Category Archives: men

Doing Dumb Stuff to Prove Manhood

TOUGH-GUISE-OriginalBy Alexander Ghanma

When David Wexler’s wife asked him to hold her purse for a moment he was suddenly filled with shame, seeing his masculinity at risk:

Loaded down with shopping bags, my wife asked me to grab her purse and carry it across the plaza. That’s all. Yet even though I knew I was being stupid, I couldn’t do it. The 15 seconds being seen carrying a purse were beyond my capacities as a card-carrying male…

Shame may be the least understood dimension of men’s inner experience — by both men themselves and the people who live with them.

Shame-o-phobia is what therapist, David Wexler calls the sort of thing that leaves men questioning their manhood over stupid stuff. Like The Freezing Water Test:

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Friendly = I Want Sex?

friendsBy Erica Dalton

Coming into sexuality is so confusing. At least it was for me.

Beyond the no-win of being ridiculed for not doing “it,” verses becoming the main topic of conversation if you do, there were other perplexities.

Most of my classmates had had something resembling sex by eighth grade. I was more naive, which some found hard to believe: Since I had more guy friends than girl friends how could I have been anything but a slut?

Girls and guys both seemed to think so.

Then along came another no-win as my friendliness was taken for flirtation. When I turned guys down I was called a tease.

On my fifteenth birthday a guy friend bought me a build-a-bear and asked me out. When I explained that I only saw him as a friend he got extremely angry. He told me that by being nice to him, laughing at his jokes and spending time together, I was leading him on and that was not fair. I was dumbfounded. How could being a good person now be turned against me? The only response I was capable of was, “Well, do you want me to be a bitch to you?”

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When Playboy Pushes Consent It’s Cool

tumblr_inline_mtbms0Kacv1r6p31lYou’ve probably heard about Playboy’s new and revised Top 10 Party Commandments for the ultimate guide to a consensual good time.

Because without consent, “party times are under serious threat” by rape:

A good college party is all about everyone having a good time. Consent is all about everyone having a good time. Rape is only a good time if you’re a rapist. And f— those people.

You’ve probably also heard that these revised commandments are a hoax unleashed by college feminists.

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My Boyfriend, the Objectifier

playboy-bunny-manual-main[1]When I first heard feminists complain about sexual objectification I didn’t get it. Why didn’t they want women to be sexy?

Turns out, I didn’t understand what objectification was.

Put simply, it is about seeing someone as nothing but an object – one that is sexual in nature – that exists for someone else’s pleasure. Objects don’t have feelings, thoughts or life goals, so you needn’t worry about hurting them.

So I finally got it intellectually. But I didn’t fully get how it played out until I met “Mike” (that’s what I’ll call him). And years later saw Mike’s way of seeing in a Ms. Magazine article discussing objectifying ads.

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Guys: Romantic? Or Just Want One Thing?

130815_DX_HookingUp.jpg.CROP.rectangle3-largeSome reports say guys are getting more romantic. Others say they just want one thing, preferably from celluloid porn stars.

Which is it?

On the one hand guys are getting sexually addicted to their computer screens. Davy Rothbart explains that the “fireworks and whiz-bangs” of extreme porn is to real women what an Imax 3-D movie is to a flipbook. (Though he thinks it’s a problem.)

And after a tour of college campuses, Naomi Wolf concluded that far from turbocharging women’s objectification and turning men into wild, raping beasts, Internet porn is turning men off real women.

But others have found young men becoming more romantic than their older brothers and fathers. Ninety-five percent of whom would prefer to have sex with someone they love over sex with a “hot” woman. Over half only want sex with someone they love.

What’s with the conflicting data?

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Man Chops Off Wife’s Fingers Because She’s More Educated Than Him

BANGLADESH-CRIME-DOMESTIC-VIOLENCE-20111216-161044Rafiqul Islam told his wife that he wanted to give her a surprise present. He blindfolded her, taped her mouth shut (huh?) and asked her to hold out her hand.

Then he chopped off all five of her fingers.

Why? Because she was working toward a college degree without his permission.

Mr. Islam had only made it to eighth grade and was a migrant worker in the United Arab Emirates. He did not want his wife thinking that she was better than him with some hoity-toity education and future career.

