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.”)
You know what? Screw this. Clearly the company is unfavorable, since I’m now being called a member of a bunch of shitheads who I literally told to go fuck themselves.
Twice, actually.
On top of that I haven’t slept in two days, a passing example I used about my opinion has turned into a multipage argument accusing me of being a misogynist thug, I’m getting angry and it’s probably affecting what I’m saying, and I’m really just tired of the whole fucking argument.
I don’t think much of video game bloggers in general. Most if not all of them are full of shit. Sarkeesian just happens to be well-known for being harassed, which is why I brought her up.
Yeah, I’ve seen those. I’ve also seen Jim Hines’s brilliant cover model parodies.
I’m not an idiot. I know that there’s a history of male idiocy in this stuff.
I’m just saying that I think Anita Sarkeesian isn’t correct in her assessment of video games.
Anyway. My original point, which everybody seems to have forgotten, is that I do not think that being annoying is in any way a justification for the shit that Sarkeesian’s gone through. I do not in any way support the harassing assholes who stalked and harassed her. I just don’t think much of her videos or her opinions on video games.
How does that make me an asshole?
@contrapangloss
Your right, you are a nice person who does things on here beyond what you have to do and you showed that more now then ever. I was an asshole but I feel that some but not all of the progressive/feminist people I interact with don’t take this seriously as I do, and the idea that it should fall to a few to do the hardest parts offended me. I let me emotions on other civil rights issues infect my thoughts. As someone whose family has been involved with the American and Canadian Indian rights movements, people who have actually been shot at I have very little tolerance for people who don’t go all in. That’s my problem not anyone on the sites. Your a better person then I have been and I’ll stop because of that.
Bye, Felipe…I mean GroundPetral.
I realise that you’re only starting out on your tertiary education and no one can do everything. Everything in this case would include a bit of Feminism 101.
There is every reason to believe that creators and users of games (and films and music and toys and every other damned thing) are inherently sexist. We live in a sexist society, we’ve all grown up surrounded by sexism, it’s impossible to avoid it. We eat, drink, live, and breathe it. We really are like fish who don’t know what water is. When it’s all around you and it’s all you’ve ever known, it’s very hard to see it even when it’s right there in front of you.
Just because you’ve never noticed it and you think someone, anyone, Anita Sarkeesian or I (who’s literally old enough to be your grandmother) who points it out in places and ways you’ve never thought of before, doesn’t mean that it’s not there. It’s like one of those silly trick illusion pictures. You look and see one thing, and someone says to you if you look at it differently you’ll see something else entirely. http://brainden.com/face-illusions.htm
Sometimes you say, “Hah, that’s clever.” Other times you’ll say, “What! I can’t see it.” Even when someone uses their finger to point to the feature that needs to be realigned for the alternative view, you still can’t see it. You’re in the confused “I don’t see it” stage of understanding what Sarkeesian’s getting at. Which means that you’re like someone who’stelling everyone else that they’re wrong for seeing the happy young couple in the picture of two old folks just because they personally can’t see them.
No matter what you think about her perceptions, she’s more right than she’s wrong from the point of view of people who can see the sexism inherent in fairly conventional media.
Ken: do you not see the irony in you telling a lot of women there doing feminism wrong?
Unless you’re brand-new, this isn’t usually a problem in my game, but I’d say just take a chatlog of the asshole, report him to the GM, and share the chatlog.
Basically the same thing without the smack-down.
You used all the gamergate talking points. Including the one about not condoning harassment. If you don’t see why that’s a problem, you do need more research. Start with reading some of David’s posts on gamergate and Anita Sarkeesian since you’re already here.
@cassandrakitty: I don’t disagree with anything you said. If I implied that online bullying of transwomen by ciswomen is worse than the overwhelming (I’m quite familiar with the statistics) real world violence at the hands of (usually cis)men, I made an error. I will say while violence against transgender women in the real world is more important than online harassment, it doesn’t mean the other doesn’t matter or doesn’t happen (not that anyone’s saying that here. Though in my thoughtlessness and overt sensitivity, I may have perceived an earlier comment as suggesting that. I’m sorry.)
@kirbywarp: Yep, I wasn’t just super-ninja’d…I was mega ninja’d. If this thread is a chorus of singers, I’m the one off key who keeps singing the last songs ending lyrics during the next song’s opening.
