“Men’s Studies” has existed as an academic discipline for several decades now. Not surprisingly, most of those involved in it identify themselves as feminists – as people interested in studying gender tend to do. But not all of them: A couple of years back, a group of mostly anti-feminist academics and popular writers with an interest in gender decided to try to do a sort of end run around the discipline of “Men’s Studies” by conjuring up a whole new, altogether un-feminist discipline called “Male Studies.”
Recently, The University of South Australia announced that it would start offering postgraduate courses in Male Studies sometime in 2014; our old friend Eoghan/Sigil1 brought this earthshattering news to the Men’s Rights subreddit the other day, where it was greeted with … suspicion and hostility.
GotMyFrogHatOn wrote:
Great, now men have the same opportunity as women to waste their time and money on a worthless degree!
Liverotto was even blunter:
YES, because the cure to bullshit is… MORE BULLSHIT! /s
That’s right: Men’s Rights Redditors hate Women’s Studies, and Gender Studies, and apparently every academic discipline with the word “Studies” in it so much that they’ve transferred this hatred to a new academic discipline that could well have been (and sort of was) designed just for them.
But don’t worry, they still hate Women’s Studies the most:
What was I saying the other day about projection?
@Ruby
Really, Ruby? Why don’t you tell that to all the gay people that married women so they wouldn’t be targeted by homophobia? Or the gay people that are sent to camps specifically designed to “cure” them, usually through abusive means? Or how about the gay people that hear that their true desires are sinful so often, that they start to believe it themselves?
You’re very ignorant Ruby, and there’s no excuse to remain so when there are so many resources online.
Sorry, I should have said “gay people that married people of the opposite gender”, seeing as there are gay women that married men for the same reasons.
Because I obviously said that.
Uhhh you do realize that gay people have had to hide their sexuality by pretending to be straight right? Many are repressed but still gay. Repressed does not refer to actually lacking desiring something (or losing desire after a period of time), it refers to desiring something and keeping it in due to social reasons. A woman can feel sexual desire but not be as out about it as men due to the social stigma. a Gay person can be repressed and pretend to be straight but they are not really. Repression doesn’t mean you lose that desire.
super secret: some men don’t find naked women sexually attractive
Can you sexually repress people enough that they don’t go to stores and publicly buy porno mags, even if they’d kind of like to? Fucking DUH.
If you make it clear that for one gender, publicly buying porno mags will be greeted with high-fives, while for the other gender, publicly buying porno mags will make people look at them like they are deranged slutmonsters, is the former gender more likely to go out and buy said magazines than the latter? Again, fucking DUH.
And if the people making those magazines are almost all of one gender, largely trying to appeal to an audience that is of their own gender, are fewer members of the other gender likely to see those magazines as a thing for them? A third time, fucking DUH.
Speaking for myself as a heterosexual woman, hot naked men are hot. You could not reasonably make me stop thinking they are hot inside my head. But I’d feel horrible and dirty and forward and icky and shameful if I went and bought a magazine full of pictures of hot naked men, despite knowing that all of those feelings are dumb, because socialization exists, no matter how many times you try to pull this evopsych nonsense and pretend we’re all just magically born conforming to modern Western societal norms.
Its biology to slutshame women!!
And you’re claiming to be a hetero who is married to a man? This sounds like it has more to do with your own personal repression than with what all women want.
Though honestly if ruby says that…..
Anybody who doesn’t think that (some) women enjoy looking at hot men should totally cruise some of the sites featuring fandom pics (coffcoff at random say Viggo_Daily,Bean_Daily, Wenham_Weekly coff coff) (they don’t even have to be nood, but we love their nood stuff too). (And I am a queer woman, not even straight).
And fan vids.
And fan art.
I am more a text gal myself (writing is TEH BOMB), but I can attest to the attraction of those pictures and the pleasure, and the fact that open female desire for male bodies/celebrities is still not exactly ok (after all, “fans are weird,”), and was, when I was growing up, totally suppressed (didn’t mean we didn’t feel it, just meant we didn’t admit to any but our closest friends that we were drooling over that hot guy walking down the street in jeans, and that lovely butt).
ANybody notice all the lovely butts (male and female) on the Avengers, eh?
Seeing MIBIII tonight WOOT!
@ithiliana: I can’t remember which Youtube video on Greco-Roman wrestling it was, but the reaction of disgust and self-righteous indignation over the realization that some people find two guys pinning each other to the ground to be pretty hot, was hilarious.
Ruby, you really need to get over this belief that you have that you are All Women. You are in fact a woman, apparently one who doesn’t find men very visually stimulating. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean that women as a group feel the same way.
There are actually a lot of things going on in terms of why women haven’t shown much interest in the porn supposedly for us that we’ve been offered. Part of it is that it’s been made mostly by men, who apparently have no idea what we enjoy looking at. (I think it also has to do with them being a very specific kind of men, too.) A lot of it is that weird resistance many men have to the idea that women really, really care about the prettiness of men’s faces. A lot of it has to do with repression of women’s sexuality and the guilt/shame that goes along with that. And a LOT of it has to do with the way in which sexual material for women is presented as a joke in the mainstream, so all-male strip shows are something women are supposed to go to for a laugh, not to get turned on. Sexuality itself is less easy to shape and change via social control, but the way it’s expressed is very easy indeed to shape via socialization. Look at how much some people freak out over the idea that women even masturbate, compared to the attitude to male masturbation.
