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.”)
@ M
That garment confuses me. Where would it be hot enough to walk around with your torso exposed but your head would be cold enough that you’d want a hood? It’s the shirt version of open-toe boots.
Anyway, my rule of thumb for not sexualizing characters (male or female) is:
1. If it’s a sci-fi setting, and a uniform is available, use that. Full cover is preferred since most of my characters see combat or muck around in engineering or need a lab coat for the pockets.
2. If armor’s available, wear the heaviest possible (this is mandatory in fantasy for simple protective reasons, and I have a lot of optional costumes in STO that use Klingon Honor Guard armor or Dyson armor because the Dyson armor looks awesome and my main is petite and wiry enough to wear the Honor Guard outfit well (it tends to make large characters, especially Gorn, look fat; slender characters just look super badass)).
3. No skirts in a military setting.
4. No cleavage in a military setting. That’s a surefire way to get hit in a vital organ.
5. I won’t play a game where female armor bares the midriff. Again, vital organs.
6. Check the bust slider and put it in a realistic range (for games with a comic-book feel and style, use the low end, for other games, use the middle or low range).
7. On a male, check the shoulder to hip ratio. If his shoulders are twice the width of his hips or more, stop playing and find something better.
It’s worked for me so far.
The trolls just can’t stay away no matter how many times the banhammer comes down on them. I still think Mikey DIRECTLY ON THE BEACH wins troll of the year 2014, but nice try Al.
Mikey wins for the 18 year old SPINSTER thing alone. Bad luck, other trolls.
Gillyrosebee,
The fact that a couple of us have expressed a reluctance to accept the apology right away and a desire for him to back off and do some feminism 101 research and he’s already commenting again like nothing happened? Kind of making me uncomfortable. Maybe that’s just me, but I think if I upset everybody here, I’d probably want to give everyone some space for a few days. If even one regular wanted me to do so, I would. I really think there’s some boundary issues.
@GP,
For number 7, in most cases, men aren’t given really broad shoulders to sexualize; they’re given really broad shoulders to make them appear stronger. The shoulders aren’t for any straight women who might be playing the game; they’re for the men playing the game who want to play as a super-strong, buff dude.
Al? Am I missing something here?
@M. and it looks like that outfit bunches up uncomfortablely into the armpit.
I’m now being reminded of the Zoolander derelicte clothes.
(holy crap it’s 1 AM)
Really?
Huh, I’d assumed that that was equal-opportunity eye candy.
That…kind of makes me rethink a lot of things.
I mean, I personally made Hunky McHunkerson specifically as eye candy for my female buddies when we’re on a team (and Hunky’s in his trunks inexplicably surviving a point-blank shot to the face with a plasma blast), but…
That makes a lot of sense. And if so…
Well, I never really considered that a guy would have a pathetic enough lack of ego to play such a character to stroke his ego, but that does make me rethink a lot.
I’ll sleep on it. It’s 1 AM anyway, I need the rest.
Some of us are entertaining the possibility that this fresh face is one of Als many faces. He is dropping easter eggs all over the thread.
Who’s Al? I think that one was before my time.
Mr. Al? I’ve heard his name mentioned before, but didn’t ever encounter him. Is GP behaving like him?
It’s doesn’t even have to be close to that. Playing a powerful character is fun, at least for me (and I definitely don’t have a fragile ego).
You don’t even need to worry about why. Just know that that’s the intention.
Where’s Orkin when you need them?
Yeah, it’s not really to boost fragile egos. It’s just that it’s fun to play super-powered and super-strong characters. I daydream about having superpowers sometimes myself.
And who’s Orkin?
Someone else who saw Casanova with David Tennant!! And yes, he was gorgeous in it. (cis/het/female here) And yes, he was adorable in it!
I mostly lurk, but after reading this whole thread in go (ouch) I want to second the “boundary issues / thing that’s making me uncomfortable”.
This got mostly buried in the flood of other problematic things but they way he couldn’t resist the opportunity to, once again, use a ableist word is disquieting.
Yeah, it was used as an example. But if multiple people asked you to stop using that term altogether? Then why use it again? And with a bonus “my definition of it is different then the common boring one (that everybody else knows) so it wasn’t like I was really in the wrong”.
Yeah, GP is acting exactly like Mr Al.
Take note, GP: whether you’re a sockpuppet or not, you’ve worn out your welcome with this stream of trollish stuff, (not least since you’ve been told repeatedly to knock it off) and I’ve contacted David.
If this is Mr. Al, I’d be seriously impressed. When was the last substantiated sighting of one of his socks, anyway? I don’t remember him ever trying to ape an ally.
Orkin are the pest control people. If you have an infestation, that’s who you call! Sadly they don’t do trolls.
It’s just creepy that we’re discussing him and he’s completely ignoring it to talk about video games.
Does this Al character go to such elaborate lengths to come back, creating a whole persona and adding regular comments with troll comments?
I actually did find STO to be a fairly positive experience, so you’re probably in one of the better online environments. However, have you noticed that only women have skirts? Even though canonically, Scotty wore a kilt as part of his dress uniform? And TNG had the skants, too. But for some reason those are not included in the game, or at least, they weren’t when I stopped playing.
Most of the time, the competence issue isn’t an overt bias. You’ll just be taken a bit less seriously than others saying the same thing as you. You’ll say something, then someone else will repeat it, and the idea will be attributed to the man who repeated it, not to you. This also happens in the working world quite frequently. Most of us are used to it; if you try to insist on attribution you end up being written off as the B-word and I personally don’t usually find it worth it. However, the downside is that I feel like I’ve missed out on career opportunities because for so long I wasn’t given any credit for my ideas.
To be totally fair about miniskirts, I played tennis as a student and the skirts really were much, much more comfortable than the shorts. You just wore appropriate underthings (called grundies, they were quite like swimsuit bottoms) underneath, that’s all. Tight miniskirts would be silly for most activity, but tennis-style skirts are really nice. One of the things men are missing out on, but I suppose my saying that is misandry.
Re: the shoulders thing. This is correct; wide shoulders are a power fantasy for men, not a sex fantasy for women. Women generally (though obviously, not always; tastes SIGNIFICANTLY vary and there is no female hivemind) prefer leaner men without massive muscles. You should do some research on that, actually, it’s quite interesting. There’s some very good stuff out there on false equivalence in sexualization.
Nightwing is one of the few male comic book characters routinely given the female-gaze treatment, and he’s one of the leaner characters, compared to the ultra-exaggerated male physiques of others.
One of his socks once almost won troll of the year. If he’d apply the same tenacity to something less creepy he’d be a millionaire.
GP:
Generally speaking, when companies asked women and made male characters to attract women, you get a character like Nathan Drake, or in japan the bishonen character modeled after Camui Gackt.