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.”)
Nice try, hotshot. I have a doctorate in conniving self justification. If you are just talking about yourself as a way of establishing context, why the: “the people I appreciate” or “those who hate me” or the “all the examples of me in this thread are misrepresentations but I won’t talk about them” or the “we should only discuss this if it’s a happy happy discussion but here’s my opinion but let’s only talk about it if we can be positive”?
Them’s not the actions of an open hand.
I agree with Katz and Kirbywarp earlier here, by the by. Three times is a pattern, and all that, and I’m also very well aware that it’s true that some versions of in-group regular bias is slowly showing. All thar is true. And sad and sucks. Noadi and AltoFronto are right there.
But dear gott im himmel, you don’t get to walk in here and make this all about you just having and opinion despite all the badwrong people who hate you or misrepresent you that you don’t appreciate and send no love. Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
O
O
O
O
Ooooooooooooo. No.
A simple fucking: “we all disagreed last time, ad I hope you are all well. Here’s what TERF and stuff actually is” would have done fine.
My hackles are so far up that I think they’ve torn free from my frame and are orbiting the planet.
Fibi fucking finished.
Ok, I realize that those remarks were unnecessary and inflammatory. I’m sorry.
Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective and I’m going to mentally filter out the accidental jabs that I choose to believe are an expression of exasperated frustration from now on.
Anyhow, I think the topic is mostly done, anyway.
Give it a week or two to cool.
@Ally S
It is really good to see you here again! I just wish it was under better circumstance. Your voice has been missed though.
I don’t really know what to say about this thread-I’m speechless.
Hi Ally,
I hadn’t delurked when you left, so I just wanted an opportunity to say thanks “in person” for the insight you brought to the thread. Your deep reading helped me find holes in my own analysis and your approach had a big influence on me.
I wish you all the best and hope you stay well, happy and lucky.
This thread was so fucking confusing on so many levels. Christ.
If anyone who’s leaving, or for that matter who isn’t, wants to shoot the proverbial shit offsite, I’ve set up another forwarding email address: [email protected]. (I always let these expire before anyone uses them but maybe this time will be different.) Or you can bug me on Twitter @gwenckatz.
And Fibinachi, definitely email me because we still have a game to write!
Folks. I’m aware that this thread has raised a number of issues that I need to deal with. Unfortunately, due to some issues of my own (including migraine and internet connectivity problems), I haven’t read enough of the thread to be able to make sense of what’s going on much less decide on a course of action here. So bear with me as I try to catch up. And if any of you have concerns that you’d rather not discuss in public, feel free to email me with your thoughts; I will of course keep all these emails private. [email protected]
Cassandrakitty:
Lawyer checking in. I’ll take a look at the new update and post in this thread again if I find any cause for concern.
Take care, David.
Hi Diogenes
Not sure if you’re based in the US but I’m a barrister here in England. Interesting comments on the most recent article about the limits of free speech versus harassment.. If you fancy getting together to bash out an article comparing the jurisdictions let me know. Folks might find it interesting (well, if you edit my ramblings :-))
Dvärghundspossen,
Goodbye. I’m very sorry to see you go.
Trying again
Dvärghundspossen,
Goodbye. I’m very sorry to see you go.
Agreed. I’m not comfortable with TERFs being welcome here.
Hi, Ally! Miss seeing you around.
Lea
I just went a loooooong way back into the depths of the thread, got to read all the way through my depressingly optimistic schooling of someone who was always going to end up being banned. Along with all the “What the …!” comments about this issue that were going on at the same time. And I still find myself all at sea. I was mystified then and I still am now. (Though I admit I haven’t clicked on links so perhaps what I’m looking for isn’t even on the pages I’m reading.)
A couple of people got really steamed up over a couple of missteps by others. I understood most of it and how people got some things wrong, but at times the people who were offended seemed to be seeing code-talk or hearing dog whistles that I wasn’t getting … and then presuming that everyone else supported or agreed with both the bad notions (most of which I thought were apologised for) and also agreeing with their personal interpretations of ambiguous or wrongly addressed stuff which neither they nor anyone else had explicated. Maybe something/ someone tripped a switch and they were reading everything through a swirling red haze of anger and fear.
