Nahida makes an interesting point about male sexuality:
Male sexuality has been socially conditioned to comprise of the same components as sports: it is aggressive and domineering, and it views women as “opponents” to defeat in order achieve high status within a male social order. Boys are taught to drive forward to see how far their partners will allow them to reach sexually, preoccupying themselves with wondering what comes next rather than enjoying the moment, essentially displacing the excitement of intimacy with the excitement of competition, until finally, in order for a man to be aroused, a woman must be objectified.
Am I saying that this is how actual men in the real world have sex? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. All but the biggest assholes value their partner enjoying themselves as much as they value themselves enjoying themselves; hence, only a fraction of people (one could call them “rapists”) have a purely conquest-oriented model of sexuality.
Nevertheless, I do think it’s valuable as a discussion of how the patriarchy views sex. The sports/sex model is apt: after all, both are ways that you prove that you’re a Real Man. Sports is basically a kind of mini-war. The most important thing is winning. Play through your injuries, you don’t need your health! Come on, the ref won’t see you break the rules, do it! Don’t bother about having fun! What are you, a pussy? A lady? A wimp?
But that’s not true, is it? For most people who play sports non-professionally, sports is about having fun. You might win or you might not, but the important thing is getting out there, hanging out with friends, getting some exercise, and having fun. Other people like competing– that’s what they find fun– and as long as they don’t let competition get in the way of enjoying themselves and compete with people who actually like competing, that’s cool too.
The same thing is true about sex. There are two models– one could call them the “rape culture” and the “consent culture” models. Very few people are pure rape-culture or pure consent-culture; nevertheless, I’ll describe them in their purest forms, so you can see them clearly.
Rape culture: Sex is about a man, who is the only one who actually desires sex, pushing a woman as far as she is willing to go. Sex occurs in a rigid set of steps: kissing, then breast-groping, then manual, then oral, then PIV; any other sex acts are signs that the man has Super Won (or that he’s a pathetic loser). Any tactic, short of ignoring a direct no (and even then) is allowable. Rape is basically like committing a foul: as long as you don’t do anything that’s technically against the rules, it’s all good, and calling someone a rapist for ignoring a “I’d rather not” is like the ref calling the ball out of bounds when it was clearly inside. If they have intercourse, the man has won and the woman has lost: he’s awesome, and she’s a slut who needs to learn to respect herself. The woman’s goal is to get a man into a relationship; if she gets his commitment, he’s pussywhipped and she’s a Smug Married/Be-boyfriend-ed (God I love Bridget Jones). Queer people can, with some straining, be fit into this model; the general idea is that one is the ‘man’ and another is the ‘woman.’
Consent culture: Some people decide that sex (whatever that means to them) would be fun and then have mutually enjoyable sex with each other. The end.
Can we agree that the rape culture model is absurd? It’s absurd.
There has been ample feminist critique of the rape-culture model of sex on the basis that it removes female agency in sexuality and ignores the fact that, you know, women want sex; however, we often ignore the ways that this model harms men too. To quote Nahida again:
Yesterday I overheard a man stating that he uses men for stimulating intellectual conversation and women for sex, and all I could feel was sorry for him. Imagine not being able to relate to your partner on an intellectual level!
She goes on to state that she can’t quite extend her sympathy to those men, since they are weaponizing their sexuality. Personally, I can’t help looking at a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist with anything but the greatest sadness. My relationships are with people– men and women– who are my equals: we have similar interests, we value each other’s opinions, we support each other when necessary and, yes, sometimes we have hot sex. I can’t imagine having a relationship with someone I have nothing in common with and can barely stand just for the sex; even being a fuckbuddy to someone I have nothing in common with seems ultimately empty. Give me sex with friends, man.
See, this is why gender equality is eventually going to win. We have the best sales pitch.
