So I recently ran across a site called “Is It Normal?” The idea behind it is simple, and kind of wonderful: people confess some possibly odd thing about themselves, and others tell them if it’s normal. Now, normally (as it were) I’m against the too-rigid enforcement of what is considered “normal” behavior, especially when it comes to sexuality and sex roles. But that’s not really what we’re talking about here. Ohhhh, no. We’re talking about grown men and women eating their own boogers; having sexual fantasies about zombies; feeling an urge to jump off of high places; or wanting to be turned into a doll or manikin. (Hey, whatever floats your boat.)
Naturally, I did a search for “misogyny” just to see what turned up. Is that a normal thing to do? I don’t know, and I don’t care, but I did it and the search pulled up a couple of pretty interesting little discussions.
The one that really grabbed my attention was from a guy who said he hated female sexuality. Which may not be “normal,” though as readers of this blog know it’s not uncommon. But this guy is no Christopher from Oregon, whose hatred of female sexuality is part of a package deal that includes hatred for pretty much everything female.
No, this guy hates female sexuality in part because, well, he thinks the male body is ugly and so assumes – or at least feels on a gut level — that any woman having sex with a man is being coerced, bamboozled, or raped. Yep, we’re talking about a rich and toxic stew of misogyny and misandry here. Let’s let him explain:
I Hate Female Sexuality
What little mysogyny I have in me is directed at female sexuality. I can’t stand it that females are attracted to males, ever. I hate them a little for it, just feel it in my gut. I thought for a long time when I was younger that females were basically asexual, not interested in sex, and that romance for them was something far removed from physical love. It didn’t occur to me that anyone might find the male form attractive, and I always suspected males were using some form of deception or raping women in some way when they were with them. I don’t understand this hate and distrust for my own sex. It really bothers me.
I hate that I feel there’s something wrong with a female having an active sexuality when I know intellectually there’s not. I’m a passionate feminist and attracted to females myself. I don’t really understand this feeling.
I think maybe a small part of it is jealousy when I see a couple, and the rest mostly my wierd, incongruous hatred for the male sex.
I don’t think females are doing something wrong but that something wrong is being done to them when they engage in sexual activity, even consentual, with a male, and they’re allowing it to happen, are complicit in it. This is just a feeling I have and can’t shake. It’s not overwhelming, like I’m freaking out whenever I see a couple but it’s there a lot, subtle but persistent. I’m atheist and I’m not someone who belives sexual promiscuity is wrong or even undesirable in male or females. This is just a wierd, lingering emotional problem, like fear of the dark or something like that.
Is it normal?
So, yeah. For what it’s worth, only 14% of those reading this confession rated it normal. But, as I said, I don’t think it’s uncommon. We grow up, after all, in a society that treats sexuality as a commodity that women possess, and that men try to “get” from women – by charming them into “giving it up,” by buying it directly or indirectly (by going to a prostitute or paying for dinner), or simply taking by force.
This way of thinking about sex is pretty deeply embedded in our culture; as regular readers of this blog know all too well, many MRAs, MGTOWers, and PUAs (especially) seem unable to conceive of sexuality in any other way. Neither does the questioner on Is It Normal (who goes by the name SamuraiPeeper), even though he’s a self-described feminist.
Like a lot of misogynistic ideas, this “women own sex, men must fight to get it” idea contains a heaping helping of misandry as well – suggesting that women basically don’t enjoy or desire sex with men because male bodies and male sexuality are inherently disgusting. It’s only a few small steps from this to SamuraiPeeper’s whole muddled mixture of desire and disgust, hatred and self-hatred.
The biggest difference between SamuraiPeeper and the MGTOWers and other misogynists I write about here is that he’s aware that his views are fucked up, and is trying actively to work through his issues. And he’s actually gotten some good responses to his query on Is It Normal?
