Category Archives: feminism
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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Don’t Let Your Daughters Grow Up To Marry Gay Cowboys
Mammas don’t let your daughters grow up to marry gay cowboys. That’s a new take on an old song.
I have friends who have married gay cowboys. Except for the cowboy part.
One of my friends married a man, only to come home early one day to find him in bed with another man.
Another gay Christian friend married a woman in hopes of turning straight and living a devout life.
They’re all now divorced.
And then there’s Brokeback Mountain.
Any surprise I became paranoid that a gay man would marry me, trying to pass, or not be gay, or something. I wished that gays could simply marry who they wanted so I wouldn’t have to deal with that.
And I was sure that gay men would rather marry someone who they were in love with and sexually attracted to, too.
We’d all be happier.
Now it looks like we all have that chance since days ago the Supreme Court ruled against DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, which had made gay marriage illegal on the federal level.
While the case was in court Justice Scalia fretted over the unknowns of gay marriage. But we do know that marriage between gays and straits doesn’t work. Gays marrying straights does not help the divorce rate.
Others insist that marriage is for procreation.
In that case, everyone from my birth family, except for my brother, would have to get divorced immediately. My father married a woman in her 40s and they never had children. My mother and her husband married in their 60’s. I’ve suffered from fertility problems, myself. My brother, who has sired three children, is the only one who’s safe from these folks.
Please, protect my marriage from these “marriage protection” types!
And besides, it looks like gay marriage is good for marriage.
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Shades of Craving Your Own Abuse
I’ve mused over why so many women want Fifty Shades of Grey. Some may crave a brief escape from the power and responsibility of their lives. Others may fetishize their own disempowerment. Random happenings may play a role. And certainly, a media blitz that eroticizes the degradation and torture of women can end up living in women’s own heads.
Some stick to fantasy and role-play. Others come to accept, or even crave, their own abuse.
Alisa Valdes was raised a feminist but eventually learned to submit when she met “the Cowboy.” What began as obedience turned violent, as when he:
dragged me down the hall to the bedroom, bent me over, and took me, telling me as he did so that I must never forget who was in charge.
The violence escalated and she eventually leapt from a moving truck, fearing he would kill her.
Or, I read this on the feminist blog, Jezebel:
“Hit me. Harder. Hard.” …
I slapped her as hard as I could. She made a noise, like crying but also like a hot intake of breath. She nodded. I did it again, a little less hard. I could see her face darkening and didn’t want to leave a mark. My hand stung. I assumed her face hurt more… As we fucked increasingly hard, she made noises I didn’t know. I took them as cues, so I would slap her as hard as I could, as hard as she seemed to want.
Another woman posted this comment on my blog:
However, as far as the violent sex goes, I will admit being one of those women who enjoys it.
I also know from experience, however, that violent sex is addicting and only induces more desire for increased violence, which almost became borderline physically dangerous sometimes.
We experience pain for a reason. It is a warning to stop whatever we are doing because it is harming us. People who lack pain receptors die young.
Does this eroticization teach women to crave their own abuse? Almost like a backlash to a movement that teaches men not to abuse and that teaches women they don’t have to take it?
A counterblast to a society that now provides women’s shelters, hot lines and mandatory arrest? Maybe we can get you to crave your own abuse, without complaint?
That’s one of my worries about the Dominance/submission trend, which includes the appeal of Fifty Shades.
In my next post in this series, I’ll look at how sexualizing male dominance keeps male dominance sexy. After that I’ll consider the other side: pro-orgasm feminism that wants women to cum, however they cum.
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Right-Wing Hearts Bleed for Kids
Right-wingers fret over “working moms” and want to jail pregnant women who drink, smoke, or use drugs. We wouldn’t want to harm children’s life chances, now, would we?
Unless children’s life chances are harmed by corporate pollution or government cuts to battered women’s shelters, early education, health care or food supplements for poor kids.
Then, no worries!
Concern only comes when the opportunity to jail or disempower women presents itself.
