Check out Margaret Corvid’s fascinating piece in the New Statesman on male sexuality and the appeal of misogynistic movements to sexually frustrated men. As a professional dominatrix who’s also a feminist, she’s acutely aware of the ways conventional masculinity restricts and impoverishes male sexuality.
When I became a professional dominatrix after years in the kink scene, I expected my kinky work to involve lots of spanking, whipping and bondage. And, to my delight, it has. But in the majority of my sessions, I am creating a space for men to explore areas of their sexual lives that society feels are unmanly; they come to me to be penetrated, to be used, to serve, to submit, to worship, to be taken. A client might have any or all of a bewildering array of fetishes, but they mostly come to me to experience something well outside the very narrow confines of what society says that it means to be a man.
Unfortunately, as she notes, Men’s Rightsers and Pickup Artists offer nothing to men who feel confined by these narrow notions of manhood; indeed, their definitions of manhood are both retrograde and restrictive.
One of the greatest tragedies of the men’s rights movement is that, in the end, its lessons serve only to drive men further away from what they yearn for. Pick up artist techniques and aggrieved entitlement are unlikely to help men achieve the goal of intimacy, but feminist values can teach them the skills to communicate with respect.
You’ll notice a few quotes in there from me, from an email interview she did with me as well as from my post Is the Men’s Rights Movement driven by the rage of the rejected? (I also discussed the issue in this post on the weird sexual undercurrents in A Voice for Men’s Facebook “memes.”)
Oh I like this Margaret corvid. Thanks for turning me on to her work oh cats in a Dave suit:)
Indeed, I like to think of male liberation as saying goodbye to John Wayne. Just be yourself and not who roosh wants you to be
There are good parts in this article, others not so much.
”Today, feminism is engulfed in a fiery debate about gender and sexuality. Intersectional feminists have embraced the trans, sex worker, and sexual liberation movements, opposed by supporters of an older radical feminist tradition, who would exclude them.I am firmly in the intersectional camp.”
Being a liberal feminist doesn’t make you intersectional. Not being in favor of legalizing sex work doesn’t make you exclusionary of sex workers, it makes you someone who’s aware of how legalizing increases sex trafficking and violence against women, most of them racial minorities (ex: in Canada, 52% of prostituted women are First Nations Women, and the Native Women’s association supports the Nordic Model.) Who’s excluding who, really?
At first it seems I’m going off topic because this isn’t about the MRM, except that she blames ”feminists who don’t agree with her” and their ”moralism” for the perpetuation of misogyny, which makes this a pretty misogynistic article in the end.
I really find her perspective interesting and informative. I’m really liking her too, but there was one thing in her article that, I don’t know, made me really uncomfortable.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that my formatting works. It is the last sentence that is bothering me. I just included the rest of the paragraph for context.
I’m not sure what she means by it because the logical conclusion leads me to places I’d rather not go. But, then again maybe that last couple of OPs have gotten to me and I’m not thinking clearly today. I guess I’d like to know if I’m the only one who is feeling uneasy with that sentence or not?
Bravo for getting this site such great exposure, David. You diagnose the misogyny, and that’s accurate. But what I’m ending up with from this article is that it’s up to women to give men full sexual access to avoid male hatred. Feminists who have detailed for years the abuses of women in the sex trades are told to abandon our “moralistic” stance. It almost sounds like a restatement of the MRA saw that it’s women’s fault some men rape them and otherwise demonstrate their hatred and disrespect. It felt like preaching and it came out of left field. Too bad she didn’t quit after pointing out that MRAs are brownshirts that scapegoat women for problems in the structuring of society by their own sex. No. I disagree that the solution is for women to service men to prevent violence, at our expense.
Myriad: I see your concern–it’s that Scott Aaronson bunkum all over again. I’ll say that young men and women need some decent talk about sex, and navigating the social side of life in general. But it’s wrong and entitled and privileged as fucking hell to say that this is the responsibility of feminism/feminists. If a particular feminist (say, Ms. Corvid) wants to offer useful and helpful advice, that’s awesome, but it doesn’t obligate, say, Anita Sarkeesian to do the same.
What a great article.
