Category Archives: men
Using Insults to Pick Up Women
Men may have success using insults to pick up women — if both the men and the women involved are misogynists, say researchers.
This particular chick magnet strategy was made popular by Neil Strauss, who checked out a workshop run by an aspiring magician named Mystery when his book editor asked him to explore the community of pickup artists. The resulting manual, The Game, reads a bit like the frog-turned-Prince tale of Crazy Stupid Love.
Some tips involve misogyny, others don’t. “Approach a woman within three seconds of seeing her so you don’t lose your nerve” and asking “What’s your sign?” or “What’s your type?” seem nontoxic enough.
But men are also told to isolate “the target” from her friends and subtly insult her to lower her self-worth. That’s called “negging.”
For instance: ignore the girl you want and flirt with one of her friends instead. Or, briefly disqualify yourself from being a potential suitor:
I go to blow my nose and I look at her and I say, “What, are you gonna watch?” I’m disqualifying myself as I’m blowing my nose in front of her!
Mystery explains that if “the target” is especially beautiful she’ll wonder why she’s being ignored and assume the man is highly selective and accustomed to beauty. Next, she will admire his status and want to win him over.
In another “neg,” Mystery suggests men ask unflattering questions like, “What have you got going for you other than your looks?” Or, “I like your hair, is that your natural color?”
This takes the woman off-guard and makes her question her value. So, of course she wants to win the guy over.
But really, why would anyone be drawn to such men? A woman attending a seminar hoping to get an inside scoop was puzzled by advice to ogle other women:
Despite the theory that what is unavailable becomes more appealing, and the fact that at times, it may seem true, there is absolutely nothing sexy, alluring or seductive about obviously looking at other females while talking to a woman… It’s just rude. Period. And if a guy can’t maintain a two-minute conversation, what’s he going to be like on an actual date, let alone in a relationship?
Exactly! I’ve always broken up with guys like that. And the “neg” advice didn’t work in a documentary I saw on speed dating when a couple of guys tried it.
Yet studies show that it can work – for those who are sexist.
In two different studies University of Kansas researchers found that the more negatively women viewed women, the more receptive they were to these techniques. These women were more likely to accept male privilege and to like aggressively dominant men.
And the more negatively men saw women the more likely they were to use the techniques.
A match made in heaven – or hell.
Forewarned is forearmed.
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Can Men and Women be Friends?
Harry told Sally that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way. The question remains.
Short answer: Yes, they can.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be romantic undertones; in fact, there usually are. Typically, “he” starts a relationship hoping for sex, but “she” isn’t interested. Yet he stays friends because he likes her. And he’s often expecting that more will come of it.
Naively, I’ve been in cross-sex friendships without noticing the “underlying attraction” part.
Before I married I had more male than female friends. I now realize this was simply because I’m an introvert (I gain energy from being alone) and am perfectly content reading, writing, painting, or biking. But men would call to chat or get together for lunch or a movie. With these guys there was no physical affection, no kissing or handholding. We talked of nothing romantic. I just thought they enjoyed my company as much as I enjoyed theirs. Until each eventually made a move and I pulled back. Yet we remained friends.
After I married and lost my men friends I realized I’d actually have to take some initiative to have women friends. It was all so disorienting, and I’m still not consistently good at it. I was lucky to have my men friends.
In some ways cross-sex friendships mirror same-sex friendships, but they’re different, too.
These relationships can offer an “insider” perspective on the opposite sex. Especially when all involved are unconcerned with charming each other and can let their hair down and tell the truth about their own sex.
They are strong in trust, respect, acceptance and enjoyment. But they are less satisfying, maybe because they don’t fulfill the underlying sexual tension that is so often present.
And intimacy can be hindered when friends create space to protect against romance, since sexual involvement becomes a threat to the relationship. Over time, sexual tension wanes.
Yes, men and women can be friends. But as Harry warned, the sex part can get in the way.
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If Sports Were Covered Like Women’s Beach Volleyball
In case you missed this… interesting contrast between photos of men’s and women’s beach volleyball. For men you find tough, competitive guys:
And for women:
Oh, and here’s a woman actually playing the sport. In that outfit she stays sexy!
Interestingly, there are a number of pics of women listed under “men’s beach volleyball” but no men on the women’s list.
When Nate Jones, over at Metro.us, innocently searched for pics of women’s Olympic beach volleyball, he was left asking, “What if every Olympic sport was photographed like beach volleyball?” Here’s a sampling of what that would look like (you can see all his pics by clicking here):
As the camera hones in on women’s body parts and ignores men’s, you can see why all of us – men and women – come to think of women as the sex objects in our society. Even the fact that women volleyball players wear such a skimpy outfit doubles down on the whole, “women as sex object” thing.
And so ignored men’s bodies leave us ignoring men-as-sexy while the women’s body-focus makes them all about sex. And actually, that’s not very good for our sex lives – or for well-rounded lives. For more on that, see the posts below.
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Passionate Love: Like a Drug, or Mental Illness
The passion of early love! Giddy, and intense. Heart thumping in the yearning breast. Can’t eat, can’t sleep. Can think of little else.
