An anonymous writer from GQ made a list of the top 10 reasons Republicans were better in bed (David Farrar got quite excited). Ann from Feministing replied with a list of top 10 reasons liberals were better in bed. Here’s #5:
5. Foreplay. Liberal men are so intellectually sexy that everything is foreplay. Republicans might get started in the cab after dinner, but the liberal man’s in-depth knowledge of (and vehement opposition to) various state-level abortion restrictions has got me all hot and bothered before we’ve ordered our entrees.
While this made me chuckle (and in a personal sense it’s not inaccuarte). I also found some of the comments at Pandagon very amusing.
But I kept on coming back to ‘but….’, I can’t accept this argument even as a joke.
I’ve known left-wing men who couldn’t grasp the radical notion that women were people. I’ve known left-wing men who treated women as objects for their conquest. I’ve known women who were raped by left-wing men. I’ve known women who were beaten by their left-wing boyfriends.
I wish that wasn’t true. I wish that you could know that once a guy knew how to talk like he thought a woman’s body was her own, you could trust him. I wish I could . But unfortunately it’s not true, and I think it’s foolish and dangerous to pretend that it is.
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It’s so true. So called radical men , in my personal experiences, have a long way to go when it comes to dealing with their male privilage.
Thanks amp–this little trope pisses me off for the same reason you cite, and while you come off as humorless, thats the way it goes, I guess. It sounds so banal in the general–“lefty men can be sexist too!” but it can be pretty crushing in the particular.
The confounding factor, of course, is men who pretend to be liberals in order to get laid.
You also have to consider sexual style preference. Some consider sex with someone “adversarial” better.
I don’t see how a scientific study could adjust for all of that.
Thanks for posting this. The problems of sexism and sexual assaults within liberal/leftie/socialist/anarchist communities so often go unaddressed because when women do bring it up we either get slammed for being divisive or told that we’re liers because progressive men don’t do things like that.
The Peak, a student paper at the University of Guelph in Ontario (Canada) put out an issue on sexual assault in activist communities. More info here
There’s also been some great stuff on the phenomenon of manarchism
I don’t know if anyone has enough experience to make a considered judgment regarding party affiliation, political belief and lovemaking. And someone who is a Democrat today may have been raised in a Republican household twenty or thirty years ago. How one views sex starts as an infant. Wilhelm Reich saw sexual repression as a key to totalitarian governments (see THE MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF FASCISM). The repression each individual absorbs as a child forms the model for a repressive society. Republicans as a party have embraced fundamentalist religious beliefs that are, on the whole, anti-sex. Being anti-abortion, anti-sex education, anti-birth control, anti-stem cell research, anti-sexual pleasure. For that they are like the Nazis in suppressing sexuality as a natural desire and then channeling that frustration into aggression in other arenas.
I am old enough to remember the civil rights movement of the 60s. When the women’s movement came along, I saw plenty of men around me (nor was I free of such thoughts) saying, well, equality for blacks is one thing, but… Straight men of good will had to go through it all over again when confronting their feelings towards homosexuality.
My point is that the deeply ingrained ideas around sexuality are just that. I believe that most people’s deepest views regarding sex and the objects of their desire are rooted in infantile and adolescent relations with their parents and the household that they were raised in. While their political self-identification may in some part also flow from identification with parents or the need to separate themselves from their parents, views on sexual conduct and politics are not necessarily wed. Neither is a reliable indicator of the other.
There are plenty of cads of all political persuasions. The presumption here is that a man who is raised in a liberal society that understands the rights of women to control their sexuality, fecundity etc., would be more likely to be a more considerate sexual partner than someone raised in a society which rejects those rights. If not, then man the sexual beast is all nature and no nurture.
As for individual lovers and their skill sets for socializing and lovemaking, beds aren’t usually big enough to prove or disprove generalizations about groups of millions. It’s all a lot of hot air, and not from panting.
It is a sad fact that though I’ve personally known many dasterdly men, the summit of nastiness is occupied by one of the founders of my local Green Party chapter. I was close friends with his wife and saw the bruises on her neck, heard her cry because he made her have sex in motels with people he’d meet online, and witnessed him justify his violence with “it’s natural cause animals use violence.”
