just her body.
Even though I have no interest in going anymore, stripping is here to stay, so I’m interested to know what we can do practically to structure it better. Can it be done in a way that re-enforces agency in women? Where men are subtly or not so subtly influenced to view women as more sexy for their confidence and abilities?
Sarah in Chicago,
I looked around a bit before I posted last night and couldn’t find the study – I was thinking I read about it in I Never Called It Rape, but in a quick skim of that the closest thing I could find was Heilbrun and Loftus’ study where 60 percent of the men who “rated faces of women displaying emotional distress to be more sexually attractive than the faces showing pleasure” had “committed repeated episodes of sexual aggression”. I’ll keep looking, but I have read a ton of stuff on rape this past year and haven’t been taking notes, so I’m not too hopeful.
I did a quick google and didn’t find the study I was remembering, but I did run across one that says women are better at reading faces than men – but neither sex was right even 50% of the time! (Chosing between four possible emotions.) If that’s typical, then even if rapists are worse at reading women’s faces, it’s probably not by much.
http://www.yorku.ca/ycom/profiles/past/nov99/current/dept/dispatch/dsp4.htm
I thought there were studies showing that men who rape tend to have more “traditional” attitudes about male-female roles, and considerable openness to aggression in sexual relationships. Warshaw mentions a study by Karen Rapaport and Barry Burkhart on that, and I think I’ve seen others mentioned. The sheets on “how to avoid a rape” usually warn against guys who have overly traditional attitudes toward women and who are aggressive.
OTOH, I tend to be skeptical about that whole idea that you can peg rapists by their attitudes, because the worst sexual assault I’ve dealt with, the guy who did it considered himself a feminist, his friends considered him a feminist, his best friend was a female feminist, and he completely rejected the whole traditional “women should get married and have kids” scenario. He wasn’t exactly known for aggression, either. Nor did he buy into the idea that women want sex less than men – his theory was that if he forced it on me (I was a virgin), I’d decide sex was a Pretty Good Thing, and thank him after. Which is the classic rape myth, really, but isn’t connected to traditional attitudes as far as I can tell.
And I would think the fact that rapists rape must indicate that they’re more open to aggression in sexual relationships, studies or no studies. But I guess what the studies showed is that the guy doesn’t have to be typically aggressive to rape – contrary to the studies on incarcerated rapists, who do often to have a history of general aggression.
I believe the idea that rapists are bizarre aberations was pretty much disproved by Malamuth’s study where more than half of all men surveyed reported they’d rape so long as it was called “force a woman into having sex” and they were sure they wouldn’t get caught. Then there’s the fact that one in twelve men confess to having committed rape (Koss, other studies show about the same) – I’m supposed to buy that one in twelve men are psychologically whacked? All the studies I’ve seen that indicate rapists share certain views of reality, it can be easily shown that these views of reality saturate the culture as a whole. And then there’s the anecdotal evidence, like this gem, from an old discussion here:
Last post to this thread:
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2004/05/05/how-many-men-are-rapists/#comments
Whether this guy has raped or not, he certainly considers rape as normative. One hopes that sentiment isn’t common, but of course in reality it is. *sigh*
I do think that economics of the transaction does reinforce an attitude that women are there for men’s enjoyment as long as the men are willing to part with their cash over and over and that that can be damaging.
See, I tend to see it working the other way – the cash is a reminder that the women are not there because they love getting naked for strangers orbecause men are naturally entitled to look at women however much they like. (I used to tell shocked ‘liberal’ friends that the difference between stripping and walking around in public normally was that in a strip bar, I got paid to listen to the catcalls, and if anyone gave me any crap there was a bouncer five feet away.)
Which to me is the real problem. It’s not the men who paid willingly to stare at us who gave us grief; it was the men who resented having to pay. To those men, hiding the cost of the transaction through a cover fee would just exacerbate the problem.
How can you tell the difference between a man who pays to see a woman minstrel show ‘willingly’ versus a man who pays to see it ‘resentfully’? The look on his face?
I think most strip club going men don’t consciously consider that they’re paying for an act and that leads to a lot of men’s abuse of strippers (and other sex workers). Think how often people think they “know” celebrities because they watch their characters on tv, and that famous study from not too long ago that showed people seeing faces of actors from Friends reacted physiologically as if they were seeing real friends of theirs and not actors. As one stripper recently said in an interview, “We’re not showgirls, we’re prostitutes pretending to be showgirls”, and men treat strippers like they treat prostitutes not like they treat actresses.
I’ve witnessed too many chumps who think they can be quasi-friends with strippers after they’ve paid money to peer into their spread assholes or run their fingers along their genitals. The NY Times had an article a few months ago where a stripper in Las Vegas said she has her stage name and then a second stage name for the yobos who insist she tell them her real name. She never tells them her real name, but why do enough strip club going men demand this information from her to necessitate the fake persona within the fake persona? I’ve got some theories I’m spare you right now, but it’s a good question.
I have also heard strippers speaking of how intricately they construct an entirely false persona for when men ask them the various forms of “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” many seem to take perverse delight in asking. Saying to a man who asks that you’re an anthropology honors student at a local college is a whole lot sexier than saying you wake up at noon, eat macaroni and cheese and smoke pot while watching TV until your 11-2 shift begins.
I see what you mean, though I still think being able buy attention is inherently problematic. I wish more of the men would work on themselves so a woman they know would help them fulfill thier fantasies. But I may be projecting here, I don’t really know what the turn on is for others. From my point of view of as a basically well-behaved male, forking over cash says women are attracted to money like men are attracted to looks. And to bring it back around to the orginal issue, to the adverage guy that makes it seem like women do have more sexual power, because if they don’t have money, they don’t get any attention. I know I felt that way for a long time; what looks I have didn’t do much for me. If I was less introspective or less honest with myself, I have no doubt I’d have ended up one of those boorish men that gave you hell.
Ron O wrote:
But this is assuming all women are attracted by the exact same thing. In my experience, women are strongly attracted by looks, but they are not attracted by the same looks. I think men are socialized to see only one type of beauty (another example of why saying women have “power” if they’re beautiful is false – men define what is beautiful), while women are not strongly socialized to be attracted to a particular look, so women’s visual interest in guys is more dispersed.
I think some men assume women all prefer one particular look, but I ‘ve never known a woman who had my taste in men and I can’t think of any two friends who lusted over the same type of guy, either. One friend lusts after a guy because he’s got a hairy back; the next one hates that. Some women like men with hairy chests; I don’t. A friend of mine had this whole list of physical traits her guys had to have – from dark hair to short legs to broad torso. Most friends have much shorter lists of likes or dislikes – no blondes, or must have brown eyes, or not too tall to dance with.
Guys, in my experience, are less likely to have a personal preferences list and more likely to name a star or type they want (“looks like Barbara Eden” or “built like a Playboy bunny”). When it comes to being physically attractive, if some women have an edge, it’s because guys tend to want the same woman. I’ve “made the moves” on guys who later told me they were convinced they’d never get to date anyone, because they “weren’t good looking” – one of the guys who told me that had at least three other females lusting after him, it’s just that I did something about it and the others… didn’t.
Part of the enculturation of men seems to be to direct them toward a particular type of woman – a particular body type, for starts. Either women aren’t enculturated that way or they fight it off better, I think. In jr. high and high school, at any rate, when an “average” guy whined to me that “all the girls like x”, I could generally respond that I knew of no female who really liked ‘x’, and half of us couldn’t understand why the other guys put up with him. It may be the women who have the look guys like tend to prefer that type of guy (which would explain why so many guys wish they looked like that – the women they want want that), but in my experience most women don’t.
Kind of wandered there, but my original point was that assuming all women are attracted to money just because some women do sex work for it is kind of silly. If women are attracted to money as men are attracted to looks, then why wouldn’t prostitution be the norm instead of the exception? Because women are enculturated against it? To me, that buys into the whole rape myth that women really want sex with every guy who asks, it’s just that they’ve been enculturated to say “no” unless the guy insists.
Shiloh,
Of course, looking back on it, it is a stupid assumption, but one I had for a long time. There were probably several women who were attracted to me over the years, but I never knew it. Since I was shy and women are socialized to not making thier interest known directly, I really did assume I didn’t have “what women want.” I certainly never got the sex or attention my better-looking, richer or more charming friends got without paying for it & then I felt like a schumck who was taken advantage of for being socially awkward. I was stuck in self-perpetuating rut, I admit. It wasn’t until much later when more women became comfortable with asking men out that I realized I was actually OK and had some power to attract as well. FWIW, my fiance made the first move by calling me first.
It would seem to me that to get a meaningful ratio of rape victims, one would need to put “holding down your reluctant girlfriend”? into a different category than “rape of/by someone that you don’t have an ongoing sexual relationship with”?.
I hope he also puts “having your girlfriend remove your penis with a rusty saw” in a different catagory from “violent assault by someone that you don’t have an ongoing sexual relationship with” as well…
How can you tell the difference between a man who pays to see a woman minstrel show ‘willingly’ versus a man who pays to see it ‘resentfully’? The look on his face?
Samantha, do you really want me to discuss this with you? If you’re just throwing insults again, I really am not interested.
From my point of view of as a basically well-behaved male, forking over cash says women are attracted to money like men are attracted to looks.
Again, from my point of view of dealing with non-well-behaved males, the real problem was the men who believe they were entitled to female attention, period. These are the same sort of guys who get mad when a woman sitting next to them on the bus won’t respond to a pick-up line. They resent paying money because, in their minds, it’s unfair that gorgeous women don’t willingly strip for them for free.
Right. I’ll just barge right in here.
It seems to me that the people in this thread who are spending an awful lot of effort dissecting every tiny aspect of ‘the rape culture’ are barking up the wrong tree. It really isn’t very hard to understand why men rape.
Look, people enjoy having sex, and they enjoy having power over, and dominating other people. If you rape someone, you can have sex *and* dominate someone at the same time. There are of course other things people enjoy which conflict with this, and these explain why all men don’t rape all of the time.
But consider this. Say you were raped, brutally. The thing goes to court, but the rapist walks, because the judge is a misogynist prick.
So you want revenge. So you decide to do the natural thing; an eye for an eye, right? You’ll just rape that bastard right back, and the misogynist, rape-apologist judge too. That’ll teach ’em that it’s no fun when you force someone against their will. Or will it?
Clearly, no one would want to get revenge
in this way, and the scenario above has never happenef, and probably never will. But why?
Why can men rape women, while women simply can’t rape men?
“Look, people enjoy….enjoy having power over, and dominating other people.”
People as in everyone, or people as in some people?
“If you rape someone, you can have sex *and* dominate someone at the same time.”
Ummmm….are you trying to say that rape is always about both control and sex? ‘Cause if so, how do you explain all the rapes in which the perpetrator doesn’t ejaculate? All the rapes in which only an object was used for penetration?
“Clearly, no one would want to get revenge
in this way,”
Why is it “clear” that no one would want revenge this way? (are you being sarcastic?)
“Why can men rape women, while women simply can’t rape men?”
Last I checked we could sexually assault men, it’s just harder and we are less likely to do so.
Vladimir writes:
Er, no. I’ll agree that virtually all people enjoy having sex, but the idea that virtually all people enjoy having power over and dominating other people is flat wrong. The only “power over” anyone I want is the power to keep them from hurting me, and I have no great desire to dominate others. Lest you think this is just because I have been “enculturated” that way, many functional Asperger and Autistic people, who are notorious for their resistence to enculturation, also have no interest in having power over or dominating others. Many people are quite happy so long as they have power over themselves.
Valdimir asks:
It isn’t that women can’t rape men – some women do rape men. One reason there are few female blitz rapists is that the blitz rapist is a bully, and bullies are cowards. Rapists only act if they’re pretty sure they can get away with it – if they think someone will fight back, they look for different prey. Since men tend to be larger than women as a general rule, a male rapist has far more opportunities to rape women than a female rapist would have to rape men. While I’ve never seriously looked into it, my suspicion is that most female rapists would rape children or young men, because of the size issue.
Anyone with any grasp of history knows that when people take an “eye for an eye” approach to life, the situation tends to escalate, and everybody loses. Perhaps women are more likely to take a long term view of things, and thus less likely to retailiate?
> >Look, people enjoy….enjoy having power
> > over, and dominating other people.”?
> People as in everyone, or people as in some
> people?
Everyone, to some degree, and given the right (or wrong, if you see it that way) circumstances.
> Ummmm….are you trying to say that rape is > always about both control and sex?
No.
> >”Clearly, no one would want to get
> > revenge
>> in this way,”?
> Why is it “clear”? that no one would want
> revenge this way? (are you being
> sarcastic?)
No. And clearly, it isn’t as clear to you as it is to me that things would never play out that way. But then again , maybe you’re the idiosyncratic one?
> > “Why can men rape women, while women
> > simply can’t rape men?”?
> Last I checked we could sexually assault
> men,
You’re being too literal.
> it’s just harder and we are less likely to do > so.
Yeah, a whole lot less, in fact I’ve never heard of a confirmed case of a forcible rape of a man by a woman. This, I think, is an interesting (non-) phenomenon, which deserves some kind of explanation.
>Er, no. I’ll agree that virtually all people
> enjoy having sex, but the idea that virtually > all people enjoy having power over and
> dominating other people is flat wrong. The
> only “power over”? anyone I want is the power > to keep them from hurting me, and I have no > great desire to dominate others.
Oh, well that’s just splendid!
See, ’cause I’ve always felt that enlightened despotism has a lot going for it. The only problem has always been finding someone who really doesn’t want the power, and consequently can be trusted with it. Now, finally, we’ve found someone we can safely trust to be a just King (queen/whatever).