@GroundPetrel: If you watched Sarkessian’s videos again, you’d see her explain the difference is how women are sexualized in video games (and everything essentially) in ways men simply never are. The fact that you see a dude without a shirt or in a dungeon isn’t as entrenched as the sexualized damsel in distress. Plus, having a few games where a guy needs to saved doesn’t stack up to the ocean of games where you save helpless, sexualized women. Not that simply switching it around will make things better. My point, and Anita Sarkessian’s is it is not “portrayed the same way” in regards to male and female sexuality and strength.
Also, how is critiquing games her “obsession”? It’s part of her job.
Well, there was the bit where someone asked what TERF stood for and the first reply generalizes it to, “a pejorative used against any woman who dares to say no,” (???) and kittehserf going on about how it’s primarily employed by trans women looking to coercively rape cis lesbians, defines TERF as a slur as if trans women somehow have the sort of institutional power over cis women to give a shout-down the backing necessary to have slur power, and then links to a blog run by an individual whose posts posit such absurd anti-trans bullshit as calling trans women, “males who ‘feel like women inside'” which…I’m not contesting the legitimacy of those screenshots, but the fact that that’s the sort of place one ends up sourcing makes me leery just by virtue of what circles you’d have to be running in in the first place for that to be your go-to citation.
With regard to the actual substance of that link: threatening to murder people is universally fucked. I’m behind that, and behind people who condemn that in and of itself. But…the violent threats from trans women towards TERFs is popping up within a cultural context where trans women get literally, straight-up murdered for walking down the street while visibly transgender (particularly if they’re black), whereas anti-trans feminists do not, and cultural transmisogyny normalized and perpetuated by anti-trans activists directly upholds the relative norm of violently assaulting trans women being a thing. Harassment of trans women often includes outing, which puts them at significant risk of economic instability, abuse from any caretakers, and violent assault from any gutsy hateful types in the area who catch wind. Calling an anti-trans activists’ work or home to “out” them as such, while fucked, is way less likely to have those same outcomes, particularly the latter two.
And I’m spelling all that out to try and communicate to anyone out there still on the fence that, while there are certainly plenty of examples of trans women making angry remarks about killing TERFs, it’s happening in a climate of fear created by trans women being murdered by folks who buy into transmisogynist attitudes espoused by trans-exclusive feminists. I’m not saying those threats are okay, but it does mean that, just as I’m going to be suspicious of anyone who makes more of a stink about, “Kill all men,” jokes by women than the actual murders of women disproportionately committed by men, my hackles go straight the hell up when someone asks the meaning of a term originally coined by trans women to spell out the attitudes of feminist activists who explicitly exclude trans women and starts going off about how it’s used by trans women to attack cis women without thinking to reference how it’s a term born from that very real fear. I’m saying this as a cis woman, but even from an outside perspective on transmisogyny, it feels like someone asking what misogyny means and being met with dudes saying it’s a term thrown around by women who hate men and posting screenshots of women making aforementioned, “Kill all men,” jokes.
@GroundPetrel:
It doesn’t. Something else does, and I think you’ve been provided ample explanation as to what it is.
@GroundPetrel:
We. Don’t. Give. A. Fuck. That. You. Don’t. Agree. With. Anita.
We seriously don’t care, Louise.
Where we got snippy, and what you still refuse to address, is the fact that you tried to devalue her arguments because she talks about how she’s been victimized and how you’re trying to make it seem like your opinions and experiences are more important than anyone else’s.
First, you say that Anita is using her harassment as a way to make her seem more “legitimate”, when we told you that talking about harassment where it’s appropriate isn’t her “playing a victim card”, when she’s literally talking about harassment and threats in the gaming sector of the internet. I asked you about why you find this bad quite a few times, and you’ve yet to answer me, instead deciding to get defensive because we’ve equated you with sexists, since you’re displaying similar arguments and behaviors.
Then you’re literally talking over everyone else, including Anita, who might have an opinion on why “X” is sexist, and telling us that you don’t think “X” is sexist, so you don’t see how it could possibly be so, even when we’ve explained to you, repeatedly, why that’s not true and why your experiences (or the experiences of your oppressed friends) aren’t indicative of everyone else’s.
