Clarisse Thorn talks rape, feminism, BDSM, and what it’s all taught her about the ethics of complexity.
This originally appeared on Clarisse Thorn’s blog. Republished with permission.
Things aren’t black and white. Life is complicated. I’d like to think that these are obvious truths, but how do we express them, how do we understand them, how do we work towards them? Especially while identifying as part of a movement that is, arguably, a blunt ideology … such as feminism?
Some of my most valuable feminist experiences arose from being trained as an advocate for sexual assault survivors. Advocates are called in for crisis counseling and to help survivors understand the options they have for dealing with assault. My training instructed me to foreground three themes while interacting with a survivor:
#1. I believe you.
#2. It’s not your fault.
#3. You have options.
The point is to help survivors cope, and help them find resources. But while these principles seem clear, it’s never even close to un-complicated. A survivor’s story is never reducible to stereotypes or easy choices. The advocate’s role is to be there and listen without judgment — to try and help find a path through a thicket of pain, confusion, stigma, medical problems, and legal issues — and to support the survivor in their choices even if the advocate doesn’t agree with them. The point is to understand, not to judge.
I’m pretty sure that this is the kind of activism I am best suited for: understanding, communicating, building. Telling stories, where appropriate (and keeping confidence, where appropriate).
Of course, there are plenty of people that it’s very difficult to feel empathy for, as a feminist. Rape survivors are a group that feminists are expected to have empathy for, and expected to recognize as having complicated stories; we all know that’s crucial. On the other hand, I recently published a book about pickup artists (a subculture of men who trade tips on how to seduce women), and I’ve taken heat from feminists who feel that I’m over-sympathetic to those guys. Don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly not an “advocate” for pickup artists in the same way that I want to advocate for assault survivors. But I believe that there’s value in empathy here, too.
As one of my feminist friends observed while we discussed the pickup artist book, I am arguably providing a valuable service by giving the men in that subculture a non-judgmental space to look at feminism. Also, by giving them — as my friend put it — “space to be ambivalent about some of the problematic things they do.”
When trying to encourage a person to question what they’re doing, it helps to understand that person first — and to offer them a sense of that understanding. I think there are a lot of icky things about the pickup artist community, and some terrible people in it. But it’s not black-and-white, and there are decent guys who learn the tactics too. If a guy is trying to learn tactics for seducing women, is he doing it out of loneliness? Or perhaps out of desire for a strange revenge on the “opposite” sex? What about both? How would these different motives change my interactions with him, perhaps even enable me to influence the way he thinks about women? With me, could he have the space to heal the damage he himself has retained from our broken social norms around sex and gender? And how does understanding his perspective make my own richer — how does it make things more complicated?
♦◊♦
One of the exciting things about being an Internet writer is that my old writing never goes away. It’s always there, cached and mirrored and easily found by both friends and enemies. Obviously, this is also one of the most un-exciting things about being an Internet writer. It’s rare that I completely disagree with an older article that I’ve written; but there are some old articles that make me feel self-conscious, because I understand the complexity of those topics much better today, and my opinions have become much more nuanced.
An example would be the way that I’ve written about BDSM and abuse. I write a lot about my experiences with consensual BDSM — Bondage, Discipline, Dominance, Submission, Sadism and Masochism — and I’m a feminist, but BDSM has always been a controversial topic within feminism. Sometimes it’s been controversial enough that BDSMer-feminists have been silenced: an editor at the iconic feminist magazine Ms. once threatened to leave if the magazine published an article by a masochistic woman, and thereby successfully buried the topic. Sometimes it’s been controversial enough to inspire non-consensual violence: a group of radical feminists literally attacked a lesbian BDSM club with crowbars sometime around the 1980s, claiming that they did it in the name of ending violence against women.