I’ve never personally known a more loathsome person, and he thinks buying a Prius, eating organic, and donating money to charity makes him a hero.
A Muslim feminist once said about why more Muslim women don’t rise up and embrace Western liberalism, “You use your daughter’s bodies to sell cars.” It’s not only Muslim women who have to choose between one man who sexually uses and mistreats her but keeps her like a pet, and an endless number of men who sexually use and mistreat her and keep her like a slave.
Don’t you hate when it’s early and you press “post” and then you realize you spelled dastardly wrong?
On the subject of leftist men or men in leftist movements being as guilty of rape, this case caught my attention:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060307/wl_nm/safrica_zuma_dc
It’s the rape trial of a former S African Deputy President, a high
official in the African National Congress.
*nods* I dated a guy who happens to go on very eloquently in his blog about what’s wrong with the two-faced liars of the Bush administration, etc.
A whole new perspective to his writing appeared when our period of dating ended due to my finding out about his tendency to ask out young women who’d just broken up, constantly suggest threesomes and make bootycalls, etc., etc.
One of my greatest pet peeves with men is the “nice guy” act, where the guy engages you as a “friend” but is really just biding his time, trying to wear you down to get into your pants. Men go on and on about how manipulative and subversive women are, but by no means does the female gender hold the monopoly on that kind of behavior!
And then there’s the related issue of lefty male bloggers really, really not liking it when you call them out on use of “pussy” as an insult. They will turn on you faster than a fast-turning thing.
That’s a really good point. If I were a woman, I’d have a hard time choosing between living in a society where men were allowed to beat me and control every aspect of my life, and one in which men were allowed to offer me money to appear in commercials wearing only a bathing suit.
The cognitive dissonance required of Lefty groups to turn a Lefty male’s abuse into “not our problem” is greater than that required of Right-Wing men. In Right-Wing thought, individualism is supreme. Thus of course a woman with an abusive partner is not anyone’s problem but the woman’s herself. In Lefty circles, where the quest for common good or collective action is supposed to be supreme, the denial necessary for an individual man to get away with this shit seems much more bizarre. Instead of understanding that one abusive person in a party or cell reflects badly on the whole group, everyone decides that the woman should just be quiet so that things look good and that nobody needs to be embarassed into taking collective action against the abuser.
Neil Goldschmidt, anyone ? Old Neil is ex-Governor of Oregon and was a major Progressive icon in the region. For years, his family, friends, colleauges and (by some accounts) even folks in the major media knew that he’d been fucking his family’s teenage babysitter. It was years before anyone finally went public with the story, though. >:
Samantha said:
“Don’t you hate when it’s early and you press “post” and then you realize you spelled dastardly wrong?”
Don’t worry about it Samantha, you were probably just thinking of “basterd” when you typed it.
Um.
waiddaminnit.
alsis39.75 said:
“In Lefty circles, where the quest for common good or collective action is supposed to be supreme, the denial necessary for an individual man to get away with this shit seems much more bizarre.”
This is the kind of thing that would make me scratch my thinker too; or rather, does; but what tends to happen, for me, is that the problem gets switched around, and then it seems to be more tractable. In other words, the problem isn’t “How do they justify this behavior toward women”, it’s really “how do they justify their beliefs that women should be [your favorite term for empowerment/emancipation here]”.
That to me makes much more sense. I don’t think any man who abuses a woman particularly “justifies” it, unless he’s caught and has to explain. Political beliefs come much more into the realm of logic and malice of forethought area, if y’will. Do they really believe in what they say they do? That would be too easy though. I think men like that are probably just suffering from the same malady that most of us do, on some level, which is that we believe in our beliefs, until they become inconvenient for our own person. Then, whaddya know..
I realize that sounds a bit sweeping, as they like to say in the movies.
Are you being facetious or serious with that comment, Brandon?
Haven’t you heard, Samantha ? Countries where women’s bodies are used to sell cars don’t have any controlling, abusive, sexist males in ’em. Neat, huh ?