(The latter paragraph is aimed more at everyone else/the general discussion, since I know it’s way over Ruby’s head.)
Ruby, I’d just like to take a moment to point that this? This thing you’re accusing jumbofish of doing? Is something you’ve actually done.
Myoo, obviously you didn’t quite get my point. No one can be sexually repressed so much that their desire goes away. Put a gay man through one of those retarded programs to, “cure” him and he will remain a homosexual. Sexual repression isn’t the reason women generally don’t like looking at a penis as much as men like to look at boobs.
Way to contradict a point nobody made.
You need to demonstrate that’s even true before you can start attributing reasons to it. Repression can make uncomfortable looking at or seeking out the object of your desire, even when you still in fact desire it.
No matter how sexually free women get, we will never get as exited over a dick as men get over boobies.
Ruby, your arguments get dumber with every comment. Cock and boobs – not even analogous. Also, either address the other very direct criticisms of your argument, or drop it.
And again, you’re just repeating yourself. I said “demonstrate”, not “assert”.
Also, was the original “duh, women don’t like looking at men naked” comment aimed at the image in David’s post? Because honestly, beauty standards change, as do ideas of what’s sexy, and that image doesn’t even look to have been designed to be porn. Take a bunch of the men considered hottest now and do a series of pics of them making sexy poses naked and you’d get a different response from your average modern women.
(On that note, MIB3? Woot indeed, though I very much doubt that it will top the shower scene in IRobot in an eye-candy sense.)
@Ruby
You said, and I quote:
People can be sexually repressed so that, even if the desire is still there, they deny it. That leads to less expression of said desire. You can have a person who wants to e.g. look at porn but doesn’t, either because they are afraid to get caught and shamed for it, or because the notion that their desire is shameful has been drummed into their heads so much, that they refuse to act it out.
You using gay people to make your point was just an extra layer of your ignorance that you should apologize for, because the situation you describe has happened to gay people historically, and still happens in places.
Good lord, Ruby. Prove to me that I don’t like to look at naked men. I’m fascinated.
You are not women, you fucking twit. You are one woman.
Your original statement was not about how much, or whether or not, women like looking at dicks. You stated, declaratively, that men don’t look good naked. That statement is not provable by the sales of Playboy vs. Playgirl, or your preference for GQ, or any of the other stupid ass shit you’ve been tossing out in these absurd attempts to prove the unprovable.
Your original statement is. not. a. fucking. fact. It cannot be proven. You are free to find naked men unattractive. Other people will disagree. Because beauty and attraction are subjective. For example: I find naked men attractive. So there.
Jesus! Can’t you go find some bullshit site about the fake-ass “mommy-wars” to post-on, or something? That kind of thing seems more your speed. Manboobz is one of my favorite sites; I hardly ever get to participate in comment threads anymore.
And watching your stupid clutter up interesting threads is totally fucking tedious.
I haven’t technically been both a man and a woman (especially not by Evopsych Biotruth standards, which assume chromosomes=gender), so I can’t say for sure what men feel, but I get pretty damn excited over dick.
Promise you.
(Also some men don’t get excited even a little bit by boobies. So maybe we should stop talking like each gender is one person.)
I meant to address this specific point yesterday, but I needed to get some sleep.
Saying “Sorry guys, but your bodies are objectively unattractive!” is body shaming, and it is insulting, and no amount of hiding behind “the way things are” is gonna change that. You really need to stop acting like people somehow aren’t allowed to offended by your claims.
Ruby, you are not royalty. Using the word “we” when you mean “I” is therefore incorrect.
YOU don’t get excited over penises. That’s fine. No one is making you. I get excited over penises, because penises are awesome, and that’s fine, too. My current boyfriend happens to get excited over boobs, and that’s fine. He is totally allowed to be very into boobs. One of my exes did not get excited over boobs; he found boobs comparatively uninteresting and would much prefer to look at female butts. That is also fine. It’s almost like people are individuals or something!
So be an individual. Say, as an individual, “I don’t like looking at naked men!” That is totally fine. No one cares if you look at naked men or not. The problem is that you seem to have an obsessive need to justify everything you do by making it the action of All Women. YOU can be into rich dudes whom you don’t ever have to look at naked, and someone else can be really into starving artists who live in nudist colonies, and both of those things are okay and can exist at the same time.
Ruby, I think a good starting point for all “the difference between men and women” discussions is that the only difference that exists 100% of the time is that the one group is called “men” and the other is called “women.”
Literally everything else is only true sometimes.
I was legit confused about this for a minute because personally, I only look at GQ for the hot guys. This month’s cover even has a huge pic of Michael Fassbender on it. Isn’t there a joke about it being a stealth magazine for gay guys?