I’m a relative newcomer to this site (and similar ones). I am however catching up with terms like MGTOW, Game gate and MRA. It’s morbidly fascinating. It would be amusing but for the undercurrent of genuine threat to women.
One thing I don;t understand, and I’d live to be enlightened, is why these men feel feminism is such a threat to masculinity (as opposed to male privilege, which is a different thing). I’m quite a blokey bloke (shave head to save time on styling, enjoy (consensual) fighting etc.) but none of my female friends (who include some hardcore radfems) have ever intimated that they want to interfere with my lifestyle; all the want is a chance to make things fairer for women, and that doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
To hear these MRA types you’d think Jessica Valenti (I do love that t-shirt btw Jessica) was planning to sneak round and replace all our Arnie DVDs with copies of “Thelma & Louise”.
So guys lighten up, feminism won’t mean compulsory Andrea Dworkin recitals. It’s not a zero sum game. Women gaining the freedom to live their lives to the full, won’t diminish our rights in any way;and, if we want to be selfish about it, there are may ways (I won’t recite them here) where it’ll be even better for us to.
It’s a win-win chaps.
Thank you all for the great responses. As I wrote in the piece, “feminists should not be obliged to sell feminism to angry men. But I would offer another analogy: when we combat fascism, it behooves us to offer an alternative to those that fascists would recruit.” I do not believe that feminists or women must offer themselves sexually to men, or cater to men’s entitlement. It is simply true that feminism itself offers true liberation to men and women – and it is essential for feminists to make that argument clear and widely known.
One huge problem with this, which I felt was outside the scope of the article but I want to talk about in future, is that in a society with structural male privilege, any argument, even a feminist one, that addresses men is likely to be foregrounded and thus sabotage its intent. We really need to figure out how to have a conversation with men in a way that does not replicate privilege, and that puts the interests and voices of women first.
I am the first to admit that I don’t know yet how to do that, but I really want to find out.
Hi Alan. I love Dworkin, FWIW, and I think it’s shameful that her works have been appropriated by people who don’t understand them, and I am looking at theTERF’s. She was men’s greatest ally, she had faith in y’all, and to hear that you think her works should be seen as a kind of punishment is disheartening. Also I’m going to make you read one, because I really think it would do you some good.
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIIE.html
Also welcome, I’ll leave the package dropping to someone else because I already found you some Dworkin and I’m lazy.
Yeah Dworkin honestly is a really important feminist pioneer – I don’t agree with all her views but she’s not the man-hating venom spewing monster mainstream media portrays her as. It really is a pity that people see her as unreasonable.
Ooh new commenters. Hi everyone!
@Alan
The reason these guys feel threatened is that despite what they say, they don’t want equality they want privilege. You can tell from their speech that they see women as inferior, and they want to have power over half the population. Women’s equality doesn’t mean that their rights are being taken away but it does mean their privilege is, which in their minds is their “right”. To them, a hostile gynocracy is one that allows women equal employment opportunities and sets laws against marital rape and domestic violence.
Sorry for the repeat posts but I totally borked that last sentence. It should say “To them, a ‘hostile gynocracy’ is a government that allows women equal employment opportunities etc.”
@freemage
Yes, I think you articulated what was bothering me about that notion so much.
Yes, so much yes. Unless the feminist high counsel says otherwise, but my furrinatti overlord assures me this is not the case.
Ah, seriously, I think I need more coffee this morning.
I read “Right Wing Women” recently and thought a lot of it really rang true, even today. Dworkin’s history of the hippie movement was particularly eye-opening… I hadn’t realized that even among hippies there had been sexual abuse and coercion and that some of the antifeminist backlash of later decades may have been related to that. Women rejected “free love” because in practice it excused a lot of really bad male behavior (ie, “if abortion and birth control are legal and marriage is obsolete, what’s your excuse for not fucking me?! And how can you demand that I help support my children, when you could have just gotten an abortion/used birth control/gotten a job?!”) That was progressive! And male privilege ensured that progressive women’s voices weren’t heard unless they toed the party line. Women with grievances against men in the movement were shunted off posthaste.
And so women retreated into more religious and conservative models to get some measure of safety and security and control over their own lives.