Countries where women’s bodies are used to sell cars don’t have any controlling, abusive, sexist males in ’em. Neat, huh ?
No they don’t. Those are the countries where men encourage, nay demand, that women enjoy the freedom to display their bodies and the economic & sexual liberation that goes with that freedom. As long as those women aren’t their daughters.
alsis39.75 said:
“Haven’t you heard, Samantha ? Countries where women’s bodies are used to sell cars don’t have any controlling, abusive, sexist males in ’em. Neat, huh ?”
But, at least to me, Brandon’s comment does make a valid point, if we focus on the “you use your daughters” snippet of the muslim woman’s statement. If “we use” our daughters’ bodies that way, that makes it sound like they’re slaves. And maybe there are arguments for that being an accurate perception. But there are certainly arguments that they are not. And Brandon is right, I think, to imply that there might be something of a double-standard in this judgment. Don’t middle eastern societies also “use” women’s bodies, at least to the same degree as our western “use” of them for advertising, perhaps more? Are the permitted uses of women’s bodies in both types of society really equal? Or did this particular muslim woman have something stuck in her craw about sex? (Probably not, I guess, since you say she’s a feminist, but you don’t mention who she is, and I certainly haven’t read anything she’s written or said as I’m really not up to snuff on my muslim feminism literature.)
I guess I’m wondering at the moment how compelling it is to mention that sex is used in advertising, with regard to the fact that many “liberal” or “feminist” men do their women real wrong. I mean, I can see where it’s going, but is it compelling? Isn’t using sex in advertising one of the marks of a liberal society? At least to some degree (which I would think “using women’s bodies” to sell cars is well within).
Yeah, I’m with you on this one. I mean, I thought it was a cute joke, but essentially the assumptions that it relies on are wrong, as discussed above this post in different ways. Plus, call me a very pushy queer if you’d like, but I do get a little tired of the “which men are better at fucking women?” thing on the grounds that well, I just don’t really give a shit, and we never ask which women are better at fucking women, now do we?
But yeah, that’s a little anal of me, I think.
I also think that the tendency to talk about not-being-a-sexist-pig in terms of getting laid is a little bit… weird. Like, hey guys, in case you can’t think of any other reason not to be a sexist pig…
I dunno. There are a lot of reasons, likely all of them sort of anal, that that rubbed me the wrong way.
sparkane wrote:
Just tune into any chapter of the epic arguments about the worldwide trade in the bodies of women and girls, and you will indeed find activists that consider it slavery. A common story is that of a girl sold as a prostitute because her impoverished family needed money, or a girl pushed into prostitution because of a parent or guardian’s drug habit, or a young woman promised a trade like housekeeping in a foreign country– only to be prostituted when she arrived there.
To the degree that the double standard exists, it comes from men who strive to “protect” the women in their own family or nation– that is, what is good enough for some other class/race/nationality/family of woman is not proper for a woman they can claim some kinship, ownership or proprietary interest in. One way or another, it’s all about men making the choices and exercizing the privileges of ownership– which is why men can preach virtue in their own back yard and then go off to “sin” with “outside” women– the daughters of men they don’t know and will never know.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by “more usage” of women’s bodies in religious Islamic nations vs. the degree of “usage” that happens in a country like this one. One of my favorite quips along those lines was the XTC song that says “I was in a land where men forced women to hide their facial features/And here in the West it’s just the same but they’re using makeup veils.” In both cultures, some outside authority, be it religion or advertising, is telling women that they are not suitable for public view without intervention and “help.” When Brandon cheers on market forces and advertising as emblems of freedom, he either deliberately or unconsciously ignores the fact that these authorities do rule over the lives of women in this culture;Obviously American men don’t beat or stone women for failing to adhere to “proper” standards of beauty. However, it’s a basic tenet all across the political and social spectrum that women ignore these standards at our peril. Some price will be exacted of us for not conforming and often a huge toll –monetary and physical– will be paid by us for accessing the privileges that come to us when we “freely choose” to alter our bodies in the name of conformity.
