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.”)
Slurs and misgendering aren’t the be all and end all of transmisogyny and transphobia, both of which have been displayed in this thread.
Yes. It sounds right. Once.
Now that you’ve absorbed that thought and put it out there, it’s your job to deal with it, nobody else’s. Explanations are good, but they only go so far. Now that you’ve admitted that to yourself and others, it’s your job to keep the awareness but also to keep it to yourself from now on. Explanations are not excuses.
If you put a foot wrong in further discussions online, you just apologise promptly and usually keep quiet for a while until you’ve thought the topic through a bit more. It’s easy to discuss afk with friends, but keep checking yourself about whether you’re using this explanation as an excuse for not learning more about the rest of the world and, especially, taking on board information or advice from others who are more knowledgeable or experienced than you are.
And read.
There are plenty of Feminism 101 sites.
My upstairs neighbors are lovely. The guy downstairs, though… He never comes out of his apartment (I’ve only ever seen him once; his back as he was going through his door), often has loud techno playing (which isn’t that bad because I can only really sorta hear the bass, but still), and occasionally does… something… which shakes practically the entire house at random intervals at 3am. Weights, maybe?
Well, most of the people where I normally come from like to whine that the Scimitar dreadnought is underpowered, which is like saying that a F-18 Hornet loaded with Hellfire missiles is underpowered compared to a pointy stick.
And then there’s Dental, who use Nazi imagery just to provoke people.
Going into the STO forums assuming that everybody you meet is going to be rational is like taking a megaphone in the middle of Mecca and calling the prophet Muhammad a pig.
I’m not used to not having to deal with trolls and blowhards on blogs and forums.
When the frat has parties in my dorm hall (since they don’t have a frat house), I can’t get to sleep until 3 AM.
In October, they had a gay pride party with rainbow togas that went until 5 AM. I had a chem midterm at 9 the next morning.
Not a good combination.
Upstairs neighbors are normally fine except for the heavy feet issue, but recently they’re banging around all the time and it’s making me grouchy (er, than usual).
kat
I thought I was keeping up pretty well. What I’ve noticed is a few missteps followed by withdrawals as well as a few misreadings or missing context or quotes. Maybe a bit clumsier than usual, made me reread a bit, but nothing set off my blaring sirens.
Not to say that I haven’t missed something, of course.
Ah, neighbors. My Downstairs likes to collect trash and leave it on my doorstep, and my Upstairs spent yesterday alternating between being violently ill to the point of crying and having very loud sex.
As stressful as last-minute-packing is, I am pretty excited to be moving out on Monday.
Why? Is your neighbor a cat, and this is their version of leaving you a dead rodent as a gift?
Aahaha, Cassandra–I wish he was a cat. He’s just a creepy dude who have lived in the complex since it was built and thinks of himself as “the mayor” (his words, not mine) of the place. He decided he didn’t like me and my husband when we moved in, so we get lovely trash presents a couple of times a week–whatever he picks up from the courtyard.
Cripes. Whatta heel.
What a very strange individual. Suddenly my neighbors with the stompy feet don’t seem so bad.
(Though if they could stop hoovering at odd hours that would be nice.)
Wow. That sucks. Any chance you could get someone to do something about it?
I can’t believe I read the whole thread.
And yet you’re still here.
Paradoxial: Len Solomon, creator and player of that instrument (the Bellowphone) is a very entertaining fellow. And that’s not the only instrument to his credit:
The Oomphalapompatronium (which is just fun to say):
and whatever this is (I couldn’t find a name, but it’s obviously an enhanced homebrew callope):
A musical instrument with a name that sounds like an oompa loompa. I’ll be damned.
Yeah, I wish this place had a setting between “immediately dismissive of any opinion disagreeing with a trans person” and “immediately dismissive of trans issues,” but it is a chimerical hope.
The comments about people using TERFs as a term to shame cis lesbians for not wanting to sleep with trans women with penises is referring to a specific argument that was had with a former commenter. Basically, no one here is fond of the idea that not being sexually attracted to another person makes you a bigot, especially when the “examine your preferences!” line is often used coercively against women (though, as was agreed, usually be men, not be trans women). So, that’s the context for those comments, which I can understand look pretty transphobic without it.
Anyway, HellKell, what was the point of sharing that article? To demonstrate that trans women shouldn’t be allowed to use women’s bathrooms or something Because given the statistics, I’d say that trans women who are obviously in transition but can’t yet pass as cis women are at a much higher risk for being assaulted by men when using the men’s bathroom than cis women are to be assaulted by cis men pretending to be trans women.
We are moving out by Monday, so Creepy Downstairs won’t be an issue then, thankfully.
And I am going to hop off and go to bed. Hunky Husband and MST3K: Gamera vs. Gaos is calling my naaaaame.
Seconding this.
Well put.
We don’t need super-finely calibrated subtlety informing ultra-informed analytical mastery of delicately refined sensibilities, but some freedom and a bit of nuance would be nice.
Ah, a classic. Fine taste, there.
Godzilla: Final Wars is the best kaiju film, though.
Although, there is a lot to be said for Pacific Rim. Especially the part where Mori beats up Beckett. Bo-staff fighting makes my inner 9-year-old go squeee.
Oh, and funny thing about Godzilla…predatory birds and reptiles, in fact most birds and reptiles, have larger and scarier females than males. (a male great horned owl might be able to take down a cat, but a female can kill a decent-sized dog with ease and still be ornery enough to rip the face off of an incautious human with one swipe of her talons, for example) Which implies that Mrs. Godzilla is even larger, cooler, and more powerful than Godzilla himself.
And since I think Godzilla has a son in one of the movies, Mrs. Godzilla must exist.
And that is an awesome thought.
It’s usually my downstairs neighbors that make noise. This time it’s next door. I never hear any noise from there so hopefully they will quiet down when it gets later. But it’s really, really loud right now. In addition to the loud music, they’re yelling and cheering. In fact, I know it’s a birthday party because I heard a bunch of people sing happy birthday followed by whooing. It’s 10 on a Friday night so I don’t want to get pissy yet. But I hope they don’t carry on like this until 3 in the morning.
Mkay… I think I read the whole thread… and I still have no idea what’s going on here.
Nice apology, GroundPetrel. At the risk of sounding condescending, please try not to need another. You seem like your heart’s in the right place, and it would be too bad if your pride got in the way of that.
If we’re going to do TERF again, I’m going to need more chocolate ice cream. A LOT more. And maybe booze.
Cassandrakitty, please don’t go be someone else’s resident meanie. I appreciate your honesty. Also, you mostly use your powers for good (which is more than I can say for the clinical fellow who made me go to work at 0200h yesterday).
Sleep deprivation may clouding my judgement here.
And nthing what Katz said. I don’t know why things always escalate immediately around here.
Jumping on the katz is cool bandwagon, here.
Hope your neighbours wind it down, soon, WWTH.