So being a BDSMer-feminist makes for defensiveness, and I began from a defensive position. My first post about BDSM and abuse was called “Evidence that the BDSM Community Does Not Enable Abuse,” and outlined initiatives within the community that oppose abusive BDSM. Around the same time, I remember making comments I now regret, comments that I believed were critical but were actually harsh towards survivors — or comments that gave too sunny a view of the BDSM community, which is far from flawless. My next post on the topic, eighteen months later, was more empathic and complex. It was called “The Alt Sex Anti-Abuse Dream Team,” and outlined how I would personally create an anti-abuse initiative that was friendly to alternative sexuality abuse survivors.
Now, these posts seem simple to me, but I was growing out of my defensiveness. I started feeling like I was genuinely moving the conversation forward when I wrote a post called “Thinking More Clearly About BDSM vs. Abuse,” in which I wrote specifically about examples of abusive behavior within the community, and used radical feminist theory about abusive relationships to reflect on how a non-abusive BDSM relationship could look. Building bridges; creating synthesis rather than antithesis.
Women with strong and different sexual desires exist, and especially with the Internet, we can’t be permanently silenced. (Although even on the Internet, there are still some attempts; my comments are often deleted on sites associated with radical feminism, such as the Anti-Porn Men Project, though I do my absolute best to comment inoffensively.) But I try to push aside my self-righteousness, because I really don’t want this to be a fight where all I do is scream “BDSM can be feminist!” I want to acknowledge and deal with real problems, like how BDSM might be used as a cover for abuse and how we can deal with that. I want to be established in cooperation, not resistance. I want to move things forward; I want to make things more complicated.
Sex-positive feminists — the BDSMers, the sex workers, the pornographers, et cetera — we have so much up-close-and-personal experience with the complexities of consent, the beautiful and ugly realities of desire, and with the edgy cases where consent can become confusing. Feminism needs us! But within feminism, our actual experience is so often stereotyped and discounted — as in this debate with anti-porn feminist Gail Dines, who sneers about “young women who strip, wax, and fuck themselves into empowerment.” Could activities like stripping or waxing or fucking perhaps be more complicated than “empowering” vs. “not empowering”? Apparently not.
The most frustrating part of this particular feminist split is that someone like me couldn’t exist if radical feminism had not existed first. “Radical feminism” has become a widely accepted term for a specific type of feminism, a set of ideas that emphasizes systemic inequality and community organizing. It’s sometimes viewed in opposition to “sex-positive feminism,” which talks a lot about individual experiences and personal choices, and would include me. But these categories are recently constructed and are not always cleanly delineated. And the analysis of radical feminists, as well as the work they’ve done, is what established space for women like me to be who we are.
The pioneering sex-positive feminist Susie Bright was attacked by radical feminists, but upon the death of the infamous Andrea Dworkin, Susie Bright wrote a sad obituary: “I have tape recordings from colleges where I would go listen to Andrea lecture in rapt attention and turn my little cassette over to capture every word. I never dreamed that I would one day become one of the people she vilified. … I know it’s strange that I have such a tragic affection for her, when she apparently only had loathing for my kind.”
This very vilification is a large part of why it’s so hard to acknowledge complication. We are forced, again and again, to take such simplistic and adversarial stances. I don’t think that all stripping or waxing or fucking is empowering, I think it’s so much more complicated. But instead of getting into that, I’ve wasted too much time defending my right to make love consensually without feeling terrible about myself and/or being dismissed as a brainless perverted whore.
I don’t want you to think I believe “my side” of the so-called “Feminist Sex Wars” is “blameless.” The brilliant sex worker activist Audacia Ray recently wrote an amazing piece in which she called out sex-positive feminists for our own sometimes simplistic thinking. For example, when people are talking about coerced and trafficked sex workers, that is not usually the best time to for a consenting sex worker to talk about how much she loves her job. Sometimes “our side” horns in on those conversations inappropriately, though.
In many ways, making a simpler case is more marketable; campaigns deal in soundbites. When it comes to the law, there must be bright lines before which an act is unpunished and after which it is a crime. And often, movements are established in resistance. Part of feminist progress can be laid at the feet of a willingness to be simple about things. Slogans like “No means no” paved the way for work like my anti-rape advocacy.
