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.”)
@GroundPetrel: An anecdote about how you play a lot of female characters isn’t a “counterexample” to anything Anita (or alisvex) has been talking about, I’m afraid. It’s simply an anecdote.
One that does give me a twinge of hope for gaming, but it’s ineffective in the grand scheme of things.
Here’s the Der Spiegel article I was talking about, btw.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/human-trafficking-persists-despite-legality-of-prostitution-in-germany-a-902533.html
Anyone who cares that Ken thinks we’re doing feminism wrong feel free to raise your hand now.
Ken L.
That’s the point I’ve been trying to make.
What is the borking POINT of trying to educate people who refuse to be educated? It’s a waste of time and effort. Let them stew in ignorance.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
If MRAs and MGTOWs don’t want to learn, no amount of force-feeding is going to make them.
GroundPetrel–
One game does not define or make up for the gaming industry. Period.
Well here’s the thing. People are different. “The oppressed” is not a huge monolithic group who all think the same, and have the same capabilities. Neither are “the privileged”. There is no all-or-nothing when it comes to oppressed people fighting for their rights, and privileged people being their allies.
It sounds like you are saying this:
All oppressed people must educate all privileged people or no privileged people will let up on their oppression and all oppressed people will remain oppressed.
What really happens is this:
Some oppressed people take on a leadership role and fight for their rights. Some oppressed people join this fight. Some support it but aren’t active. Some disagree. Some privileged people empathize with the plight of the oppressed because that’s the kind of person they are. Some will be convinced by great arguments. Some will have a personal experience that results in them relating with the oppressed. Some will disagree. At some point, the oppressed people will gain enough power, or allies, or both, to get some of what they want.
It’s complicated.
So what is important when we talk about oppressed people educating the privileged is that no individual person bears any moral responsibility to educate any other person about anything whatsoever. (You know, unless they chose to be a teacher or something, and in any case they can quit whenever they want.)
However, people being human, some people will choose to educate each other anyway. We run absolutely 0 risk of running out of oppressed people who are willing to talk about their oppression if given the chance.
We just cannot put that moral responsibility on all oppressed people at all times. That is too much of a burden. We should instead put the burden on the privileged person who wants to learn to find a person who wants to teach. In the internet age, this is trivial.
Yeah, but that doesn’t change the fact that I find her to be arrogant and annoying.
Sure, she’s done some great stuff. So has Paul Sereno, and he’s a fucking prick.
I’m not saying that she’s not a gamer. I’m saying that she’s arrogant and annoying, and her arguments are serious stretches at best.
As above, I never said that. I just said that she uses the fact that she IS a victim of internet assholes who themselves know jack shit about video games to bolster her arguments, which is in my opinion a distasteful rhetorical tactic.
I’m not saying that she somehow deserves the shittiness she’s got or anything like that. I’m just saying that despite the abject fuckery that she’s uncovered and attracted, she’s still arrogant and annoying.
It’s not just cismen who are threatening transwomen, it’s ciswomen as well. Simply saying “It’s MEN who are threatening…” seems like callous hand waving trans women’s harassment at the hands of cis women.
And the whole “she’s not a gamer” thing–nope, nope, nope. That’s just another way to other women in gaming, or anyone who games in ways other than FPS/MMORPG/whatever other hypermasculine BS is suppose to define a “gamer.”
Ken, I can’t make it any clearer that your premise is incorrect and therefor your conclusions are as well.
Speaking of annoying…
I think you need to take a long hard look at the history of radical and revolutionary movements of all kinds. What comes out of that, at least at a superficial level, is that the great majority are driven by educated, usually middle class, people of conscience and commitment.
The primo case here would be anti-slavery. Abolitionists were not slaves, they were people who found slavery abhorrent and worked to end it. Once you get to workers’ rights and women’s rights and racial minorities’ rights you get various mixtures of the oppressed and the not-so-oppressed with astounding levels of courage and commitment facing down people who genuinely wanted to suppress them, all the way to killing a fair few of them. Just look at unions and other workers’ representatives for that one, especially in the USA, as well as indigenous and other racial minorities just about anywhere.
We can often point to one or a few outstanding events — riots, revolts, boycotts, walkouts and the like — which brought home the point of different movements at certain stages in their history, but they are just the foreground features of a much larger picture.
I guess we are fortunate that the entire effing world does not revolve around what GroundPetrel finds arrogant and annoying.
@Jennifer,
I have to agree with you there. There also are a lot of cis lesbians who refuse to see trans women as real women, and I don’t say that because they don’t want to sleep with trans women. One of my cis lesbian friends, for example, often gets excluded from lesbian circles because she’s dating a trans woman and therefore can’t be a real lesbian in their eyes.
And then there a lot of cishet women, like Michelle Duggar, who think that trans women who want to use women’s bathrooms are just deranged men plotting to rape women.
GroundPetrel
So, what you’re saying is “I don’t like her”. And that’s supposed to be important how?
From earlier:
That sounds like “She’s not a gamer” to me. Or at the very least “She’s not a REAL gamer!”, which is equally bullshit.
From earlier:
You think Sarkeesian is using her victimization to “try to make herself seem more legitimate”, thus you’re saying she’s a “professional victim”.
You’re also saying that you don’t like the fact that she uses her own personal experiences with being victimized as an example of how women (especially women who speak out against sexism) are treated in the game-sphere on the internet, when it’s a damn good example and it shows people exactly what’s going on.
Why do you feel like her experiences aren’t a valid talking point?
GroundPetrel–
So she’s not “not a gamer.” She just am arranging fool who doesn’t know the first thing about video games.
NOW I GET IT.
So GroundPetrel, you didn’t ‘exactly’ say Sarkessian was a ‘professional victim’, but you basically said it with “she USES the fact that she’s a victim to bolster her arguments…”
Anyone could see through that…
Whoops, ninja’t and so many typos. Ah, the perils of trying to do this on a phone.
I’m getting ninja’d into oblivion here…
I just got ninja’d on acknowledging I’m getting ninja’d!
Y’all are so patient, bless every one of you (except Ken and Petrel). I’m just sitting here going “ugh, not this shit again”. Some people you can tell really quickly that they’re going to be an ongoing source of drama and annoyance.
@ Shaun
“that requires reading comprehension.”
Well, that’s my brief flirtation with pro-feminism scuppered then.
[Only kidding, love it here. The commentators are so nice, even when they disagree, It’s like the Anti-Youtube!]
@ Proxieme
If random postings from strangers on the internet are of any help, ouch, you have my sympathies. Hope you’re feeling better soon.
What happened here?
GroundPetrel, of course Anita “uses the fact that she is a victim of internet assholes … to bolster her argument.” Her argument is to draw attention to sexism, and the harassment she faced for daring to look at video games is a perfect example of that sexsim.
Calling it “using the fact that she is a victim” is absurdly uncharitable though… It’s frikken drawing on personal experience.
I know you like to talk plain, dude, but you’re coming across as an ass. If she’s not your cup of tea, so be it. She’s already the target of an internet mob that doesn’t need you piling on top with your opinions of her.
Unpacking further on my thoughts from my previous post: GroundPetrel, would you say that this site:
http://fatuglyorslutty.com/
Is also someone using their status as a victim to make themselves seem legitimate? It’s a collection of harassment that women have received via online gaming.
Jennifer, we ninja-inceptioned each other! Interwebs high fives for us.