All Hail Supreme Emperor/Empress Shiloh!
> many functional Asperger and Autistic
>people, who are notorious for their
> resistence to enculturation, also have no
> interest in having power over or
> dominating others.
Well, the one Asperger guy I know definitely
does not fit that description.
> Since men tend to be larger than women as
> a general rule, a male rapist has far more
> opportunities to rape women than a female
> rapist would have to rape men.
The colt 45 ‘equalizer’ was invented back in the 1850s, IIRC.
> when people take an “eye for an eye”?
> approach to life, the situation tends to
> escalate,
That is beside the point I was trying to make.
*Assume* you want revenge. How would or wouldn’t you get it?
Vladimir wrote:
I can only speak from my experience. The people I know with Asperger’s are not interesting in controlling others, because it’s too much effort for too little payoff. All they want is for people to quit trying to control them.
Vladimir wrote:
Yes, and it is best used at a bit of a distance. Rape, by its very nature, requires close-up work that is distracting and probably requires the use of one’s free hand. Your average pistol weighs a pound or more – this kind of weight gets awkward pretty fast. Most rape prevention courses recommend aginst using a pistol for a defense because women have been raped facing the muzzle of their own gun.
Vladimir wrote:
Sorry, I feel no obligation to stick to the points you’re trying to make.
Vladimir wrote:
Focussing on revenge puts the other person in charge of my life. Speculating on same strikes me as a complete waste of time.
Women can rape men–we have photos of it from the Abu Gharib prisons. Actually, that entire situation makes the power dynamics in rape very, very easy to grasp. I haven’t yet heard a single person tell me those women in the prison who were sexually abusing the male prisoners were doing it because the victims teased them and they were overcome with lust and couldn’t help themselves.
Vladimir,
Thus far, your arguments are incoherent and trivial. You have generalized the beliefs of some men as the beliefs of all people, and then seemed (although your argument is sufficiently ill-formed that it is impossible to know what you think you are actually arguing) to argue that women never act on those beliefs. And you framed the entire statement as though it were a profound explaination of why this is so. Actually, all you have said so far is an inaccurate and poorly phrased statement of the starting point of this discussion. Men are more likely to think that rape is a reasonable way of getting either a) sex, b) sex combined with abusive power, or c) abusive power. Women are less likely to do so. This discussion has been about why.
Your answer appears to be: It is natural for people to want that, and women never do (or never act on it). This answer is both logical nonsense, and irrelevant. Even if anyone accepts your argument that a desire for power over is natural, and a desire to for genital-genital contact is natural, so it is natural to wish to combine the two, it is also natural for people to defecate as soon as they feel the need, but you find very few people doing so. The question of whether rape is natural is irrelevant. Depending on how natural you think it is, the question is why is it either amplified by the culture, or not suppressed by the culture.
You know, the belief that all people like power and control and like sex, so it is perfectly natural that people rape, combined with the counter-factual insistence that women never ever commit rape is an interesting position.
Are women not people?
If women are people to you, then how do you explain the fact that women rape much much less frequently than men, despite the fact that they presumably have as much of a natural desire to combine abusive power and sex as men do?
The thing that explains this disparity is what is called rape culture, and is what has been being talked about here. The disparity can be described in either direction (or both): what makes women rape less than men, what makes men rape more than women. However, if, like other sane people, you would prefer that there be less rape in the world rather than more, it probably makes more sense to talk about it in terms of why men rape more often, not why women rape less often.
What makes people like you think that combining the desire for abusive power over and sex is perfectly natural, or more accurately, what makes people like you think that sex is a good tool for enjoying abusive power over another? This is an important question, and one that folks here have been exploring in all the detail that you think is so irrelevant. If you have something to contribute to that question, then please procede, but so far, you are merely stating the starting point of the discussion (and doing a bad job of it) and insisting that the question of “why?” is answered by the statement “It just is.”
Not very interesting.
Also, try to respond in coherent posts, not in one line responses to individual lines of other people’s posts. It is much more likely that a meaningful discussion will result if you actually state your positions, rather than responding to to a question on your position with a one word answer.
is not useful or interesting.
Also, drop the sarcastic and insulting tone.
Not that I have all that much say in setting policy around here. Just some suggestions that might lead to an argument with you being interesting and productive, rather than a waste of everyone’s time.
Victor, how do you reconcile this statement
with this statement?
What gives? Are you interested in an exploration of the possible reasons for that “(non-)phenomenon,” or aren’t you?
I mean, if what you’re saying is that you don’t agree with the reasons people have proposed here, then why not propose some of your own? You seem to be trying to lead people to your own explanation through some sort of Socratic dialogue, but it’s really not working out very well, is it? Maybe it’s time to show your hand.
As for women fantasizing about taking vengeance on men by raping them…well, I guess I’m just not the saint that Shiloh is. Or perhaps I just don’t share her autisms. I fantasize about that frequently when I’m royally pissed-off at someone.
Thing is, though, see, I wouldn’t actually do it. Why?
Well, because I don’t believe that I have the moral right to treat another person like that.
Men who rape clearly don’t have that same idea. On some level, they’re just not grasping that whole “you don’t have the moral right to rape someone just because you feel like doing so” concept. And studies indicate that there are a scarily high number of men who don’t grasp that fundamental moral principle – who think it’s okay to rape women, so long as you call it “using a bit of force” or some such nonsense, rather than calling it rape.
So why? Why is that? Are all of those men really moral idiots, do you think? Isn’t it more likely that they’re somehow being taught that the moral rules which apply to their fellow men do not apply to women, at least not in regards to rape?
Vladimir. Not Victor.
Sorry about getting your name wrong, Vladimir. My coffee was a’brewing as I wrote, but I hadn’t swilled it down yet.
> Men are more likely to think that rape is a
> reasonable way of getting either a) sex, b)
What an interesting choice of words.
“Reasonable”.
That is *exactly* what is wrong
with this whole discussion. The words “reasonable” and “rape” (or “mayhem”, “riot”, “rage”, “assault”, “pillage”, or “murder”) just don’t belong in the same sentence. People – which category, since you asked, includes women – don’t sit around *deliberating* as to what would be the ‘reasonable’ course of action and come up with ‘rape’. Neither do they, as someone suggested, sit around philosophizing about the moral correctness of their possible future courses of action; am I *entitled* to rape this person? is this my *just deserts* somehow or other?
No, rather, you do what you can get away with, given societal sanctions and your own inhibitions, and then you dream up a justification afterwards, as needed.
This matters because the remedy that people seem to suggest to ‘rape culture’ is to – over and over again – disabuse presumptive rapists of the notion they suppose they have that they are ‘entitled to access to the bodies of women’. Surely, if you repeat that litany a couple more thousand times they’ll take that into account when they *deliberate* on whether or not to commit rape. Or maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll hear not an abstract (and trivial) point of moral philosophy, but simply the message ‘screw you, buddy’. I know I do.
About ‘power over’. Well, I don’t mean to imply that the sort of dominance that a rapist exercises isn’t in some sense pathological. But it’s a pathological exaggeration of things that should be perfectly familiar to anyone who ever spent five minutes in a schoolyard. Usually, people more-or-less grow up, and manage to go through life without ever, or only rarely, feeling a need to openly dominate or humiliate their fellow humanoids. But the potential for that urge is universal, and the thirteen-year-old mind always lurks just beneath the surface.
Now, you say:
> However, if, like other sane people, you
> would prefer that there be less rape in the
> world rather than more, it probably makes
> more sense to talk about it in terms of why
> men rape more often, not why women rape
> less often.
That doesn’t follow. For example, I understand that people in your country, often belonging to your aftrican american minority are given to engage in various types of anti-social behaviour, such as, for example, robbing convenience stores, often run by people from your various asian minorities. Now, while there is no reason not to study what causes a black youth to rob a conveninence store, it might *also* be useful to study what would cause him run one.
But of course, asking the former question offers much less in the way of opportunities for people like Bill Cosby (and other right wing creeps) to act morally superior, so it doesn’t happen.
It seems to me that this is why it’s better to approach the ‘rape culture’ question from the womens’ side rather than the mens’ . If you try to answer the question ‘why do men rape’ it takes about five seconds for any answer to get shot down as being an implicit apology for rape. That doesn’t happen when you flip the question over.
Which brings me to my final point. Now, this is wierd and – ooo Weee ooo!! – paranormal, absurd and unaccountable for, but when I asked the question ‘why’ it was because I was interested in the answer, and didn’t, and don’t, know.
Any ideas?
> What gives? Are you interested in an
> exploration of the possible reasons for that
> “(non-)phenomenon,”? or aren’t you?
I am. I hope I’ve explained my position in the above post.
> You seem to be trying to lead people to
> your own explanation through some sort of
> Socratic dialogue, but it’s really not ‘
> working out very well, is it? Maybe it’s time
> to show your hand.
Funny how everyone assumes I’m being *sly*. I’m not. I don’t have a ‘hand’.
> As for women fantasizing about taking
> vengeance on men by raping them…well, I
> guess I’m just not the saint that Shiloh is.
> Or perhaps I just don’t share her autisms. I
> fantasize about that frequently when I’m
> royally pissed-off at someone.
Oh. If that’s commonly the case then my whole argument is shot to hell.
> Are all of those men really moral idiots, do
> you think?
No. But moral rectitude isn’t the only thing to consider. ‘Coolness’ counts, too. Being a rapist -especially when you don’t fit the sneaking-in-the-bushes pervert stereotype – is cool compared to being a kiddyfiddler or a pickpocket. Morally wrong, and all, but cool. Rape will end when Jay Leno starts making the same kind of jokes about Mike Tyson as he does about Michael Jackson.
Elkins wrote:
I wonder how common that is. I’ve fantasized about taking a baseball bat to a rapist or two, but I wanted to whap them upside the head with it because I was angry and pounding on the cause of my anger sounded good. And I’ve had more involved fantasies about specific rapists getting a clue about the pain they caused, but those never involved rape, either. I guess I figure if the guy got raped, he’d be focused on his own pain instead of worrying about the pain he caused. I mean, if the guy getting raped was likely to make a difference, then all the guys getting raped in prison would get a clue. Which they generally don’t, best I can tell.
I kind of think that’s part of what caused the problem in the first place – the guy is so hung up on his own angst and pain he’ll do anything to resolve it and he isn’t real interested in worrying about what pain his solutions might cost others.
Vladimir wrote:
But if “socieital sanctions” allow rape as a valid choice, then you’re going to have more rapists. Among other things, this thread – these threads – have been exploring the lack of societal sanctions, and the fact that the culture in some ways endorses the choice to rape. Challenging and changing social standards can be a more effective way of changing behavior than changing laws. The classic example I was taught is the period when deuling was outlawed in the U.S.. In the North, deuling died out, because it wasn’t socially acceptable anyhow. But in the South, the law didn’t make much of a dent, and it took decades for deuling to be elminiated, because Southern society endorsed deuling. Society’s attitudes have more impact than the law.
If coercive sex were truly condemned by the majority in this society, rape would still exist, but far fewer men would choose to rape.
Vladimir wrote:
I am not thrilled with this example, and I think it poorly supports your argument that “it’s better to approach the ‘rape culture’ question from the womens’ side rather than the mens'” – on the contrary, your example suggests that looking into why men rape and what can be done to help them treat women with compassion is the more logical approach. Which I think it is.
If a considerable percentage of rapists justify rape by labeling women the privileged ones, challenging that concept can help to cut down on rapes. If men rape because they believe that men should be aggressive while women are passive, then changing the cultural assumptions so that women are allowed to be aggressive and men passive can cut down on rape. If, as some researchers claim, rape rates are considerably lower in more egalitarian societies, then working toward an egalitarian society will cut down on rape.
“Oh. If that’s commonly the case then my whole argument is shot to hell.”
I’d say it’s pretty typical of most women I know. So, unless the forces of the universe have conspired to make my life so exccessively unique that the majority of my female aquaintances fall into the furthermost edge of the bell curve when it comes to women and violence, yeah, your argument is shot to hell. (Although my fantasies do run more to the type Elkins describes and for similar reasons, as well as the fact that I generally just want to obliterate them – simply hurting them rarely suffices.)
“No, rather, you do what you can get away with, given societal sanctions and your own inhibitions, and then you dream up a justification afterwards, as needed.”
The point is that culture helps us determine where we draw the lines between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour; indeed, that’s one of it’s main functions. I’m not convinced that people justify things to themselves after the fact, I think they are more likely to justify their actions to others after the fact – once they are caught. Since “inhibitions” covers not just fear and revulsion but morals as well, a person being raised in a culture that is less likely to teach them that something is wrong is also less likely to have inhibitions regarding such actions. Such moral inhibitions, or lack therof, often come with (or are created by) arguments for or in favor of such actions. Maybe I’m unique (though I doubt it) but I don’t choose not to steal only because I was taught that it was wrong, (much less for no other reason than because I’m afraid I’ll get caught), but also because of why I have come to believe that it is wrong. Futhermore, I’m more likely to steal when these arguments fail to hold up due to the circumstance of the situation (if I were ever starving, in need of medicine I couldn’t afford, stealing from someone who steals themselves, etc.). So a society that makes a certain action illegal, but gives weak arguments against such actions, will tend to create a culture that condones such actions, despite the laws against it.
“…moral rectitude isn’t the only thing to consider. ‘Coolness’ counts, too. Being a rapist …. is cool compared to being a kiddyfiddler or a pickpocket. Morally wrong, and all, but cool.”