The sports/sex model is apt: after all, both are ways that you prove that you’re a Real Man. I (as a man (more or less…) in a patriarchal culture) have always thought of the “winning” culture in Sex as more of “How often you get to do it and how much you and your partner enjoy it” and much less of what you actually do/how far you can take it. (Now there are people who mutually decide to take it as far as they can and see where they get, and all the power to them(!), but I think they… Read more »
preoccupying themselves with wondering what comes next rather than enjoying the moment, essentially displacing the excitement of intimacy with the excitement of competition, until finally, in order for a man to be aroused, a woman must be objectified.
Isn’t this slippery-slope argument, and objectification of men to boot…?
Am I the only one bothered by the final quote in the article?
“…Imagine not being able to relate to your partner on an intellectual level!”
If all partners agree that what they want is a good lay and after that never see each other again. Why should intelectual connection matter?
Had the genders been reversed this would have been called represing female sexuality.
Male sexuality has been socially conditioned to comprise of the same components as sports: it is aggressive and domineering, and it views women as “opponents” to defeat in order achieve high status within a male social order.
Cobblers. It’s this sort of crap that leads to homogeneous hetero porn — and is why I don’t use it. Women posing as passive receptors and I’m supposed to want to do stuff to them. Nuts to that.
The quickest way boys get lost in their gender identity is coming to feminist sites like this purporting to speak for men. This site should ashamed of it’s failure to tell the truth. At least somebody is doing it: My immediate assumption was that what lay at the end of the link you posted would be crap, and then I realized that would be prejudging the site without having seen it, based solely on the language you used. So I went to the site and damn if my prejudice wasn’t spot on. The PDF, in particular, was hundreds of pages… Read more »
“She goes on to state that she can’t quite extend her sympathy to those men, since they are weaponizing their sexuality. Personally, I can’t help looking at a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist with anything but the greatest sadness……….. who are my equals: we have similar interests………… I can’t imagine having a relationship with someone I have nothing in common with ” A man is not necessarily a misogynist just because he has sex with someone who is not an “equal” whatever the fuck that means, has dissimilar intellectual interests, and who has very little in common. I am not sure why its… Read more »
“There are a lot of women like this. In fact I would say MOST women are like this.” Firstly, that is a huge generalization for which you have no proof. Secondly, you sound like you’re saying you prefer women with low self esteem, low self confidence, a sense of powerlessness and who are generally ‘weaker’ than you. And that you prefer these women because being with them makes you feel good because you can “pull them up.” If that is, indeed, what you’re saying, then that’s a problem. Women aren’t there to make you feel better and boost your ego,… Read more »
Actually I think he’s talking about he likes being the dominant, the leader, and the women being more submissive n following his lead, not that they have lower self-esteem. Some people like to lead, some like to follow. At times I’d rather follow cuz leadership takes a lot of responsibility that I cbf dealing with. I don’t think he’s saying the women he likes have low self eteem or low confidence, it seems the way he is talking about “confidence” is in a manner that those “confident” women are actually bossy. I don’t think it’s wrong to like women with… Read more »
Archy, I purposefully used the words “weak” “confidence” and “self-esteem” in my reply because those are the words he uses. A healthy sub/dom relationship requires that all parties aren’t suffering from self-esteem or confidence problems (perhaps more than vanilla relationships). But he wasn’t talking about a healthy sub/dom relationship…what assman was describing was actually a pretty unhealthy type of relationship.
(I do not mean this as an attack on anyone, by the way).
Yeah they threw me off a bit too. I guess I’ll wait for his explanation. I was just trying to think of any and all possibilities:P
i think that’s pretty sad if people think that women who have confidence and good self-esteem are negative and bossy. In my experience, negative and bossy people are usually very insecure. Truly confident people are positive and don’t need to boss others around, and that’s true of both men and women. I read assman’s comment as saying that he likes women who are weak and easier to control.
Yeah, I’m not bothered by truly confident women. I’m bothered by women that say they’re confident who are bossy and negative.
I think he’s confusing bossy with assertive. Assertive women know what they want. Bossy women demand what they want with little or no compromise and little to no consideration for others. I don’t mind assertive women, but would prefer they be less assertive early in the relationship. I find kindness to be a very attractive trait. If she’s assertive and kind, I won’t care if she was assertive early in the relationship.
