As I’ve been mulling over what people can agree on regarding the Duke rape case, I thought I’d look into how the environment at that party, before the first stripper walked in the door, could impact men’s sexual behavior.
From @ Health about the relationship between sexual assault and alcohol:
Most investigators agree that alcohol’s effects on aggressive behavior are mediated by alcohol-induced cognitive deficits. Alcohol consumption disrupts higher order cognitive processes — including abstraction, conceptualization, planning, and problem-solving — making it difficult for the drinker to interpret complex stimuli. Thus, when under the influence of alcohol, people have a narrower perceptual field and can attend only to the most obvious (i.e., salient) cues in a given situation (Taylor and Chermack 1993). In aggression-inducing situations, the cues that usually inhibit aggressive behavior (e.g., concerns about future consequences or a sense of morality) are typically less salient than feelings of anger and frustration. Therefore, when a person is intoxicated, inhibitory cues are ignored or minimized, making aggression seem like the most reasonable response.
This pattern is relevant since an ESPN report stated that there was a dispute at the Duke lacrosse party over money and the amount of time two dancers were expected to perform which led to players using slurs and other bad language. That would give us the dangerous mix of alcohol, anger and frustration.
And here’s one rabbi’s perspective on college life in America:
University men in the Western world view going to college as an opportunity for the fulfillment of their unbridled lust. And, sadly, it is these ostensibly exalted educational institutions that one finds the greatest contempt for women. Saddest of all, unless these activities lead to some terrible tragedy, like rape, nobody cares.
and
If the definition of a heterosexual man is a male who is attracted to women, then most men today are barely heterosexual.
It’s a sexed up version of the belief that girls have cooties. On the cootie meter, strippers would have been off the scale
That attitude explains this from an earlier post of mine on abyss2hope:
According to a nationwide study of college students in 2000, between 20% and 25% of women reported experiencing completed or attempted rape. College women appear to be at higher risk for sexual assault than their non-college-bound peers.
Which leads me to this, from the Washington Blade about the significance of the 2 cases pending against Collin Finnerty:
A criminal psychologist said Collin Finnerty, the Duke University lacrosse player charged with rape and assault, could be attempting to prove his masculinity.
and
“Masculinity is something that has to be proven,” she said. “It is not innate or natural. It’s something young men have to establish, and they have to establish it publicly.”
And what could be more emasculating than losing an argument with a stripper?
Then there’s this from an interview with Roy Hazelton, a longtime FBI profiler of sexual crimes:
Gang rape: This involves three or more offenders and you always have a leader and a reluctant participant. Those are extremely violent, and what you find is that they’re playing for each other’s approval. It gets into a pack mentality and can be horrendous.
So what these various observations put together lead us to is this motto:
I am a manly MAN, see me get the best of women without becoming dependent on them or taking their side against my buddies when they are proving to me that they are manly men.
Note: Also posted on my blog, http://abyss2hope.blogspot.com
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I am a manly MAN, see me get the best of women without becoming dependent on them
Is attitude strengthened by feminism, which discourages men and women from seeing themselves as dependent on each other? I think if we were to acknowledge that men and women should be dependent on each other, that we can’t be complete without joining to someone of the other sex, then the anger that comes from crazily thinking we need to get away from the cooties of the other sex would dissipate quite a bit.
University men in the Western world view going to college as an opportunity for the fulfillment of their unbridled lust.
Say what? I’d love to see his sources for this breathtakingly broad assertion.
“I think if we were to acknowledge that men and women should be dependent on each other, that we can’t be complete without joining to someone of the other sex”
Uh…queers? Completition models of difference just don’t fit the real world. Encourage healthy and mutual interdepdence in general. but don’t tie that to some gender reinforcing “you complete me” rhetoric.
Actually, John, the attitude you promote (believing that there are two genders, based on sex, that compliment each other) is exactly what has led to a culture of hatred, rape, and violence against women. By setting up and reinforcing a dichotemy, you encourage the view of one gender as the “other,” which always creates tension and fear, leading to violence.
Better far to break down this view and see gender and sex on a spectrum, thereby eliminating the ideology of the other, and liberating specific people to practice behaviors to which they are led, rather than requiring them to conform to societal norms which leave the individual frustrated and insecure.
Oh, not to mention. Homophobia and sexism, which are rife in your posting, do little to help anyone.
If the definition of a heterosexual man is a male who is attracted to women, then most men today are barely heterosexual.
Another rather odd comment by the rabbi. What is he talking about?