You are talking in circles, and I’m done trying to explain this shit to you. Go fuck off and go re-read the posts addressing you again, since you’re insistent on repeating yourself and ignoring anything other people including myself have said, and I have lost all patience I had left for this conversation.
Though I think you’re more like me and that bottom picture of coffee beans. I’ve stared and stared and stared at it and it just won’t happen for me. I think I begin to see, and then it disappears — which is a pretty good indication that I haven’t got it at all.
Ken,
As a white person I don’t pretend to know more about Native American and First Nations issues than they do. Nor do I make it my business to tell them how to do their activism. That’s ally 101.
Is there some reason you can’t extend the same courtesy? What makes you think you know more about how to deal with misogyny then the people who actually experience it?
Since pretty much every woman I know, including myself have been harmed or threatened by men at some point, your relative being shot at one time is no fucking excuse to be a condescending asshole to us. As if we don’t know what it’s like to be in physical peril from our oppressor class.
@GroundPetrel:
Brilliant! Why haven’t women thought of that?
Oh yeah, they have. The reports don’t work. Nothing happens to the assholes. Then what? Just ignore them? Women do that to. Then they either back out (because who wants to deal with a game that makes them feel like shit?), they grow a hard shell, or they speak out and make it public that there are a bunch of assholes to raise awareness and make someone do something.
Point is, you’re an 18-year-old dude, right? Your experiences playing games, and your percieved lack of sexism, doesn’t speak to the experiences of other people. So trying to use your experience, especially as a dude, to say that Anita’s description of sexism is full of shit is laughable. Might as well be a white dude during Jim Crow saying the racism isn’t so bad.
Kirby, his “just report it” was the distillation of a certain sort of privilege.
I’d also like to point out to Ken the blindingly obvious fact that somebody who is oppressed has OTHER shit to do than educate idiots who can’t be bothered to read a beginner-friendly list-icle. If you don’t have privilege, by definition you have to work harder to achieve the same results. Most people are not activists for a living, which means this is something we do in our spare time because it’s important to us.
I am not going to stop in the middle of a crazy busy work day to take 20 minutes to explain what “trans” and “cis” mean just because some random asshole demanded it of me. The people who are most oppressed don’t have time for this crap because they are busy trying to SURVIVE. It’s incredibly arrogant and condescending – people deserve to be treated like people because they are people and they are not obligated to give you their life story so you can have sad feels on their behalf. Frankly, I don’t give a damn if you feel I am doing feminism wrong. It is not about you. I don’t want to play with your toys and nobody will cry that you have packed up and left.
As an addendum to my last post, I consider myself one of the lucky ones because I’ve never been raped or been in an abusive relationship like so many other women have. That’s fucked. That should be the norm. I shouldn’t feel lucky because I’ve only been sexually harassed, followed on the street, called misogynist slurs, groped on public transportation and molested by two classmates as a child.
But sure, Ken has a relative who got shot at so he’s more knowledgeable about oppression than us silly, silly ladies.
Psyche – Thank you, glad someone said it. And for my money, anyone here with TERF sympathies can get bent. If that’s tolerated here, I will feel justified in continuing to almost never comment here. Honestly, lay it out, folks. If you’re anti-trans at all on any level and in any situation, tell me, so I can avoid the comment sections here like a bucket of strawberry-scented toxic waste. I would not have expected that, and it’s disappointing.
@hellkell:
Yeah, that’s what I was working towards.
@Alan Robertshaw: Thank you very much. Your comment reminds me how the Internet, for the most part (not here on this website of course) often agitates arguments into angry rhetoric you wouldn’t see in the real world.
I admit with shame, in the past would have that discussion with your friend online and probably turn it into a caps lock scream fest. But if I met her in person, while I would still disagree with her, I know I wouldn’t be like that. If I could talk with her, and she with me, I know we could actually learn from each other.
I have an mentor of sorts (best friend, sort of mother, role model, she’s everything), an older transwomen in her late 60s whose been in transition as long as me (I’m in my early 20s) and she says the same thing to me whenever I come to her with all my more negative feelings.
“You attract more flies with honey than with vinegar”. In other words, don’t let my angrier side take over, be nice, and that’s how you change minds and hearts. Something I should keep in mind; I stand by feeling some people who use the term TERF aren’t necessarily bad though I think the term should be dumped, if it’s associated with any kind of harassment campaign or is used against actual allies.