Um, exactly. How does that not support the idea that culture can and does condone rape? After all, if something is “cool” how wrong can it be? You may be able to argue that rape culture isn’t especially pervasive if rape is only considered “cool” in certain subsections, but I’d hardly consider Jay Leno’s audience representative of only a small subsection of American culture.
Well, I don’t know about “sly,” but I did think that you were trying to get at something specific in a roundabout way with all of your questions before. Clearly I misread. I apologize if I seemed to be accusing you of some form of dishonesty.
I don’t really know how common it is. (Hey. Maybe I’m just a freak. Who knows?) But it does seem to me that we’ve got an entire body of “sex as violence” metaphor floating about in our language and our thought, and that no matter how strenuously one might intellectually believe that sex isn’t (or shouldn’t be) viewed as conquest or used as dominance display, we’re pretty well enculturated to think of it as such anyway.
And I don’t think all of that enculturation is just directed at men, either. I’m suddenly thinking of myself, as an adolescent girl, listening to Pat Benatar belt out “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” on the radio. That’s sex as violence, sex as conquest, sex as dominance, and even sex as revenge right there –and it’s all being narrated very much from a woman’s POV. I mean, we’re talking pop culture here, not any deeply hidden subtle stuff. That entire idea of sex as conquest, too, is to my mind intimately connected with a view as sex as dominance display, and I remember it being very much a part of how teenaged girls (whose thirteen-year-old minds were still pretty close to the surface) often talked about the objects of their attraction.
So no, I really don’t think that “sex as dominance/violence” is something that only men find themselves internalizing. I do think that society sanctions them actually acting on the more excessive external manifestations of that equation a lot more than it sanctions women doing so, though — like you said, rape is wrong, but it’s also “cool.” Only for men, though. It’s not at all “cool” for women. That right there is what I think we mean when we talk about there being a “rape culture.”
Well, yeah. I do think that’s the solution, in the long run. Unfortunately, the ways in which people get that sense of entitlement are pretty deeply-engrained in the culture. I mean, how do you convince people not to be racist? Obviously it’s not half as simple as just wagging the finger in the face and crying “shame!”
The point is, though, that I don’t think that most rapists (ie, date rapists and marital rapists, not sociopathic serial rapists and the like, who are a much less common phenomenon) really are “deliberating,” any more than the person who has been taught to believe that black people are worth less than white people is “deliberating” when she behaves in a way that reflects that belief. They’re just operating under the assumption that a woman’s volition means less than their own. The same balk instinct that would kick in to stop them from committing some other violent criminal act just isn’t kicking in for a lot of guys when they think about forcing sex on a woman.
Okay, I was with you right up until this line. Now I’m confused. Where’s the feeling of indignation coming from? Is it the entire idea that men are enculturated in ways that make them more likely to commit rape than women that smarts–does it make you feel unjustly accused, in other words; is that where the “hey, fuck you too!” reaction is coming from–or is it something else?
What about the people who use rhypnol? It’s not an easy drug to get, it’s certainly not something you were likely to get ahold of unless you were planning to rape someone – especailly the variant that makes women infertile! In drug “date rape” cases, the rapist has to have deliberately sat down and thought “I want so I will go to a club and rape someone, I will procure drugs to do so, and I better ake sure she’s infertile coz I don’t want the bitch screwing me for child support later”. In their heads it must be a reasonable course of action, that they are able to drug, rape and screw up the fertility of some women just because they feel like it.
Perhaps not am I entitled to rape, but am I entitled to have sex with this person irrespective of their wishes?
A (male) friend of mine was quite recently raped by a girl he knew – she was staying the night at his house, made a pass at him which he refused (in part because he had a long term girlfriend). At some point in the night, she decided he couldn’t really be serious, how could a guy turn down sex? how could a guy turn her down for sex? So she went into his room and woke him up with a blowjob, and then was surprised that (once concious) he hit her off him and ordered her out of the house.
She honestly believed that, having offered him sex, she was entitled to that sex and ignored his opinion.
Story has a rather sad ending. He didn’t dare tell his girlfriend, afraid she would believe it was consentual and break up with him. He got a load of shit for giving rapist girlie a bruise when he threw her off the bed, and for kicking her out in the middle of the night and that plus problems he then had sleeping around with his gf lead to their breakup anyway.
And today’s rhetorial question is…
Is it ever possible to have a discussion about rape without being given examples of the one in a million times that a woman sexually assaults a man?
Is it ever possible to have a discussion about rape without being given examples of the one in a million times that a woman sexually assaults a man?
I know it’s rare. But it’s a bad effect leading from the rape culture idea – she raped him because she believed it was impossible for a man to refuse sex, that men cannot control themselves and have such a great desire for sex that they _cannot_ ever mean no.
While it’s the reverse of the logic of why men rape women, they both stem from a simliar idea – that men have a greater desire for sex. An idea that is not nessisarily true, but is accepted as true and have negative consequences. This is what we were talking about yes? Rape culture, beliefs in our society causing rape. Just because it happened to a man doesn’t make it any better.
>>Perhaps not am I entitled to rape, but am I entitled to have sex with this person irrespective of their wishes?>>
If you don’t understand that these are exactly the same thing, you really shouldn’t be here.
I think VK’s point was that in the mind of the rapist, they’re not raping–they’re not beating the woman over the head and physically violating her in a dark alleyway, they’re just, like, encouraging her.
while women simply can’t rape men?
Of course they can. Surely I’m not the only one who’s seen the pool-cue scene in A Gun for Jennifer? (Okay, maybe I am.)
Excellent post, Elkins.
Exactly! I took a similar thesis in the other thread. The fact is, directed action takes more work than passive display. When your directed action is rejected, you suffer more than if your passive display is rejected. Because males bare the emotional brunt of being actively rejected, they must learn to suppress their emotions. They must become more stoic, and also learn to invest less emotionally when they pursue females in the future (knowing that you may well be rejected painfully is a disincentive for you to invest emotionally). If a male is afraid to invest in a woman emotionally, he is more likely to see her as a sex object, and he is less likely to seek out genuine emotional connection with women in the future. Furthermore, when males are required to become extra stoic, they are likely to (a) look down on less stoic men as “wimps,” and (b) look down on women as “over-emotional.”
As Warren Farrell has pointed out in Why Men Are The Way They Are, males may react to this state of affairs by seeing their interactions with women as “the game.” The advantage of playing the game is that you can’t really get hurt… but neither can you show the vulnerability that would make a real relationship possible.
This system is obviously fucked up. It is unfair to females, because it reduces them to sex objects. It is unfair to males, because it often requires them to ignore their own feelings, and substitute those feelings for assertiveness and sexual aggressiveness. In romantic/sexual situations, there is usually a certain level of doubt, hesitancy, nervousness, and ambiguity. By requiring males to initiate, our culture is saying that the man must thrust aside all of those extremely human feelings, and go for it. He is supposed to do it in such a confident and smooth way as to alleviate all of the woman’s feelings of uncertainty also by “sweeping her off her feet.”
In a context like initiating kissing, because situations with women are so often ambiguous (not all women give clear signals that men can read), a man must basically try to read the woman’s mind. This becomes harder when he has no idea how to read body language and recognize what few signals do come his way. Thus, there will usually be a certain amount of ambiguity: he will never be able to tell for sure whether she really wants him to make a move or not. If he asks, he risks being seen as a “wimp” who isn’t confident or smooth enough to sweep her off her feet. Thus, he must take a risk, which means ignoring the chance that she might not want him to initiate. He must ignore her feelings to some degree also. And he might feel bad about about doing so, but apparently those feelings don’t matter either.
Yes, the training that males get for dealing with women in romantic/sexual situations in our culture is so abysmally bad it defies belief. It isn’t practical, it is damaging to both males and females, and it doesn’t seem to correspond to what women actually want and feel comfortable with. I’m not even going to get into all the reasons for this right now, because there are so many.
Of course, men are supposed to do all this stuff naturally. But not all males are naturally smooth, suave, confident, and sexually assertive. The current system seems to assume that males are naturally womanizers. In other words, you are only a man if you embody the current male sex role. Or it assumes that all males need to attract females are looks and money (so males aren’t taught to develop all the other qualities that attract females). Neither of those assumptions are true. Since interacting with women are not really “natural” for all males, many males will lack the tools for initiating and maintaining positive romantic/sexual relationships with women, and our culture does not help them gain those tools. Both men and women pay for this state of affairs.
thanks, mythago, I did mean that from the point of veiw of the rapist. Sorry if it wasn’t clear.
I’ll consider the subject of f/m rape to be as important as m/whoever rape w hen the fear of it keeps men in the house after dark, causes them to consider their clothing carefully for fear of being provacative, and earns them all the handwringing that women get now. Not until.
Yeah, and ‘my buddy got raped by this girl’—this is something that keeps popping up. It’s very seldom the guy himself reporting it—it’s always a buddy he evidently told it to, which makes an interesting counterpoint to all those people who complain that rape is so much worse for male victims than it is for women—to the point where the guys can’t talk about it.
> > while women simply can’t rape men?
> Of course they can. Surely I’m not the only
> one who’s seen the pool-cue scene in A Gun
> for Jennifer?
If they did what I think you’re suggesting with the pool cue (and how may ways are there to sexually asssault someone with a pool cue?), then it just shows you that the best way to sexually humiliate a guy is to treat him like a woman.
“Suck my dick, bitch!” is a threat and/or an insult. “Eat my pussy, dog!” is a joke.
Aegis:
Well said and very true. (And the rest of post 135 was true as well, but im quoting only that).
Yeah, and ‘my buddy got raped by this girl’…this is something that keeps popping up. It’s very seldom the guy himself reporting it…it’s always a buddy he evidently told it to, which makes an interesting counterpoint to all those people who complain that rape is so much worse for male victims than it is for women…to the point where the guys can’t talk about it.
I didn’t say it was worse for the male victim – I would say it is as bad for both. He doesn’t call it rape, neither do several female friends who were raped – the rape myths keep people thinking their assaults are their own faults.
I related his story, because I felt it was obvious how cultural perceptions of the different sexes had lead to the rape. I could have told the story of one of my female friends, or my own but I picked on that one because I thought it was an obvious link from gender stereotypes -> rape. I wasn’t trying to make a point that it’s worse for men and I’m sorry if it came across like that.
I mostly agree, Sarah. However, I don’t think that this is an all or nothing, 100% nature or 100% nurture argument. If 5% of men rape (I think that’s about the case), that 5% may be, on average, less empathetic and morally developed than the other 95%. That doesn’t mean that the culture isn’t screwed up, though, because 5% is still such a big fraction of the male population, when it comes to committing a horrible crime like rape, that our society is doing an inadequate job of preventing rape.
Or, to put it another way, lets say there were a medication, say a sleeping pill, that killed 5% of people who took it. If one did a study, and found that, generally, those who died were in worse physical condition than the other 95%, generally more sedentary, more likely to be smokers, with worse diets, more congenital health problems, more diseases, etc, does that mean that the medication is okay? That the only problem is with the patients? No, of course not, because 5% is way out of the range of acceptable tolerances for a sleeping pill!
I’m willing to say that there is a point at which rape is rare enough that it can fairly be said to be indicative solely of the problems of an individual, and not a problem of rape culture, best addresssed through law enforcement and incapacitation for perpetrators and therapy for victims rather than broad cultural change: I would say our culture has arsonists, but I wouldn’t say we have an “arson culture.” I’d guess that that point comes at roughly when 0.01% of men rape or attempt to rape. However, we aren’t nearly at that point, because our culture is still toxic enough in its attitudes towards women to teach men to be rapists who, if they aren’t as empathetic or nice as most, are certainly a large enough fraction not to be rare abberations.
Summary: in our culture, a lot of men, mostly meaner and less empathetic than average men, rape. In a better culture, even the meaner, less empathetic than average men would not rape, and rape would be a rare abberation of a truly twisted handful of people.
I have to say, I fully understand the point that male-on-female rape is a bigger problem than female-on-male rape, but I don’t at all understand why this incurs hostility toward the mention of female-on-male rape. It sounds to me a bit like Nicholas D. Kristof (whom I generally like, by the way) or someone saying, “those white middle class feminists are wasting their time on the problems of women in America — they should care about Afghan women instead!” The middle here is falsely excluded.
Aegis, I doubt it’s true that directed action takes more work than passive display. Many women do a lot of time-consuming and sometimes unhealthy things to themselves for the sake of passive display enhancement. Various diets, makeup, fashion. Nor is “passive display” limited to physical work, without the emotional demands of directed action. A woman must develop a self-confident yet relaxed demeanor of the type that most men like, something that I don’t think can really be achieved without significant emotional investment in that “facet” of oneself.
For once Aegis, I agree with a lot of what you said. With regard to parts that I didn’t agree with:
That isn’t what I got from Elkins’ post. Of course, I could be wrong, but I read hers as acknowledging that this type of catch-22 tends to contribute to the rape culture, not that women suffer less from rejection – as you point out later in your own post, men’s inability to handle emotions has a lot to do with it.
On the previous thread you posted that:
Well, I’ll do my best.
I think that you underestimate the extent to which women invest their time, effort, and emotions into getting a guy – often a specific guy. (Well, actually, I mostly think you suffer from your very human inability to read people’s minds and possibly a very “masculine” lack of practice with empathy.) I think that at best you can argue that our rejection is usually less public, and so our humiliation is too; although, again, this fails to take into account, for instance, the fact that since girls and women share their feelings more, more people are likely to know how much we actually desire someone, even if the guy in question is clueless.
