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.”)
Signing off now, it’s vvvv late.
Generally, I wish this would be a topic we treat the same as religion. We know that people here are on several very different sides when it comes to religion, and since we don’t want to hurt people, it isn’t discussed (it can be mentioned, but not critically discussed). I also know that this is really hard for some people, so I don’t know if it’s possible.
http://imagesofrmnp.com/images/large/Mr.%20Bobcat.jpg
friday jones. So sorry about your mum. This year’s got to be better, surely.
I feel lucky that my mum’s still going well, 90 next month, but with every year that passes you know it’s getting more and more likely. All I hope is that it’s not on an important birthday or something.
When dad died and we were arranging the funeral for the Friday of that week, I simply couldn’t bring myself to point out that the chosen day was my wedding anniversary. So every anniversary now has that niggling reminder that it was dad’s funeral day.
My mother’s birthday was on a major public holiday. Every year everyone else is celebrating and asking me what I’m doing, and “being depressed” always seems like such an inappropriate response that I just try to duck the questions.
Hi Tracy!
Oh that lynx (bobcat?). So beautiful!
All people need to do is stop arguing with people that aren’t here on the forum. Got gripes against trans people who try to force women to have sex with them? Understandable, but those trans people aren’t here, and there’s no good to come out of bringing them up at all save to make trans folks feel they have to be defensive. Got issues with trans-exclusionary feminists? Again, understandable, but those people aren’t here and they aren’t welcome here. Bringing them up only makes people feel like they need to be defensive.
That’s the cause of every meltdown I’ve seen; people arguing against people who aren’t here, making others feel like they have to answer for them or otherwise feel guilty for them. Argue against the things people bring up here, or don’t bring them up at all unless they’re directly relevent to the topic. That’d be the number one rule I’d put in place if this were my blog…
*sigh* Anyway…
Friday, the lyre sounds really pretty. 🙂
Really sorry to hear about your mom.
And yours too, Cassandra, even if it was 20 years ago.
May 2015 be a better year all around!
I haven’t commented much, but I’ve been around for a while. And honestly, I’m disappointed with the community today. This absolutely does not read as a trans-friendly space.
(Apologies for lack of specifics, this thread is huge and I didn’t take notes.
The overall impression I’ve had catching up with this thread is that its fine to have issues with the use of TERF because of past experience/how some people use it, but it isn’t okay to have issues with non-cis community defining terms and saying what you can and cannot say to describe your oppression because of past experience.
Some people on this thread have been strongly invoking the trans-women as weird men/not quite women/secret rapist tropes. You don’t need slurs to be oppressive.
Puddleglum, I am hugely offended that you think that this topic should just be avoided as if it was religion or an academic argument. Like Friday Jones said, this is people’s lives. Apparently the transmisogny (not sure why I can’t spell that) that effects peoples lives just as much as plain sexism. is off limits because it might offend someone
None of you would stand for someone saying, ‘well, I don’t believe women should have the same rights as men, but I would never condone death threats or abuse’. But that is basically what I have seen today towards the trans community.
Come on, guys. Your better than this.
LurkingFish, thanks for coming in and bayonetting the wounded.
Looks at typos, cringes.
One of the reasons I don’t often comment is that I seem to lose all editing ability in this format.
You’re having a go at Puddleglum of all people, LurkingFish?
It’s fun to wait till a thread calms down and try to stir shit back up apparently.
I am genuinely baffled as to why, of all the things said in this thread, Puddleglum’s comment would strike anyone as the most logical thing to be angry about.
As well as offering a suggestion, there is also a fine picture of a bobcat. I know it is a bobcat because I moused over the picture to see what type of cat it is.
Are bobcats tameable?
The old “didn’t read entire thread before jumping in” thing, maybe? Not that that explains having a go at Puddleglum’s comment.
