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.”)
Just dropping a line to say that, as always, I’m in awe of mammoth’s ninjas.
Watermelon- It is an insult, and it is deserved if it is accurate, and I don’t want those people as allies.
Jennifer, we keep ninja-ing each other. Great minds!
Well if it didn’t bother you, why should anyone get upset by it, right? That’s what you’re saying here.
You should look up the First Rule of Holes.
Thank goodness for Psyche! *bows down*
To add to my short post from earlier, short because i have exactly zero energy for debating this one – If this place is sympathetic to transphobia then count me on the list of people who’ll be leaving.
Blockquote>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.
http://www.torontosun.com/2014/02/15/a-sex-predators-sick-deception
And to correct myself, checking her panties will only tell you if she has a penis, not whether she is trans.
I will never understand why people think that all gamers are treated like shit by sexist, racist trolls, therefore women should shut up being harassed. Is that supposed to be a comfort? If that’s the case, then the culture is shitty. Making racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic or ableist remarks should never be acceptable. Even if they’re being said to someone not in the group the comment is denigrating. The answer is not for everyone to grow a thick skin. The answer is for gamers who fancy themselves social justice oriented (particularly if they belong to privileged groups) to call out the bigotry. Make this behavior socially unacceptable. Don’t call a person who is trying to change things arrogant and annoying and not a real gamer.
Groundpetrel, you are in serious need of some feminism 101. I don’t even know where to begin unpacking all the crap you just wrote.
Well there you go, you found the one who gets to be the “practically” in “practically unheard of”. Now shall we list the trans women who were murdered last year or something? C’mon.
GroundPetrel
Your experiences are not the default. How many times do I have to say this? Because you don’t see sexism, it doesn’t mean everyone else is okay with it too.
For fuck’s sake, dude. Read what other people have to say, please.
If you think that’s the only place you’re going to see sexism in games, you’ve got a big storm coming your way.
Sexism in games isn’t limited to the browser games that are overtly sexist. There’s also a thing called “subtle sexism”. They’re little micro-aggressions that occur in every day life.
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).
A handful of non-sexist games doesn’t mean that sexism is dead in the gaming industry. For fuck’s SAKE. A handful of good examples doesn’t mean that there’s still rotten apples in the barrel. Stop trying to make this argument.
The existence of some non-sexist games in the industry is not an excuse to stop seeing sexism in the industry as a whole, because it’s still fucking THERE.
How about you listen to people, women especially, who are actually pointing this out to you?
NO ONE IS MAKING THIS ARGUMENT THAT ALL GAMES ARE SEXIST EITHER.
It’s not a fucking zero-sum game! It’s not “all games are sexist” or “all games are not sexist”!
No one is making these straw-man arguments except YOU.
Anita Sarkeesian isn’t saying that “all games are sexist and therefore bad”. She’s not here to take our fucking games away, she’s just looking at them through a critical lens.
Why is this so hard for some people to grasp?
And why is it so hard for you to grasp that we don’t care if you don’t agree with Anita?
For fuck’s sake, I told you what I was having issue with, and here you are AGAIN, talking in circles! It’s not about you agreeing with Anita, it’s about you saying “I don’t see sexism, so it’s not there!”, and refusing to listen to anyone say otherwise!
Aw, shit. I finally got hit by the blockquote monster.
Damn you for making the blockquote disappear when I needed it! *shakes fist*
WWTH
All of this too!
HellKell – Thanks for illustrating that I cannot read the comments here, with that bullshit-assed gotcha. Have a nice fucking time ruling your TERFy roost. Peace forever.
Who are you again?
I’ve been following this blog for a long time as a mostly lurker, and I don’t think I’ve seen (in my cis privilege) any support for transphobia – people tend to use the pronouns that fit a person’s gender identity. I hope my reading has not been wrong, because I would be deeply disappointed too. The idea that trans women would not be allowed into female spaces “for safety” confuses me deeply, can I cannot help but draw the parallel of white-only spaces being justified by the same excuse. A cis man dressing as a woman to get into female spaces for harassment purposes is a plot point in sexist, poorly written “comedies”, not reality.
Fine. I’m wrong.
I have used very poor debating tactics, improperly generalized my own experiences as a representation of the entirety of a large industry, and failed to qualify and denote the exact extent of my opinion of Anita Sarkeesian.
I reacted badly to criticism and did not think before posting.
Frankly, I was an idiot, a fact of which my friends have just made me aware.
And I apologize.
@ Jennifer
I didn’t think that’s what you personally were saying, so I think we’re on the same page. What I’m getting at is that the fact that there are lots of people who do that is part of what leads to the reflexive irritation that some feminists show when the term “TERF” starts getting thrown around. On this site it particular there have been blowups about this in the past, and we had a former commenter who was firmly onboard the “cis lesbians who don’t like penises are transphobic bigots” train, so that’s the backstory here.
As exhibit A of why people need to stop flinging that term around every time there’s any disagreement or even discussion of trans issues, we now have Petrel calling a trans woman (hi again, Jennifer!) a TERF. Granted that this is partly because he’s a dumbass in general, but it’s an example of how these conversations tend to go, which is why a lot of people are trying to just avoid those conversations entirely.
@ Petrel
I didn’t think it was possible for you to make any more of an ass of yourself than you already had, but look at you, exceeding expectations!
I don’t think anyone here is transphobic. I’ve never heard anyone here say that trans women aren’t women, nobody here deliberately misgenders anyone, nobody uses t**nny as an insult. Anyone doing anything like this would be called out immediately and probably banned.
Thanks for the apology GroundPetrel. That’s well done.
Cassandra,
It wasn’t petrol who called Jennifer a TERF. It was Great American Satan. They just have similar colored avatar things.
mildlymagnificent, I may be (self-admittedly) young and stupid and with extremely limited experience (hell, I was homeschooled, and I wasn’t aware sexism was a thing until I was 12–long story involving my absurdly intelligent and awesome mother), but when my friends tell me I’m being an idiot, I’m being an idiot.
Eh, he apologized before and then went on to do whatever the hell happened in this thread, so I’m not holding my breath. Evil feminazi who is evil is me.
@hellkell – The Toronto Sun is only slightly better than the Daily Mail, so I’m taking everything in that article with a grain of salt. Assuming I take this article at face value, however, it clearly states that the individual in question is suffering from multiple delusions, and on further digging, this individual is under psychiatric care. I don’t know the full picture, but we cannot hold all trans people into account because one individual is both mentally ill and violent, any more than we can hold all people with delusions/psychosis to account for one person being violent.
@weirwoodtreehugger:
But, like it or not, we have a set of people that tend to be extremely uncharitable whenever transness comes up… Take hellkell’s post above as an example. I don’t have any right to be part of the conversation, being neither trans nor a woman, so I try to just stay out of it… but to me at least it doesn’t always seem like the friendliest of places.