Monthly Archives: July 2013
In-laws Rip Off Girl’s Fingernails, But Who Cares?
Sahar Gul
KABUL, Afghanistan — A court has reversed the convictions of three Afghans jailed for torturing a young relative who had refused to become a prostitute, alarming activists who had celebrated the guilty verdicts as a warning to all those who would seek to reverse the strides made by women here in the past 12 years… the defendants — Sahar Gul’s mother-in-law, sister-in-law and father-in-law — (will) be set free.
In objection to this reversal, I am rerunning my original post and unfortunately asking this same question: In-laws rip off girl’s fingernails, but who cares?
Fifteen-year-old Sahar Gul’s in-laws locked her away in a basement for six months. They beat her, tortured her with hot irons, broke her fingers, and ripped her fingernails off. Her uncle called authorities and by the time she arrived at a hospital her eyes were swollen nearly shut and scabs crusted her fingertips.
Afghanistan allows multiple wives, including child brides. This young bride had been taken in hopes of pimping her out in prostitution. The abuse was meant to persuade.
What struck me most in the AP report were the following lines:
The outcry over a case like Gul’s probably would not have happened just a few years ago because of deep cultural taboos against airing private family conflicts and acknowledging sexual abuse.
I am heartened that things are changing, with public outrage and an editorial in the Afghanistan Times reading, “Let’s break the dead silence on women’s plight.”
But to think that not long ago horrendous abuses like Sahar’s would have provoked no comment is outrageous. You have to wonder why women’s plight has been invisible for so long. And whether Afghanistan is alone in its blindness.
Women must be poorly valued for such abuses to go on without remark: mere property to be sold off, to make money off of, to beat when “disobedient,” to be stoned as spectator sport. And in some cases, to be tortured like lab rats.
When that is all you’ve known your whole life, when this world seems normal to all around you, who can fully see the horror?
Yet America isn’t always so different. Many still blame rape victims for their rape, and many victims still fear coming forward. Battering victims may be blamed for their abuse. Bullied spouses may feel shamed and cover up — and cover for their partners.
The world may be changing in Afghanistan.
The world needs changing right here in America, too.
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Choosing Beauty Over Sex, or Anything Else–Lessons From Tootsie
Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie
A lot of guys think women want to be beautiful so they can get sex. I’m sure many do. But some guys are surprised that — or don’t believe that — it’s often the reverse: many women have sex hoping to feel beautiful.
But then, men’s value often rests on how much sex they have, while women’s value often rests on their looks.
A woman may capture the Wimbledon title yet be slighted as not “a looker.” She may even become Prime Minister of Australia yet folks debate, “the size of her bottom… the cut of her hair.”
And as I’ve said before:
From the time they’re small, little girls are told they’re pretty – or notice when they’re not told that. They receive gifts of play makeup and vanity sets. They watch endless repeats of Disney princesses on DVD, buy beautiful princess dolls, and then graduate to Barbie or Bratz. All of whom have extensive wardrobes. It’s all about being pretty.
Meanwhile, girls and women are bombarded with media images of impossibly beautiful women who are photoshopped up the wazoo, modeling what they’re supposed to look like.
Who’s popular in middle school and high school? Pretty girls. By the time they’re in college young women are under relentless pressure to be hot, as if that’s the most important thing in the world.
When Dustin Hoffman took the role of Tootsie he got a shocking first-hand glimpse of all this.
In the film, Hoffman plays a difficult-to-work-with actor who no one will hire. So he poses as an actress to get a role. In an interview that’s gained a lot of attention, Hoffman says the experience helped him to see how men can unknowingly reinforce impossible beauty ideals.
His make-up artist had made him look like woman, he recalls, but:
I was shocked that I wasn’t more attractive… I said “Now you have me looking like a woman. Now make me beautiful.” I thought I should be beautiful. If I was going to be a woman, I would want to be as beautiful as possible. But they said, “This is as good as it gets.”
At that moment he had an epiphany that made him think twice about how he treated women. He told his wife,
I think I am an interesting woman when I look at myself on screen. And I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to that character because she doesn’t fulfill physically the demands that we’re brought up to think women have to have in order to ask them out… There’s too many interesting women I have…not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed.
Women are taught from the time they are small that their value lies in their beauty — unfortunate since our shell is shallow and looks are fleeting.
But is it any surprise that beauty so often seems more important than sex – or anything else?
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Shades of Making Sexism Sexy
Do Fifty Shades of Grey, along with the deluge of violent and humiliating images that flood our consciousness, support patriarchy by making male dominance seem sexy?
Some worry that it might.