Most importantly though, while this public humiliation may be especially difficult for guys to deal with properly, which helps explain their tendency to lash out at the woman in question, I think that it is important to note that at this point, it is often their rejection by their peers as a result of “being shot down” that is the important factor, not their rejection by a specific girl or woman. With this in mind it’s not hard to see why we might cry foul at being told that we hold more power when it is perfectly clear to us that all too often it is not even our opinion that men ultimately care about.
And of course, in the end, what you said doesn’t make sense anyway. Rejection is rejection, but when you put time and effort into it…what? It can’t be that you feel more rejected because you just said that wasn’t so. Is it that you feel more entitled, as if she owed you something for your efforts? What else is there?
I think that you brought up an important point, though, when you said:
Stereotypes hurt everyone. I empathise with guys who are trying to do the right thing and acknowledge and deal with their emotions properly in spite cultural opposition, and often despite not having been given the tools to do so in the first place.
However, I don’t see how going around saying that women have “more sexual power” or have the better deal when it comes to dating helps you in this effort. It seems especially myopic and illogical to me to argue that women’s “sexual power” is directly related to why guys lash out when rejected, but still deny that the construct behind female “sexual power” is related to rape in any obvious way.
In a context like initiating kissing, because situations with women are so often ambiguous (not all women give clear signals that men can read), a man must basically try to read the woman’s mind. This becomes harder when he has no idea how to read body language and recognize what few signals do come his way. Thus, there will usually be a certain amount of ambiguity: he will never be able to tell for sure whether she really wants him to make a move or not. If he asks, he risks being seen as a “wimp”? who isn’t confident or smooth enough to sweep her off her feet. Thus, he must take a risk, which means ignoring the chance that she might not want him to initiate. He must ignore her feelings to some degree also. And he might feel bad about about doing so, but apparently those feelings don’t matter either.
*sigh*
I have come across this sort of description of the ‘poor confused male who cannot read the signs’ before, and it never fails to strike me as convenient tripe.
Why is it universally accepted that every person knows how to behave with other people in every other context but sex? Like it’s some incredibly complicated nuclear reaction that requires a degree in engineering?
Every person, unless they have particular difficulties and personal problems, knows how to tell if another person they just met is interested in their conversation or not, in a friendship context.
Throw sexual attraction, or even just the *possibility* of it, into the mix, and we’re supposed to believe it becomes so impossible – for men only, conveniently! – to “read the signs” of what is none other than normal human communication. Why?
When this happens, ie. when people do really behave according to this assumption, it’s only because there is such an amoung of fakery involved and such an amount of stereotypes and expectations that get in the way of actually being there, you know, talking to that person, and engaging in direct, personal communication with them, not with the idea of how they as women/men should behave.
That a man should genuinely be incapable of understanding if a woman is as attracted to him as she is to her is, in my experience, a complete myth. IF a guy seriously thinks he couldn’t tell if she liked him or not, it only means he didn’t even bother to consider the actual person in front of him, he just assumed that of course a smile, a nice comment, a laugh – in short even the most basic forms of human communication that, if taking place between two people of the same sex and heterosexual, would be considered normal gestures of friendliness – must in fact be read as “hey baby take me I’m yours”.
No man who has a functioning brain is incapable to tell the difference between friendliness and sexual attraction, unless of course he thinks he must suss that out within 10 minutes and get laid within the next two hours, no matter with who. Then of course he won’t be paying attention to the actual person in front of him.
The other problem I guess is women are more often expected to be always nice, smiling, friendly; couple that with men expecting friendliness to signal attraction and sexual flirting, and you get the perfect recipe for miscommunication.
I do find it amusing that even this supposedly mild level of miscommunication should be attributed to women’s ambiguity and men’s inability to read their *minds*. No, dear, it’s not about telepathic or magic powers, any more than all other ordinary human communication is.
Also, another thing I find interesting is this recurring use of the “initiating” term. It’s not working, when it’s only one person “initiating” any form of behaviour that involves sexual attraction. When it works, you *cannot tell* who initiated who because it’s mutual. Two-way communication. No special secret codes or signals, just basic human capacity to relate to other human beings.
There is nothing mindboggingly complicated or ambiguous about it, unless you want to make it so, but that to me seems like a nice excuse to treat people you feel attracted to as stereotypes, as if they were not human beings right there in front of you.
Why is it universally accepted that every person knows how to behave with other people in every other context but sex? Like it’s some incredibly complicated nuclear reaction that requires a degree in engineering?
Every person, unless they have particular difficulties and personal problems, knows how to tell if another person they just met is interested in their conversation or not, in a friendship context.
There are quite a few people (not just men) who don’t know how to behave in every other context. It’s just that in the context of sex, the “stakes” tend to be a lot higher.
I think that it is important to note that at this point, it is often their rejection by their peers as a result of “being shot down”? that is the important factor, not their rejection by a specific girl or woman.
I would disagree with this – I think that a lot of the hurt of rejection for both men and women stems on being especially attracted to someone and that attraction not being reciprocated. (Though I suspect it can seem that way when gender roles encourage one to wait to be approached – men may have less need to invest time, effort and emotions, but that doesn’t mean that a lot of them don’t.) I think it’s largely irrelevant whether this rejection takes the form of being turned down or never being asked; or rather, it’s a matter of personal preference. Some will think the finality hurts more, others that the lack thereof does.
As for the peer reaction to “being shot down,” I suspect it only occurs in a few contexts (e.g. approaching someone whom one’s never met in a bar) that I don’t think are as representative as we make them out to be.
Quoting various people:
> But if socieital sanctions allow rape as
> a valid choice, then youre
> going to have more rapists.
> If coercive sex were truly condemned by the
> majority in this society,
> rape would still exist, but far fewer
> men would choose to rape
> Since inhibitions covers not just fear and
> revulsion but morals as well,
> a person being raised in a culture that
> is less likely to teach them
> that something is wrong is also less
> likely to have inhibitions
> regarding such actions. Such moral inhibitions,
> or lack therof, often
> come with (or are created by) arguments
> for or in favor of such actions.
I more or less agree with this. Where I
differ is in thinking that rape could be
any more morally unpopular than it already
is.
Now as for ‘coolness’, it’s not a sign of endorse-
ment. Think about all the Che Guevara and Charles
Manson themed merchandise people buy. It’s not a sign
of widespread belief in the tenets of hardline
marxism-leninism, or insane homocide cultism.
> What about the people who use rhypnol?
I agree with whoever said they are sociopaths,
and, as such, very atypical.
> The same balk instinct that would kick in
> to stop them from committing
> some other violent criminal act
> just isnt kicking in for a lot of guys
> when they think about forcing sex on
> a woman.
Or a man. And I’m not even sure about the
idea that they’ll balk at rape but not at other
violent crimes. A disproportionate number of
rapists will probably be the sort of guys that
might get into a bar fight or join a jolly band
of football hooligans.
Another thing is that violence somehow is only
violence amongst men; against children it’s
discipline, amongst women a catfight and against
women ‘a bit of rough’.
> > screw you, buddy. I know I do.
> Okay, I was with you right up until this
> line. Now Im confused.
> Wheres the feeling of indignation coming
> from? Is it the entire idea
> that men are enculturated in ways that
> make them more likely to
> commit rape than women that smarts
> does it make you feel unjustly
> accused,
No. It makes me feel *justly* accused, which smarts
a hell of a lot more. I don’t know, maybe I’m strange
or something, but personally, I feel entitled to the
whole *world* and the best of it. I also know that
*feeling* so won’t *make it* so. I am in fact *not*
entitled.
Only, what say ye to not scornfully reminding me of
what I already know every five minutes?
> That a man should genuinely be incapable of
>understanding if a woman is as attracted to
> him as she is to her is, in my experience, a
> complete myth. IF a guy seriously thinks he
> couldn’t tell if she liked him or not, it only
> means he didn’t even bother to consider the
> actual person in front of him, he just assumed
>that of course a smile, a nice comment, a
>laugh – in short even the most basic forms of
>human communication that, if taking place
>between two people of the same sex and
>heterosexual, would be considered normal
>gestures of friendliness – must in fact be >read
>as “hey baby take me I’m yours”?.
Well. it works the other way around, too (i.e not just friendly -> flirting, but also flirting -> friendly).
And now for some elizabethean rape culture:
On a time in summers season,
Iocky late with Ienny walking,
Like a lout made loue with talking,
When he should be doing, Reason
Still he cries, when he should dally,
Ienny sweet, sweet, shall I, shall I.
Ienny as most women vse it,
Who say nay when they would haue it,
With a bolde face seemed to craue it,
With a saint looke did refuse it,
Iocky lost his time to dally,
Still he cries, sweet, shall I, shall I.
She who knew that backward dealing,
Was a foe to forward longing,
To auoide her owne hearts wronging,
With a sigh loues sute reuealing,
Said Iocky sweet when you would dally,
Doe you cry, sweet, shall I, shall I.
Iocky knew by her replying,
That a no is I in wooing,
That an asking without doing,
Is the way to loues denying.
Now he knowes when he would dally,
How to spare, sweet, shall I, shall I.
Do you see, btw, how that “you’ll just automatically know what to do” attitude might be problematic?
Well thought out post and they all shine light on the subject thread.
However no context has been defined as to what women you are talking about? All women in the world, through the course of human existance?
All women in the world in modern times? Or all women in the cilvilized world? I don’t keep track on the daily numbers but i would argue that in modern times in developed countries, particularly the last couple of decades, in that context, females do have an advantage due to there sexuality becuase those negative *consequences* of there advantage are rapidly diminishing but are still reaping the benefits of sexual manipulation, without the cost or risk. Which in my opinion is ok, that is your human right to do what you want with your body, including using it to make money or simply for pleasure and hey if some smuck lets himself get taken advantage of, thats his human right. But i get scared and sometimes see this picture that is already getting painted. I see a picture of feminism being used to silence males, and any form suddle or overt of his sexuality, good or bad.
1)in the future it will be the normal social if not legal standard that only a female can intiate any form of sexual contact physical or verbally.
2)pornography will be illegal in any form but male sperm will be freely availible to any adult female.
3)females will have all child costady.
The above is of course a very extreme scenerio but i see people buying into all over the place and either by intention or lack of foresight the leading feminist perpetuating it. As a male i feel extremely vunerable and i think there is a real possibility males could become second class citizens and for more reasons then one i would trade places with a female any day, at least in this country, at this time but i have lived a realativly sheltered life i admit, ive never been, seen known anybody who was raped. But im definatly tramatized into ever asking a women out for fear of being a harrasser. Ok im done before my post turns into a double standard rant!
A lot of the posts on this and the related thread over the past few days have been amazing. Unfortunately, some of them have also been annoying as hell.
Could we just for ONCE in our lives have a discussion of rape and rape culture where going on about how PHMT & lists of woman-rapes-man tales were prohibited? I don’t like the idea of censorship, but dammit, I’m really sick of having to wade through long drawn-out post after post after post of knee-jerk male defensiveness every time the word “rape” comes up.
Guys, get a grip: rape happens a LOT, and it’s NEARLY ALWAYS men who do the raping. Accept it and let us get on with some productive discussion about how to deal with it, ok?
Just voicing my opinion as an individual male and yes it is defensiveness and i elborated on why :) Yes rape does happen and the only solution is that we evolve, our science technology so that people are happy and healthy on this planet and males rape becuase they has a differant sex drive and they are strong physically, rape is not much differant then any form of violence.
I have to second noodles’ cry of bullshit. The idea that asking for a kiss is insulting to women isn’t a woman-generated idea. If some women believe it, it’s because they’ve been suckered by fairy tales and whatnot. Most women I know, myself included, think that there is probably nothing sweeter and cuter than a guy asking if he can kiss you. I cannot think of a man I’ve been out with who up and kissed me out of the blue. Generally they either ask outright or confess their feelings or something first.
So, men who think they have to up and kiss and are confused if they are getting “mixed signals”, just ask. I promise, the right mix of respect and love-struckness wows the ladies every time.
First of all it’s men’s responsibility to face rape culture, not technology or “people”. Men don’t have a different sex drive; they have a human sex drive; as in, both males and females are human. Men rape because they are taught that this is how to be sexual — it is rarely an act of violence. Most usually it is an act that threatens violence (or other coercion: economic, child custody, etc.) but rides on the coattails of the threat. It has very, very little to do with any inherent male sexuality, and everything to do with gendered power and maintaining that power.
We really don’t need technology to end rape. Men just need to keep their zippers shut.
Soooo…. it’s better to risk possibly molesting a woman than to be viewed as a wimp. Let. me. get. this. straight.
… your ego is more precious than a woman’s bodily integrity.
You do realise you’re portraying men as social neandrathals who are victimized by women’s so called poor-signals. Poor, poor men. They can’t read the signals so they’ll just go ahead a do the ONE THING that is most inappropriate — touch without being invited. If you don’t fucking know what to do — DON’T DO ANYTHING. How pathetically apparent is that?
No one has to be “confident” or “smooth”. That’s just a line of pop culture bullshit. I’ve had plenty of geek-powered, fumbling hot sexual encounters (with women, thank you) that were anything but “confident” or “smooth.” Somehow they were quite fulfilling… and get this, fun!
Why are men so hung up on sex=performance?
Oh, that’s right. They objectify women.
>So, men who think they have to up and kiss >and
>are confused if they are getting “mixed >signals”?, just ask. I promise, the right mix of >respect and love-struckness wows the ladies >every time
I took the noodles to mean that if you don’t already know the answer to that question, then you’re either an autist, attracted to a stereotype or a drooling sex-mainiac.
Maybe I misread, though.
Oh no, Q, didn’t you get the memo? Men rape coz they got “different sex drives”, so they’re really just the poor, poor little old victims here, and us women are like, soooooooooooo mean and evil coz all we do is get mad at them for doing what just comes naturally.