An extremist Muslim nation, a conservative Christian small town and an upscale “gentleman’s club” in a Left Coast urban center may each have very different standards of acceptable female beauty (though there’s one universal I can think of: the elevation of youth as being most desireable in attracting men). Yet in all cases, there’s an emphasis on women acheiving a “correct” appearance as a primary factor in her acheiving safety, happiness and high status in whatever culture she lives in.
alsis39.75 said:
“Just tune into any chapter of the epic arguments about the worldwide trade in the bodies of women and girls, and you will indeed find activists that consider it slavery. A common story is that of a girl sold as a prostitute because her impoverished family needed money, or a girl pushed into prostitution because of a parent or guardian’s drug habit, or a young woman promised a trade like housekeeping in a foreign country”“ only to be prostituted when she arrived there.”
Whoa. Are we talking about the _actual_ slave trade of women, which obviously will work by guile, promising work of one kind and then forcing women into prostitution, or are we talking about the use of sex in advertising? The quote Samantha gave from the muslim woman mentions slavery, but it does not mention a _slave trade_, or prostitution. Are you claiming that a scantily-clad woman appearing in a trade booth or on some tv ad is experiencing the equivalent of prostitution? I suspect the women – most of them, surely – who do that kind of thing for some bread would really disagree with that.
I guess Samantha’s point was that women can be treated as slaves even by those purporting to liberate them. But I fail to understand why that translates to a valid reason why liberal values should not be adopted or even embraced by other societies, which is what the muslim feminist’s quote implies, IMV.
I’m not able to parse how your response to my mention of a double-standard actually maps to that mention, so forgive me, I’m not responding to it at the moment.
“I’m not quite sure what you mean by “more usage” of women’s bodies in religious Islamic nations vs. the degree of “usage” that happens in a country like this one.”
What I think I was getting at was that, if we’re to talk about “using” women’s bodies on some level, it certainly is fair to wonder which “use” is worse, a scantily-clad woman in a trade booth or a woman forced to wear a veil.
I’ll couch what I’m saying in terms of standards of beauty, since “use” is obviously vague and you chose that context yourself. Sure, I can see how makeup is another kind of veil. But I find your claim that “it’s a basic tenet all across the political and social spectrum that women ignore these standards at our peril” to be simplistic. As you yourself point out, women in liberal society are not stoned if they don’t wear lipstick and eyeliner (unless it is by an abusive spouse/sigoth, which I think is an exception, and certainly not a street crowd). C’mon, that’s a _significant_ difference. The difference between the coercive levels, or means if you prefer (and if you don’t, name the term you do), of advertising and religion are significant. You compare them in terms of a completely abstract notion of “an outside authority”, which again, is simplistic. A woman who refuses to wear lipstick, or a thong while standing next to a Hummer, is forced to find another job, and there are other jobs. A woman in some middle eastern societies who refuses to wear a veil _could be endangering her life_ – as you know.
I’m not sure I buy the whole “outside authority” thing either. Are the societal apparati you mention “outside authorities”? Sure. But so what? Can you name a standard of beauty that _isn’t_? I don’t think anyone can. There’s no little group of people who get together and create a standard of beauty. We are all complicit in it, or most of us are, and that includes women, women who work in the beauty industry, and women who respond to the categorical imperative of the advertising industry to create demand in order to move crazy, stupid amounts of product; liberals and feminists too are complicit – including the non-wife-beating kind. At least, I can’t believe we aren’t, because we all (or most of us) have this little Achilles’ Heel, called a libido. (And please excuse me if it sounds like I’m insinuating you don’t have one; I’m not going that far.) At any rate, the real point of this paragraph is that, if you are waiting for some kind of pure standard of beauty, voluntarily adopted, or one that isn’t somehow an “outside authority”, I fear you’ll be waiting a long time.