Yet the minute we actually start creating organizations and institutions, we must be willing to complicate things, or we will serve people badly. If I’ve learned this lesson anywhere, I’ve learned it in international charity work, wherein rich countries throw money at poor countries and few real problems are addressed. Where does the money go? How is it spent? Who gets bribed, who gets shorted? Does the Third World even want the “solutions” we think they want? These questions are just the tip of the iceberg. So many charity organizations have incredibly simple slogans for getting cash, after which the money disappears into a black hole of conflicting social forces. It’s all very well to send a billion dollars to people in need, but the extensive problems and complexities of these international aid systems has been well-documented — see, for example, Letting Them Die by Catherine Campbell or The Wisdom of Whores by Elizabeth Pisani. (Pisani also has a blog.) If only those of us in the donor countries would talk more about the complications.
For me, when I personally oversimplify what I’m trying to say, I admit that it can feel slick and clever and fun in the moment. But it’s almost like a drug; I feel hungover later. (It is so hard to write punchy prose that’s complicated. Ironically, when I am more willing to simplify my message my writing is often more successful; some of my most successful pieces are, I believe, far from my best.) I feel so very exhausted with the simplification of these conversations — yet I acknowledge that sometimes it’s my own fault, my own defensiveness, including the reflexive anger and mental blocks that arise from my defensiveness. (And there are still people I won’t try to understand, like anti-feminists who think women shouldn’t vote. I’m okay with viewing that as uncomplicated BS.)
One of my feminist friends has told me that I am a philosopher, I’m not really a feminist. And yet one of my writer friends has told me that I am clearly an activist, not an aesthete. I keep finding myself in the middle of these continua. I worry sometimes that it is really not possible to be an activist who seeks complication. Yet it seems to me that if anything can save the world, it’s empathy. And empathy requires us to allow people’s stories to be complicated.
Photo—Conceptual Image from Shutterstock
About Clarisse Thorn
One thing that many activist ideologies share, and I would add some forms of feminism to that list, is that they tend to leave little room for things that don’t fit into a nice judgment binary – right and wrong, victims and perpetrators, attack or defend, part of the problem or part of the solution. There are many, many ideologies on that list, not just some types of feminism.
What happens is that important nuances get lost. For example, there is a real difference between explaining something and justifying something. There is a real difference between having empathy for people and excusing their behavior. I think that’s part of the reaction to your piece on the PUA community. From one ideological mindset, you cannot empathize with the enemy you are at war with. Or, if you’re explaining where these men are coming from, it’s like you are justifying their actions.
But, we have to be able to explain things why things happen if we are ever going to make a situation improve. If the PUA approach really is a disgusting, dangerous development that needs to be reduced (and I’m not saying that it is, but if,) then let’s figure out where it is coming from. Sorry for the terrible analogy here, but it’s like with terrorism. If you want to fight terrorism, it’s important to look for explanations as to why it happens, why people do it. Make it something explainable. That doesn’t mean justified, just explainable. If you just say terrorists are crazy and evil, end of story, then that really does not help you fight terrorism. It actually blinds you.
This is a bit off topic, but personally my problem with PUAs is the intended deception. It’s power play, but without the negotiation and without a safe word. It doesn’t matter if they are actually successful in the deception…it’s just impossible for me to understand attempting the deception.
But I agree that I think it’s important to understand why. Why are PUAs becoming popular? What makes someone want to deceive another human being into having sex with them? I mean, do PUAs think that all successful sexual encounters between men and women involve some sort of deception? Do they think they’re just the masters at a game that everyone is playing?
I do think that PUAs are dangerous, at least in their current form, but I think that the way to change it is to understand it first.
HeatherN,
Your problem is by categorizing what the PUAs do as “deception.” If the average pickup artist said “What you do is, go up to girls and tell them you are a best selling novelist with TONs of money…” then you might have a case for deception.
The average PUA actually just teaches someone how to seem confident regardless of how they are actually feeling. That’s a skill that has always, and will always be in demand. Seriously, look at the “techniques” they recommend, at no point do they recommend lying about who you are or what you want. Instead, they just give advice on how to seem like you aren’t actually paralyzed by fear.