The level of male arrogance on this thread is pissing me way the hell off.
Any lame-ass, pathetically weak excuse is a-okay to these guys as long as it lets them off the hook for their own damn behaviour. Talk about playing the victim!
Look, if men can’t be trusted to keep their willies in their trousers unless nicely asked to get them out, then they freaking have no business walking the streets where they can harm the innocent. Either grow a sense of responsibility or accept that your “natural” place is locked behind bars where you can no longer do harm. How fucking clear is that?
I think it’s not only the arrogance, but this rather immature fear that women (or men) won’t ask them to take their willies out that makes me want to scream. I’m tired of the “different” male sex drive and the woman-as-virgin-who-faints-at-the-sight of the manly willie. Both set me up to behave badly and then blame it on women who have “mixed” signals.
Maybe if these guys could admit that women like to fuck there wouldn’t be as many mixed signals, eh?
I guess it’s just easier to force yourself on a woman than it is to accept that women are 1) actively sexually active 2) horny 3) horny and sexually active 4) sexually agressive 5) still horny 6) willing to play with men’s willies, agressively or not 7) rather, rinse, repeat.
Good point noodles and Amanda.
I hope I didn’t come across as buying into such bullshit – though I have a feeling I did. I do think that its possible that a lot of men currently have trouble “reading” women in social situations, sexual or otherwise, but I also think that while some of it comes from lack of practice, quite often they don’t even bother, or want, to try. Simply accepting this an an excuse and not challenging such men to learn to pay attention to body language and tone of voice (or, you know – bothering to actually listen when women talk), doesn’t help anyone.
And Jeff, I wasn’t trying to say that men only get hurt from rejection by women because it means they are rejected by their peers – thus the words “at this point.” To clarify, I simply meant the only ways that I could see men being especially hurt simply because they have to do the asking are because a) doing so means making their desires public (as opposed to internal – not necessarily “in public”) b) they have less practice in dealing with their emotions in a healthy manner and c) they feel entitled after having gone through the effort. C is clearly mysoginistic and A means that being “especially hurt” is dependent upon their desires having been exposed to the larger world – which means that it isn’t that particular woman’s rejection that is “especially hurtful” – it’s public exposure. B speaks more to loss of control than actually feeling anything more intensely.
Qgrrl – that’s what I was trying to get at in the end, thanks for saying it more clearly. Aegis: Recognising that masculine and feminine ideals encourage men to disregard women’s wishes isn’t mysoginistic; in fact it’s an important step to challenging such stereotypes. However, saying that men being encouraged to ignore women’s wishes and autonomy is somehow more hurtful to men than women is.
You know, I’m beginning to get so cynical about all this that I doubt even their accepting that simple fact would change anything much at all. I suspect for a lot of them, thinking that women do actually like to fuck would just serve as further excuse to force fucking on us when we don’t want it, using the “but you know you *really* want it” chestnut to excuse themselves (once again) for ever, ever having to be held accountable for their own actions.
Do you see, btw, how that “you’ll just automatically know what to do”? attitude might be problematic?
Vladimir, no, yo no compriende Elizabethan English, however, just last night I was watching the Fifth Element on tv and there’s this cute scene where Bruce Willis has taken Milla Jovovich to this priest guy who supposedly knows that she came to save the universe blah blah preposterous sci-fi plot blah blah, so she’s unconscious and he drops her on the couch, and while he’s alone in the room with her, as she’s laying there passed out, he gets closer and tries to kiss her on the lips, at which point she snaps awake, snatches his gun and holds it against his throat, looking dead serious like she’s going to use it, and he retreats and says “sorry, I was just trying to wake you… ok, you’re right, I know, I shouldn’t have done that!”.
Later he asks what she meant with this phrase she said when she snapped awake, and it turns out it was “never without my permission” – “yeah, I figured it was something like that…”
There you go, I think that illustrates my point somewhat better than your poem, even if a little emphatically. No, no one was talking of sneaking up to kiss unconscious women, but an “initiating kissing” situation where the kiss comes out of the blue, without any two-way communication leading up to it, is more often than not an unwelcome advance, and yes, exactly like Amanda and Q Grrl said, if you aren’t sure if it’s going to be welcome or not, you don’t do anything! It’s not such an outlandish concept, is it? It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.
That was my point, not what you thought you read into it, Vladimir. The point was not “a man will automatically know what to do” – there is nothing “automatic”, because he’s not alone, he’s interacting with another person, not a robot. Anyone who isn’t a jerk or flat out drunk and stoned (and even that’s not a good excuse) will know he cannot just go and make a move on a woman without the slightest consideration for her, the situation, the level of contact that’s been established, etc. And in any situation where there is uncertainty in how to behave to another person, the basic rule of civil behaviour is, you err on the side of caution and politeness. IF I’m on a plane and I don’t know if the person sitting next to me and with whom I only exchanged an hello is interested in having a two-hour conversation or just wants to read their magazines, I’m not going to start chatting to them for two hours just because I decided I want to do that.
Any form of human interaction is made of that kind of dance, exchanges, exploration – communication, that’s what it is.
It shouldn’t be any different with basic sexual advances, really. It’s just a really sad excuse to say that men don’t know if women are flirting or not, women are so ambiguous, and all that crap about how a man is going to feel less of a man if he asks. You found a rather bizarre way of *justifying* unwelcome advances by saying a man just *has to* ignore a woman’s reactions and just go ahead and “initiate” because oh poor thing, he’s so caught in this damned if you do damned if you don’t. That’s just ridiculous. It’s you, Vladimir, who are speaking of men as autistic, sociopathic, drooling sex maniacs without a working neuron, not me.
This myth that the possibility of sexual attraction suddely deprives males – and males only – of the most basic capacity to engage in a civilised way in the most basic, natural and spontaneous steps of human communication is part and parcel of the “just couldn’t help it” refrain, that is so typically used to turn sexual harassment and sadly, often, even rape into some kind of product of ambiguity and confusion that women supposedly generate in men just by virtue of being sexual beings. Tiresome, and not very flattering for men, is it?
> This myth that the possibility of sexual
> attraction suddely deprives males
>of the most basic capacity to engage in a
>civilised way in the most basic, natural and
>spontaneous steps of human communication
>is part and parcel of the “just couldn’t help
> it”? refrain, that is so typically used to turn
> sexual harassment and sadly, often, even
> rape into some kind of product of ambiguity
> and confusion that women supposedly
> generate in men just by virtue of being
> sexual beings.
Oh. I wasn’t aware of believing all that, but, well, sorry about that, then.
Q Grrl:
If I’ve got Aegis pegged right, his complaint isn’t that he should be allowed to commit rape, but rather that because (a) he can’t read signals very clearly; and (b) men are expected to be sexual aggressors; that his choices are to be aggressive or to be celibate (of course, Amanda’s solution of asking seems to me to be a perfectly fine middle ground).
Jenny:
I’ve been in situations where I was waiting for a clear signal, and I’ve been in situations where I’ve asked someone out (in a private context) and been rejected. It’s hard to say which hurts more; I think it’s very personality-dependent (some people like closure, some don’t) and prone to “grass-is-greenerism.”
Amanda – I cannot think of a man I’ve been out with who up and kissed me out of the blue.
Eh, it happened to me. Twice, at least, that I recall. Not in a really disturbing manner, but annoying all the same, because it was literally out of the blue. With nothing, nothing at all leading up to that. Once, I’d never even met the guy before or spoken to him for more than two seconds, a friend of a mutual friend, and we were with lots of other people, coming out of a pub, I’d just been left behind with this person, and I cannot figure out what, except from one too many pints – and again, it’s not an excuse – led him to think that kind of move could be welcome. It wasn’t aggressive, it was extremely clumsy, and even funny, because it was so unexpected, and he was so not the type of person I’d have expected it from.
Another time, from someone I did know well, we were training together, once we went out to the cinema, it was so not even anything resembling a “date”, but I think in some odd way because it was his car, when he drove me home he just felt like he was entitled to a kiss. Agh. Very clumsy. Again, it was not so much the move itself that was disturbing – nothing aggressive about it either, he never even touched me, I retreated and made it clear I wasn’t interested, he apologised and was genuinely embarassed, and he really wasn’t the arrogant jerk type either, but it was so annoying and so pathetic, really. You just wondered, who does he think he is and why on earth did he think of doing that? I’m not even flirty when I want to flirt, nevermind when sex is the last thing on my mind. I couldn’t have possibly given out any signals whatsoever. Ambiguity my ass, really. He just felt like it was expected of me, because I’d gone to see a film with him, oh what an obvious signal of sexual interest from my part. I was used to hanging out with my group of friends, my own age, mostly students, females and males, there was none of that bullshit with them; this guy was older and probably more used to the notion of women being passive and men having to “make a move” even with no sign of reciprocal interest.
And that’s only the two harmless experiences I recall. Other times attempts involved more than kissing, less than sex, something in between, and very much more annoying. Once, from a former primary school mate of mine, I knew him since we were five. The asshole.
All the other, good, times that something was “initiated” in a good, pleasant way, and with pleasant results, I cannot genuinely recall who “initiated” what, it was so obviously reciprocal. Otherwise, how on earth can anything even begin to develop, if it’s not reciprocal?
Jenny – I do think that its possible that a lot of men currently have trouble “reading”? women in social situations, sexual or otherwise, but I also think that while some of it comes from lack of practice, quite often they don’t even bother, or want, to try.
Exactly, that’s what I mean. And those instances I recall fit perfectly in that definition. It is an excuse for a mentality where the man has to “get” and the woman to “give”. Those kind of guys may not even be that aware of thinking in those terms, they’re so used to it.
What I don’t understand is, how can there be anything sexy going on if one doesn’t even bother to pay attention to the person in front of them. For me, the whole ‘leading up to’ movement is the best part, the whole dance of attraction, the progression towards physical contact. There is a special pleasure in that exploration, in sussing out how much of a chemistry there actually is. If there’s no evident mutual chemistry, nevermind how little or long it takes to develop, how can the sex be anything than boring, mechanical, forgettable – and that’s assuming it *is* consensual…
Oh. I wasn’t aware of believing all that, but, well, sorry about that, then.
I don’t particulary care to know what you believe, Vladimir. I have a feeling the discussion is about a mentality that’s wider than your own precious person. I also have a feeling you’re just pissing about, throwing in comments and then refusing to argue them. But nevermind.
In case you forgot, this is what you said, Vladimir (to pick one exemplary phrase out of that whole paragraph I already quoted):
he will never be able to tell for sure whether she really wants him to make a move or not
Please note that “never”.
I did acknowledge very clearly that you were talking of “initiating kissing”.
But that phrase, that mentality it speaks of, that notion you described in that paragraph that I was responding to is precisely the same that is used, even in court!, to minimise or shift responsibility for rape, nevermind “kissing”.
I thought the point was clear enough first time, but just in case.
> In case you forgot, this is what you said,
> Vladimir (to pick one exemplary phrase out of
> that whole paragraph I already quoted):
> he will never be able to tell for sure whether
> she really wants him to make a move or not
That was Aegis, not me.
>I don’t particulary care to know what you
> believe
So I see.
>I also have a feeling you’re just pissing
> about, throwing in comments and then
> refusing to argue them.
Well yeah, frankly, I kind of am taking the piss here. But, the thing is, for example in this particular instance I don’t necessarily care that much about who’s right in this whole initiating-a-kiss (or whatever it was) discussion. It just seemed to me that your response to Aegis(?) argument – an argument, lets face it, about a fairly tiny problem – was just way, way over the top, and it made a pretty uncharitable interpretation what he was saying, too.
And that happens thruout these threads; ridiculous arguments about petty, inconsequential shit (“I popped a boner at the bellydancing show. Am I a stooge of the patriarchy?”), constantly people going “so what you really mean is…”, “are you saying that…”, “that’s the kind of attitude that..”, “oh, that’s just Typical…” and the absurd defensiveness (“this argument must not be construed as an attack on..”, “I don’t mean to say of course that this in any way excuses…”) and the ridiculous pedantry (“I will define Sexual Power to mean the property such that a) Blah bluh blah b) Buh snuh duh c)…”) and all the people who again and again get hopping mad and put forth claims and arguments they’ve clearly put forth a million times before, and in very nearly the same words, and who clearly are enjoying being hopping mad at the same things in the same way for the nth time to a completely *unhealthy* degree, and, and and…
All that stuff.. well, when I saw that anthill I just couldn’t resist the temptation to poke at it with a stick, and then unzip and… well, you know?
So, uh, I should probably be going, now.
Jeff says:
I concur. :)
I wasn’t trying to prove that women are more hurt by rejection than men, but rather trying refute his claim of the reverse. I was also trying to point out how, despite talking about some of the root causes and larger implications of gender stereotypes, he still can’t to see how these same ideas of “masculinity” and “grass-is-greenerism” can be found throughout his arguments that men suffer more, and, indeed, by continuing to find that to be the more worthwhile discussion to begin with.
It’s just my opinion, but it seems to me that if you want to talk about “female sexual power,” standards of “masculinity,” and how men are hurt by all this, it makes more sense to expand the discussion to include men’s overall lack of training in dealing with their feelings and how this affects all of their relationships, not concentrate just on the early stages of their romantic/sexual interactions. If Aegis wants to focus on this one aspect of the idea of “female sexual power” and its consequences for men, that’s his perogative, but I can’t help but wonder why.
Well, obviously not from personal experience, but still: gee, thanks for condescending to piss on us. It really goes a long way towards convincing us that we are the ones “who clearly are enjoying being hopping mad” and making “ridiculous arguments about petty, inconsequential shit.”