“Women aren’t there to make you feel better and boost your ego, and for goodness sake you’re job as a boyfriend/partner/whatever isn’t to provide an external source of self-validation for women with confidence and self-esteem problems.” I somewhat disagree with this, in the sense that I think it’s the job of any good boyfriend (or girlfriend, or friend) to provide external self-validation for their loved ones when they’re getting down on themselves. I understand this can be annoying when you have to do it constantly, but why tell people with low self-confidence or low self-esteem that they can’t date anybody… Read more »
I disagree that “most women are like this.” None of the women I know are like this.
Have you ever considered that women might be manipulating you by putting on a charade of weakness and “looking up to you.”
People behave differently around different people and in different situations…
If you’re asking about experiences, once my friends wanted to go to a bar/club to pick up women, I wasn’t in the mood, but you make compromises to keep relationships so I went. I decided that I wasn’t going to try to meet anyone, just have fun. I decided to buy my friend a muff dive. The waitress didn’t know what it was so I explained it. It’s like a male version of the blow job. It’s a shot glass full of liquor inside of a larger wine type glass and is held in the center by a ring of… Read more »
It sounds like mild ptsd from sexual assaults in your past, same as I’ve heard women talk about. It’s trauma because you’ve been traumatized and treated immorally by people who took advantage. The stories you are telling are no different than ones I’ve heard from girlfriends.
This is why I promote much more explicit communication around consent (for both males and females) and boundaries.
I’m sorry that you had to undergo something so unforgivable.
Of course, men don’t get PTSD from sexual assaults, according to the women in my life I’ve known. Women get PTSD from both assault and catcalls in the street, but of course men don’t have to put up with catcalls.
And if they do get PTSD, they just need to man the hell up, because really only women have feelings, according to the women I’ve known.
Sounds like you’ve known some callous non empathetic people. Of course men get PTSD.
Of course they do, during wartime. That’s the only acceptable way for men to end up with it, don’t you know.
No, I don’t. You can be as sarcastic as you want. It does no good to use it on me. It’s like throwing nails at someone who is trying to help someone. I mean, it’s not like you being snarky at me is gonna make me disbelieve what I know to be true (that all humans can suffer greatly at the hands of other humans and that men can be assaulted and suffer from it) and be like, Yeah!
I’m sorry that you had those kind of experiences. There are a lot of screwed up people out there.
What you describe is rape. No wonder you don’t like women who fondle you without asking first because they assume you’re okay with it. By the same token, that’s not behavior that anyone, male or female, should engage in without clear, though possibly non-verbal, signs of consent.
I don’t think the difference between aggressive and passive, as it is used in practice and not words, is the same as the difference between exercising choice and not having the ability to exercise choice (with the nuance of degrees implied). We exercise plenty of choice and one of the dominant ways is by appearing passive, with many a quibble on the relative mix of willful choosing. Choosing passivity can be a luxury, but it does carry a double edged sword, for it tends to encourage gamesmanship and marketeering. So many things break down to economics, and that’s why Scotch… Read more »
I think it’s too simple. I used to point out a woman and joke about getting some with a female friend of mine. She would tell me that I wouldn’t know what to do if she came up to me and started hitting on me. She’s right. I’d probably run away. I’ve had several bad experiences with aggressive women. My lady friends don’t know this and I’ve only told one guy who I’ve known since I was five about one incident. My friends will sometimes get overly aggressive in a playful way to get a reaction out of me. It… Read more »
What do you mean by sexually aggressive? I’m not trying to be snarky, I’m actually curious. So many guys complain that women won’t initiate or ask men out, yet I often suspect that if a woman did initiate, many guys wouldn’t really like it. It would make them too uncomfortable, or if the woman wasn’t attractive, they’d be creeped out.
Sorry, my reply got misplaced. It’s a little farther down.
