Trigger warning: discussion of rape and false rape accusations. Troll warning: this is going to attract the kind of people who really, really like talking about false rape accusations. Comments will be STRICTLY MODERATED. I picked my first college based on gender ratio. I figured with two girls for every one guy, even a denim-clad mid-90s…
Advertising Sins: Everything I Do Is Wrong
There’s this dreadful ad presently running: Now, from a pure-comedy standpoint, the computer-enhanced doofy expressions on the men’s faces really are pretty funny. They ain’t Mort Drucker, but as caricature goes they’re decent. Pretty much everything else in this is awful.
Oh, Naomi Wolf
The post title is seriously the only reaction I can muster to Naomi Wolf’s recent article “Is pornography driving men crazy?” Just “Oh, honey.” I mean, what else is there to say? Okay, you could do a thorough analysis of how badly Ms. Wolf is misunderstanding the brain chemistry involved, but first you’d have to…
Masculinity and illness
As ever, images of maleness are contradictory. No matter what one does as a fella, one is doing it wrong according to somebody. So one stereotype about men and illness is that guys always try to tough it out and never seek treatment until a limb falls off or an organ gets coughed up. The…
Planned Parenthood and Me
I have one of those penis dealies, and I’m pretty down with it, so the conventional narrative about Planned Parenthood is that they’re not really my thing. Planned Parenthood is often framed, both by supporters and opponents, as a women’s organization, and that’s one of those things that’s not really untrue, but misses a lot…
Marvelous post on sexual submissiveness
Clarisse Thorn makes a good point, as she is prone to doing. Don’t have a huge amount to add here; she makes a compelling argument and backs it up with good links. Short version: the perception that “women are all naturally submissive” is a wrong one, and is intrinsically connected to a lot of very…
Asshole uses dick and pussy inappropriately
So one of the asinine media kerfluffles of the moment is the ginned-up controversy over MSNBC pundit Mark Halperin getting suspended for calling President Obama a dick. Because this is soooo much worse than the actual crimes against political discourse and rational policymaking that are Mr. Halperin’s day-to-day contributions to our nation. Thing is, a…
On Libido, part three
Trigger warning for discussion of rape. In my two previous posts on the subject, I talked a little about the ways that gendered societal ideas about libido fuck with people. Men are expected to be constantly-horny fuckbeasts, and women are expected to not want sex all that much, but trade it for things they do…
On Libido, part two
[Full disclosure: I have published portions of this post elsewhere while researching libidos for a different project.] Having nattered on a bit about cultural conceptions of libido and how it affects men, I wanted to go a little deeper into the deeply broken ideas about women’s libidos that are part of our cultural discourse. One…
On Libido, part 1
I recently came across an interesting post about a very interesting study concerning high-libido women. It was striking for me how much it resonated with my own experiences as a high-libido man, and very revealing in how it differed. The study talks about how the women interviewed all described needing multiple relationships to be sexually…
What I’m Doing Here
For my first post on this blog, I wanted to, like Ozymandias, state some of the basic principles I’m working with, and explain why I’m here. More and more, I hear people, mostly men, complaining about the unfathomable damage that being male in this society does to you, and I agree. I’m mad about misandrist…