I bow to your wisdom, oh PissAnt Master.
How often does a troll admit being a troll?
Well, perhaps we can pack him a nice bag of ‘fuck you’ for his departure. Wouldn’t want him to not feel like he wasn’t fed enough during his stay.
I think it all boils down to human respect, you don’t rape someone else, no doesn’t mean yes and yes can change to no at any point during an encounter, why some people fail to see this i honestly am oblivius to but thats it in a nutshell and this thread is about expanding on the hows and whys and solution. I think up to a certain point gender issues have to be addressed to each gender accordingly but i think ultimatly after progress is being made it can start to have a negative effect phycologically. An example is race relations where the gap between black and white power has closed alot and will continue to close all you know of other people is the stereotypes and the political theme tags attached to them so an issue like *race* continues to be the filter through which you see, and judge people, oh thats *black* guy he is always distingished as such with his very own generic theme blah blah. The same thing with gender issues. Ultimatly people walk around with guilt for things they haven’t done or even thought of doing and then resentment builds up. The arrogant expectation that any individual has to be of a sexual nature in the first place to define who they are or that all they are is a some unit in some system designed by some other unit regarding sexuality. I can say with confidence the majority of us more or less didn’t enjoy most if not all of our schooling experiences which main focus is socialization and exagerated gender roles assigned to us. I found that issues like rape or harrassment didn’t exist in the social microcosims at the least the one i was in which was the drop-out crowd becuase we all knew each other as individuals and i think in a larger social structure the danger of rape becomes greater becuase individual human value is greaterly diminished not to say it doesn’t exist in more isolated settings or that other sexism issues weren’t there like a couple of the group i was in getting there gfs pregnant and being jerks about the responsibilty and forcing them into getting an abortion but average kids even with some special problems somehow had a natural and healthy experience with each other more or less. Take porn for instance which relies on stereotypes for its material, always the strong stud and always the passive female or if she isnt passive she at least is unrealistically sexually agressive and desires the guy and if she is lesbian well she at least wants some *stud* to watch if not join in. I see all the pitalls of porn and i see rape-culture as unfortunatly its driving theme but what is an alternative to it? For guys who are shy or unattractive or for whatever reason don’t want or can’t have a relationship which the opposite sex only alternative to be nonsexual completly? Homosexually is an easy answer and it suits many well becuase more easy partners are on equal grounds and have similair interest but thanks to hiv and the negative social stigma its very very flawed alternative. I think a more unisexual approach to sexuality is the most healthy and logical though some would argue less natural but it is our capacity to alter and improve our enviroment beyond its natural state that elevates us above the animal kingdom and enanles us to impower all individuals and make life better for all and some where there is where the solution so my last point is that social awareness and policy only have there uses up to a certain point.
*Crys T Writes:
May 23rd, 2005 at 10:45 am
If you don’t fucking know what to do … DON’T DO ANYTHING. How pathetically apparent is that?
Oh no, Q, didn’t you get the memo? Men rape coz they got “different sex drives”?, so they’re really just the poor, poor little old victims here, and us women are like, soooooooooooo mean and evil coz all we do is get mad at them for doing what just comes naturally.*
I can understand where your coming from with that response but thats not where i am coming from, to further clarify, men rape becuase they can and i admit i could be wrong but i do think sex drive is a factor as more sex drive equals ultimatly more chance of rape and i agree keep your dick in your pants if you lack the capacity to function as a empathetic, reasonble human being and no male decent or not has any *right* to a women, if 2 people of the opposite sex find middle ground so be it but nobody is owed sexual privalege from birth.
Yeah, I was making a point separate from Elkins’ argument. I am saying that the way that being actively rejected is worse than being passively rejected could be a cause of resentment and misogyny.
There are at least a couple reasons why I think that being actively rejected is worse than being passively rejected. I don’t doubt that both males and females feel anxiety around the person they are interested in when they don’t know if their interest is requited, the problem is that if you must actively make advances on a person, that anxiety gets much worse. Hence, even if woman who gets rejected passively suffers just as much as a man who gets rejected actively, the man has dealt with more net suffering because he had to go through extra anxiety and stress to get rejected than the woman did.
The second reason: yes, you suffer more over rejection when you put more time and effort into it. This is not necessarily because you feel more rejected, but rather because you feel more dissappointed. It’s normal to feel more dissappointed over not succeeding at something you put more work into. This is nothing to do with entitlement, but more to do with frustration about seeing a lot of your time and energy go down the drain. And it definitely takes more energy to pursue than to be pursued.
This is made worse by a lot of the current norms for how men should pursue. For instance, some men are taught that they should treat women they desire as goddesses, and give them various gifts. Or they might hear the common mantra that “women like to be treated well,” but go completely overboard. For instance, some males will do favors or homework for women they desire, or provide a listening ear and virtually be her therapist. Even if such men don’t think that those behaviors entitle them to sex/relationships with women, they may believe that those behaviors should make women desire them. In reality, such behaviors won’t make a woman desire a guy sexually: at best, giving favors/gifts/therapy might make her like him as afriend but not as a potential lover; at worst, such behavior might appear manipulative to the woman.
When a man gets rejected after pursuing a woman with these anachronistic scripts, it should be no surprise that he is frustrated and angry. He might react by blaming himself for not pleasing her enough, or he might wonder what was wrong with her for not appreciating him. This is one way nice guys turn to misogynists. The real problem is the system that told him to waste his time and resources basically trying to buy a woman’s love (or maybe just her sexuality). If less men were trained to pursue women in such a supplicative manner, then less men would feel entitled to female sexuality and less men would develop resentment towards women when they were rejected. This system also makes things difficult for females when males feel entitled to their affection, and they might feel extra guilty about rejecting males who have spent tons of unecessary effort pursuing them.
I used to do a lot of favors for women I was interested in, and help them with homework or provide a listening ear. When I would get rejected, it would be even worse because I felt totally used. And I was used… it just wasn’t the woman’s fault. But before I realized that, I would resent her for not appreciating me more. If I hadn’t been taught that such behavior was “romantic,” then I would have been able to save myself a lot of time, energy, and suffering. I don’t even know why such behavior is still encouraged. Some women probably like getting free lunches from men, and some men might like to give gifts because it makes them more confident (and it is easier than actually having an interesting personality). The problem is that in a lot of cases, the scripts for male gift-giving in “romance” amount to nothing less than forced misogyny (now there’s a polemical statement for you, Amp!). In other words, these scripts will make males feel so used after rejection (and the scripts might even cause that rejection) that they will develop resentment against women, or at least the specific woman involved.
It’s clear that a lot of the current social constructs lead to (or cause) misogyny. But it isn’t as clear how such misogyny directly causes rape. There are plenty of misogynists who don’t rape, and not all misogynistic beliefs will lead to rape, so I think the connection between misogyny and rape needs more explanation, instead of being assumed from the start.
In other words, these scripts will make males feel so used after rejection (and the scripts might even cause that rejection) that they will develop resentment against women, or at least the specific woman involved.
Unless they do so via mind-control satellites, the man is choosing to blame the woman rather than the sexist tradition. Instead of saying “Geez! It sucks that we have this sexist society that pressures me and my girl to follow this script!” he decides all women are bitches. That’s a choice, and an easy one, because it slips right into the pre-existing and very comfortable sexist programming: I, the man, am put upon by women wanting anything from me.
Oh, p.s.: as a women who has, in virtually every relationship, done the “asking out,” I assure you that active rejection (“No, I don’t want to go out with you”) is about a thousand times better than passive rejection (“I sat there all night and smiled every time he walked by and he never paid any attention to me”). The anxiety of passive rejection is worse because it’s, well, passive. A five-minute phone call is nowhere near as tension-producing as an hour of pacing and waiting for the phone to ring.
That is just complete bullshit. How the fuck do you know how much time women put into being pursued and how much time men put into doing the pursuing? To act as if it’s a given that men invest more time and effort, without more than anecdotal proof, in a culture with the type of beauty industry we have, is just myopic. What exactly do you think the stereotypical woman does during all that time she spends in the bathroom?
And yet also has nothing to do with the woman in question.
I don’t see how the connection between hating women and hurting women is anything less than obvious, although the exact ways in which its connected deserve to be explored.
And saying that, directly after saying this:
stinks to high heaven of denial.
On a lighter note: to unecessarily take this discussion off into an only remotely related tangent, for no other reason than because I have Star Wars on the brain, I want to say that, noodles, I really liked this:
Partly ’cause it just rocks, and partly because I have this uncontrollable urge to yell at all the people complaining that there was no chemistry between Amidala and Anakin:
“It’s not meant to be sexy, people! It’s not suppossed to be a healthy relationship, that’s the whole flipping point of the Ep I-III! If the chemistry between Amidala and Anakin was equal to that of Han and Leia none of what happens would make sense! Not that the exchanges couldn’t be more entertaining, but I won’t get into whose fault that is….”
/off topic rant
I’m usually afraid to approach women, but it’s not exactly rejection I’m afraid of; I’m afraid of being seen in the same category as the endless horde of men who harass and torment women. Every woman I’ve ever known has story after story about how badly men treat them — and usually, at least a few of those stories took place within the week of the telling, if not within the hour. I’d rather be celibate than be thought of as one of those men. And that still leaves me getting off easily compared to what women go through.
Frankly, in the context of discussing a rape culture, complaining about men’s pain from rejection is like complaining about paper cuts in the context of discussing people who’ve lost limbs to landmines. Grow up, already.
This sounds suspiciously like the “you women make us hate you!” defence, and that has no place in the context of a discussion about rape. In fact, it kinda chills me to read it.
Vladimir, so I confused you with Aegis, for some weird reason… sorry about that.
Well yeah, frankly, I kind of am taking the piss here.
Oh you don’t say? I guess we have to admire the honesty now?
But, the thing is, for example in this particular instance I don’t necessarily care that much about who’s right in this whole initiating-a-kiss (or whatever it was) discussion.
Well perhaps it’s not even matter of “being right” as in arguments about did or didn’t Saddam have WMD, it’s a matter of personal experiences and how they intersect with certain mentalities.
It just seemed to me that your response to Aegis(?) argument – an argument, lets face it, about a fairly tiny problem – was just way, way over the top, and it made a pretty uncharitable interpretation what he was saying, too.
See, the way I see it, it’s what Aegis wrote that was so over the top ridiculous, based on my experiences and experiences of male and female friends and partners alike.
I didn’t accuse Aegis of minimizing or supporting or finding excuses for rape, for pete’s sake. For the third time, I did acknowledge the topic was initiating kissing, ordinary ‘flirting’ context, ordinary situations in which a man feels attracted by a woman. I didn’t qualify that situation he described as harassment or rape, I said “mild level of miscommunication”. I also qualified the examples I brought, of men making a move out of the blue, as “harmless” annoyances. So what exactly is over the top there?
I just found Aegis’s statement about women’s ambiguity and men’s inability to engage in ordinary communication a pretty poor excuse for men making unwelcome advances. Also, the mentality it describes – women don’t really know what they want or don’t make it clear; men are so confused and unable to understand if a woman has any interest in them; but it’s men who are expected to make the move anyway or else they’ll risk being considered wimps…
On a non-heavy level, it’s the usual litany of, men are from mars women from venus, which is good only to market books that supposedly tell you all about how it “works”; or the other usual litany of, poor men, with all this feminism and gender role confusion, they don’t know anymore what they’re supposed to do, but we all know deep down a woman loves a man who takes the lead, and let’s take that to mean making a pass even if he has a feeling it’ll be annoying and unwelcome, so let’s just revert to stereotypes, it’s easier than being individuals. Let’s just keep talking of sex as a conquest, a competition, a points-scoring business, that has nothing to do with communication.
On a more serious and heavier level, that is far beyond “initiating kissing”, it really is the same typical mentality by which a woman who was flirting, drinking, or acting like she was interested will not be believed easily if she claims things went beyond what she was willing to engage in.
If you don’t like to hear the words “typical mentality”, or to see the stereotypical connections between even harmless annoying behaviour and mentalities and more disturbing behaviour and mentalities pointed out, it’s not my problem. Typical mentalities exist, whether we like them or not. Some were encapsulated perfectly in Aegis’s comment.
and all the people who again and again get hopping mad and put forth claims and arguments they’ve clearly put forth a million times before, and in very nearly the same words, and who clearly are enjoying being hopping mad at the same things in the same way for the nth time to a completely *unhealthy* degree, and, and and…
Yeah, yeah, women just like to whine and play victims… *yawn* That was so the point of the whole discussion, yeah yeah.
“Unhealthy” and “hopping mad”, just because of responding to patent neanderthal bollocks like ‘he must take a risk, which means ignoring the chance that she might not want him to initiate. He must ignore her feelings to some degree also. – now who’s being over the top, hmm?
I am saying that the way that being actively rejected is worse than being passively rejected could be a cause of resentment and misogyny.
Well, I second what mythago and Jenny and ms.b said.
Women do get attracted to other people too, be they men or women, they do make advances and tentative explorations of the possibility of sexual chemistry, they do invest time and emotions into that, and shock horror, they do “get rejected” too, or simply realise on their own, thanks to their amazing powers of mind reading, that there is no reciprocal chemistry. It can be a real bummer, believe me, especially when you’ve fallen like a fool for someone that made you go weak at the knees the very first moment you saw them. Do women become misandrists just because they know how to read clues and take no for an answer?
Jenny – glad you liked that comment but I’m afraid I must be the only person in the world who never watched any of Star Wars (I swear) so I’m completely at a loss about the reference :-)
Every woman I’ve ever known has story after story about how badly men treat them … and usually, at least a few of those stories took place within the week of the telling, if not within the hour. I’d rather be celibate than be thought of as one of those men. And that still leaves me getting off easily compared to what women go through.