Lastly, I disagree strongly with your characterization of Brandon as cheering on the advertising industry. That’s black and white. Brandon was clearly being sarcastic and eliciting an ironic judgment about a muslim woman attacking liberal society, which possibly is kinder to women that the woman’s own. I say possibly because, in retrospect, Brandon might be making a variety of assumptions about the woman, for example, that she wears the veil, or even that she isn’t an American, though that at least seems clear as she won’t embrace Western liberalism. Still, if we get past the assumptions, I’d say Brandon is clearly not showing a special love for the advertising industry – he’s comparing it to something that in his mind is worse.
The post started out as to whether right versus left men are better lovers (kinda dumb), but quickly moved to the hypocrisy of leftist men towards women. It’s true, and the hypocrisy shines brighter because liberal men are supposed to know better, or at least they espouse more egalitarian goals.
As I said earlier, I think that from individual to individual there is no way to make any kind of prejudgment of a man’s respect of a woman’s rights based on his avowed politics. But I do think that it is true that a society that recognizes a woman’s right to control her body, her fertility, that recognizes a woman’s full social, moral and legal equality, that society is more likely to produce boys who will grow up to be good men. It’s as simple as that.
From my fifty-five years on the planet I think that there has been some improvement in American men regarding respecting women’s rights. Behavior that was commonplace and accepted in my youth will land a man in jail now. Not always, but more likely now than forty years ago. I don’t sit in the backseats on people’s dates or prowl lovers’ lanes to collect data, but I think things, believe it or not, are marginally better than they were in the sixties.
However, the rise of the fundamentalists’ anti-sex agenda specifically targets the rights of women, and I am afraid that in future years things will get worse, not better, with the quality of man unless this movement’s momentum is turned around soon. The tradeoff, like in any religiously dominated culture, is “respect for motherhood and home” (read: baby producer) for giving up freedom.
Likewise, before anyone gets too glowy about a woman’s treatment in Islam, there are plenty of examples of what happens to a woman who doesn’t walk the straight and narrow, which include rape and murder.
===
All societies use sex in some way to promote the goals of its leaders. It has always been so. I think that it’s the individual’s obligation to recognize the manipulations.
I said:
“And please excuse me if it sounds like I’m insinuating you don’t have one; I’m not going that far.”
Christ, alsis, My Bad. A sincere apology for my really poor phrasing of this head-em-off-at-the-pass, which makes it sound like I _am_ still going somewhere on the path of personal insinuation. What I meant was this, which I guess was clear enough, but anyway: If it sounds like I’m making a personal insinuation as a subtext of my argument, please ignore it; because I’m not making one.
Maybe I’m over-sensitive to the taste of my own foot, but better that than the alternative I think.
sparkane wrote:
Yes. And yes. I figured that the thread had drifted from the original strict question of whether liberal or conservative men were better in bed.
Prostitution is certainly advertised using pictures of women’s bodies. Just flip to the back pages in most hip urban free weeklies and there they are– euphemistically referred to as “escorts,” and such, but there for the purchasing, nonetheless. So, yes, sometimes women’s bodies advertise cars, and sometimes they advertise… themselves.>: In both cases woman’s body = sex. So I don’t think that it’s so outlandish to view these usages as part of a continuum, though obviously not every feminist would agree.
Sure. We can wonder away, but I think it’s also important to understand the distaste that the woman Samantha quotes is legitimate, and worth thinking about. Otherwise, we end up parrotting some version of “white man’s burden” along the lines of Shrub’s spurious mission to “liberate” Afghan and Iraqi women in the midst of bombing their countries to bloody bits.
But that’s exactly the point I was trying to make, spark. I’m very skeptical of setting up a dichotomy that insists everything about liberal values is inherently a pinacle to strive for, when often enough they’re based on the principle of men controlling women. Also, I tried to make it clear in my earlier post that even Right-wing men are not above enjoying the fruits of this kind of liberalism, as long as they can keep their enjoyment tidily boxed up somewhere where it doesn’t touch the rest of their lives.
Well, Brandon can speak for himself, as ever. But I wasn’t striving to be “black and white,” as you put it. I was striving to understand why a woman from another culture, one we think of as inherently more oppressive than our own, would be leery about embracing values that many of us consider synonymous with freedom. In fact, it didn’t take me much work to understand her leeriness, because I share it to some degree, even though a)I am about as secular a soul as you can imagine and b)the only time you’ll see me with a head covering is during inclement weather.