Sure, you could probably find some fringe PUA advice books and/or sites that suggest actual deception, but that’s not really what the core of it is about.
My understanding of PUAs is that it’s about convincing a woman to sleep with you, without actually saying that’s what you’re trying to do. The goal is to have sex with a woman but the PUA never actually says so. That is where the deception is.
There appear to be several goals within PUA. One is to develop “game” or the self confidence with which to pick girls up. The other would be the actual pick up. There are PUA trainers that focus on the inner confidence and ethics around dating and there are some that focus on getting to yes in most any way possible. There is a range.
I have never been put off by deception, nor even really see that. I see more of a win/lose model of human relationships, of a bit of a war between the sexes that places men and women completely at odds and seems to eliminate actually liking each other.
“I see more of a win/lose model of human relationships, of a bit of a war between the sexes that places men and women completely at odds and seems to eliminate actually liking each other.”
Hmmm, perhaps that better describes what I’m thinking.
I invite you all to read my book, because you will learn all about this
Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser is available in paperback here:
https://www.createspace.com/3830583
Or multiple e-formats here:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/144451
Amazon Kindle here:
http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Pickup-Artist-Chaser-ebook/dp/B007I5HRQU
When you say:
“My understanding of PUAs is that it’s about convincing a woman to sleep with you, without actually saying that’s what you’re trying to do.”
I cannot even comprehend what this means.
Are you seriously suggesting that a man should, upon meeting a woman, immediately blurt out “I want to have sex with you!” if that is something he would like?
Or do you just think that physical attraction alone shouldn’t be grounds for sexual desire?
Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m suggesting. (Sarcasm, there). As I said, I think Julie probably explained what I was trying to say better. It’s that PUAs seem to be working under this idea that women aren’t there to find someone to sleep with. It seems to assume an adversarial role between men and women. Like, okay, when I go into a gay bar and hit on a woman, or a woman hits on me, we both know the expectation is sex and not a relationship. We aren’t trying to convince each other to have sex, because we’re both assuming that’s the reason we’re both there, to have sex. We’re just trying to convince each other that we should have sex with each other. And even then, it’s not just that…it’s trying to decide whether you do, indeed, want to have sex with the other woman while at the same time presenting your most attractive self so that she’ll want to have sex with you.
But it’s not like, entering enemy territory or something. PUAs seem to be about smooth-talking their way into someone’s bed…as if it requires convincing or nudging. It seems like it starts from the assumption that any woman you approach will be reluctant to have a one-night-stand.
Look, I’ll give you, I haven’t spent time in the PUA community, but from my friends who have, nothing they have ever done or said sounds even remotely like the situation you are describing.
In fact, most of it is about “Why she’ll be with YOU instead of A DIFFERENT GUY,” rather than “Why she’ll be with you instead of NO ONE AT ALL.” The presumption is that the women involved do actually want sex, and the question is who it’s with.
This is fairly obvious from the usual “beta male” advertisements that PUAs use to attract new clients. The idea is to get men to ask themselves why they keep ending up being “beta” instead of “alpha.” It’s not that women don’t want sex, it’s that they want to sleep with “alphas” and you need to be an “alpha” in order to succeed, otherwise some other guy, who is himself an “alpha” is going to beat you out.
To men this is a pretty clear statement: women are having all kinds of sex, just not with you. To which the PUA has the “solution” about how you can become the kind of guy that women will have sex with.
It seems like you might be confused about what PUAs are actually about…
Exactly. PUA students aren’t there to learn how to lie to women; they’re there to learn self-confidence. The look, the behaviors, and the words are just tools to help carry them through the anxiety and fear until they achieve it for themselves.
How many times have you gone up to a girl you’re interested in and said “I want to have sex with you.” Romance doesn’t work anything like that.