Brian, you shouldn’t think in those extremes, beacuse there is no celibate-or-asshole alternative, it’s a trick, a stereotype, don’t let yourself be conditioned by that crap. There is a perfectly pleasant, nice, friendly and non-assholish way of making advances or just tentative enquiries, call them what you like, and even if they lead to nowhere or are not reciprocated, there’s a way of making them without being the slightest annoying, in fact, it can be so nice to be approached in a pleasant way even if you don’t reciprocate. I guess you know that too. Works the same for men and women. Anyone can tell the difference between an asshole and someone genuinely interested, except those who consider politeness as something only wimps do…
Frankly, in the context of discussing a rape culture, complaining about men’s pain from rejection is like complaining about paper cuts in the context of discussing people who’ve lost limbs to landmines.
Yeah, but it is interesting, that in any of these discussions, the topic the troubles of the confused man in ordinary dating always, always comes up…
I agree, but I do think it takes a while to pick up on that in our society – you don’t see nearly as many examples of that middle ground as you do of the other two extremes, which means that men tend to internalize either the “men must be ‘persistent’ to court women” message or the “men’s sexuality is wrong and unwanted” message.
This is lame, all the way through. I think only a man could be so hopelessly passive aggressive enough to suggest he only has a choice between inappropriate aggression and (horrors!) celibacy. How insulting and base — you are basically saying that if the man can’t get the fuck he wants on the terms he wants, the only alternative is not to fuck. Great.
Your last sentance also comes across as increadibly condescending. The women in this thread have already stated that this is the approach that should be taken when interested in a woman… there isn’t any “seems to me” involved. You either listen to us, or you don’t. But of course, you’ll whine about not understanding us when we have been perfectly clear.
Again I will say, in a slightly different way, if men want to make sex about performance and signals etc., then keep your damn willies in your pants.
William Rice writes:
This might make for an interesting side angle to come in from… the “sexual privilege” idea…
you don’t see nearly as many examples of that middle ground as you do of the other two extremes, which means that men tend to internalize either the “men must be ‘persistent’ to court women”? message or the “men’s sexuality is wrong and unwanted”? message.
Bah, smells like another excuse to me. What you call “middle ground” is the behaviour of most normal, civilised people all over the world. How else do men and women get together? No one would be having sex and relationships, casual or long-term, if it was all only either assholes or… I’m not even sure what is the “other extreme” here. If you mean celibate, then I don’t think it’s fair to even compare that to the assholes. Celibacy can be a choice and it’s not necessarily to do with a lack of supposed “skills” at “courting”, and come on, “courting”… as if women are only sitting there waiting for some man to come up to “court” them…
You know what’s funny, one day you hear (or read, it’s a popular refrain) the complaint that men are confused because women today are too aggressive, too demanding, too outspoken; then it’s the complaint that they’re not giving clear signals, not “guiding” the poor confused men, not responding unambiguously, not outspoken enough… Which is it? Notice how it’s always the women’s fault? Both are just excuses used by those who *want* to return to clear-cut stereotypes that are no longer even feasible or as largely represented in actual behaviour as used to be. Each generation makes a few steps forward in being more spontaneous about sexuality but there’s always a few steps back to deal with because there’s always people who want things to fit into the usual old patterns. It’s like that for anything, from sex to politics…
Brian’s useful paper cut to landmine analogy reminded me of a question asked to men and women about what they most feared from the opposite sex. Men said they most feared women would laugh at them and women said they most feared men would kill them.
I’ll buy that you don’t see very many examples of healthy male behaviour, and that this can make it more difficult to act in a “normal” way. On the other hand, something being hard is never a good excuse to not even try.
noodles – oh, well, let me enlighten you. :)
The chemistry between Han and Leia in the original trilogy is great, to the point that their exchanges are often some of people’s favorite lines, even among guys. Their relationship is a very healthy one: neither takes the other’s shit and, by the end, both are willing to show their vulnerability as well as their love.
Anakin and Padme/Amidala have pretty much no chemistry, but their relationship isn’t so healthy. Anakin doesn’t just shut Padme out (all the while obsessing about her) but Padme barely protests when he does so. So, I buy that their getting together could have been more slightly convincing and the tension could have been more entertaining, but how are you suppossed to have chemistry when they never talk?
In the end, the original trilogy is a positive lesson in how to act, but Ep I-III are examples of how you shouldn’t. It just amazes me that people fail to see this when they complain about things like Padme becoming increasing less kickass. If the whole story shows how you aren’t supposed to be, what message would it send if Padme was as strong as Leia?
When did I imply the internalizing of these messages about men’s sexuality was women’s fault, or that I wanted to revert to traditional stereotypes?
I feel like I’m being shoehorned into positions I don’t hold here.
Jeff, the first paragraph of my last comment was in response to the part of your comment I quoted.
The second paragraph, the one that started with “You know what’s funny, one day you hear (or read, it’s a popular refrain)…” was talking, as you might have guessed, about popular refrains, and how they related, in my view, to that recurring reactionary tendency for anything in which there is some progress, in this case, interaction between the sexes. I wasn’t particularly attributing to *you personally* that pull to revert to stereotypes. I wasn’t launching any personal j’accuse, I was only making an observation on some of the classic “confused men” refrains we happen to read in papers and magazines and so on.
Like, you know, people sometimes expand on their own views when they reply to someone else’s comment.
Jenny, thanks for the enlightenemnt, now I think I get your point :)
Sometimes I do feel a bit left out and like I *should* get the DVD’s once and for all and catch up on what the world has been watching the past twenty years ;)
(To think my mom even bought me the toys, mini replicas of the two robots, I loved playing with those, but it took me ages to find out they were from Star Wars…!)
Jenny, I just saw ROTS last night. I think you’re basically right, though it’s hard at first to distinguish the “Anakin and Padme have a sick relationship and don’t genuinely relate to each other” from “the acting in this movie is awful.” It’s like there was a rule that, at most, only one actor was allowed to act well per scene. In general, I thought the movie was almost brilliant, but kept missing the mark, through excessively fast pacing and bad acting.
On the asshole/celibacy thing: I was presenting that as sort of a false dichotomy. Sort of, given that the only models I’ve seen for male behavior in this context are poor models, so that the alternative is for women to initiate things. This gets tricky for me, since I’m getting close to where I know I’m neurotic and irrational, and it’s rare I ever see relationships at the very beginning. I see flirting going in both directions once things have been initiated, but I’ve never seen a man try to initiate that sort of thing and have it welcomed. At best, I’ve seen the relatively polite and mild advances by men politely and mildly rejected by women.
As I said, I’m getting close to my own neuroses, so I suspect my perception of things may be distorted. (Oddly, though it must be a common problem, I rarely read any discussion of how to deal with perceptions when you know you’re neurotic and your perceptions are distorted.)
Who says it’s universally accepted? People don’t always know how to behave, even when sex is out of the picture. As Jeff said: “There are quite a few people (not just men) who don’t know how to behave in every other context. It’s just that in the context of sex, the “stakes”? tend to be a lot higher.”
Well, of course. If people can’t tell if a person they just met is interested in their conversation or not, then they obviously have some kind of social difficulty.
I think sexual attraction does make signals more difficult to read, because it adds another dimension to the interaction. Women may have difficulty reading signals too, but it doesn’t matter so much because they aren’t the ones who need to initiate. Also, there is reason to believe that females are better at reading nonverbal communication on average than males are. Perhaps this discrepancy exists for purely social reasons, but it does exist.
Bullshit, noodles. How could you know this? You are female, right? It’s funny that for all the flak someone and I got in the previous thread for supposedly “telling women what women think,” certain posters seem to have no qualms about telling men what men think. I think certain inferences into the thoughts of the opposite sex can be justified, but this isn’t one of them.
It isn’t always possible for people of either sex to know if someone is attracted to them or not. Men have even more trouble registering attraction for several reasons. First, they may have more difficulty reading nonverbal communication. Second, if young women are often sexually repressed (which some feminists here claimed as an explanation of why females may appear to have a lower sex drive in our culture), then those females are less likely to broadcast sexual interest. In fact, the ambiguity or lack of signals from women could be one of the main reasons for the perception that women have a lower sex drive than men. Third, different women are likely to have slightly different signals of attraction, and some women will be harder to read than others. Perhaps a man could read the signals of some women, but it is unlikely that he will always be able to tell when a woman is reciprocating attraction or not. Fourth, the range of ability in reading nonverbal signals varies from male to male. Some males will be able to read female attraction easily, and some men won’t. Fifth, males are not given any teaching/socialization in reading female nonverbal communication to make up for these difficulties.
Again, bullshit. I don’t think people of either sex are always able to tell the difference between friendliness and sexual attraction. Males will have extra trouble because of the reasons I outlined. Also, some females will be flirtatious with males they aren’t attracted to. They may not be trying to “manipulate” him or lead him on, but that might simply be how they communicate and express affection. In such cases, it will be much more difficult for the male to tell the difference between friendliness and sexual attraction. Your claim is simply a counterfactual.
Oh, I totally agree with you here. Two way communication communication is the best. But in our less-than-perfect world, it doesn’t always happen. If one person is sexually repressed, then it doesn’t work. If one person chooses to remain passive, then it doesn’t work. If one person has trouble reading signals, then it doesn’t work. If one person gives ambiguous signals, then it doesn’t work.
One of the reasons that two way communication doesn’t always happen is because of the weird assumptions that all men can read female signals, and all females give clear signals. Your claim that males can always tell whether women are attracted to them, or else they have “something wrong with them” is one of those assumptions. You assume that males can naturally read female body language. If males weren’t expected to basically read minds, and instead: (a) males were taught to read female nonverbal signals better, and (b) females gave more obvious signals, then two way communication would work a lot better. It’s definitely a two-way street.
(Whether a man asking for a kiss is “insulting” or not isn’t the issue. The question is whether females may find such behavior “wimpy” or otherwise undesirable.)
It doesn’t matter whether the idea is woman-generated or not; actually, I doubt it was either “woman-generated” or “man-generated,” but rather generated by past evolutionary conditions (oops, I used the “E-word”). What matters is that a substantial amount of women seem to hold it. Not all women are feminists (and there is no reason to believe that all feminists like a guy to ask for a kiss). Maybe they have been suckered by fairy tales into holding the expectation that the man initiate a kiss without asking, but that doesn’t change the fact that they do hold that expectation, and that males have to deal with that expectation. This is one example of the ways that females, or subsets of females uphold “patriarchal” norms.
Most of the women I have talked to on this issue have said that they can stand it when a guy asks for a kiss. Some said it was wimpy. One didn’t think it was wimpy, but that it might be inept. She said that maybe a man could pull off asking for a kiss in a way that wouldn’t be a turnoff (considering that asking for a kiss in a steady voice is difficult due to nervousness), and that most men wouldn’t be able to manage this. One of my female friends said that she much prefers it when a guy asks. It seems to me that there is hardly a consensus among females on this issue. Yet guys are still supposed to figure out whether a female wants to be asked before a kiss or not, and no matter what he chooses, he risks a chance of rejection.
No. Why do you insist on always jumping to conclusions? First, I wasn’t advising any course of action. Second, I am not certain that it is molestation if a man tries to kiss a woman without asking. Creepy? Maybe. But not molestation (unless he forcibly kisses her). She always has the choice to say “no” or turn her head away. By trying to kiss a woman in such conditions, a man is not forcing or coercing her to do anything (unless you believe that women are frail porcelain statues with no free will), hence it is isn’t molestation. Also, I am not convinced that it is molestation if someone kisses another person without asking, as long as they stop if the other person doesn’t respond. If I refused a gay male who tried to kiss me without asking, I might feel uncomfortable, but I would not feel molested. Likewise, if a gay male kissed me, but immediately stopped when I didn’t reciprocate or when I resisted, then I would not feel molested. (If a male felt molested in either of those contexts, I would suspect that he was homophobic.)
If everyone lived their lives by that philosophy, it would be rare for anyone to do anything.
Wait, because some women don’t have to be smooth or confident with you, males don’t have to be smooth and confident in general with women other than you? The standards of sexual desire that women have for other women are probably slightly different from what women have for men. And of course men have to be confident. First, you need confidence to initiate anything; men must initiate, therefore men need to be confident. Second, many women claim that “confidence” is an important quality in men, sometimes more than looks. By smoothness, I mean (a) relaxation, and (b) good interpersonal skills. Both of those qualities are going to make people more attractive, even in non-sexual contexts. In my experience, most of the males I have seen with girlfriends are confident, relaxed, and have good interpersonal skills. In my own life, women started being a lot more interested in me after I developed more confidence and interpersonal finesse. It is well documented that females place a larger emphasis on personality and less on looks than males do, and the qualities I mentioned seem to be some of the character traits that make males attractive.
That’s like asking “why are women so hung up on attention = conformity to conventional beauty standards?” The answer to your question: Because we usually only get sex when we perform in some way. Think about this for a little while.
The answer would be no, asking for a kiss/to kiss (in the right context of course) is respectful, romantic, endearing and at times heartstoppingly romantic. Some of my most memorable kisses are those that were asked for.
I never said it was more hurtful to men, only that it was hurtful. You have been one of the more astute people in this discussion, but please read my posts a little bit more carefully! Thanks. Btw, you made some good points on the issue of initiating that I will get to soon.
Yes, except that I’m not sure what Amanda is suggesting is really a viable solution. It’s my suspicion that the majority of women prefer not to be asked for a kiss, simply because they don’t seem to be exceptionally enlightened on the subject of gender roles. But I have no way of backing that up, so I don’t expect anyone to agree with me.