Oh, if only sexually aggressive women only meant women who initates or ask men out. If only the women who according to CDC in 2009 made 0.89% (79.2% of 1.1%) of men penetrate them without the men’s consent didn’t exist. Whenever I see a complete failure to conceptualize women’s potential as sexual abusers and rapists I worry. A loaded gun in the hands ofa person is dangerous, but it is even more so if the person is convinces the gun is not loaded. For me the OP is another disappointing feminist analysis which erases my experience by on one end… Read more »
“It would make them too uncomfortable, or if the woman wasn’t attractive, they’d be creeped out.”
You mean…like many women today?:P I don’t think most men would care, or would love it since it takes the weight off our shoulders in the risk of rejection. Although it brings in the whole “how to reject someone nicely” dynamic which sounds annoying.
>I often suspect that if a woman did initiate, many guys wouldn’t really like it. It would make them too >uncomfortable, or if the woman wasn’t attractive, they’d be creeped out.
Yes, that is part of life. Hooking-up is a numbers game.
Sorry to be critical but A’Dog’s comment is itself a indicator that patriarchy is alive in well. Obviously if a woman is completely passive she will allow a man to do what he wants. In the rape culture described above, men are assumed to always want sex, and the woman is supposed to expect this. Thus in rape culture a passive woman is seen as consenting, since presumably sex is guranteed if you let your guard down around a man. So if she lets her guard down, including relative passivity, she presumably wants sex. According to the rape culture and… Read more »
“Thus a man should ask for consent, or else refrain.”
This doesn’t necessarily follow. A woman can give consent without being asked first.
Otherwise lesbian sex would be really really weird…
My point was that in this society, women are assigned the role as sexual ‘gatekeepers’, they are not required to initiate romantic/sexual relations, and men necessarily have to take a more pro-active, ‘aggressive’ role. As ‘gatekeepers’, consent is necessarily part of a woman’s romantic/sexual role.
I’m still convinced that ‘the patriarchy’ is primarily a rhetorical construct which can be attacked at will without the likelihood of anyone seriously defending it, thereby allowing any attackers to have the last word, and avoid any serious debate over the merits of their attack……it’s just a more sophisticated version of blaming ‘Society’.
“P.S. Patriarchy describes a series of elements in a culture that enforce certain gendered behaviors and emphasize men. It doesn’t require a large number of “patriarchs”. You can claim it doesn’t exist, you can claim it isn’t that bad, however feminists know the definition, and the idea that “women consent to sex by being passive” is a patriarchal idea.” Your example of lying back and grinning mischeviously is an excellent example of the way women employ passive consent. Elements do exist in most cultures which emphasise men, but other elements exist which emphasise women, I’ve rarely seen any definition of… Read more »
*But I’m glad that you do acknowledge non verbal consent as valid. It’s a very important statement. Alot of lobbying that goes on addressing sexual assault fails to take into account the fact that quite alot of sex is the result of non-verbal consent.
“Elements do exist in most cultures which emphasise men, but other elements exist which emphasise women, I’ve rarely seen any definition of patriarchy which allows for the existence of the latter, much less adresses them, hence why the idea is so problematic.” Perhaps it would have been better to say “emphasize men in positions of power/control” on QuantumInc’s part. No culture is monolithic with every aspect of that culture conforming to a single idea or ideal (whether you’re talking about patriarchy or capitalism or whatever). The U.S. is capitalist, for example, but it has elements of socialist policies. But on… Read more »
How much is male aggressiveness a consequence of female passivity? Um, as much as female passivity is about male aggressiveness? Both of them come from the same narrative. Unless you’re arguing that women are inherently passive but that men are only aggressive to meet this, which makes no sense. And isn’t the whole concept of sexual ‘consent’ dependent upon female passivity rather than a model of mutual agreement. I…don’t think I understand. Sexual consent revolves around people doing things sexually together that they want to and not doing things they don’t want to. The only way female passivity could come… Read more »
How much is male aggressiveness a consequence of female passivity? If everyone were passive, no one would ever get together. And isn’t the whole concept of sexual ‘consent’ dependent upon female passivity rather than a model of mutual agreement. And I think discussing ‘how the patriarchy views sex’ is mostly a rhetorical parlor trick. No one self identifies as part of the ‘patriarchy’, but everyone is often fingered as part of it. The whole purported existence of the ‘patriarchy’ is a rhetorical framing device to make BS-y gender arguments sound plausible. Sorry, the Patriarchs all died back in the Old… Read more »
“And isn’t the whole concept of sexual ‘consent’ dependent upon female passivity rather than a model of mutual agreement.”