PoisonFlowers suggests that some of his hatred and disgust probably stems from a fear of female sexuality:
Is it misogyny? I don’t think it’s as clear cut as that. Perhaps because the image you had of women (almost an idealised impression it seems) when you were younger has been destroyed (instead of having romance that is above sex, it turns out that women can be just as animalistic as men), you feel a sort of resentment and that mixes with the jealousy and then as you say “a weird, incongruous hatred for the male sex.” This then becomes a strong dislike for female sexuality.
Why do you have these feelings about men? Is it the people you’ve been surrounded with throughout your life and their behaviour/attitudes? Have you witnessed a man being abusive towards a woman at any point in your life? …
You say that you feel as though “something wrong is being done to them,” which could point to an urge in you to protect women, or perhaps it is more accurate to say to protect the _idea_ you have of women that stems from the concept you had when you were younger.
randomsensuality offers some similar observations:
It definitely sounds like you want to protect the idea of females as pure, with an almost divine stature. It also sounds like you have been taught or embraced the idea that penetrative sex is inherently degrading or immoral: therefore a woman who enjoys it is equally so.
Another bit on the matter is that many men do not find it attractive when women lead the hunt, as it were. They want to be the ones in control, in the pursuit of the sex and relationships. If a woman is as much “on the prowl” as he is, then he can’t say that it was a full conquest. He wants to know he’s been where others have failed to enter, that it took his prowess to crack the nut, setting him apart and making his mate a trophy and attribute to his stature.
Lets also not forget the angle of loathing the male form, which you say you can’t understand a woman being attracted to. If you are heterosexual male, this makes sense. Of course it’s easier to wrap your brain around lesbian sex, you like women, you understand innately attraction to women. Attraction to men, is scary for more than that reason though. If a woman is attracted to a man, then she could be attracted to any man the way a man can be attracted to any woman: this vision of the situation can induce pre-emptive jealousy and defensiveness.
Meanwhile, a 19-year-old girl calling herself so_damn_unpretty offers a blunter response – and one that might do the questioner as much good as the longer, more thoughtful responses:
I love men… and cock.. and sex… so i really cant relate.
In the end, that’s probably the most important takeaway here, as they like to say in the business world. Women – most women, anyway – genuinely like and enjoy sex as much as men. Sometimes more. When a guy “scores” with a woman — she is also “scoring” with him. Rigid gender roles that define man as the sexual pursuer and women as the sexual prize may make it hard to see this, but it’s true. Not only that, but women – heterosexual women, anyway – actually like and enjoy the male body.
Guys, know this: while you are watching sports, or playing video games, or playing with yourself, or knitting (or whatever your favorite hobby is), there are thousands of women writing, sharing, and reading slash fic about dudes (from various TV shows and movies and books) getting it on with each other. There are no women in these stories, at least not in the dirty parts. Just dudes, and their dude bodies, having dude sex with each other. Freud once asked: what do women want? And to that we have a partial answer: stories about Sam and Dean from Supernatural penetrating one another’s deepest mysteries.
I transitioned 5 years ago (about 24) and never have had those criticized since.
Do did I, but my exps have been way different than yours it seems :
I was beaten for being perceived as male (certainly not for the opposite). And have been assaulted on the street, in the recess court at school, in class, in the school building, and even at work.
Me too (it’s awful, I’m so sorry 🙁 ), but for being percieved as female, also that, possibly worse : Definitely in terms of SEXUAL violence, WAY WAY WAY worse… and when percieved as a trans person… another layer too -__- I’m so glad that nothing’s happened to you in that way tho :]
Since transition, I’ve had nothing bad happen to me except almost being refused a job for being trans “for my own good” and problems about legal name and pronouns, with the government and it’s officials. Believe me, they find it weird when Sara is legally male at the hospital. No stalking, sexual harassment, or being beaten up since. And no one questions my credentials as a gamer.
Yeah way opposite reaction for most of those xD WAY *(and it’s pretty much across the board for all of my trans friends, and all of the ppl I work with and have worked w/ : it’s rly awesome tyou haven’t encountered much if any of this tho, and you’re rly lucky that you haven’t faced sexism or sexual violence and etc… i hope you never do :] *hugs* for being rejected for the job tho >:O It’s BS with the “for your own safety” “for your own good” crap )
@Ami
Sure I’ll drop you a line.