John Howard,
You can blame feminism if you like for antagonism toward women, but since rape and other violence against women existed long before feminism, I can’t agree with you.
If a man and woman aren’t complete before joining together, that joining process won’t make them complete any more than nesting two leaky bowls will make a single watertight container.
RonF,
To understand the rabbi’s statement, you need to think about what it means for a man to be attracted to women as more than sources of sexual gratification.
To understand the rabbi’s statement, you need to think about what it means for a man to be attracted to women as more than sources of sexual gratification.
I’m well aware of what that means. What I don’t understand about the rabbi’s statement is how he supports his apparent thesis that most men don’t. I’ve read the linked article. He relates a few deplorable incidents. But I’m not familiar with any logic that would support how he spins them into the broad overstatements used to support this thread.
Actually, John, the attitude you promote (believing that there are two genders, based on sex, that compliment each other) is exactly what has led to a culture of hatred, rape, and violence against women. By setting up and reinforcing a dichotemy, you encourage the view of one gender as the “other,” which always creates tension and fear, leading to violence.
So “complement” means seeing someone as the “other”? And that always creates tension and fear, leading to hate, which then becomes rape and other violence? You might want to look up the definition of complement (not compliment). And I must say that I thnk you have a very odd view of human relationships.
If a man and woman aren’t complete before joining together, that joining process won’t make them complete any more than nesting two leaky bowls will make a single watertight container.
People can be complete, but still benefit from skills and aptitudes possessed by a partner in such a fashion that the two working together can accomplish much more than working separately. This has been the point of every project and people management course I’ve ever taken.
Sounds like garbage to me. Try this:
* University women view going to college as an opportunity for the fulfillment of their unbridled lust.
* If the definition of a homosexual man is a male who is attracted to men, then most men today are barely homosexual.
RonF,
Look at complement not just in the sense of two individual people. If you take the cultural construct of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and look at the way they’ve been made complementary to each other, it’s not such a flattering picture.
Men = strong
Women = need to be protected
These are complementary traits, in the way Americans construct the world. Those who need to be protected need a protector. Protectors need to feel like they’re doing something. So men and women should “fit together” – except, of course, some women are strong, some men need protection, some strong people want to be together, some people who are physically weak could care less about gaining a protector, some people move back and forth between physically strong and weak due to illness or deciding to get buff, and so on — the complementary stereotypes placed on men and women are very constraining.
Men = smart
Women = emotional
Men need women to interpret the world for them, emotionally. Women need men to be rational. Again, not born out by individuals.
Men = brutal
Women = empathetic
Men = good at things in the public sphere
Women = good at things in the private sphere
…and so on. So when John martials the idea that “women and men are complementary” he’s not saying that people in relationships should complement each other — instead, he’s martialing an idea of what women are and an idea of what men are and saying that these two stereotypes require help from the other half in order to survive. (Which the stereotypes might. I don’t know; I’ve never met them.)
If he’d wanted to express the idea that partners should complement each other, than I suspect he would have to make room for homosexual partnerships (unless he’s just homophobic, which is always possible). He also wouldn’t be framing his reaction as a rejection of the concept that men and women are similar — he wouldn’t be saying that men as a body need women as a body, and vice versa.
There are a bunch of science fiction novels from the (seventies, I think?) which make this conceit explicit through the use of their “what if?” heuristic. In one of them, men and women – through a sudden magical device! – are separated into two different universes. And — shock? Women turn out to be emotional and needy and good at building communities and bad at building governments! Men turn out to be strong and violent and unable to form emotional alliances! Thank goodness the world gets reunited at the end so that the female heroine can listen passively to her spouse as he sums up the moral! Whew!
I may be cynical, but I suspect you know all this and just wanted to pick on Jenna. :-P
RonF:
You are either assuming I’m trying to indict all men or you are trying to obscure my points by saying that if something isn’t true of all men there can’t be a pattern among any groups of men.
Just to be sure I’m clear, I’ll say that many college men reject the attitudes I highlighted long before they reach college. Some men leave the type of environment I discussed but take all the harmful attitudes with them.
If there are no attitudes and patterns that foster rape then we must believe that all rapists are monsters who are born evil and the only solution is to put them to death. Personally, I’m not that pessimistic.
I have little to say other than that you raise some very interesting points I hadn’t thought about and that I’ll definitely have to read all these links when I have time.
I especially liked this quote: “If the definition of a heterosexual man is a male who is attracted to women, then most men today are barely heterosexual. ” That’s a powerful statement. It says a lot. I’ve met some men for whom I definitely think this is true.
