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.”)
Whoa. I stop paying attention and Threadmageddon happens.
I’m just going to try and sift through this later, because I have no clue what is going on here anymore.
I don’t think David or the vast majority of the folks on here support transphobia, and obvious stuff like misgendering gets called out really quickly.
I hope you all can sort it, but I’ve got stuff to do and so I’m running away for now.
Ah, at least he’s somewhat less ridiculous than I thought. Still not down with him having tantrums like this, though. It should not have taken this many pages for him to back down and stop being aggressively unwilling to listen.
@cassandrakitty:
He’s young. I guess we’ll have to see whether he learns anything from this.
Oh, ninja’d by WWTH.
Also, Kirby does have a bit of a point, and I should shut up now… Because I don’t have enough of a clue about what’s actually going on, right now.
Thanks, GroundPetrel. I really want to like you, because your username makes me think of Space Oddity and I love that song.
…especially the Seu Jorge cover.
…and now it is time to listen to that on repeat.
Also, in that case, Great American Satan – why did you just call a trans woman a TERF? If that was an attempt to be an ally it strikes me as Doing It Wrong.
GroundPetrel. Now I’m going to go all nagging grandmotherly on you.
Thick skin. Christ on a bicycle. You’re a bloke and you’re only 18. Please don’t ever say anything like this again — ever — when you’re in a discussion with a lot of women. Preferably don’t say this sort of shit anywhere.
Some of us have thick skins. Many of us also have a history with men who’ve not only threatened but actually carried out real physical or sexual violence against us. We’re not the majority of women but, when you get people like me over 60, it’s approximately a third of that group of women when you add up the victims/survivors of physical and sexual violence. (Not all rape victims have suffered other physical violence, not all intimate partner violence victims have been raped.)
Don’t do it.
I haven’t seen it and I don’t want to believe it is no substitute for facts. People have been claiming for years that men don’t do this and that that in spite of overwhelming evidence that men do indeed do that on a regular basis. I don’t understand why peeps cling to denial like that and if you puncture their bubble with a factoid they flounce in rage.
While I am at it I should also point out how disingenuous I find it to compare the violence against Trans women with the violence against “cis people”. I see what you did there. The aboriginal women and Native American community called and said WTF?
@Great American Satan: I don’t understand you. I know TERF means Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. To reiterate, I said others were saying it gets used too much by MRAs as a sort of “check mate” against feminism, and others may use term against those who aren’t actually trans-exclusionary, merely perceived to be. I hope none of your anger was directed against me; I’m a proud transwomen and a proud trans* activist.
I agree the whole “secret trans rapist” is beyond wrong. I’m not saying it’s an acceptable position, and it’s one we should be educate others on.
I’m not making a very good first impression here…especially on being ninja’d…
Also, for the record, lack of experience isn’t generally going to be a problem on this blog. It’s the aggression, refusal to listen, doubling down, and general lack of understanding of how communities work that’s making me go “nope, bye now”.
(That was directed at Petrel, btw.)
@mildlymagnificent: Yeah, my friend just called me out on that, too.
I think it’s because I was raised relatively isolated from social stupidity (most of my knowledge comes from books, and my mom was quite insistent about teaching me that everybody is equal early on); I can’t really comprehend it since I’ve only experienced it since I was 16 and got into video games and the Internet.
I’ve been reading this thread on and off for the past few hours, I’m just going to bed now at 3am because insomnia, and I can’t figure out if the last couple pages have made me more tired or more stressed. Seriously, just reading them felt like a battle. Anyway, Ground, glad you apologised but like has been said, next time please just listen and absorb what’s being said to you. We’re a reasonable bunch, honest.
Look, since I seem to be the official meanie at the moment I’m just going to go ahead and point this out. “Social stupidity”? Is the way you’ve been behaving right here. You are getting up people’s noses not just because some of the things you’re saying are ill informed, but because of the way you’re approaching those disagreements.
(Please note – I’m not saying that people who want to hold this dude’s hand and try to help him grow and learn and all that shouldn’t do so, I’m just saying I’m not gonna. If I’d wanted kids I would have had some, and they’d be better behaved than this.)
I meant to say thanks for the apology. Again, 3am.
Sounds like you have at least one friend who can offer useful food for thought.
It doesn’t matter how you got to where you are now. What matters is how you choose to go on. The better way is to listen to reliable people who are more informed or experienced than you are at the time. The real trick here is to be good at deciding who is and who isn’t reliable.
If you come up with a foolproof formula for that, you should bottle it and sell it. You could make your fortune.
(In other words, reliable people need to be treated with a bit of caution also, just not as much as people you don’t know at all or people who are obviously unreliable.)
^^^ THIS
They didn’t call her a TERF.
@cassandrakitty:
You may be the official meanie, but you’re our official meanie. 🙂
Threads like this one make me want to go be someplace else’s official meanie, honestly.
I don’t think cassandrakitty’s a meanie at all.
Everyone has limits and people who’re oblivious — regardless of how or why they are that way — can step on toes. There’s nothing wrong with saying you don’t want to dance with someone who’s stepped on your toes once too often.
Alright, I think I see the main issue from root causes.
I have little experience in the world, and most of it revolves around environments where if someone criticizes you they’re either stupid or a jerk, and rational debate is a pipe dream. This is not one of those environments.
My thought processes revolve around “everyone is equal” and for more than a decade and a half my world was one where the only woman I knew was normally the more intelligent, better educated person than the only man I knew. I find outright misogyny like the MRA shit disgusting but do not understand unconscious biases that I have.
On top of that I’ve just survived my first semester of being drop-kicked into the world of knowing dozens of people in real life, and am beginning a new one.
In a nutshell I’m young, stupid, and don’t really understand how society can be as sexist as it is.
Does that sound right?
I’d say that the assumption that anyone who criticizes you is either stupid or a jerk in any environment is part of the problem.
Why do my neighbors have such a knack for choosing the weekend I’m sick to have a party? Every damn time. I just hope it doesn’t go late.
Mine seem to have been doing some sort of construction directly overhead for the past few days, which is just lovely when you have a headache. Also it’s amazing how some people manage to sound like an entire football team’s worth of people when they climb stairs. Why so much stomping? Has the staircase offended them in some way?