I’m 5’6″ and have been 110 lbs for most my adult life. Still expected to do heavy lifting, even if I had no interest in manual labor (and never demonstrated an interest in doing it).
On that note, I actually got jobs cuz of that (even tho I’m slightly taller and prolly just as thin xD ) b/c being perceived male was enuf, that ppl knew I could do it or lift that much (I still have the tendon strength that belies my physicality now xD so I’m still much able to lift things now than I was before) and it got me a job that way too which led to a bunch of other jobs and then eventually moved me out of having to do that work (long story xD but definitely something that had to do w/ my perceived gender) and now there’s no way they’d hire basically the same person to do that kind of work cuz of how I’m perceived 😐
I personally am against this perception of ppl being forced to or expected to do heavy lifting while other ppl can’t or even are told not to (like my sister always wanted to, but my parents always told me to), male or female, it should definitely be a joint effort, or ppl should be able to say no, esp if they’re tired or etc… :] It shouldn’t be this expectation, on EITHER gender on what they can and can’t do or what they are good at or aren’t good at 🙂 Way with you on that :3 Another thing I’m passionate about, the whole gender roles and gender assumptions thing. *nods*
“Which means that these agencies were wrong-oh my god! An agency of the government made a mistake! Get the torches and pitchforks. Or maybe not.”
No, it means VAWA got changed in 2005, 11 years after it began. And still didn’t fully incorporate men, simply added an addendum say “this can’t be used to discriminate against men”.
“Again, the actual law’s own author said women were covered. The Office’s director said otherwise. Apparently someone ignored the memo. It happens.”
You are aware the author has demonstrated an inability to act unbiased in gender issues. He has recently forced (via threat of removing funding) universities to use a preponderance of evidence in campus trials regarding violence against women. That means an accusation doesn’t even need to be that convincing anymore to ruin a man’s life.
http://chronicle.com/article/In-Making-Campuses-Safe-for/127766/
““society deemed”
Ahhhhhhh! Sorry, pet peeve. Hearing those words from an MRA is like fingernails on a chalkboard. “
But when feminists cry it, such as “society deems women are to be sexual objects”, it is acceptable? You did say it’s only bad when MRA’s say it.
“One instance is things like shared parenting. They don’t give a damn that women have the short end of the stick if the couple is together and she is the one giving up earning potential to take the lion’s share of child rearing. They only look at whether or not there is shared parenting if the couple splits.”
That is one of the dumbest arguments against shared parenting I have ever seen. You do realize that Shared parenting is basically men ASKING to take on a larger share of the work. They are being denied this option, and thus, it is being forced on women. You can’t bitch at men for forcing the lions share, and forcing you to suffer the consequences, when you actively oppose the solution to BOTH genders problems.
I just read the article-in the comments section it talks about something that Biden said in an interview in another magazine and this is in of itself another opinion piece claiming that a school board is finding people “guilty” by preponderance of the evidence.
A civil hearing using a civil standard is not doing anything wrong. What is wrong is making the claim that these boards are making conclusions of law and sentencing individuals to prison. She also is making another rather bizarre claim that beyond a reasonable doubt has some kind of numerical figure.
Did you know you could be evicted from your own apartment for being accused of a crime? The plaintiff can file a claim after giving you a notice seeking to have you removed from your apartment and if they are able to prove with a preponderance of evidence that you were accused of criminal activity (even though or if the criminal case was dropped for whatever reason) you could be kicked out. And that is because, just as in this situation that Ms Sommers is hyperventilating over, a civil proceeding (in this case a court) is making only a factual finding and conclusions of law with a preponderance of the evidence that something happened warranting removal.
Same with a college board-they have no authority to find someone guilty, make a conclusion of law and sentence someone to prison. They can merely expel someone from a school for violating a rule by preponderance of the evidence, a standard used in civil courts all across the US.