I’d agree that if a guy lies about wanting to be in a relationship to hop into bed with someone then that’s reprehensible and emotionally abusive. But if they just hang out with them, have fun and *hope* to have sex with them is it really all that necessary for them to say straight up “I just want casual sex?”
So I sort of ended up explaining this below…but like…just want to reiterate that I’m not saying you gotta say it explicitly out loud like that. I’m well aware that’d probably kill any chance you had. I’m saying…everyone (both men and women) need to make sure that their prospective partner is on the same page.
Seems like PUA is just like learning to be a car salesman — a lot of cheesy techniques and confidence-boosting exercises combined with some valid psychological insights. It’s lie whenever I go to buy a car the salesman always talks about his kids. I’ve even had salesmen show me pictures of their kids. I’m 100% certain that’s a technique they learn to use with female customers. It’s a way to build a rapport and to get me to relate to them emotionally so I’m more likely to buy a car from them. Then once they rope you in, they have all the hard sell techniques to make a sale, like “going to check with the manager” to make you think they are giving you a special deal, telling you the car you want might not be available but putting on a big effort to get it for you to enhance it’s value in your mind, etc. PUA’s are basically doing the same kind of thing only they’re selling sex. Identify the target, suss out their vulnerabilities, build rapport, then close the deal. And have the confidence to pull it off without choking on your own nervousness. That’s all it is. I personally don’t like being sold sex like I’m being sold a car. But there it is. Buyer beware.
” I’m 100% certain that’s a technique they learn to use with female customers. It’s a way to build a rapport and to get me to relate to them emotionally so I’m more likely to buy a car from them.”
It also creates a subconscious consequence for you not buying a car from them… Your buying a car or not will impact his children, the children he supports by selling you a car.
“That’s all it is. I personally don’t like being sold sex like I’m being sold a car.”
The main difference is that a car salesman waits for you to come to them, meaning, when he’s trying to sell you what it is he’s selling, you’ve already established you’re interested in buying what he has to sell. Same thing as clubs, I would suspect you’re far more receptive to a PUA’s tactics if you went to a nightclub looking to hook up (perhaps not even realizing the guy hitting on you is a PUA, due to your receptiveness already established by going to the club to buy their product). I suspect you would be as unreceptive to car salesmen coming up to you on the street or the bus, or in a library trying to sell you something. The problem is that society expects men to always do the approach, and to limit yourself to doing that approach at a nightclub rather limits your options.
Yeah I don’t really have a problem with people playing those kinds of games in clubs and other venues where pretty much everyone knows what’s going. Outside of those environments, where women may be expecting or looking for more than a casual hookup, I am somewhat bothered by aspects of it. I don’t like the idea of cynically building a fake emotional rapport with a woman in order to get sex. E.g. using methods to give the false impression that you like her as a whole person while really only seeing her as a walking masturbation aid (there is plenty of that attitude in PUA stuff that I’ve read). That’s different than learning to communicate better in order to build genuine connections with people. I suppose guys can go either way with the PUA thing. You can use it to be a better person with more rewarding relationships, or you can use it to become a shallow, self-absorbed a*hole. At the end of the day, you have to live with what you’ve become.
Women play these games too, PUA is simply a concerted effort for men to learn what women are exposed to every day in women’s magazines. It isn’t for everyone but I do not deny that it helps some men with attracting women. Women have their own PUA techniques, they just call it Womans Day and Cosmopolitan. Same stuff, different name. If getting sex when desired is empowering for women then it is also empowering for men. Equality after all.
You are right , everyone has their own ways of being fake to get what they want. All social interactions involve a degree of fakeness. There is fakeness intended to create positive interactions (such as feigning interest in a co-worker’s vacation photos because that’s what friends do) and fakeness that is used cynically for selfish purposes. There is also ritualized fakeness that everyone knows is fake but is part of a social game. PUA seems to have elements of all of that. The thing that is interesting to me about PUA is how it has been refined to the nth degree, packaged and marketed. Some of it strikes me as almost cult-like, similar to other highly packaged (and expensive) self-help programs like Tony Robbins or EST (back in the day). I’m not saying it IS a cult, but it does have its gurus, slavish adherents, and elaborate doctrines that are always presented as incontovertible and the Answer To Everything. That said, there is nothing wrong with wanting to get laid, just like there is nothing wrong with selling cars, and nothing wrong with women wearing skimpy clothes to get attention, or whatever floats your boat. Again, how you use these things, in positive or negative ways, comes down to what kind of person you want to be.