Ehhh… no worries. I think I got your point.
For the record, I was neither cheering nor condemning the advertising industry. Their job is to sell things by catering to the tastes of the masses—if you don’t like it, blame the masses. Personally, I don’t see a problem with women appearing in advertisements in bathing suits.
And we don’t “use our daughters’ bodies to sell cars.” They’re adults who are perfectly capable of making their own choices. I find it odd that you call someone with such a paternalistic attitude towards women a “feminist,” while I’m an “anti-feminist” because I oppose economic intervention.
Alsis:
You do realize, don’t you, that not all prostitutes are slaves? I would be very surprised if more than a tiny minority of prostitutes in the US were.
Brandon:
You confuse the notion of collective responsibility for the culture we live in with paternalism, Brandon. IOW, “our” in this sense means that when one woman makes her career as a sex object, it affects other women because men often assume that a life as sex object is the sort of thing all women aspire to. Or else they create rigid hierarchies in which the women under their purvue must be kept from such “fallen” creatures or else they’ll be contaminated. (Men, OTOH, can partake of the benefits of association with such “fallen” women and keep their reputations intact.) You don’t believe in the notion of collective responsibility, but rest assured that not everyone confuses it with paternalism as readily as you do.
If the majority of prostitutes in the U.S. would like to get out of the field, but can’t, is that slavery ? “A rose by any other name…” At any rate, why should we use the U.S. as the gauge or ideal for the rest of the world ? Even in the U.S., to argue that prostitution is empowering because a privileged few prostitutes make oodles of cash and live happily ever after is a poor argument for being thrilled with the trade.
I don’t believe the Muslim feminist’s comment (wish I could remember the source) was intended quite as literally as Brandon has interpreted it. Alsis is correct that “You use your daughter’s bodies to sell cars” is not a criticism of a specific instance of advertising in bikinis as much as a larger, more universal indictment of the way women from her culture see Western men looking at Western women and treating Western women.
Many women have to make the choice between being one man’s whore and being every man’s whore, and the Muslim woman was expressing that is how her female peers see the type of “women’s freedom” the United States of Baywatch offers to them. I am in a position of privilege to not have to choose between having sex with one man to keep myself alive or having sex with every man who wants to use my body to get himself off to keep myself alive. Far too many girls and women have to make that choice, and yes, here in the country that produces more child pornography than any other country those are the only options millions of girls and women are given by men.
I get news filtered to me on prostitution and human trafficking every day. This Harrisburg, PA story from today’s catch is utterly normal, I read 5-10 like it every day. Every fucking day. It isn’t even the most horrific thing in my inbox, that would be the story of girls held captive in a family home in St. Paul and raped by an uncountable number of paying johns where a neighbor said, “We heard little kids crying and crying at all hours of the night and during the day.”
Prostitution ring traded in girls as young as 12
(excerpted)
A 102-page federal indictment unsealed in December names him and 13 other men as co-conspirators in a nationwide sex-trade ring. He knows investigators allege this ring traded and sold girls as young as 12 — routinely beating them if they failed to follow orders or make enough money.
But Mr. Maes said federal prosecutors have it wrong. He’s no pimp, he said in phone interviews from the jail last week, he’s “a player.”
“Pimps do things like … lock the girls up in closets. I’m ‘finesseful,’ you know what I’m saying?”
Mr. Maes has been accused at least three times of breaking women’s noses. But he insisted that he forced no one to do anything. “These girls, they love the game. They love the game, trust me. It’s the glamour, it’s the pimped-out ride. … It’s Snoop. It’s all of that.”
Robert Scott, 44, agreed.
Convicted twice before of pimp-related charges involving minors, the Toledo man also awaits trial. Four others charged in the Harrisburg case, he said, are relatives: two sons, a cousin, and a nephew.