Maybe he felt that trying to kiss you was expected of him, and that you would see him as a wimp or reject him otherwise?
Well, Aegis, it sounds to me like your troubles are largely from dating sexist women who expect a knight-in-shining-armor act from you. Spare yourself some of the stress there! Why not date women who are more “enlightened on the subject of gender roles.” I’m not saying she has to have read Wolstonecraft, Mill, and Brownmiller before you can have a reasonable relationship with her, but if she expects you to be a Hollywood hero that you don’t know how to be, then it’s not making either of you happy, is it?
THANK YOU, Brian!
Also, there is reason to believe that females are better at reading nonverbal communication on average than males are. Perhaps this discrepancy exists for purely social reasons, but it does exist.
Either “there is reason to believe” or “it does exist”, Aegis.
That capacity for communication varies a lot on an *individual* basis, otherwise all men would be behaving one way and all women another. There’s many women who are pretty bad or clueless at communicating too, whether it’s about sexual attraction or any other social interaction. But because it’s impossible to tell which part of a behaviour of social interaction is ‘innate’ or ‘learned’, how much and in what proportion the individual is behaving according to their own personality and wishes or the expectations of the society they live in, because of all behaviour is naturally a mix of all those factors, then it’s impossible to ignore that cultural expectations to behave differently according to gender, as opposed to individual behaviour, come into play.
So all notions of ‘women are more skilled at social interaction’ still leave the question open – isn’t much of social interaction something we learn? So why are some men supposedly learning that it’s ok for them to ignore the responses of the other person?
How could you know this? You are female, right?
Yes, which also means I have had both friendly and sexual interaction with males for years, how weird, and because I was there and know what happened and what didn’t, and you don’t, I can tell you that in my own experience, the vast majority of those males were perfectly capable of telling the difference between a friendly gesture and an expression of mutual sexual attraction. Oh lucky me. I must have some radar that attracted only those endowed with exceptional ‘mind-reading’ powers.
Second, I am not certain that it is molestation if a man tries to kiss a woman without asking. Creepy? Maybe. But not molestation (unless he forcibly kisses her).
Well dude, since we were talking unwelcome and not asked for, of course it is molestation. No, not as serious as other heavier kinds of molestation, and pretty harmless, and it does depend a lot on the specific circumstances, context, etc. but by definition any sexual advance coming out of the blue, not asked for, not welcome, nothing leading up to it, is a form of molestation. Try imagining your slimey boss that you loathe creeping up on you and planting his tongue in your mouth. See how you’d like that.
And you don’t get to define how a particular woman views an unwelcome sexual advance, any more than you get to define what that woman sees as a welcome and pleasant sexual interaction.
It seems to me that there is hardly a consensus among females on this issue.
Good grief, maybe because women just like men are not some herd of sheep but individuals with their own individual preferences and behaviour. And that’s precisely why any man who’s not an asshole will pay attention to the woman right in front of him, not some imaginary notion of what the imaginary Woman expects from the imaginary Man, as the latest bestseller says.
Maybe he felt that trying to kiss you was expected of him, and that you would see him as a wimp or reject him otherwise?
And where am I, the real me, in that picture? How does that make it any less annoying, to think that he only thought of what was expected of him according to what *he* believed was some kind of universal rule about how Men should behave and what Women really like, rather than think about how I had actually behaved towards him? I was there physically, not some stereotype of woman. ‘Wimp’ is not even a word in my vocabulary. I don’t think in terms of ‘macho’ vs. ‘wimp’. I think in terms of, I like, I don’t like.
I don’t care what he thought, when he did something that affected *me*, physically and emotionally, I care about how it affected me. Understand that?
See, you may think you’re finding excuses, but they only make that harmless but annoying situation look even more pathetic than it was. And I did purposefully described only the harmless examples, because I have no intention of talking about far creepier and more obvious instances of molestation, luckily rare but still very vivid in my memory, only to hear ‘oh but he might have thought this and that’. Those guys weren’t ‘clueless’ or ‘confused’ and I was not ‘ambiguous’, when I like someone I made it very blindingly clear myself, and only if I know there is some possibility of reciprocation, otherwise I don’t bother. I expect the same basic civility from any other person, man or woman.
Aegis, how do you reconcile the following statements?
And regarding those women who do think you are “wimpy” when you ask for a kiss because they are unenlightened about gender roles: If you are, but they aren’t, it wasn’t going to work anyway, so rejection may sting, but its better to find out sooner rather than later.
Jeff, I wasn’t speaking of you in particular, just that people have a general tendency to do that, and it’s always useful to remind people (including myself) that “knowing is half the battle” not all of it.
Brain, yeah, there is so much about Ep I-III that sucks (although RotS made me at least glad I had seen it, even while wishing is was better made) which is why noodles, if you ever do watch them, you must watch the original trilogy first. And that’s the end of my pop culture references – I swear!
Exactly. But that isn’t consistent with your earlier position: “Why is it universally accepted that every person knows how to behave with other people in every other context but sex?”
Because there is a wide variance in interpersonal skills in both sexes, a certain subset of males is below the cutoff point for being able to reliably read the signals from most females. The only question is how big this subset is; maybe it’s 90%, or maybe it’s 10%. Either way, I think the amount of males that have trouble reading female signals is big enough to be a problem. So I still take issue with your statement: “That a man should genuinely be incapable of understanding if a woman is as attracted to him as she is to her is, in my experience, a complete myth.”
I agree (note my statement: “perhaps this discrepancy exists purely for social reasons”). The point is, no matter why a male is having trouble reading nonverbal communication, he still has to deal with that difficulty, and he can’t immediately make it go away.
Perhaps males sometimes think it is ok to ignore a woman’s signals, or do so out of chauvinism, but I think it’s more common that they are simply oblivious and don’t even know there is something they are missing.
I’m still wondering how you know your male friends could always tell the difference. Did they tell you that, or are you simply inferring it because they never complained that they have trouble recognizing the difference? Or do you think so because they didn’t seem to have any difficulty interpreting your gestures?
On the subject of women’s preferences varying about being asked for a kiss:
Of course. What I am getting at is that since women’s preferences in this area vary, then if a male is to ask for a kiss, then he is going to get rejected a certain amount of the time. Hence, Amanda’s claim that asking the woman with “the right mix of respect and love-struckness wows the ladies every time” don’t make sense; asking will not wow the ladies every time. Some men may feel (either correctly or incorrectly), that asking for a kiss carries such a high risk of rejection that it might be more pragmatic for a man not to ask if he wants to kiss a woman any time soon. I am not necessarily advocating that attitude (although I haven’t ruled it out); I am simply describing it. The alternate solution would not be for him to randomly jump her, but rather for him to closely watch her body language for invitations to kiss, and for him to obviously signal when he is going to do it (i.e. two-way communication!).
You are definitely justified in being annoyed.
As a side issue I don’t think that following universal rules in one’s interaction with the opposite sex necessarily means that you are ignoring them as a person (although sometimes it can). There are sometimes perfectly legitimate reasons in following various social norms and simply assuming that the other person shares them (for instance, showing up for a first date wearing clothes instead of naked may be following a universal rule, but there is good reason to assume that the other person follows that rule even if they haven’t done anything to prove it). The problem occurs when people think some rule is universal when it really isn’t.
Perhaps males sometimes think it is ok to ignore a woman’s signals, or do so out of chauvinism, but I think it’s more common that they are simply oblivious and don’t even know there is something they are missing.
Ok Aegis, then let’s posit all those men you’re talking about are that clueless and inept at interacting with women. (Again, I must have been lucky, except for a few obvious assholes, I only met the ones exceptionally endowed on the cognitive front!)
How is Q Grrl’s reply – if you aren’t sure, just don’t do anything – not enough of an answer to that “clueless” scenario?
We’re talking sexual advances and the difference with molestation, Aegis, in case you forogt. Actually, the original topic was rape. But nevermind. It always drifts off into the troubles of the young man during courtship, doesn’t it?
Your reply to what Q Grrl said about that simple rule was to read it as a prescription for all behaviour in life. Sure, if we were always to avoid any sort of choice or action only because we’re not sure how it turns out, we’d do nothiing. When it comes to our own decisions. But when it comes to doing something to another person, and when the uncertainity is not knowing how it will be received by them, not by you, then it’s a basic rule of civility that you don’t trespass what is polite behaviour and you don’t assume that the other person is just waiting for you to plant your tongue in their mouth or your hands on their butt out of the blue, when they have shown no inclination whatsoever to that effect, and most of all, you don’t assume that some notion of male and female behaviour expects you to behave in that way, regardless of the person in front of you. You also don’t assume that it’s you who are expected to “act” as the male and the woman expected to “react” as the passive female. You just talk to the actual person in front of your bloody nose.
The men who are genuinely more ‘clueless’ or ‘inept’ at sexual interaction than others are the kind that are genuinely shy, clumsy, reserved and more polite than anybody else, Aegis.
The men who plant a tongue in your mouth or a hand on your butt or boobs out the blue – just to pick the more harmless examples, again – without even knowing you are the ones who are assholes and think they’re entitled to get attention and sex from anyone they want, regardless of the actual person in front of them.
This is not some revolutionary feminist concept, for god’s sake, it’s basic notions of civil vs. uncivil human behaviour.
If I have a sudden impulse to clean the windows of my neighbour, I don’t just go up there with a bucket and clean them. Even if I assume it’ll please him. I have to ask before, or at least get a clear indication that he wants me to clean his windows. Otherwise, even if I’m doing him a favour – which is cleary different from unwanted sexual contact (and I’m making a comparison here!) – he might be very annoyed all the same. Why? Because I’m invading his space before he’s done anything to allow me in.
Just like, again, if I’m on the train, I don’t assume the person sitting next to me wants to hear me talk for two hours, if we haven’t even started any conversation – con-versation, mutual. Inter-action, mutual. You don’t ‘initiate’ an interaction by yourself, it takes two.
I’m still wondering how you know your male friends could always tell the difference. Did they tell you that, or are you simply inferring it because they never complained that they have trouble recognizing the difference? Or do you think so because they didn’t seem to have any difficulty interpreting your gestures?
Ok perhaps I didn’t explain that clearly – I was talking of the situations in which sexual contact was welcome because there was already, indeed, a mutual interaction. What I’m saying is, I do know what they were thinking and I do know they could tell I was interested, because I made that clear and because it was mutual – that’s why I said, in the pleasant interaction experiences, I cannot even tell who “initiated” what, because it was reciprocal.
Of course I am not reading anyone’s minds, but I do know what happened to me while I was there, how I behaved, and how the other person behaved towards me. In short, how we both behaved to each other, and how we ended up together. That I can very well tell, since I was there.
No, they did not have any difficulty in ‘interpreting’ my ‘gestures’ (I am not a hyeroglyph, I am a person, you know), anymore than I had in ‘interpreting’ their ‘gestures’.
In some cases, what started as only friendship developed into something else, and it was not an overnight process. It was mutual attraction developing in time. Other times, it was more sudden, and I’ve also often found myself dropping more overt hints, or even “pursuing” a guy, but I’ve never needed to be obnoxious about it.
In those, fortunately rarer, situations where the sexual contact was ‘initiated’ out of the blue by guys and most unwelcome, both the less annoying and the more annoying cases, I know they were assholes because I know how they behaved. Again, I was there.
In other cases, where there was an interest on the other part that wasn’t reciprocated by me, where I was only being friendly but they were interested in something more, I know that too, because it was obvious – even said overtly. I appreciated that a lot, and believe me, I’ve found myself in that situation too. Of course it is disappointing when someone doesn’t reciprocate your attraction. Both parties need to be sensitive and polite about it. There’s no need to be obnoxious about “rejection” either, you know. It can happen to anyone, both females and males, because the notion that males initiate and women react is complete bullshit.
If some men are so egocentric they just can’t take even the most polite “rejection”, it’s their problem, Aegis, it has nothing to do with insecurity, because a genuinely insecure person won’t even go and behave like an asshole in the first place. Those who do, do it only out of an inflated sense of ego and a sexist notion of women as being expected to fall to their knees and worship the man just because they’ve been given that male attention, even if it is most unwelcome. That’s not an inability, that’s voluntary ignorance of the difference between reciprocal or not, consensual or not; it’s voluntary disrespect of the actual person they are acting towards. It may well be so automatic they don’t even realise it, doesn’t make it any less escusable. When it’s just a kiss, or even a hand on your butt, really, it’s nothing. Compared to what happens when it doesn’t stop there.
Hence, Amanda’s claim that asking the woman with “the right mix of respect and love-struckness wows the ladies every time”? don’t make sense; asking will not wow the ladies every time.
No, because of course if you mean being ‘wowed’ as in sexually attracted, it obviously depends on the woman in the first place if she’s interested or not on a sexual level in that particular person – but that right mix Amanda spoke of will definitely be nice and welcome and polite, and yes, even charming, wether the woman does reciprocate the actual sexual attraction or not. So yes, in the sense of being actual civil behaviour, it will wow anyone.
Sexual attraction is no excuse to turn into hooligans, you know. Politeness is still nice, and even shyness is nice, and it doesn’t matter wether it gets you laid or not, you still behave civilly anyway, if you’re not an asshole, no matter what ‘result’ you get. Civility is not an option and sex is not a competition for scoring points and results.
Of course, if all the guy in question wants is get laid no matter what, then I guess civility is an option for him, but not to the other person, you know. If somebody wants sex without even respecting the other person, then there’s always masturbation. Treating women as inanimate sex toys is not a susbtitute for that.