I’m still seeing a lot of fallout from AllyS’ departure following her arguments that cis lesbians not wanting to sleep with trans women might be subconsciously transmisogynistic, making every issue specifically about transmisogyny (even stuff like abortion rights), and downgrading the plight of trans men. However, she’s not here anymore, and none of the other trans women commenters here do things like that. Using the rhetoric that were aimed at her arguments and behavior against them is blatantly unfair and does look transphobic because they’ve done nothing to warrant it. For example, explaining to AllyS that some trans women whom certain mammotheers have known have, in the past, used the argument that cis lesbians not wanting to have sex with trans women (or at least those who still have male genitalia) is transphobic in order to pressure the cis lesbians into having sex helped demonstrate why telling cis lesbians to examine their preferences (or why, indeed, telling anyone to examine their preferences) is troubling and deeply problematic, even if the person telling others to examine their preferences isn’t trying to be sexually coercive.
However, telling other trans women commenting here, who’ve never complained about the so-called “cotton ceiling,” (still don’t know if Cathy Brennan coined the term or not because that was also a point of controversy) to stop using the word TERF because it’s used in an effort to shame cis lesbians into having sex? Of course that looks transphobic as hell. Of course that makes those commenters feel unwelcome. They feel like they’re unfairly and transmisogynistically being targeted as potential rapists for labeling actual trans-exclusionary radical feminists as TERFs because they likely don’t know the context for those objections to the TERF label because they never argued that not wanting to have sex with trans women was bigoted and because focusing heavily on the idea that certain trans women are potential rapists (something that’s also true for every other gender/sex out there, including cis women) seems to be embracing the dominant perception of trans women, which is that they are mentally ill men trying to trick straight men into sleeping with them or trying to sneak into cis women-only spaces in order to commit rape. Because this is the way that so many Americans still view trans women, there’s a reason that claiming that you weren’t referring to all trans women when you said that doesn’t excuse focusing really heavily on trans women who are rapists when no one provoked you into bringing up the topic (aside from one person asking what a TERF was and that person being told that it was a pejorative for women who dared to say “no”) in the first place.
And yes, I know that we can talk about cis men who are rapists and assume that everyone knows that we’re not talking about all cis men. That’s because, unlike the prevalent image of trans women, the most prevalent image of cis men isn’t of deviant sexual predators, whatever the MRAs might claim. Seriously, asking why we can’t keep stressing that some trans women are rapists to trans women who are protesting at being characterized as potential rapists is like asking why we can’t keep stressing that black men sometimes shoot white police officers. Sure, you can bring up trans women who are rapists, but it should be relevant to the conversation (e.g. as it was in the conversation with AllyS but which it wasn’t when someone asked what a TERF was) because, as Kirbywarp said, we should try not to argue against people who aren’t commenting here or the subject of the OP, or it should at least be talked about in a more conscientious manner. Commenters talking about trans women who are rapists do need to make it clear that they’re not talking about all trans women because, for so many people, that’s what all trans women.
alaisvex, for what it’s worth, I realise I didn’t phrase it well to begin with, but I have since said repeatedly that neither I nor anyone else here is saying ALL trans women or a majority or anything like that.
This came about, in this thread, from one simple thing: the term TERF being used, a request not to use it, and an explanation of why.
Kittehs, for what it’s worth, I realize that you meant well and don’t think that you, or anyone else here for that matter, is transphobic or transmisogynistic. Mainly, I feel like the stuff that happened with Ally while I was still lurking really poisoned the well here, which isn’t at all surprising, really.
It has been said before, in this exact thread even, that this is not the entire problem with use of the acronym TERF:
It’s any use of the fucking acronym, irrespective of the user’s gender identity/identities.
It did, alaisvex, it did.
I know that, pallygirl. However, it seemed that trans women who commented here objected to that explanation of why it was problematic most because it seemed to paint them as potential rapists. Not to the other explanations.
But like you said, that’s not how you meant that explanation to sound, and it’s been explained that you really didn’t mean all trans women or even more than a small minority of trans women.
Can we talk about sea monkeys now?
Talking about sea monkeys sounds like an excellent idea.
Do you think sea monkeys would be improved by the addition of peanut butter and chocolate?