Not that this WORKS, really, but the impulse can certainly be understandable.
@ Lids, also Dworkin was very sympathetic to the needs of trans people, even though she was pretty much uneducated about it, and she felt that they should be granted the sex they chose and not have it questioned, so the appropriation by the TERF’s is truly mystifying. I am *not* saying that what she said wrt to trans issues wasn’t problematic, it was *because* she spoke through privilege instead of knowledge, but I honestly believe she was trying, and I know she was right about a lot of it.
And I now believe that mandatory Dworkin recitals are the best idea ever, thanks Alan! Can we start that here? Can that be a thing? All Dworkin threads?
I don’t really see the point of sex and don’t plan to have any until I’m at least 36, have my PhD and a stable position somewhere, and a good, stable relationship of at least six months. Does that make me unmanly somehow?
(said semi-rhetorically)
I also liked much of the article but had a couple of the same concerns.
Feminism can have the side effect of helping a man get laid. In a world where misogyny is rare, women can choose to have casual sex without it being used against her later and we wouldn’t need to fear that going home with a man we don’t know well could result in being raped or killed.
That said, it is not the job of feminism to help men get laid. What are we supposed to do that we aren’t already doing? We already promote the end of mandatory gender roles. We’re already saying that everyone should be free to say yes to what we don’t want and no to what we don’t. It’s not us promoting the toxic masculinity that makes men feel bad if they don’t fit into little boxes. It’s not us that need to change.
What a lot of these sexually frustrated and anxious men have a problem with is that we are for affirmative consent. That women are able to have standards and say no to any man we aren’t attracted to. They’re frustrated that women are demanding not to be viewed as sex objects. Are we supposed to say yes to any man who is “nice” so they don’t hurt us?
I also agree that it’s not bad for feminism to look critically at the sex industry. I don’t wish to shame sex workers and if a woman is doing sex work free of coercion, that’s fine with me. However, intersectionality doesn’t mean shutting your brain off. When an industry has a history of misogyny, abuse and coercion we can and should critique it be wary of it.
I remember a novel by Marilyn French in which there was a scene at a commune that I’m morally certain she based on a real-life scenario: one man said that if they had everything in common, well, the women should be held in common too, it wasn’t fair that only certain men got to have sex with certain women. The proposal got voted down, but needless to say there was a nasty atmosphere afterward.
That last comment was in response to the mention of Dworkin’s criticizing the hippie movement.
Charles Manson is a racist and a misogynist. While he was never really a hippie, it was quite easy for him to infiltrate the culture and that is where he got his followers.
I liked the article overall, but I have issues with this: “Solidarity should motivate the privileged in their struggle for change, not self interest…”
This viewpoint bothers me, because first of all it seems to believe some kind of ideological purity is more important than change: it’s not good that men fight the patriarchy, but rather that they do it for the “right” reasons.
But the worst part is, it’s impossible. There will always be self-interest in being an ally. If we wait for a purely other-focused ally, we’re waiting for someone who’s not a human being.
Of course I do agree with her subsequent point that marginalized people shouldn’t have to spend time “educating” the privileged, if that’s not what they think is most useful. But I think it’s important not to conflate that with somehow feeling like you have to apologize for the fact that men benefit, too.
Given that, every time there’s an incident like the Isla Vista shoot-up, some jackass posts something that says explicitly that women should have had sex with shooter to prevent the violence, I’m gonna go with “yes”.
Hi all, and thanks for the welcome.
Actually, I do find Dworkin quite interesting. Found out about her, gosh, quite a few years back now. One of my law lecturers was famous (by obscure academic standards) for a paper called “Dworkin not Dworkin” that somehow managed to link the works of Andrea and Ronald.
[And if you want to do well in exams, it’s not a bad idea to quote your lecturer’s writings!]
Interesting article but as others have mentioned, it also rubbed me the wrong way that she came across as quite dismissive of those who disagree with her on the subject of sex work as “moralists”. I don’t think it enhances the debate to point fingers and say “you’re just a prude!”
@ tedthefed, then you’re not my ally.
http://herhonestlife.tumblr.com/post/96307042955/some-thoughts-on-privilege