I’d also be very unhappy with TERFs being welcome here, and any other transphobic person for that matter. I don’t envy David trying to read through the whole thread and work out if there’s anything he can do to deal with it or to prevent future break outs.
In case anyone is confused about why I got angry, it was when a mod here linked to a transphobic hate site that bills itself as:
An introduction to “transgender” identity politics for rational leftists
Fear quotes included in original. A site where trans activism is depicted as a threat to women, and where trans activist jargon is rebranded as alleged hate speech.
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/01/16/the-new-statesmans-margaret-corvid-on-the-ways-misogyny-restricts-male-sexuality/comment-page-2/#comment-689775
That was where my skin crawled and I felt surrounded by enemies for a few minutes.
Ally, if you’re still around, it’s good to see you again! I hope you are doing well.
damn you blockquote monster!
To Friday Jones: Not to mention the very same moderator (who used to be a regular commenter at Feministe) linking to the Gender Minefield blog — which belongs to one of the tiny handful of trans women (and I mean tiny) who are TERF apologists, purporting to agree with them in insisting that all trans women are really “male” — because it’s so validating to be a TERF pet and have them pat you on the head and say “good boy”! — and giving that blog as an example of a trans woman she approves of. Which is pretty much like pointing to Clarence Thomas as an example of a black man who really gets it.
And no, “TERF” isn’t a slur invented by trans women; just ask tigtog of Feministe and hoydenabouttown, who invented the term
And no, you can’t pretend that TERFism is any better by calling it “gender-critical feminism”; see this analysis:
http://www.transadvocate.com/gender-critical-feminism-the-roots-of-radical-feminism-and-trans-oppression_n_14766.htm
And no; people here shouldn’t be getting away with blathering essentialist nonsense about “biological” sex being a fixed and immutable binary, or trans women being women but not entitled to be considered female. Even if that’s what anyone believes, and they think they’re being a brutally honest, brave truth-teller, they should remember that people who feel self-satisfied about their brutal honesty are usually far more interested in brutality than in honesty.
Don’t these people realize that by engaging in this kind of rhetoric, you’re doing EXACTLY what MRAs do? That MRAs (trumpeting their proud “realism” and “skepticism”) are one of the three members of their own little transphobic Axis of Evil, along with TERFs and the religious right? A fine group of allies they’ve chosen.
But in any event, that sort of essentialist argument is grossly simplistic. See this post at Feministe, from back in 2011 when I first started commenting there, quoting Dean Spade at length: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/10/10/red-flags/#comment-397888
And this is what I wrote in a recent email to a friend, addressing the supposed dichotomy between sex and gender as it applies to trans women — i.e.,:
the dichotomy some TERFs or quasi-TERFs set up to appear to be reasonable: that there’s a strict distinction between “sex” (supposedly biological, based on chromosomes, “real,” immutable) and “gender” [usually without any distinction drawn between gender identity, gender role, gender expression, etc.] (supposedly entirely a social construct, and implicitly less “real”). Accordingly, while these people may grudgingly concede that trans women may be “women” as a social identity, and may even have a female “gender” or gender identity, their “sex” is, and always will be, male. In fact, I think one of my very first comments on Feministe was about that issue. I think I quoted something Dean Spade wrote. [see above]
But the issue still comes up, obviously. [On another forum, someone recently wrote] that “sex,” to her, was what you’re assigned at birth based on your genitals. This is what I wrote in response:
‘My gender is female, and so is my sex, regardless of the fact that I was assigned male at birth. Sex does not equal only what’s assigned at birth or how one was raised; sex does not equal only chromosomes — and how many people even know what their chromosomes are? [I don’t!] How many people even know what a chromosome looks like? Does that mean that before chromosomes were discovered, there was no such thing as sex? — sex does not equal only a particular kind of reproductive capacity or its absence; sex does not equal only hormonal levels; sex does not equal only the presence of primary or only the presence of secondary sex characteristics; sex does not equal only genotype or only phenotype; sex does not equal only “brain sex” or only “body sex” (even if one believes that such a distinction exists); sex does not equal only body or only soul; sex does not equal only the common definition now, as opposed to what the definition was 200 years ago (when nobody had heard of chromosomes), or what it will be 200 years from now (when the common definition may be entirely dependent on some other, presently unknown factors). It’s a combination of some or all of those things in varying proportions, depending on the context of the discussion.