I’d probably amend it to something like, “if the definition of a heterosexual man is a male who likes women”, since there are so many men who seem to hate us and yet somehow can’t stop trying to get into our pants. I find this attitude disturbing and utterly perplexing, since I can’t stand men who think like that nor do I want to sleep with them anyway, despite it. ;)
earlbecke,
If you read the entire aticle you will see what garbage his statements are. He asserts that most men are only attracted to ‘hot’ women which he states is 10% of women and thus men are 90% asexual… or not fully heterosexual. He writes, “And if he only attracted to a small fraction of the women he meets, then he is fractionally heterosexual.”
How is that different than asserting gay men MUST be sexually attracted to EVERY man or they are not ‘fully’ gay? It’s just garbage.
He also asserts that men having friends (“his male buddies… real confidantes are still their drinking and card-playing buddies”) is a bad thing. Oddly, this same behavior in women is considered healthy and the behavior he is suggesting (exclusive dependance on the spouse to meet all emotional needs) is considered an unhealth trait for a women. It’s all just garbage.
Chillingly accurate, as far as my experience in college. And I was, luckily, never assaulted. Masculinity, over-simplified, is about besting AND not being women. If women smile, a “man” does not; if women feel pain, a “man” does not; if women care and take time off when they are sick or care for other people or study or go to college or read books or use turn signals or back down to save their lives, “men” do not. It’s over-simplified, not essentialist. There’s nothing about this that has to do with having a dick.
Ron, I think it was meant to be a more elevated version of the old saying that there are two kinds of straight men: the ones who like women, and the ones who like pussy.
Mythago nails it. Then again, Ron knew that already, he’s just being Ron =P.
Sgt. York;
You were perplexed about the blurred lines of heterosexuality and homosexuality it seems. So much so that you made this comment, as if it was ludicrous:
“How is that different than asserting gay men MUST be sexually attracted to EVERY man or they are not ‘fully’ gay?”
That isn’t a very unusual belief at all. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Kinsey scale, and if not, you ought to take a look. Whether you think Kinsey is a boob or not makes no difference as to whether or not the gist of what he was saying with regards to most people falling somewhere between the hetero/homo scale as being far more normal than being in the polar regions is pretty spot on if you ask me.
Oops, read every as only men. That changes the context. At any rate, I still believe the Kinsey scale is pretty accurate in considering the level of straight/gay that people are, but no I wouldn’t agree either that a man would have to be attracted to every man to be 100% homosexual or every woman to be 100% heterosexual. Switch that to ‘only’, though, and then I’d throw in my support to the statement.
I love this quote. I think it is absolutely true. I have run into so many men that are so amazingly hateful in how they perceive and speak about women, who also consider themselves to be Playah MacDaddy’s that it’s nauseating. That isn’t to say that I’d automatically classify them as homosexual, but instead whatever sexuality, be it autosexual or lacking affectional orientation. There is a definitive disconnect with men like this, and they aren’t uncommon.
abyss2hope,
Okay, this is a trivial point, since I agree with your thesis that the Duke gang rape was the predictable result of a profoundly misogynist college culture, but I have to say that I found the Rabbi’s piece to which you link (which is actually about life in a British college – Oxford- and in Tom Wolf’s pathetically prurient fantasy world, and if it matches anything about modern US college life, probably does so only by coincidence) to be reactionary misogynist tripe, with a thin dressing of feminism to cover the stench.
This passage could just as easily have fit into one of those absurd “Oh for the great days of male chivalry, when men were decent and kind because women acted as proper guardians of Teh Sex!” essays that made the rounds a few months back:
I hate masculinity and men more than most, and I haven’t been an undergrad for more than a decade, so there is no anti-feminist defensiveness on my part here, but I have to say I’m with RonF on this one (I suppose it had to happen some time).
Also, didn’t that passage (in context) just suggest that the Duke gang rape is the fault of loose women? WTF?
Of your version (#14):
Well, I agree with the second part, but I think that while your rephrasing of the statement is a less dubious statement than the rabbi’s original (men who don’t sexualize every woman they encounter are somehow failing to treat women with proper respect? WTF? The rabbi’s version doesn’t even actually capture the idea of misogynist men not liking women. Most women I’ve met are also only attracted to a small portion of men they meet, this is a problem?) the problem with your phrasing is that it isn’t anywhere close to the definition of heterosexual. Do you really think the definition of a gay man is a man who doesn’t like women? So would a man who likes both men and women be a bisexual? Again, WTF? Basically, both the rabbi’s version and your version of this seem to be playing the game of mocking misogynist (and presumably homophobic) men by suggesting that they don’t really measure up as real heterosexuals, which is a pretty homophobic game to be playing.
