- For most of history, we’ve taken for granted the implicit brutality of male sexuality. In 1976, the radical feminist and pornography opponent Andrea Dworkin said that the only sex between a man and a woman that could be undertaken without violence was sex with a flaccid penis: “I think that men will have to give up their precious erections,” she wrote. In the third century A.D., it is widely believed, the great Catholic theologian Origen, working on roughly the same principle, castrated himself.
Well then.
- The (very few) prominent men who are speaking up now basically just insist that men need to be better feminists — as if the past few weeks have not amply demonstrated that the ideologies of men are irrelevant.
Perhaps it's because the only socially appropriate response at the moment is to be shouted at and pilloried for existing so long as we refuse to give up our "precious erections."
I will say in all sincerity that these past few months have caused me (out of curiosity, self-reflection, and muted fear) to think about how I've behaved in my life. I can say with a high, though not total, degree of confidence that I've never been guilty of these types of sins. However, I sure as hell have sat idly by while others have. High school in the 90s was a depraved place (as I'm sure it still is), and there were many guys I knew and some I was even friends with who openly bragged about forcing girls to blow them, e.g. I knew two separate guys who admittedly fucked women (girls, actually) who were passed out drunk. You'd kind of roll your eyes and think to yourself that he's a creep, but saying anything wouldn't have entered your mind, because it wasn't your business and being cool matters at that age. I think the author is wrong insofar as his argument that it's inherent male sexuality that is problematic. He's bordering on negating men's agency in sexual encounters, which has been rejected by every court everywhere in human history. Of course were all ogres on the inside; that doesn't mean we're all (or even most of us are) ogres on the outside. Culture goes pretty far in saying what is and isn't permissible. If I observed any of the behaviors nowadays as I did back then, I'd never keep my mouth shut. Part of that is that I'm 35 and a lot more confident in myself and in the difference between right and wrong, but it's also that we've had these conversations in public that highlight how sexual violence affects victims. Those conversations matter and are effective, and it's a good thing that we're peeling back the curtains to shine light on this topic.
I will say in all sincerity that these past few months have caused me (out of expectation, experience and general pessimism) to wonder who I've raped in the past and how it's going to ruin my life. Because of course, I can't recall ever raping anyone. I can't even recall ever pressuring anyone for sex. This does not mean I wasn't accused of rape by an ex-girlfriend while in high school - a girl whom I never even got to second base with. The logical conclusion of the chattering class on this roiling tragedy is "all men are bad" and the column makes the point succinctly. Of course, I can't even profess my innocence - because that's backlash and as we all know, #notallmen is just an excuse to diminish the very real pain these women have suffered. Men, of course, are universally unaware of the trevails women face just to be women and if we merely attempt to nod and agree, we're complicit. Here's what I know - - I let a friend mic up Jessica Alba because I had a sense touching her even vaguely wrong would end my career. - very powerful women have stripped down to their bras with just me in the room because "they don't care what I do." Right now, anyway. - A costume designer tried to get me and my boom op kicked off a show because she said one of the actresses didn't like the way my boom op "looked at her" while wiring her up. Said costume designer had previously refused to help at all, or take responsibility of any kind for getting a microphone under skin-tight evening gowns. She suggested that we both be fired and a female sound crew be hired. We would have, too, if there had been any willing to take the job for the miserable wages we were earning. I have the utmost of sympathy and respect for the massive iceberg of women under the tip of the scandal that's engulfing the public sphere. I am heartened that conditions might improve. But I also know that the terms being discussed take on a singular power of their own and that the safe move for everyone is to err on the side of purity, regardless of the circumstances. Thus we come full circle with this column: all men are bad, period. I've read three screenplays that were bald-faced adaptations of Lysistrata. All of them were by aspiring screenwriters who were sick of a male-dominated industry. Good on 'em. But we have legitimately reached a point where it's easier to assume that a male in public is guilty of malfeasance than not because obviously, all men are scum even if we, personally, try real hard not to be.
It is instructive to find/replace "sexual impropriety" with "violent crime" and "men" with "black people". Doesn't come off so thoughtful in that case.The logical conclusion of the chattering class on this roiling tragedy is "all men are bad" and the column makes the point succinctly.
it's a bunch of nonsense dressed up in a vaguely topical shell to spark social media controversy - claiming that men are inherently brutal frees rapists from responsibility and blames good people for things they don't do. you need more than dworkin, freud, and anecdotes about fairy tales and "the men i know" to make this argument. there are better and more thoughtful ways to talk about this, and none of the pop evo psych in here will do it
Bingo! How many people of any gender examine their motives and behavior critically? Almost none in my experience unless they have some wake up call and realize they're fucked up and seek some kind of help. I've done things in the past in regards to women that I'm truly ashamed of but that I didn't see a problem with at the time. Later when I was more mature, and also after hearing about some experiences women have had, I reexamined what I'd done and I'm not a fucking bastion of enlightened feminism, I'm just a dude and I do dude stuff. And some of that stuff is really shitty. And I don't want to do it again. But I might have if I hadn't seen my own actions reflected in some really awful behavior, not that it was the same or as extreme, but I can see my own traits and behaviors in those of other people that aren't 1:1 correlations. I'm introspective and reflective by nature so I'm prone to some self examination and navel gazing and regretting. But it's super easy for anyone to blow through life and never think about anything going on that's not five minutes in the past or future. I do that. But I sometimes think about why I did something and if it was a shit thing to do. #wokeasfuck #iwinthewokenesscontest #imjokingyouaspiesFreud also understood that repression, any repression, is inherently fluid and complicated and requires humility and self-searching to navigate
It's hardly unexpected considering the inherently weak and feeble nature of the female psyche.