“The prosecutors are trying to make it like a bunch of us running around with candy in our pocket, going to parks and picking up little kids. It wasn’t like that at all — period,” he said. If the girls were forced or scared, Mr. Scott asked, why didn’t they call home? And when they were arrested, Mr. Scott added, why didn’t they ask police for help?
The federal indictment against the pimps reads like an inventory of brutality: beatings and robberies to keep hookers in check. But it wasn’t just at the hands of the pimps, Trooper Olweiler said. “What really started to push this was we had girls dumped. We had one dumped off the highway with a sock in her mouth.”
At least two died. One barely survived, he said.
“It’s not like they’re just getting slapped. These girls are getting violently abused,” said David Johnson, chief of the FBI’s Crimes Against Children unit.
Beyond that, maintaining control is a matter of psychological conditioning, especially for girls already fleeing homes of incest, battering, or even simple neglect, said Chip Burrus, the FBI’s acting assistant director of the criminal investigative division. “Normal,” he said, is a relative term.
“A lot of these girls, you wouldn’t know they’re victims. They love to brag. You wouldn’t know they were in it against their will,” he said. Mr. Burrus takes it one step further: “You can’t consent to be a prostitute at age 14. That’s just an impossibility.”
But Mr. Scott and other co-defendants argue that no one is forced into the business. And, as for brutality, Mr. Scott said: “Have I ever hit a woman? Yeah, I hit a woman, I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “You know why I hit her? Because she hit me. … My old man raised me. [He said if] you’re big enough to give a punch, you’re big enough to get a punch.”
Besides, Mr. Scott said, he’s not even a pimp. If anything, he’s in a partnership — and partners are always free to change allegiance.
“She’s choosing the best investment for her money,” Scott said. “It’s like going to Smith Barney or any other firm that invests your money.”
Brandon, I know I’m a bit late coming in here, but I wanted to point out that your counter-argument here assumes a false dichotomy. It’s quite possible that the Muslim Feminist quoted believes that both western society and Sharia law are bad for women, but advocates for a third possibility.
Plus, your answer seems to assume that all Muslim-dominated countries practice Sharia law, but that’s not the case.
One unspoken problem I see with many of my leftist male friends: they haven’t resolved a lot of lingering anger issues with women. Because liberal/left culture abhors (rightly so) the language of violence against women, many of these boys suppress and suppress the kind of words and actions that their brothers on the right feel more comfortable expressing.
As a result, there’s a huge problem of passive-aggressive behavior.
Ask me how I know.
Let me clarify that in my previous comment, I wasn’t suggesting that liberal men with anger issues move from being passive-aggressive to plain old aggressive.
Rather, what I mean is that these guys need to do the hard work of facing their own issues in appropriate settings (therapy, men’s groups, etc.) so that they can get past the rage that so many of ’em struggle with deep down.
Alsis said:
“Yes. And yes. [..] Prostitution is certainly advertised using pictures of women’s bodies. [..] So I don’t think that it’s so outlandish to view these usages as part of a continuum, though obviously not every feminist would agree.”
I won’t disagree that we _can_ place these two phenomena on a continuum; I think where I’m coming from is: is it justified in the current discussion, which as I saw it was never about the relative sexual prowess of liberals, but the hypocrisy of liberals in advocating for women’s issues and then behaving otherwise.
(Incidentally, after your last comment I’m not sure you and I are really arguing substantively; it’s starting to seem more like we’re trying to express completely compatible observations of the same thing, but coming at it from different directions perhaps.)
Samantha’s quote fits nicely with the accusation of some liberals’ hypocrisy toward women. I’m going to try to focus on that. The quote basically says: we’d embrace the freedom, the liberal values of the West, except that it doesn’t look like freedom when you come down to it, because they use their daughters’ bodies to sell cars.
Now Samantha says: “Alsis is correct that ‘You use your daughter’s bodies to sell cars’ is not a criticism of a specific instance of advertising in bikinis as much as a larger, more universal indictment of the way women from her culture see Western men looking at Western women and treating Western women.”