John Stoltenberg, a feminist activist and scholar, wrote a piece called “Pornography and Freedom,” observing that plenty of porn seems to promote oppression, whether a woman is pictured bound and gagged with her genitals open to the camera or whether lines from a book read, “The man wanted only to abuse and ravish her until she was broken and subservient.”
These sorts of images in both mainstream media and porn are mostly about women submitting to men.
In the eroticization, male dominance can seem sexy, he says.
If it’s sexy, who would want to end it?
A student of mine once asked why we should care about women’s equality when a lot of women (like her?) find male dominance sexy.
Two of my friends told me that they wanted to marry dominant men. One did and eventually divorced him because she didn’t like the reality of it. The other stayed married but had a lot of emotional problems.
I’ve mentioned Alisa Valdes before. She was raised feminist, and was even named one of the top feminist writers by Ms. Magazine. But when she met “the Cowboy,” she “embraced her femininity” and learned to submit: No back-talking; no second-guessing; no sarcastic, smart-ass remarks. She stayed monogamous and ignored her jealousy while Cowboy catted about. Her book, “The Feminist and the Cowboy,” suggests women will live happily ever after in orgasmic bliss if they just submit to controlling, misogynist men. In a recent post I described how her submission turned increasingly violent.
Still, my students often wonder “What’s the big deal?”
But what if the imagery were about race instead of sex? What if blacks nearly always had white lovers in real life, and at the same time nearly all of the “D/s” imagery depicted white domination and sadistic acts inflicted upon blacks? And what if some blacks came to crave submission and their own abuse at the hands of whites?
Would that be healthy?
Of course, once patriarchy sexualizes submission you can turn it around with “the dominatrix” emerging. Yet we are not bombarded with imagery that makes matriarchy sexy. So guys don’t go around wanting to marry dominant females who will boss them around in real life.
But a lot of people don’t want to engage this discussion. Repression and all that.
Prof. Robert Jensen, of the University of Texas, studies porn and says,
When I critique pornography, I am often told to lighten up. Sex is just sex… (but) Pornography offers men a politics of sex and gender – and that politics is patriarchal and reactionary…
There should be nothing surprising about the fact that some pornography includes explicit images of women in pain. But my question is: Wouldn’t a healthy society want to deal with that? Why aren’t more people, men or women, concerned? …
We should be free to talk about our desire for an egalitarian intimacy and for sexuality that rejects pain and humiliation.
I feel it is important to discuss things that are rarely discussed, and that make distinctions between what is healthy and what is not.
Next time I will turn to the other side of this question, looking at “pro-orgasm” feminists.
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How to Pleasure A Woman
Men get much of their sex ed from porn, which has little to do with pleasing actual women (porn stars are acting ecstatic, after all, and the focus is often on pleasing the man). So WebMD asked reputed sex educators, Tristan Taormino and Lou Paget, to talk about some common mistakes men make. Go here to see the full text. We’ll also look at research from Cindy Meston and David Buss, who researched and wrote, Why Women Have Sex.
Men imagine that women feel something parallel to what they feel, says Paget, leaving a “huge disconnect” about what feels good to women:
When a man has intercourse with a woman, and his penis goes into her body, that sensation is so off the charts for most men, they cannot imagine that it isn’t feeling the same way for her. It couldn’t be further from the truth.
The vagina is actually less sensitive than the clitoris and the surrounding parts for most women.
And a vibrator can help. So don’t be insulted, thinking something is wrong if that’s what she needs, say the authors. “Some women can’t have an orgasm with less than 3,000 rpm, so think of a vibrator as your assistant, not your substitute.”
But many men continue to believe that women should be able to reach orgasm from vaginal penetration. Taormino says:
I still get letters from people who say things like, my wife can’t [orgasm] from intercourse unless she has clitoral stimulation — please help. I want to write back and say, ‘OK, what’s the problem?’
And then there’s the myth that bigger is better. It all depends. Length is great for women who enjoy having their cervix stimulated, say Meston and Buss. But the same stimulation can be painful for other women. And if the penis is too long, “it feels like you’re getting punched in the stomach,” Paget explains. “It makes you feel nauseous.” Still others feel neither pleasure nor pain—and often not much of anything.
Generally speaking, width is more important than length. But depending on the woman, some prefer larger and some smaller.
And men should not assume they know what a woman wants based upon what other women have wanted. Taormino points out that:
You develop a repertoire as you mature sexually, but you should never assume that what worked for the last person is going to work for this person.
So open the lines of communication and ask what feels good. But consider: If you constantly ask her if she’s coming, do you really think she will? The badgering can move her from erotic to just feeling pressured. So don’t overdo it.
And finally, let her know how gorgeous and sexy she is. That’s one of the biggest turn-ons a woman can get.