Right now sequester cuts are threatening shelters and early education, while budget discussions are threatening the ability of little kids to get enough to eat.
Congress rushed to rectify across-the-board cuts to the FAA – long lines at airport security are a no-no! Especially when frequent flyers so often bring in big campaign contributions.
But who cares if kids are so hungry or lacking in medical care that they can’t focus on their schoolwork? How about the life-long trauma that comes from watching fathers beat mothers? How about cancer-causing toxic waters?
Right-wing extremists have their priorities.
They stew about moms working outside the home. But that’s where they shouldn’t worry.
University of Michigan psychology professor, Lois Wladis Hoffman, reviewed 40 years of research and performed her own study. Turns out, kids whose moms worked outside the home did better academically and were better-adjusted behaviorally and socially. Daughters, in particular, had a higher sense of competence and effectiveness.
Extremists. Worried about kids? Or just looking for ways to disempower women?
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Male/Female Friendships Help End Rape
![220px-WhenHarryMetSallyPoster[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/220px-whenharrymetsallyposter1.jpg)
by Michael Kimmel PhD
Cross-posted at Sociological Images
Let me ask you a question: Do you have a good friend of the opposite sex?
Odds are you do. In fact, the odds are overwhelming.
When I first began teaching, 25 or so years ago, I asked my students how many of them had a good friend of the opposite sex. About 10% said they did. The rest were from what I called the When Harry Met Sally generation. You’ll remember the scene, early in the film, when Harry asserts that women and men can’t be friends because “sex always gets in the way.” Sally is sure he’s wrong. They fight about it. Then, thinking she has the clincher for her position, she says, confidently, “So that means that you can be friends with them if you’re not attracted to them!”
“Ah,” says Harry, “you pretty much want to nail them too.”
Young people today have utterly and completely repudiated this idea. These days, when I ask my students, I’ve had to revise the question: “Is there anyone here who does not have a friend of the opposite sex?” A few hands perhaps, in the more than 400 students in the class.
But let’s think, for a moment, about the “politics” of friendship. With whom do you make friends? With your peers. Not your supervisor or boss. Not your subordinate. Your equal. More than romance, and surely more than workplace relationships, friendships are the relationships with the least amount of inequality.
This changes how we can engage men in the efforts to end sexual assault, because there are three elements to sexual assault that can be discussed and disentangled.
First is men’s sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, to sex. This sense of entitlement dissolves in the face of an encounter with your friends. After all, entitlement is premised on inequality. The more equal women are, the less entitlement men may feel. (Entitlement is not to be confused with resentment; equality often breeds resentment in the privileged group. The privileged rarely support equality because they fear they have something to lose.) Entitlement leads men to think that they can do whatever they want.
Second, the Bro Code tells those guys that they’re right – that they can get away with it because their bros won’t challenge or confront them. The bonds of brotherhood demand men’s silent complicity with predatory and potentially assaultive behavior. One never rats out the brotherhood. But if we see our female friends as our equals, then we might be more likely to act ethically to intervene and resist being a passive bystander. (And, of course, we rescue our male friends from doing something that could land him in jail for a very long time.)
Men’s silence is what perpetuates the culture of sexual assault; many of the excellent programs that work to engage men suggest that men start making some noise. We know the women, or know people who know them. This is personal.
Finally, we’re better than that – and we know it.
Sexual assault is often seen as an abstraction, a “bad” thing that happens to other people: Bad people do bad things to people who weren’t careful, were drunk or compromised. But, as I said, it’s personal. And besides, this framing puts all the responsibility on women to monitor their activities, alcohol consumption, and environments; if they don’t, whose fault is it?
This sets the bar far too low to men. It assumes that unless women monitor and police everything they do, drink, say, wear etc., we men are wild, out of control animals and we cannot be held responsible for our actions.
Surely we can do better than this. Surely we can be the good and decent and ethical men we say we are. Surely we can promise, publicly and loudly, the pledge of the White Ribbon Campaign (the world’s largest effort to engage men to end men’s violence against women): I pledge never to commit, condone, or remain silent about violence against women and girls.