Yes, and I keep coming back to the thought that even if it’s inentionally deceptive, no one is really being fooled. I doubt there are very many women going home with a PUA who are at all deceived. That doesn’t excuse any attempt to deceive. I just think it’s amazing that some men think they are brilliant liars when in fact these women see right through them and have sex with them anyway.
I agree…although the article about picking up on the subway is a bit different. The example of “accidentally” touching a woman and then behaving awkwardly about it, and acting like it was an accident…that could definitely end up deceiving someone, particularly since it’s in a space that’s not usually used for pick ups. But yeah, in a bar/club/etc, I agree that most of the time PUAs probably aren’t deceiving anyone…it’s the attempt to do so that gets under my skin.
What do you think of women who ‘accidentally’ drop something and then bend over to pick it up in order to catch some man’s attention?
I think that’s bollocks as well. This article was about guys trying to use methods to pick up women, so I’ve focused my comments on that. But yeah, you can safely take what I’m saying and apply it to women who use specific methods to attract guys. (Well or frankly…men who are all methodical about picking up other guys, and women other women…you get what I’m saying).
And the thing is, if all this was happening at like a designated pick-up club, then I wouldn’t mind nearly as much…because then there isn’t that attempt to deceive, from either side. Then everyone goes there knowing that it’s all about the pick-up; then it’s a negotiated power play.
Sorry heather, but it looks very much like your trying to say hooking ups are a deception. The methods PUA’s use are largely the same ones used by most guys to establish a connection for the purpose of initiating a relationship, just more practised and refined. Does being good at something due to practice and/or study make one a cheater? The idea that presenting the attributes that others find attractive is some horrible deception, well, given make-up, and the various clothing designed for that very purpose, perfumes, etc, I’d hardly call PUA’s the primary culprits in our society. Or do you only wear make-up and attractive/accentuating clothing when you go to a bar?
“Or do you only wear make-up and attractive/accentuating clothing when you go to a bar?”
Funnily enough…yeah I do only wear make-up and attractive clothing when I go to a bar. My normal wardrobe is t-shirt and jeans and no make-up at all. lol. But actually, that’s missing the point. The issue I have isn’t with women dressing up for no reason, or with men chatting with women on a subway, or even with a man finding a woman attractive and then walking up to her and talking to her. The problem is when one person is playing the game and the other isn’t…when one person is treating the entire thing like a mission and the other person like a target, while the other isn’t.
Okay, I’ll take an example from last night. I was out in a club and I met this woman and we immediately hit it off. We were flirting and she managed to work into the conversation that she’s in a relationship, but it’s open. We danced together, got a bit bump n’ grindy…bought each other drinks…etc…We were both of us playing the game, so to speak, and in a space created for such social interactions. Neither one of us said “I’m only here for sex,” but we both communicated to each other that was what we were looking for. So no probs…we both knew what was what.
But throughout the entire evening neither one of us ever attempted to pretend our flirting wasn’t flirting…or to pretend that we cared about more than sex. I’m perhaps more thinking about the article about picking up women in subways…but that is the sort of deception I’m talking about. So a PUA using techniques in a space created for just such a purpose, no problem….because then everyone knows what the game is and is a willing participant.
And I’m also not saying that a one-nighter can’t turn into something more, because it can. I’m saying people should make their intentions known.
Being in academia (at the moment anyway), it’s hard not to see this entire issue as simply a reflection of the rubbish that feminist thought is built upon in the first place.
In social sciences like psychology or economics, there is a desire to stay as close to the scientific method as possible. When activism takes place, it’s based upon research that adheres to accepted empirical standards: a hypothesis is tested repeatedly, the results are reproduced from many data sets, and only then is the hypothesis accepted as a viable theory.