I just don’t think this passage, or the rabbi’s piece in general, serves the purpose you want.
But as to your larger point, yes, definitely.
Kim,
Hah! We cross-posted.
Gotta say, while I agree with a sentiment of disgust for men who lust after and hate women (which, oddly, is not actually what the rabbi was describing exactly), I think there is a serious problem with even playing at the edges of suggesting that it is akin to homosexuality (or even that it is fundamentally un-heterosexual).
It isn’t homosexuality at all (as, to be a homosexual man, one generally shouldn’t lust after women, and hating women is entirely tangential to homosexuality), and it is very much heterosexuality. The entire romantic/predatory sexual model is about hating the ones you desire (and loathing the ones you don’t). Fucked up as all hell, but bog standard heterosexuality (or anyway, bog standard male heterosexuality)…
Yeah, I agree with that – actually that’s why I went out searching for some better terminology, which still barely fit (the autosexuality/affection orientation terminology). It’s hard to explain exactly how that sort of relating of men to women is seperate from run of the mill male/female attraction, but still short of rape. I can picture it in my mind better than conveying what I’m thinking, but when I read that quote I immediatly conjured up men that I’ve heard referring to women in general as ‘bitches’, while at the same time boasting of their ability to get pussy, or worse yet speaking of how ignorant women are as they explain their grotesque version of initiating sexual encounters with women, whom they clearly have zero respect for, but are inclined to have sex with.
Bleh, it’s late and I’m babbling. Perhaps I’ll have a better grasp on what it is I’m trying to express in the morning!
I would add to that parenthetical: “and/or the ones who don’t desire you,” and then I would add “and using sex to subdue/control them.” That has always seemed to me the reason why heterosexual men who hate women so often have this overwhelming compulsion to have sex with them anyway. And at least some of that compulsion, I think, comes from the double bind that male dominant heterosexual masculinity puts them in: on the one hand, acccording to that standard, in order to be “real” men, they must have sex women, and so their masculinity does not exist, cannot exist, except in the presence of women–or at least sexual images of women that can serve as stand-ins for actual women. On the other hand, this need for women can never really be satisfied because women are still fully fledged human beings in their own right who, simply by living their own lives, will always at some point slip out of the bounds of male heterosexual control.
The simple fact of women’s presence, in other words, cannot help but remind such men that they can never fully possess what they need. Hating the person who possesses what you need but will not give it to you–and of course it is an illusion that women gan “give” this to men anyway–is the next logical step, as is the constant attempts by such men to get what they need anyway, by any means necessary, and to hate themselves on some level for needing it and feeling compelled to get it.
So when John martials the idea that “women and men are complementary” he’s not saying that people in relationships should complement each other … instead, he’s martialing an idea of what women are and an idea of what men are and saying that these two stereotypes require help from the other half in order to survive. (Which the stereotypes might. I don’t know; I’ve never met them.)
Sounds to me like you’re setting up a straw man to counter an argument that John hasn’t made. You don’t know what kind of traits that John considers complementary. You’ve just put a bunch of words into his mouth.
You are either assuming I’m trying to indict all men or you are trying to obscure my points by saying that if something isn’t true of all men there can’t be a pattern among any groups of men.
Based on what I read in the original post, I was presuming that you presented the rabbi’s words as a blanket indictment of male college students.
Just to be sure I’m clear, I’ll say that many college men reject the attitudes I highlighted long before they reach college.
Good. Glad to hear it. Of course, many of them never see those attitudes presented to them until they get to college and meet creeps that they weren’t exposed to at home and high school.
Some men leave the type of environment I discussed but take all the harmful attitudes with them.
I accept that statement as well. There are some young (and older!) men out there with some very sick attitudes towards women. Some of them even act on them.
earlbecke:
I find this attitude disturbing and utterly perplexing, since I can’t stand men who think like that nor do I want to sleep with them anyway, despite it. ;)
And in turn what I find disturbing and perplexing is not your attitude, but the fact that these guys do end up finding women that will sleep with them.
A few years ago, the rabbi wrote a book (the name escapes me) that catalogued all the horrible things that men do to women in the modern world then blamed the ill treatment on women and their slutty ways. Basically his position is that if women were more modest then men wouldn’t rape and disrespect them. No feminist there.