How?
“The whole concept of sexual ‘consent’ ” is, indeed, not dependent on female passivity.
On the other hand the concept that “Men ask, and then the woman needs to consent in order for sex to happen” does indeed have that flaw, so perhaps that’s what AnonymousDog was trying to get at.
I’d say that the whole concept of sexual consent is a lot broader than that, though, and says that sex should be dependent on all parties (however many of them there are, and whatever their gender is) consenting to the acts that take place.
Some people view the word “consent” as synonymous with “acquiesce” and they wouldn’t be wrong to do so as the meaning of the word “consent” has shifted considerably from its latin roots and towards the more passive meaning. Hence the term “enthusiastic consent” to refer to an agreement that all parties actively want , rather than one being the aggressor and another acceding – sometimes reservedly – to what has been proposed.
Just wanted to hear his take on it. I’m well aware women can both initiate and agree
-How much is male aggressiveness a consequence of female passivity- How much is the chicken a consequence of the egg. They’re both THERE. They’re the cultural narrative. Women weren’t being all passive and men decided “We better get aggressive there!” Nor were men being all aggressive and women were like “Oh, cool, we’ll just be passive now. All the aggression was difficult on our feeble lady brains anyway.” Society dictated both of these things at the same time. – And isn’t the whole concept of sexual ‘consent’ dependent upon female passivity rather than a model of mutual agreement.- D…Wha… My… Read more »
I’ve always wondered why men pursue women and sex so aggressively yet “getting f–‘ed”, or being a “pussy” are the worst kind of insults. They want to have sex with women yet they seem to think that being the woman in the interaction is absolutely despicable.
“I’ve always wondered why men pursue women and sex so aggressively yet “getting f–’ed”, or being a “pussy” are the worst kind of insults. They want to have sex with women yet they seem to think that being the woman in the interaction is absolutely despicable.”
I do not get your point.
I am sexually aggressive because I love sex and women. I could care less about conquering, spreading seed or any of the bull. It is just pure pleasure and excitement. Simply put: it feels great!
Maybe they just want to be the gender they already are? If you were a woman that valued your femininity, liked the whole wearing makeup and other gendered stuff then would you want to be a muscle-laden hairy person?
Pussy is cowardice, they don’t want to be seen as cowards. Get fucked, this one is strange, can’t find an origin to it’s usage but it could be a variety of things as fuck isn’t always sex.
True. It probably comes out most often in groups of men, where peer pressure pushes them to keep to the patriarchal notion.
In my experience, very few men fall in the category of “rape culture.”
As Ozy pointed out, zie’s not suggesting that most individuals actually fall into the ‘rape culture’ category, but rather that is how society has largely spun the narrative. It’s like when Foucault (think it was him) at one point who mentions that the idea that everyone in Victorian England was totally sexually repressed is actually kind of wrong. They weren’t, exactly…people were still having sex (obviously), and sometimes pretty scandalously. It’s just that the discourse, the social narrative, surrounding sexual relationships was different from and in many ways divorced from the realities of how people behaved. So what this results… Read more »
Or at least, that’s how I read it.
Some guys like me have had bad experiences with sexually aggressive women and just can’t enter into another relationship without some measure of control. That’s not saying we don’t want her to have fun because we do or that we won’t respect her no or that we won’t stop if she seems hesitant. We will. Some may mistake that with a desire to feel dominate, but that really comes from the need to feel safe.