Our friends – both women and men – deserve and expect no less of us.
Michael Kimmel is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stonybrook. He has written or edited over twenty volumes, including Manhood in America: A Cultural History and Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. You can visit his website here.
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Learning to Like Torture in Shades of Grey
What’s the appeal of Fifty Shades of Grey? As I’ve written before, release from power, fetishizing disempowerment, and random happenings may all play a part.
Internalizing a culture that eroticizes the degradation and torture of women surely plays a role, too.
A post from Feministing reads:
I am in no way surprised that many women, who have been socialized in a culture in which male sexuality is linked to domination and in which women are taught their sexual power comes from being wanted, have fantasies of submission.
When you are bombarded by images, ideas subconsciously get inside your head. And we are drenched in “male dominance is sexy” imagery.
![Dolce-Gabbana-Ad-Sexist[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/dolce-gabbana-ad-sexist1.jpg)
Dolce & Gabana has a sexy ad suggesting gang rape. In another, a swimsuit-clad woman lies down as fully clothed men look menacingly down on her.
A Tom Ford eyewear ad seems to say F-you to a woman, in a BJ kind of way.
Fashion ads suggest that black and blue is beautiful.
At Superbowl XXXVIII Justin Timberlake slapped Janet Jackson around before ripping off her bodice.
Rhett Butler “takes” Scarlett in an act of marital rape – and she awakens sexually satisfied in the morning. Luke rapes Laura on “General Hospital” — and they fall in love.
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit invites us to indulge in the rape, battering and torture of sex victims — usually women.
Meanwhile, The Secretary indulges in a little D/s on the side.
Or go to the ballet and watch a man overtake a woman in “Petite Mort” or “little death” (in idiom: orgasm).
On the music scene sexy women are routinely debased as bitches and ho’s while Eminem chants “I’m in flight high of a love drunk from the hate” while Rihanna submits saying, “I like the way it hurts” — and periodically returns to a lover who beat her.
Women are also watching more porn these days. Now showing: violence and degradation of women. Watching, they increasingly find it all arousing.
On the High Court Justice Breyer asks why thirteen-year-olds are protected from Playboy while video games that let boys bind, torture and kill a woman are just fine – so long as the she’s not topless.
As a kid I checked out Grimm’s Fairy Tales at the library only to read a tale about a woman who was punished by being stripped and driven through the town in humiliation as sharp spikes pierced her skin. Another childhood memory emerges of a woman being thrown over a man’s knee to be spanked on TV.
When young girls are steeped in these sexy images, is it any surprise that they come to see male domination and violence as sexy, themselves?
So really, it is no surprise that so many women are enthralled by the domination and submission of Fifty Shades of Grey.
I’ll talk more on what I make of all this later.
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Enslaving Sex Objects
Every day, girls are kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery. Stella Marr was attending Columbia University, working to make a good life for herself and escape the abuses of home. But the more she succeeded, the more violent her mother became. Her mom finally kicked her out of the house. A friend knew a friend who needed a roommate. But when she got to the apartment three men beat and raped her and locked her in a tiny room with no window. Next, they forced her into prostitution. Men bought her for sex, and some who knew she was enslaved didn’t care.
Not so long ago, even Osaka’s Mayor, Toru Hashimoto, excused sex slavery – at least in times of war — explaining that soldiers need “comfort women”:
When soldiers are risking their lives by running through storms of bullets, and you want to give these emotionally charged soldiers a rest somewhere, it’s clear that you need a comfort women system.
The “comfort women” enduring this intense trauma — which sounds worse than war to me — don’t need comfort (and freedom!) themselves? I guess only men count. Women exist only to serve them?
Then there are men who kidnap girls for their own uses. Like Cleveland’s Ariel Castro who was arrested last month for locking three young women in his house — even chaining them in his basement in the early years — while he emotionally, physically and sexually abused them.