Kim, I definitely had some idea of how to interpret that quote. I asked about that statement because I wanted to hear how abyss2hope interpreted it. I’d rather not make assumptions about what someone means if I have them right there to ask.
I do agree with the general tenor. I have met an astonishing number of men who don’t seem to like women. They tolerate their presence, appreciate some of the things they do, but (for example) couldn’t imagine sitting down with a beer and shooting the shit with them for a while. You wonder how they manage to live with one.
Of course, there’s plenty of women I could say the same about with regards to men. Nice to have around when something needs to be lifted or fixed, but when discussing anything else about them, out come the disparaging remarks. And forget about hanging out with them.
In both cases, I think it’s a blindness that “the way I do things or the way I feel is best, and anyone who comes at it from a different direction or method is wrong.” I’ve often come across the stereotype in business that “men think tactics, women think relationships”. To a certain extent it’s true. What both often fail to see is that you need both, and that by combining strengths and abilities, instead of disparaging those you don’t have, you can be more effective in business and in life in general. But when people have a weakness where someone else has a strength, the impulse is not to accept that and seek it out, but to say “well, it’s not really a weakness, and the other person’s strength in that area is not really a strength and we don’t need it.” That’s a denial that hurts everyone.l
If you go to link farm no. 19 and click on Bark/Bite, you’ll get to the rest of this:
What do we suppose the (apparently normal, it’s often said…) men who perform the male bonding exercise of gang raping a girl or a woman are communicating to each other? What bond is being forged in the utter de-humanisation and brutalisation of a female human being? Why couldn’t the most reluctant rapist of the group ‘just say “no”.’?
On the rabbi I quoted, I wasn’t holding him up as an expert, only as someone who did a good job of pointing out that the swaggering need many college studs have to prove masculinity instead communicates the lack thereof. If you truly got it and you know you got it, you don’t need to prove it over and over again.
Interactions with a female (who is seen as sexual) should not be seen by a man as a match to be won or lost.
I don’t believe swaggering dominance is biologically linked to sexual orientation or gender. It has to do with self-image and reputation. If you are a man trying to keep the reputation that you can overcome every girl’s resistance to you, a very dangerous attitude has a hold on you.
Only fools and criminals believe everything they want is theirs for the taking.
men and women should be dependent on each other, that we can’t be complete without joining to someone of the other sex
You’re seriously arguing, Ron, that this quote is talking about individual people and not abstract concepts of ‘men’ and ‘women’? Seriously? Not just trying to keep an argument going through contradiction, but seriously?
I did mean that in general, men and women should feel a general protectiveness and need for each other, not just their for their particular lover, but for all people of the other sex, over and above the benevolence one should feel for people of your same sex. My point was that if it is true that this guy was thinking “i am a manly man and get the best of women without being dependent on them”, that he probably feels that way because that is how feminism tells women to behave. If we were to teach that it was actually good for a woman to be dependent on a man and taught that men and women needed each other, then maybe guys wouldn’t feel they had to prove that they weren’t dependent on women.
And that rabbi’s quote seems to me to also to be making a statement about how most men have interpreted the modern parlance of homosexual/heterosexual to mean that they have to have a gross “manly man” sort of attraction to women in order to be heterosexual. It’s like if a guy isn’t proving his atraction is as animalistic and base as possible, then the source of his heterosexualism is challenged.
That bit from the rabbi which implies that it’s seriously disrespectful to burp or fart in front of someone else is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while.
I did mean that in general, men and women should feel a general protectiveness and need for each other, not just their for their particular lover, but for all people of the other sex, over and above the benevolence one should feel for people of your same sex.
What, even if we’re queer?
If we were to teach that it was actually good for a woman to be dependent on a man and taught that men and women needed each other, then maybe guys wouldn’t feel they had to prove that they weren’t dependent on women.
Yeah, we tried that one, John. Didn’t work. You see, it turns out that means the woman has to be inferior to the man all the time, and if she’s smarter or taller or makes more money, why, that destroys the balance and she has to be put in her place.
I also can’t help noticing what side of that equation you fall on. What a happy coincidence!
John Howard:
Maybe in your twisted interpretation of feminism. In my interpretation of feminism, rape is wrong and can never be justified no matter the gender of the rapist or the victim.
That bit from the rabbi which implies that it’s seriously disrespectful to burp or fart in front of someone else is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while.
I’ll have to post the paragraph from the old BSA handbooks discussing the evils of masturbation one of these days.