Okay, so we should take the surface meaning of the quote with a grain of salt. Nothing unusual there. But: unless the woman really meant her statement as it sounds on the surface, it’s an entirely toothless explanation of why some non-Western women don’t like Western liberal values. Do Muslim women, in Sharia society, in not-so-Sharia society, balk at “embracing” (whatever this really means) Western liberalism because there’s no guarantee that their men are going to behave any better, one-on-one? Because they see hypocrisy in liberal society?
Well, if so, I can say I think I understand that sentiment. Not that my experience is a woman’s, but I can well imagine looking down a path that seems like it will never change.
However, there’s a problem.
Hypocrisy is everywhere. Women put up with men’s bullshit everywhere. Obviously, they do it here in the West; and as ignorant as I am about the Middle East and Muslim practices in general, I won’t hesitate to say that I Know they do in non-Sharia and Sharia societies. That being the case, at best, the quote sounds so relative as to be meaningless. I can understand “leeriness” of liberal values if it doesn’t look like a change on the level of one-on-one behavior; but I can’t understand it if it is suggesting that liberal values cause or allow the use of our daughters’ bodies to sell cars – by which we mean, of course, not the literal selling of cars, but the abuse or objectification of women.
Furthermore, the quote suggests that using daughters’ bodies to sell cars is not something that happens in the woman’s own society. I’m sorry, but where does she live? Does she live in a Sharia society, where I believe such things are strictly forbidden, and actually do not happen? Then she’s crazy, to the extent she appears to say that liberal society’s oppression of women is commensurate with that of Sharia societies. (Caveat, I am sure the woman is not really crazy, I am addressing the surface appearance of the quote; and, I don’t really know, except for what I hear from others, about Sharia societies.) Does she live in a society like Egypt’s, which I think is not Sharia, and which I heard a guest say on Bill Maher’s show last night, has sexy billboards advertising pop music all over the place? Then she herself is a hypocrite or in denial, because her society also uses images of women’s bodies to sell things.
Like I said before, sex sells, and it sells everywhere, it’s the coin we all carry in the bottom of our pockets, we all have libidos – or rather I should speak of the libidos of men, as I happen to have one of those (libidos, I mean). I am willing to give my full attention to arguments to the contrary, but I have to say I’m going to quite skeptical of claims that sex doesn’t sell in strictly religious society because the men there are so much more upstanding. It’s just more secret. And thereby, probably more hypocritical.
I have to say too that I think the appearance of women’s bodies in advertising is not hypocritical in a liberal society; to the extent that the woman really was making an attempt to point out that the West is sometimes hypocritical, it fails in that regard. The hypocrisy of advertising – it seems to me – only becomes evident in the behavior of the men and women who may be influenced by it. Granted too, the ads themselves could be the result of bad attitudes, bad behavior. But then we are not talking about liberal values, or the realization of liberal values in our actions; we are talking about individual hypocrites, aren’t we? (Let me just say that I’m not at all sure I’ve expressed this adequately.)
“We can wonder away, but I think it’s also important to understand the distaste that the woman Samantha quotes is legitimate, and worth thinking about.” (alsis)
I agree, it’s worth thinking about, but the “distaste” seems to me, when understood (in the current context), to be merely distaste, and nothing that addresses a real hypocrisy inherent to a liberal society. My understanding is, furthermore, that the quote is not, or appears not, to be something along the lines of “objectification of women in advertising is bad”, which seems to be where you are more or less coming from. That I’m not questioning. The quote is a deliberate distancing of Western values, setting it apart from the speaker – do you follow my meaning here, what I’m getting at? It’s critical in that way, and not so much in the way you appear to sympathize with it.
Having said all this, I have the strong suspicion that if we knew the original context of the quote, this entire discussion would appear silly.
Unspoken by whom, Hugo? Feminists have been addressing this for almost four decades now.
Unspoken by the men. Sorry about that.
Hugo, did you see the statement by Sean Penn that he has a plastic doll of Ann Coulter, which he tortures in a variety of ways whenever he’s “stressed”?
http://contactmusic.com/new/xmlfeed.nsf/mndwebpages/penn%20has%20torture%20doll_27_03_2006