In fact, passionate love is like a drug. Or a mental illness.
Researchers asked volunteers to look at photos of their partners. Those in passionate love responded in ways similar to drug addiction, as captured in brain imaging. Lead researcher, Helen Fisher, commented, “When I first started looking at the properties of infatuation,” she said, “they had some of the same elements of a cocaine high: sleeplessness, loss of a sense of time, absolute focus on love to the detriment of all around you.”
According to Psychology Today, a brain chemical connected to falling in love rises with infatuation, heightening euphoria and excitement.
Meanwhile, brain areas that control impulses, fear and negativity become less active. Obsession and reckless behavior increase. As Dr. Fisher put it, “Infatuation can overtake the rational parts of your brain.” Passionate love resembling mental illness.
The turbulent times are marked by ecstasy and fulfillment when love is returned; but sadness and despair when it is not.
Over time passionate love settles a bit. Not a bad thing, really, for who can function drug-addicted and mentally ill?
Something is lost, but something may also be gained as greater intimacy and commitment join passionate affection, rounding out the three pillars of love, which psychologist, Robert Sternberg has identified in his “triangular theory of love.”
Sternberg calls love that is marked only by “intimacy,” but not passion or commitment, “liking love,” or good friends.
When love consists only of “commitment,” nothing but duty keeps a couple together. He calls this “empty love.”
But when intimacy and commitment meet passion, a couple moves into “consummate love,” the best of all worlds.
Few couples continually stay in a state of consuming love. And many will go through various loving styles as feelings rise, fall, and rise again.
Perhaps the trick is going with the flow and creating ways to enliven the relationship.
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Men Find Fewer Women “Porn-Worthy”
Feminist, Andrea Dworkin, had feared that easy access to internet porn would turbocharge women’s objectification and turn men into wild, raping beasts. But it looks like internet porn too often has the opposite effect, deadening male libido in relation to real women, with men who over-consume finding fewer women “porn-worthy.”
This is what author, Naomi Wolf, noticed when students talked about their sex lives during her speaking tours of college campuses.
Others have made similar findings.
Pamela Paul interviewed over one hundred people, mostly men, in her research for Pornified, and found that porn-worthiness was a common concern among those who over-indulged.
One young man talked of his change in perspective.
My standards changed. Women who are otherwise good looking but aren’t as overtly sexy as the women in porn don’t appeal to me as much anymore. I find that I look more for women who have the attributes I see in porn. I want bigger breasts, longer hair, curvier bodies in general.
I find that when I’m out at a party or bar I catch myself sizing up women. I would say to myself, wait a second. This isn’t a supermarket. You shouldn’t treat her like she’s some piece of meat. Don’t pass her up just because her boobs aren’t that big.
Paul went on to cite a 2004 Elle-MSNBC.com poll which found that one in 10 men admitted he had become more critical of his partner’s body with exposure to porn.
Meanwhile, 51% of Americans believe that pornography raises men’s expectations of how women should look.
Many of the college women Wolf spoke to complained that they couldn’t compete, and they knew it.
Men, she said, learn about sex from porn but find that it is not helpful in teaching them how to relate to real women. She ended with this observation:
Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don’t know is how to get out, how to find each other again erotically, face-to-face.
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Women Gazing At Men
Lately I’ve been asking why women don’t get so excited by naked men, why women are often uncomfortable with male nudity on stage and screen or in print, and why these nude men can seem “gay” to the women who gaze at them.
Elizabeth Hall Magill has been asking the same questions over at Yo Mama. And she’s wondering how women can better appreciate the male form, without objectifying them. Here’s an excerpt from one of her posts.
So—where does that leave a woman’s gaze?
Neither here nor there.
And yet, we have eyes. We gaze. And we like what we see.
As I pondered this issue, I realized something: perhaps men posing sexually seem homosexual not only because we are used to the male gaze. Perhaps it is also because we are used to the female pose. And here we encounter a difference between media (artful or otherwise) and life: real sexiness is rarely posed. It just happens. But in “sexy” pictures of women, the women are aware of the gaze and arranging themselves for it. So, when a man does the same thing, we read him as feminized. And when a man strips for a woman, he can be seen as “performing” something generally feminine, and therefore we define it as insincere, the object of a joke. Not true eroticism.
In one of my favorite essays of all time, Looking at Women, Scott Russell Sanders says:
When I return to the street with the ancient legacy of longing coiled in my DNA, and the residues from a thousand generations of patriarchs silting my brain, I encounter women whose presence strikes me like a slap of wind in the face. I must prepare a gaze that is worthy of their splendor.
This is how I feel about men. And I bet I’m not the only one.
We’re all conditioned to ignore the fact that women feel this way about men. How many times a week do you think a man checks out his wife as she reaches into the refrigerator to get something from that bottom drawer, or reaches high above her head for a rarely-used dish? How many times a week does he check out the women walking by him on the sidewalk, riding a bike in the gym, or sitting in the next office? Magazines love to make little pie charts telling us about how often the male brain does these things. I’ve never seen a pie chart telling me how often the female brain does similar things.