And right now trial has begun in the Bay Area over the gang rape of a 16-year-old Richmond girl who was lured by a “friend” who saw her walking home early from a high school dance. The girl was “slapped, punched, kicked, robbed, urinated on, groped and raped by both people and objects,” according to a news report. As many as 20 men were involved. Some laughed and took pictures. The ringleader said he wanted to “pimp her out.” Her enslavement was more short-lived, but nearly fatal.
Do these men have no sense of women as human beings? Are they mere objects that exist to sexually satiate men?
Instead of living fulfilling, growing lives, developing their potential and creating bonds with family and friends, these women are kept in small, dark rooms, beaten and raped. They are denied health care. Some are starved. One of the women Castro kidnapped was starved and beaten to induce miscarriages — from five pregnancies. About three quarters of Japan’s sex slaves died, while survivors were often left infertile from trauma or from STDs.
Kris Mohandie, a forensic psychologist who works with long-term kidnapping cases says, “These are some of the most catastrophic kinds of experiences a human being can be subjected to.”
He also says that when a man abducts a woman for his own personal pleasure — and for her pain — he has “had longstanding fantasies of capturing, controlling, abusing and dominating women.”
And that, in turn, comes out of a pornified culture that objecifies women and ties eroticism to their abuse.
You don’t find sexuality and violence tied together in every culture. Indians of America’s east coast were free from that sort of violence when Europeans first arrived. The Arapesh still don’t “get” rape.
But inside of violent, objectifying porn cultures, some men both find violence against women arousing and enact their fantasies in real life.
All the more likely when women are seen as mere objects that don’t deserve empathy as a result of objectification.
Violent pornography is also correlated with both aggressive behavior and men becoming more callus toward women who are sexually assaulted, says Robert Johnson of the University of Texas.
But the whole culture has become pornified, so it’s not just pornography that’s at fault. As Slippery Rock University’s women’s studies director observed about the Ariel Castro case:
Sadly, in a world that endlessly replicates and sexualizes male domination of women, I am not surprised that this “fantasy” narrative has been literalized. Though there are doubtless myriad factors that contributed to this nightmare crime, I hope that one positive outcome is broader critical analyses of how pornography normalizes the domination and degradation of women in pervasive and damaging ways.
Some wonder why we don’t talk about this. Maybe because critiques of violent, degrading porn seem anti-sex. But there are plenty of non-violent and non-degrading ways to enjoy sex!
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Ya Gotta Be A Bitch To Do Stuff
“All women are b*tches — or need to be in order to succeed at, well, pretty much anything, judging from the publishing industry,” to paraphrase the Huffington Post.
Here are a few examples HP presents (for more, go here):
Get Married
via Amazon
Be Thin
via Amazon
Run (And Be Fat)
via Amazon
Be Happy
via Amazon
So this has got me thinking. Why must women be bitches in order to do stuff?
Maybe it depends on what you mean by “bitch.”
If a guy says, “She’s a bitch” it means she’s difficult — or she sleeps with everyone but him!
If “She’s my bitch,” she’s submissive. If “He’s my bitch,” he is, too.
But if she says, “Yeah, I’m a bitch!” then she’s assertive, she has self-respect and she looks out for herself.
I know, it’s confusing. So let’s go with that last one.
Maybe to get married, be slim, run — and be fat, stay on a budget, do yoga, date men, have great sex and be happy, it helps to be assertive and stop worrying about giving yourself completely over to others… and stop worrying about how everyone else sees us?
Or, to date, marry and have sex with any man that you’d want to date, marry and have sex with, it’s best to be a bitch?
Hmmmmm, maybe the books have a point.
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Female Viagra May Work Too Well?
A pill that boosts female desire might work too well?
Scientists developing Lybrido (due in 2016) fear the pill may create orgasm-hungry, sex-craved nymphomaniacs who cheat on their husbands and splinter society.
Or at least they are afraid the FDA might reject the drug for that reason. Andrew Goldstein, who’s conducting the research says, “There’s a bias against — a fear of creating the sexually aggressive woman.”