I'm going to assume that you're speaking from your conversational experience here, which is rough. I have no idea what your part has been in the social discussion of male sexual violence, but this is definitely not the only "socially appropriate response at the moment", and I'll say that from my experience - which I know first-hand - rather than assuming yours. In discussions with friends and a lot of strangers, harassment is not the intent - especially considering the subject matter. There are a lot of angry women (and men) out there, but being shouted at for having a male's stance on the issues has not been my experience, and it's definitely not been the "only socially appropriate response" - in fact, it's often the least socially appropriate response in the thread or dialogue. If you're referring to the alleged perps as being "shouted at and pilloried for existing", then I think you've got to clarify what you mean by "existing". If your intent's literal, then you probably agree with the OP more than you think. This article has a lot of truth. Drawing on the two quotes you placed in the link's description is a mischaracterization in my opinion. The real meat of the OP is that there is a disturbingly brutal connection between male sexual violence and male sexuality that doesn't seem to be bounded by the man's ideologies - which is true by example a, b, &c., &c., y, z. That's the discussion I was hoping to see here. Up next, Marche wanted to check how we talk about the brutality, which you skipped right up to, but possessive anger about soft dicks is tangentially what the author was concerned about, and they're both conversations.the only socially appropriate response at the moment is to be shouted at and pilloried for existing
This whole topic is well outside my comfort zone and beyond this I don't really want to participate, but I found a counter opinion that seemed worth sharing. I didn't want to make it its own post though, so I thought it wouldn't hurt to leave it in the comments here.
The statistic's been thrown around forever that 1 in 4 women experience sexual harassment/assault in their lives. When you think about that, and realize for every woman harassed there had to be an aggressor, and overwhelmingly the data pointed to male aggressors....I think people just didn't ever really think about what this said about the likelihood incident rate of male aggressors would be. AKA how many there would probably be in the general population. I think everyone just assumed that a very small fraction of men were chronically repeating this behavior on everyone around them in their lives. Idk.
Although the math is relatively simple, it's a difficult calculation without knowing how many people the typical predator preys upon. If it's 25, then one might expect that one in a hundred is guilty of that behavior, which seems low but not unreasonably low. I really have no way of even guessing, but I'm almost sure that most people who commit any sort of sexual violence don't do it to just one person.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. So: 1 in 4 women experience sexual harassment/assault. And for every A there's a B. Therefore it follows that 1 in 4 men are sexual harassers, right? Pretend that's true. That means that 3 in 4 men AREN'T HARASSERS. Yet here we are, "all men are bad." But let's take a step back: Harvey Weinstein: 57 victims Louis CK: 5 victims Roy Moore: 9 victims Al Franken: 4 victims John Conyers: 2 victims Danny Masterson: 4 victims (of rape, not sexual harassment) Bill Cosby: 60 victims So what's "very small?" Clearly - whatever it is, it isn't small enough. However - if we assume that male predators harass two women in their lives on average, we're at one in 8. Here's what I know: My sister settled with one architecture firm because she was one of six women to report harassment by a principal at the firm. She settled with another because she was one of four. Meanwhile, I worked for an architectural consultancy firm that was sued for sexual harassment three times in the four years I was there. We had 11 employees, 7 of them were male, and all three suits were against the principal of our firm. I can't find any statistics to reveal how likely a man is to sexually harass or assault a woman. No matter how you slice it, it's probably less than 1 in 4. But here we are: all men are bad, all men should STFU. So we attend our sexual harassment training (I get to do 4 hours of online training if I want to keep working, thanks to Harvey Weinstein) and everybody's insurance rates go down and we propagate the notion that sexual predators lurk around every corner and we tell young men they can't attend rape prevention marches because "we're part of the problem" and we wonder why the entire situation is so adversarial. I worked for a firm where my boss sexually harassed a drafter a year. That's bonus money I didn't get. Every year. That's a shity-ass firm building a reputation... every year. And I never so much as hugged anybody there. And you can think "sweet jesus we should stop hiring female drafters" which is accurate and horrible but the better move is to find a new job SO YOU DO and end up at a 500-person company where the sole purpose of trade shows is to rent a block of hotel rooms, get plastered and recreate the Tailhook scandal twice a year. I didn't hug anybody there, either.When you think about that, and realize for every woman harassed there had to be an aggressor, and overwhelmingly the data pointed to male aggressors....I think people just didn't ever really think about what this said about the likelihood incident rate of male aggressors would be.
I think everyone just assumed that a very small fraction of men were chronically repeating this behavior on everyone around them in their lives. Idk.
Forgive me for assuming the author's gender, but doesn't he invalidate his own article in the first paragraph? I didn't bother reading beyond that absurd statement so I don't know if he exempts himself later.After weeks of continuously unfolding abuse scandals, men have become, quite literally, unbelievable. What any given man might say about gender politics and how he treats women are separate and unrelated phenomena.
By STEPHEN MARCHE