Maybe I saw a different gamergate than people here did, but I saw a bunch of assholes screaming invective and hateful threats, not people saying “you know, a lot of this is outdated and overblown”.
@Jennifer King: I won’t deny that ten years ago that video games were a lot more sexist than they are now, but frankly none of the games I’ve ever played sexualize women in distress. And I’ve played quite a few games.
Now, there ARE games that are ridiculously sexist–they’re usually advertised on websites like tvtropes and are made by Chinese companies as browser games. I will not deny that those exist and are disgusting, but games like XCOM, Mass Effect, STO, hell, even Dungeons&Dragons Online, are realistic and nonsexualized. Hell, before the last expansion STO revealed new promo art that was universally panned by the playerbase because one of the female characters in the picture had unreasonably long hair (the anger was centered mostly around the fact that such hair would only be a hazard in a combat situation like the one said character was supposed to be in).
I won’t deny that sexist video games do exist. But that doesn’t mean that all video games are sexist, and IMHO Sarkeesian makes some really specious arguments in looking for sexism in video games.
Maybe that makes me a shithead. I honestly don’t know anymore.
Hey, I get sexist and racist slurs all the time. The assholes aren’t picky. I’ve been called a “beta male” more times than I can count. I’ve had people suggest that I be anally r*ped. I’ve had people threaten to kill me IRL. I don’t give a shit. It didn’t bother me when I was a newbie and it doesn’t bother me now.
Assholes are everywhere in video games. When they aren’t sexists, they’re racists, or just trolling for the hell of it. A thick skin is necessary for everyone, male or female.
Now, I admit that I’m young and stupid, and I’m sick and tired enough of this to say “you win” and go. I’m probably wrong about everything I’ve said so far. I really don’t mean to be an ass, and rereading the argument I admit that I sad a lot of stuff the wrong way, and implied (unintentionally) that my annoyance with Sarkeesian goes further than it does. My apologies.
@Great America Satan: I don’t think anyone is a TERF here, I think others were just saying it get’s used against those who aren’t anti-trans, and by MRA’s looking to score anti-feminist points.
Great American Satan–
I’m pretty sure no one has said they are anti-trans. We’ve just discussed how “TERF” can be used as an insult and that it can be used to devide people that would otherwise be alies.
I’m pretty sure that TERF was always meant to be an insult, just like the word “asshole” is meant to be an insult when describing someone.
That being said, I disagree that it is a slur, or that it is a word that people shouldn’t say. Some people may use the term inappropriately to silence others, but the same could be said about anything, really. “Racist” can be and is used inappropriately to silence people. “Homophobe” can be. “Bigot” can be. Hell, “asshole” can be.
To this I would say several things, the foremost of which is this:
Trans women are far and away more likely to suffer violence from cis people than the other way around. There is just no comparison. Any trans woman can give you stories of being accosted or assaulted for being trans, including (and perhaps even especially) in spaces for women, such as a women’s bathroom. I’ve yet to hear of any instance of a cis woman being assaulted by a man who pretended to be trans in order to get into a woman’s space. I’m sure it’s possible that it has happened, but what you mostly hear is fear that it will happen. But it is not even remotely as common as trans women experiencing violence from cis people.
And let’s get real here: how are we doing this gatekeeping? Are we checking panties? You have literally no way of knowing a woman is trans unless she tells you or you check her panties.
So instead of “hurt feelings for trans women” vs “real danger for cis women” we have “real danger, hurt feelings, and humiliation from being asked to prove they don’t have a penis in order to be accepted as a real-enough woman for trans women” vs “unfounded fear of assault for cis women”.
Yes, women have a very good, very founded fear of sexual assault from men. But trans women are not men, and it is practically unheard of for men to pretend to be trans women in order to assault women. So, yes, it is an unfounded fear.
Jennifer King – It means TRAN EXCLUSIONARY radical feminist. If you don’t regard trans women as real women, you are a transmisogynist and trans exclusionary, and I don’t like you or want you as an ally. All this crap about secret trans women rapists is Cathy Brennan talking points, like Christian right wing bathroom panic bullshit. Real progressives are past it by now. Yes, rapists of any gender are bad, but this trope is pure unmitigated transmisogyny.