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Tween Panties That Say “No”
![PantyTrio[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/pantytrio1.jpg)
By Annie Shields @ Ms. Magazine Blog
What better way to reinforce family morals than by wearing underwear that doubles as a conversation starter, right? If the junior prom after-party starts to get dull, just take off your pants and encourage a dialogue! Awkward first date? Lift up your dress and ask for some feedback!
On the one hand, these panties were created by parents to encourage their teens to remain abstinent. On the other hand, these are panties. A strange choice of merchandise to hawk in the name of chastity.
Stranger still, these 75-percent “frisky” garments seem to be closely tied to a religious agenda. The very name of the line implies a Christian affiliation–subbing “your mother” for Jesus in the familiar WWJD. So what’s really going on here? Let’s take a closer look at some of the site’s offerings.
The messages on these panties – ”Dream On,” “Zip It!” and “Not Tonight” – coyly indicate non-consent to a potential romantic partner.
But the whole concept of abstinence-promoting underwear makes about as much sense as commemorating sobriety with flasks instead of coins at AA meetings.
It isn’t just dumb, it’s dangerous. There’s nothing wrong with encouraging your children to choose abstinence before marriage; there is something wrong, however, with not empowering them with the knowledge and tools to make that choice and confidently communicate it to romantic partners. Without pulling down their pants.
What’s more, the panties can really muddy the notion of “consent” in young people’s minds. What if a teen girl wears “Not Tonight” panties and decides at some point in the evening that she actually does want to have sex? Nothing wrong with that, but the dissonance between the panty-message and her ultimate decision may well reinforce the mistaken idea that “no means yes” in her partner’s mind.
This bizarre line of undergarments calls to mind what Jessica Valenti dubbed The Purity Myth in her book of the same name. In an interview, she argues that oversexualization of women in the media and pop culture has begun to intersect with the conservative movement, resulting in the fetishization of virginity:
If you are telling young women over and over that what’s most important is their virginity … then you’re sending the message that it’s the body and sexuality that defines who they are … With the virginity movement it’s adults–and a lot of men–deciding what appropriate sexuality is for younger women. It’s anyone and everyone except young women themselves defining (their) sexuality.
This is ridiculously displayed in WWYMD’s promotional videos, which feature abstinence-friendly songs and wind-blown girls posing suggestively in their skivies next to fully-clothed young men. Here are some of the choice lyrics:
No kiss, no touch, no makin’ out hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey… When men see a body like this, they have a tendency to dismiss that I got anything upstairs, but I got me a lot of brains up there … Let me make it clear, so there’s no mistake my life’s goin’ good, there’s too much at stake to just hand it over, to any man…
The second video is even more explicit and confusing, combining gratuitous crotch shots with pro-chastity song lyrics:
I am waitin’, for my time in life, I am waitin’ for love. I am waitin’ on the world to change I am waitin’ on you
Abstinence-promoting strategies as ineffective as these will certainly prove to be are, unfortunately, not unprecedented. With the rise of what’s been called the chastity-industrial complex, peddling purity is big business. Once again, social and religious conservatives say one thing, do another and wait for the money to roll in.
This lightly edited post was originally posted on the Ms. Magazine Blog on April 14, 2011.
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Gay Marriage Hurts Patriarchal Marriage
Have you heard that gay marriage hurts marriage and family? Some Supreme Court Justices worried about this in hearings over DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act — which was recently struck down, allowing for gays to marry.
If my gay cousin gets married, will my husband and I start fighting more? Will my brother’s kids feel more stressed out and run away?
When marriage equality was argued before the California Supreme Court the presiding judge asked the attorney “defending marriage” how gay marriage would harm it. After several false starts the lawyer finally admitted he had no idea.
Gay marriage doesn’t hurt families.
But it could hurt patriarchal families.
Patriarchal families have male heads. In a family with two men married to each other, who is the male head? If one man were in charge would the other be submissive? No patriarchy-lover wants to see a submissive man!
And in lesbian marriage there can be no male head.
If families without male heads begin flourishing that could harm the whole notion that men must be in charge. Oh no!
All this reminds me of a post by CanBeBitter which lists relationship phrases we should retire. Like this one: “Wearing the pants,” referring to women who possesses an “inappropriate” amount of power in a relationship. And then there is “whipped”: a man who is at his lover’s beck and call and defers to her.
CanBeBitter goes on to observe that, “This list mostly applies to heterosexual relationships.”
Yes, exactly, I thought.
Of course that’s why so many patriarchy-loving folks rail against gay marriage. Who will “wear the pants”?
Gay marriage doesn’t hurt marriage and family.
But it may hurt patriarchal marriage and families.
And that’s a good thing.
Since invalidating DOMA, the Supreme Court scored one for marriage equality in more than one way.
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