In the context of discussions of transness, I don’t think there’s any way you can try to distinguish between sex and gender that’s the least bit productive or helpful. The end result of such attempts, somehow, is almost always a conclusion that no matter what, no matter who we are or how we look or how we feel about ourselves or what we do or how we live in the world or how others perceive us, it’s only the “appearance” of sex that can be altered, and, therefore, that trans women will always remain “male” in some way (assuming we ever were in the first place).
Why is it so important to people? Why do they care? What’s the point? It has nothing to do with my life, or how I live it, or how people see me, or how I see myself.’
At least, that’s how I feel. I’m not some sort of “male woman,” whatever my chromosomal configuration may be. And regardless of the fact that I could never become pregnant or give birth. I love my son, and always have, as much as any other woman ever loved her child. Oxycontin or not! And anyone on that webiste can just go to hell if they believe differently. Even if they can find a few self-hating trans women who agree with them.”
And the reputation of this website, which seems to be turning into pretty much a cesspool in which transphobic sentiments go unaddressed either by moderators or the blog owner — so long as they’re careful not to say they hate trans women, and don’t use the wrong pronouns — will continue to decline among trans people if all of this continues, and if a small clique of cis feminists is allowed to continue to aggressively “debate” trans women on issues about which they have zero personal knowledge — including by linking to fringe transphobic websites. What’s next, links to gendertrender? To Janice Raymond, who wrote that all transsexuals rape women, including by “appropriating” female bodies? To Sheila Jeffries. whose latest book — the most recent Bible of respectable “gender-critical feminism” repeats the disgusting canard that all trans women’s vaginas (a/k/a “second assholes” or “fuckholes” or “surgical wounds” to TERFs when they talk at their own websites) can be distinguished from “real” vaginas by their distinctive odor, which another TERF has compared to rotten meat? In other words, an argument that’s the exact modern equivalent of the “foetor judaicus” of medieval Christian rhetoric.
Wow! Brilliant!
If “gender-critical” means “refuses to accept someone else’s gender identity,” then that’s true by definition.
If we’re merely talking about excluding trans women from female spaces and/or rejecting out of hand everything they say…well, po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
I personally do not care about terminology; I care that there are people here who make all trans people feel like they’re surrounded by enemies, and other people who find that acceptable, or who are more concerned about whether the word “transphobic” gets used than whether the space is actually transphobic.
Also, fwiw, there have been a large number of scientific studies on the causes of transness. They’ve found that trans women to have hormonal and neurological similarities with cis women that cis men don’t have. Similarly, trans men have been found to have hormonal and neurological similarities with cis men that they don’t have with cis women. So, biologically and neurologically speaking, it is actually quite fair to recognize trans women as female and trans men as male.
PS: I meant oxytocin! I’m always getting those two mixed up.
And just to make clear, some of the studies alaisvex mentions have been careful to control for the effect of exogenous hormones. None of these studies is conclusive — and I think any effort to find a “trans gene(s)” is no more likely to succeed than the search for a “gay gene(s) — but they’re certainly becoming increasingly suggestive. But I don’t generally focus on such things, because I don’t need scientific studies to prove the reality of who I am. Any more than I need one to prove the reality of having been “born this way” as a left-handed person despite there being no history of left-handedness in my family, even though the genetic and/or hormonal causes of left-handedness have not yet been established., The same with sexual orientation.