The female libido has been oppressed and repressed for millennia by means of slut-shaming, chastity belts, genital mutilation (in which the clitoris, along with the inner and outer labia are removed), honor killings (killing daughters who may have been unchaperoned, had sex outside marriage, been raped or chosen their own husbands), and more. Even vibrators have been outlawed!
Why?
Just jealous of our multiple O’s?
A desire to feel powerful and in control by controlling women’s bodies?
Or maybe men just don’t want to support kids who aren’t their own, as evolutionary psych claims? (So why do so many of these same dudes want to keep women out of the workforce and unable to support children, themselves?)
If the FDA worries that women – and their partners – will have too much fun and freedom, well, that’s just stupid.
But if they’re worried about cheating and social instability then “female Viagra” might actually help.
First, a big reason men seek divorce is a partner’s low sex drive (which likely stems from repression). So if women desired sex more, there’d be less divorce from that cause.
Meanwhile, even as repression depresses a woman’s natural desire and ability to enjoy pure sexual sensation, we also fetishize women’s bodies and not men’s. All this leads to a convoluted way of getting aroused that could encourage cheating:
Many women get turned on by sensing a man’s lust for her, and from feeling chosen because she’s so attractive. She kind of makes love to herself, vicariously through his eyes… his desire for her. But if she’s been with one man for a long time she may sense less lust as he grows used to her. And if it’s a committed relationship, she may feel like he simply has no choice but her. That’s no turn-on. And then there’s the “everydayness” of seeing the same guy all the time, morning and night. She cherishes him, she’s bonded to him, but the sexual magic is gone. UNLV psych professor, Marta Meana, says men don’t seem to experience this problem so much because they have a stronger sex drive – one that is less repressed.
If a woman had another option – a pill that boosts desire – she would feel less need for a series of new, lustful guys to make her feel desired and chosen, and the “everydayness” wouldn’t be the same problem.
The truth is, most women stay true to their partners even when their sexual desire for them drops. But for those who are bored and stay, or for those who might otherwise stray to recapture that spark, this little pill could boost monogamous relationships.
And should a woman’s sex drive grow so strong that it wears her husband out, well, there are vibrators.
We can debate whether monogamy is preferable or not, but as New York Times writer, Daniel Bergner put it,
Perhaps the fantasy that so many of us harbor, consciously or not, in the early days of our relationships, that we have found a soul mate who will offer us both security and passion, till death do us part, will soon be available with the aid of a pill.
I’d rather women enjoy sex because our culture stopped repressing their desire, but if a pill works in the interim, that’s a-okay by me. So long as she is empowered in having this option, and not pressured by her partners or society.
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It’s Crucial to Call Women Names?
Not so long ago you could go to Facebook pages called “Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs” or “Kicking Your Girlfriend in the Fanny because she won’t make you a Sandwich,” or pages promoting sexual violence against female Marines — and fb didn’t really care.
But after letting companies know that many of us would not buy products that were advertised on these pages, Facebook began including gender-based hate among its banned content, including racial and religious hostilities.
And so we move further away from normalizing women’s debasement.
But some guys are pitching a hissy fit. As Make Me a Sammich declared,
It’s amazing to me how many people seem to think that rape culture on Facebook is something to be protected and defended by coming to #FBrape and calling campaigners “bitches” and “cunts” and “fascists.”
All these guys with their knickers in a twist.
Really, why’s it so important to call women cunts?
I can see how women and girls are harmed by the name-calling and celebration of violence against them. Psych 101 says that when we are repeatedly called names many of us internalize and believe it. So girls and women could be left feeling degraded and secondary.
Rape jokes also signal to rapists that sex assault is normal and accepted. As Time Machine at Shakesville points out:
A lot of people accuse feminists of thinking that all men are rapists. That’s not true. But do you know who think all men are rapists? Rapists do.
Calling women cunts may buttress some guys’ sorry egos, making them feel “superior” by putting women down.
They don’t get that they make themselves look worse: depraved, small-minded and immature.
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