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.”)
I actually bought men’s shorts a while back because no one makes cargo shorts for women in a size bigger than 12. I am sure that gets me misandry points.
@Kim,
*le gasp* And you probably unfairly appropriated men’s pocket privileges too!
…I’ve worn a glorified kimono for about a week straight now, I’ve never seen my lesbian friend in anything but shorts or long pants (depending on the weather), and my (male) roommate wears a plaid skirt all the time. He says it’s cultural. I say he’s not Scottish. He says that everybody’s Scottish at heart. I say he’s full of it. He says “Oh, yeah. Of course. Doesn’t mean I’ll stop using that excuse.”
Gender roles are another thing I have trouble understanding.
Tessa, your typo was appropriate though! If you’re afraid of upskirts in your game, why not design climbing girls with appropriate attire for climbing?
It’s hard to upskirt climbing pants and rappelling harnesses, I’d imagine.
Anyway…
Back from mission no. 1 of the evening, and I must admit to really, really, really hating the vibra-alerts on Scott SCBAs (Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus for firefighting)
We all ran down a pack tonight, just to experience the feel in a non-IDLH (immediate danger to life and health) environment. I was fine until the vibra-alert started going off at a quarter of a tank, and then my head went “Nope!”
It’s like being trapped in a fish tank and having metallica’s bored drummer on the outside, beating up a storm, right in front of your nose, because he’s a jerk with nothing else to do.
I still behaved and got through the bottle, but not fun. The first ‘breath’ where there’s no air is also not fun.
Fun until then, and I like the vibra-alert because I’ll like living later, but not fun when you get to that monster at 1/4 tank.
On to mission 2.
I’m trying to imagine what would have happened in the development meeting if someone had suggested putting the female character in shorts instead of a miniskirt.
You’re so cool, contrapangloss!
Spontaneous combustion?
Random aliens?
Sharknado attack?
I dunno, just throwing out ideas here. I don’t know what would happen if someone suggested short instead of a skirt. It might offend someone’s Scottish (or pretend Scottish) sensibilities?
@cass
It’d be a bit like that scene from Scanners, I’d assume.
I mean, I know a woman who climbed mountains in skirts (I believe she had servants carrying the packs), but she was, in almost every way that exists, an outlier.
“But what’s the point of making the character a girl if people can’t see her panties? I don’t understand.”
I climbed every available tree, rock and vaguely stable rubble pile throughout my childhood, so he can go fall on a pile of legos. Did it maybe occur to him to write the code so as to not allow upskirting? No? No, of course not.
I hate to jump in as things seem to have calmed down, but I went out of my way to explain the whys and wherefores of what was so troubling and problematic in GroundPetrel’s last couple of ragewanks, and I’m not impressed with tonight’s performance.
Of course it’s not up to me or anything, but for my part I’d like to make it really explicit that the whole “dur, I’m just a stoopid guy!” and the related “I know you’ve all been saying that I’ve been going overboard and acting like an ass for the last two pages, but someone else just told me that I was being a jerk so I’m going to apologize because *they* told me so, not because any of you have said repeatedly that I’m chewing on my knees and rapidly heading for the thigh” are leaving me unconvinced that he gets just how inappropriate he was being. This impression is heightened by that “Does that sound right?” at the end of the most recent apology, because it gives me the sense that he’s apologizing more for the form of it than out of a sense that he knows or admits he was acting inappropriately.
GroundPetrel, I’m glad you have friends willing to look over your shoulder and let you know when you are acting like an ass, but you really need to consider listening to people here, too. Several times you’ve had people generously willing to hold your hand and explain all this to you, but you are pretty close to using up all the available goodwill.
@Cassandra,
Something like this?
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/Lost
Fuck! That was supposed to be an image of someone being thrown out of a window, not the tv tropes page for Lost.
What’s the point of making a dude if I can’t see his rippling pecs and hear his rich, Takei-esque baritone, and see his briefs straining to contain his genitalia, all ready for me to…
Uh, yeah. Um. I’m straight but I can see the appeal of George Takei in nothing but briefs.
But it’d be pretty hard to play a video game with that as the character, it’s better to make them look nice but professional. Same reason you don’t put ’em in neon colors and bizarre patterns.
Anyway, having caught up on that right royal clusterfuck…
1. What the hell.
2. Still not entirely sure what all those people were trying to do, but at least Satan gave us a perfect example of “TERF” being used as an insult against any and all feminists, regardless of whether or not they’re actually trans-exclusionary, to confirm why some people around here get twitchy about the term. Like one of those high school performance art plays that explain concepts to kids (while confusing, embarrassing and annoying said kids).
3. If they really had lurked as much as they claimed, they’d know that we have pretty much every possible combination of sexualities and gender identities around here, that we regularly call out, boot out and ban transphobes, and that there’s an entire tag just for posts about transphobia. Yeah, I’m calling BS on the “Regular good-faith lurker” stuff.
4. What the hell
… Aaand back to stuff that has nothing to do with that.
Aaaaand THIS is the reason that so many women “don’t wear skirts anymore”. A gay friend and I were discussing this on Facebook the other day — he mentioned that he hears (straight) guys moaning about that all the time. Oh to be able to give those guys a collective smack upside the head, figuratively speaking, and tell them that WE DO NOT OWE THEM SKIRTS (or a nonconsensual look at the territory that’s up in there, either).
PS: Mang, did this thread blow up, or what? Yeesh.
Missed a full stop in there, oops.
I protect myself from upskirting creeps via the tights of misandry.
Leggings! Bike shorts! Ugly old bloomers! Misandry!
That’s it, put the character in bike shorts. Good luck taking an upskirt photo of someone with those on, dudes.
Was it in the 90’s that girls regularly wore bike shorts under their skirts? Debbie Gibson, Tiffany era.
Leggings aren’t misandric. Seriously, imagine Brad Pitt, in his “Troy” glory days, in tights.
I’m heterosexual (at least, mostly), but I’d definitely be attracted to that.
Oh, and David Tennant, as Casanova (his first really big role), in bike shorts. I think the concentrated sexy would cause a black hole big enough to eat Earth.
…and now I know I need to sleep, because I’m starting to fantasize about David Tennant.
As a modeler, you get to decide what actually goes on in the model’s crotch area. Just put in a dark plane or something, it isn’t that hard. It’s not like you’re trying to create a perfect imitation of the human form here, and you aren’t supposed to look there anyway.
One of the many reasons my mind is boggling at this guy’s logic.
Just for laughs, this is supposed to be a serious product for sale but it just looks like a ridiculous IRL role-reversal of women’s clothing in games:
Linked because man-nipples.
Just in case I haven’t said it enough already: What the hell?
Night, Al. Don’t come back tomorrow.