Guess what else they cannot do? Have much or any bearing on the criminal case pending in the courts. At most they can provide information to the prosecutor who can maybe use the information-only if legally obtained mind.
What this DOJ person is requesting the schools do is take seriously these accusations and backing it up with a punishment with real teeth.
That person is not the Vice President of the United States Joseph Biden. The Vice President has one legal duty (to break ties in the Senate and not fall asleep while presiding over it.) Anything else he does is just make work for him. And he has zero authority over the DOJ. He can ask them to do something but they can ignore him.
Also the original text of the Act had titles that said women but pretty much all of the actual text was gender neutral which indicates if there was a problem (and it appears there was) the Office On Violence Against Women handling the funding screwed up the regulations, not the law. The only part that was not? SEC. 40241. GRANTS FOR BATTERED WOMEN’S SHELTERS.
And if that office wrote regulations…Oh wait, what is this, why the most recent guidelines on who can apply for grant funding. Guess what you do not see in those guidelines? That is right! Nothing saying men are excluded.
Again, looks like an official somewhere down the line got the law, then the regs, then the guidelines wrong. You know what is really annoying? The fact that there is nothing prohibiting men from being included but some lower level flunky never bothered to verify it and so people like the original letter writer may have told someone the wrong thing: a no instead of a yes. And that may mean men who needed (and were entitled to) help never got it. That is a real problem and so that is why I told you to lobby a change of the Act’s name so that confusion goes away
While this may be objectively true – it’s an uphill battle for guys to start believing it.
Mostly as most girls are still taught to act and pretend like they’re doing him a favor by sleeping with him. I say “girls” as I think women tend to get more confident over time.
So, he can repeat to himself “women want as much sex as me” until he’s blue in the face. But then he goes into the world where most women do act very convincingly that they don’t. In fact he’s probably used to having sex used as a bartering tool and having it rationed and negotiated as if it were a commodity.
I’m old, and I am not, nor never have been a ladies man. Having said that I will say that women’s culture has change over my life from what a man could experience in that culture then, to what a man can experience now. The introduction of the pill in the 60’s gave women the freedom to have sex, to initiate sex with greatly reduced fear of getting pregnant and forced marriage or forced, single or married, motherhood. Since then, women’s culture has been more accepting a woman having sex, and women’s culture has broken the connection between sex and marriage and traditional romantic relationship. Women no longer need the romantic long term relationship in order to have sex. And, with this freedom, they no longer need to have sex to get out of a relationship or marriage the other things they want from a romantic or marital relationship.
This presents a big problem for men want a romantic or long term pair bonding. Certainly, these kind of men want to have sex, and want a long term relationship, but the risks and consequences for men who are not the Find’em and Forget’em Bad Boy types, who venture to find such, are much greater.
I can relate..I am a woman and have mostly felt the same..men are these ugly disgusting beasts 99% of the time, and women are being lied to from a young age that they need to get attatched to one in order to be considered “adults”, and functional members of society-and that’s because men still have most of the money and power in the world.
I do have some basic sex drive, but because I see sex as just of form of submission on the part of the woman(even if she enjoys it; or better yet, even worse if she enjoys it) I am still a virgin(in every meaning of the word;never even kissed a man) in my mid 20s and plan to stay this way for years and decades to come, or more(and I’ve been called gorgeous more than just a few times in my life, so it’s not for lack of opportunity).
It really bothers me when women are so unbelievably dumb that they don’t realize the only reason men are ever interested in them is to use them as ragdolls for their own selfish pleasure.
I’ve long felt and probably always will feel that if women had as much power and money as men did(meaning if they didn’t buy into the male brainwashing that says they cannot succeed on their own) they would drop any idiotic fantasies of romance and focus on doing exactly what they wanted whenever they wanted.
Sounds like there’s some real misandry here, although it seems to come probably from negative experience, I’m not sure it’s justified. You and Alex Novy’s post are two faces of the same coin, although Novy’s more observant of the fact it’s social expectations, often lack of interactions with the right people which gives off this impression.