His wife, Hawa Akhter, promptly moved in with her parents and took to writing with her left hand in order to finish her studies.

According to the Daily Mail, this was one of a series of attacks against educated women in the Middle-East. Here’s another: Read the rest of this entry

Betas Pushing Theory That Insults Them

averageSome guys who call themselves “Betas” (gentler, less macho men) complain that women want successful, dominating “Alphas,” instead of them.

Despite evidence to the contrary.

Turns out, women actually prefer Betas. I know I do. (Well, I prefer most Betas: the one’s who aren’t complaining about what idiots women are for wanting Alphas.)

Actually, they aren’t always complaining. They are often explaining, matter-of-factly, that women want Alphas because of evolution. Because dominating genes are just better genes, or something.

And sometimes these guys aren’t just telling me. They are adamantly pushing a cause.

I “get” the complaining. Who wants to feel rejected?

But why are they so tied to a theory that puts them down? And that leaves them no hope (in their minds)?

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Who’s Afraid of a Feminist? And Why?

CLICK IMAGE TO ZOOM

CLICK IMAGE TO ZOOM

Scary stuff, eh?

Placing these images on the Internet was only the third frightening thing that 17-year-old Jinan Younis did this year.

Here’s the first:

A group of men in a car started wolf-whistling and shouting sexual remarks at my friends and me. I asked the men if they thought it was appropriate for them to be abusing a group of 17-year-old girls. The response was furious. The men started swearing at me, called me a bitch and threw a cup of coffee over me.

In response to this and concerns about other ways girls suffer – eating disorders, abusive relationships, and pressure to put out – she started a feminist group. She didn’t anticipate how ominously boys in her peer group would find it:

They took to Twitter… One boy declared that “bitches should keep their bitchiness to their bitch-selves #BITCH” and another smugly quipped, “feminism doesn’t mean they don’t like the D, they just haven’t found one to satisfy them yet.” Any attempt we made to stick up for each other was aggressively shot down with “get in your lane before I [ridicule] you too,” or belittled with remarks like “cute, they got offended.”

Next, girls were photographed with white boards that completed the sentence “I need feminism because…” and posted on the Internet. The response?

We were told that our “militant vaginas” were “as dry as the Sahara desert,” girls who complained of sexual objectification in their photos were given ratings out of 10, details of the sex lives of some of the girls were posted beside their photos, and others were sent threatening messages warning them that things would soon “get personal.”

Luckily, most guys don’t act that way.

But why do these guys feel so threatened? Read the rest of this entry

Advice Women-Haters Could Use Via Ashton Kutcher

ashton-kutcher-teen-choice-awardsYou may have seen Ashton Kutcher’s Teen Choice Awards speech. After all, it went viral.

He says a lot of great stuff. I’ll focus on this:

The sexiest thing in the entire world… is being really smart. And being thoughtful. And being generous. Everything else is crap, I promise you! It’s just crap that people try to sell to you to make you feel like less.

Now, Ashton Kutcher can’t help but be sexy, so what does he know?

On the other hand, anyone could become more attractive by following his advice.

Think about it.

Being smart is a confidence-builder. And confident is the sexiest thing you can be.

The thoughtful and generous also hold an air of confidence. And they don’t scare people off.

Unlike some men who write to tell me how much they hate women because they can’t get one. Like this guy:

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Sex ‘s Us

UnknownSex is a bad thing, I learned growing up. I don’t know that anyone directly told me that, but that sure was the sense I got.

The religion I grew up in has the highest level of sexual dysfunction in America. My parents and friends came out of that religion and I didn’t talk about sex with any of them. I did notice squirming when “things” came up. Sex ed at school was about contraception and disease. And nasty whispers spread about girls who got pregnant.

Maybe John Harvey Kellogg grew up the same way. He created Kellogg’s Cornflakes in hopes of weakening the sex drive.

By the time I had an orgasm I didn’t know what it was. But I was embarrassed and determined to never let that happen again, no matter how good it felt.

I sure could have used Rohan Healy’s book, SEX, Not as a Separate Subject, which could also be called, “Things I wish I’d learned in middle school – or at least college.”

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