In my own field (economics) the best example of this was when Keynesian thought gave way to Monetarism in the 1970s because available data clearly refuted aspects of Keynesian thought: the entire field shifted and a new “mainstream” consensus developed. In the wake of the latest recession, a similar assessment is taking place.
By contrast, feminist thought is not concerned with the scientific method in the slightest. There is no concern that the hypotheses might be wrong, they are simply accepted without testing. The best example of this actually comes from “radical feminism.” The assumption about “root cause” is by definition unfalsifiable: there is literally no evidence for it, nor any way to test it. It is a tautology. Yet it is completely accepted, and academics within the field will trade in it as the Objective Truth.
Now we fast forward four decades and we see the disaster this has created. When you are unwilling to test your own theories, to consider that they might be completely wrong, and that an entirely new paradigm might need to be drawn up, you end up in a balkanized echo chamber: everyone is told that all the theories are true, even the ones that contradict, and this is simply shouted louder and louder by all involved.
The only solution is for feminists to turn a critical eye on their own theories and to begin acknowledging that many of them are likely false. Until that happens, don’t expect anything to change.
I’d say we’re all so busy in our lives that all we have time for is the power of soundbites, but that is probably too simplistic. But it’s also true. Busy, preoccupied, disinterested, confused… there are a ton of reasons.
It does come down to part of our human make-up. We categorize things. And it’s a lot of work to keep making smaller and smaller mental boxes to file away specifics in. If we’re in fight or flight mode, we just want to know “is that lion going to eat us?”
A lot of people spend too much time in defensive, hostile modes trying to to just be heard.
I’m not sure that many folks are interested in hearing about BDSM anymore. For a long time, I have tired of the entire concept being normalized. It’s fine if some want to practice it, but honestly, is it worthy of so much space when so many of us aren’t into it and aren’t interested in hearing about it? I also tire of words like ‘sex worker’… this would be ok if it actually has some meaningful meaning, but when you include porn stars, prostitutes and such in that term/concept it has no real meaning. Who wants to support those industries when they are so connected to crime, cohersion, gangs/crime syndicates, hard drug profiteering, and sex trafficking/child trafficking. Go away already!
“(And there are still people I won’t try to understand, like anti-feminists who think women shouldn’t vote. I’m okay with viewing that as uncomplicated BS.)”
Just for clarification, when you say “anti-feminists who think women shouldn’t vote”, are you referring to a subset of anti feminists, that think women shouldn’t vote, or are you suggesting that being anti-feminist means you think women shouldn’t vote? How do you determine what kind of anti-feminist someone is, or is it only once they openly state they don’t think women should vote that you view what they say as uncomplicated BS? Is it, perhaps, you are oversimplifying anti-feminism itself?
I’d also like to point out all your acknowledged hostile actions committed by feminists, yet it is men’s rights activists alone who have earned the “hate group” label from the SPLC.
PS: I find it odd that someone trained not to be judgemental, would be so judgemental in how they describe PUA’s, and how they feel PUA’s need to change to better suit their personal code.
There are also people who learn from PUA practices how not to be manipulated. The PUA community is a response, for men who do not feel confident, to the manipulation women use in the dating scenes described – usually a bar/night club. Women’s magazines are replete with dating tips for women, the men’s equivalent is PUA techniques. People going to these venues are not looking for committed relationships, at least not in a meaningful way. There is competition for who beds who and the PUA’s practice to achieve a better success rate. It isn’t for everyone certainly, but why criticise some men for working at getting better at getting what they want – sex without attachment.
Excellent point. All PUA tactics do is level the playing field (slightly). The right mindset, all by itself, can eliminate a lot of the advantages women ordinarily wield in the dating scene and put you on an equal footing. (Some would say that’s the real reason so many outspoken opponents of PUA are outraged.)
Spot on with this write-up, I really suppose this website needs way more consideration. I’ll probably be once more to learn way more, thanks for that info.