He says people experience women not really having a strong sex drive because they are socialized (now less and much less uniformly so) to hide it, while you (Sandy) say men are disgusting beasts 99% (not sure if the men or the time 😀 ).
From what you say, you have experienced probably many encounters of people buying on such roles and paradigms, which are the unfortunate encounters which tend to build our biases, that makes you live the sex as something men use money to buy, so that probably makes you live it as something men expect from you, not something you share with some of them, you feel deprived of an active part of that desire. Patriarchal dynamics tend indeed to kill the desire, as they choke it in the squeezed channels of power dynamics, making women the object of it. Something on your sad post says you have trouble seeing yourself as the subject of your own desire.
This part “I do have some basic sex drive, but because I see sex as just of form of submission on the part of the woman(even if she enjoys it; or better yet, even worse if she enjoys it)” explains it all indeed. Now you might legitimately have a low sex drive, there’s nothing wrong with it. But I want to tell you off the misandry, as there are also lots of men with as low drives, but made to feel unmanly because of that. But granted that, I feel that yours is simple curbed by the judgement of the society, part of it, which you feel it makes it hard for you to be a subject. Many women sadly accept it without questioning it, in a way they enjoy it, but accepting all the power dynamics and the assigned roles, men pursue and women are the prize, instead of challenging it.
Bye
Anti troll kitteh
Who’s the troll?
And if it’s me, am I at least a good one? 😀
I promise I’ll post on more recent articles. But sometimes I feel like arguments of last posters however old the post is, are still actual and deserve a confutation, that might benefit people who are currently reading it .
@Ingmar, I’d be incredibly surprised if you got a response from Sandy, she’s not around anymore.
She’s capable of her own self-analysis though, I’m sure!
There is no such thing as real misandry and you’re responding to a comment from 2013.
-/\0_0/\-
*shrug*
When I was reading through the old threads from before my time, I was always tempted to reply to people in ancient threads. Not even just the trolls. Sometimes the conversations were just interesting and I wanted to add my two cents.
weirwoodtreehugger:
Hi, exactly, basically same thing for me . But I refrain, if you prefer or think I mess up.
Lea: “There is no such thing as real misandry and you’re responding to a comment from 2013.”
Mysandry, or androphobia, however one wants to call it is not systemic and widespread as misogyny, no known state is based upon it, compared to misogyny. But individual people might express it, like some racism against white people exist although as said is not systemic as much we can recognize that while also being aware how calling it “reverse x-ism” is a ridiculous idea. It’s x-ism period :).
Most of the post, especially the phrase “It really bothers me when women are so unbelievably dumb that they don’t realize the only reason men are ever interested in them is to use them as ragdolls for their own selfish pleasure.”, contains generalized claims on men without distinction. Though I understand where she comes from and I addressed the point, of course I know she’s hardly around anymore :).
It’s just like having had bad experiences with some individual women doesn’t justify saying the usual refrain that they are hypergamous gold digger entitled teasers “riding the cock carousel” :D.
I also know you’d have also addressed such points should she be posting when the thread was still going. Generalization on men here are called out as swiftly and that’s what I like of this blog, it really seems to be agaist sexism.
Tl dr, I think misandry exists, but too many people call that just denouncing misogyny and patriarchal models of masculinity, which are seen as the only possible one, so they (often in bad faith) call it an attack on males.
Yeah I guess she might be capable of self analysis, I simply criticized the content of the post, and her misandry is anyway nowhere near the level of toxicity expressed on reddit and what David reports here.
I think the male form can be really beautiful and aesthetic, equally to the female form, and I’m a straight male saying this. This is another problem with society, as a male I cannot appreciate male beauty and physique without being gay, but that’s not true. I don’t feel sexually attracted to men I deem really beautiful (another thing, we can’t call men beautiful apparently, but men can be really beautiful) but I feel inspired.