And yet.
Men get things from the refrigerator or the top shelf, and often look damn good doing it. They walk on the sidewalk, ride bikes, and work right next to us, looking good all the while. And women notice.
What we need is more women noticing themselves as they notice men. Thinking about how they feel when the tide of desire leaves and returns, leaves and returns. And owning that tide.
And then we need women talking about it—not giggling, not blushing, not encouraging men to mock the idea of their own desirability. Somebody ought to talk about it so often and so loudly that a pie chart becomes inevitable, cause we just know women are thinking about sex so dang much that we better measure it.
After that, we need female photographers and directors, tons of them, taking pictures of and telling stories about men being men. Holding babies in the middle of the night, shirtless and vulnerable and full of fatherly love and strength. Squatting in the middle of a road, looking at a rock (clothed, as squatting naked in the middle of the road is unnatural and possibly unsafe). Running on treadmills, making copies in the office while wearing snazzy ties, washing the dirt off their hands after a day working outside, laughing with their friends, kicking a tire and making dinner and coming home at the end of a long day. We need to see men being men through the eyes of women, not men posing as the objects of female desire. And we should see them in all their shapes and colors—in all their splendor.
You know what I think?
I think men would totally get being sexy in this way, and I think they would love it. They wouldn’t feel like objects, they wouldn’t feel feminized, they wouldn’t pose or feel goofy. They’d be themselves, and they’d be damn glad that the women they’ve been checking out all this time are checking them right back.
Which means the female gaze would no longer be marginalized, masculinized, or mocked. It would be honest, and it would be powerful—as powerful as desire itself.
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Why Aren’t Male Strippers Sexy?
Channing Tatum in “Magic Mike”
The typical atmosphere in such an establishment isn’t one of arousal and longing, the kind that reliably fills the air in a female strip club. As far as I can tell, female patrons are typically cracking up, shielding their eyes in mock horror or cartoonishly objectifying male dancers as a performance for their friends.
Her observations come by way of the new movie, Magic Mike, which gets a lot right, she says, but shows male stripping as it mostly is: “goofball, absurd and sometimes repulsive,” which is how she describes her own first – and last — male strip show outing:
Onstage was an overly tanned dark-and-handsome type dressed like a race car driver. He slowly unzipped his onesie while popping his knee to the throbbing techno music, which was accented by sounds of a car engine revving. Once naked, he took his flaccid penis in his hand, stretched it out as far as he could and let go; it snapped back to his body and flopped around as he wiggled his eyebrows at the crowd.
And so she asks why these strip shows are libido-killers and offers her thoughts. On some points we overlap, on others we don’t (for instance, I think evolutionary psych is full of crap). Here are my own musings:
Some of what I’ve written before applies here. For instance, male bodies aren’t sexualized in our culture. Since I’ve discussed this in pieces like, “Men: Erotic Objects of Women’s Gaze,” or “Women Seeing Women as Sexier than Men.” I won’t dwell on the point. But whether out of homophobia or because women have only recently become involved in creating media, literature, art, or anything else that could eroticize the male form, we see few sexualized images of men. So lusting after men isn’t something that women learn to do.
Some say women are just more erotic, yet breasts are only sensualized in places where they are either hidden or selectively hidden and revealed. The U.S. is so obsessed by the secreted breast that even women can develop a fetish. There’s no biological reason for that.
Repressed sexuality may also make it more difficult for women to respond to the visual. I don’t have data on this other than personal experience and talking with other women about it, but a few of us were better able to respond to visual stimulation when we were very young and less repressed.
Forces of repression? I’ve discussed this before (so see refs), but it arises as women are told that sex is bad – for them – and slut-shamed, from being the ones who get screwed and f’d, from being told not to touch themselves (males are more likely to figure out pleasure sources due to differences in anatomy), and from sexual abuse.
Making matters worse, when men do show skin they can look “gay.” This seems to occur because women are so used to nudity being meant for the male gaze that they come to see nude males through male eyes, too. That’s jarring, not a turn-on.
Men doing women-things (stripping) might be jarring, too.
Another problem is that straight women get more aroused by being desired than by desiring men. (Being desired by men they’re interested in, not by any ol’ guy.) Probably due to culture. While women don’t learn to see men as sex objects, they do come to see themselves that way. So in a convoluted form they can become aroused by experiencing how men are experiencing them. Yet another factor preventing women from desiring men in a fetished way.
And then floppiness could add to the problem, erasing any fantasy of being desired by the stripper. Flaccidity – at least on a twenty-something — communicates that he’s just not that into you. (Maybe a male strip clubber’s fantasy is helped when no obvious bodily sign tells him that the female stripper’s not into him.) But standing at attention might not work with a whole houseful of ladies anyway, since he’s still not necessarily into you.
Also, even if the stripper were erect, women may still have the same reaction that they have to strange men who flash or sext them: repulsion, trauma or laughter.
Yes, women have a very different reaction to the male member on a stranger than the men they love.
There are plenty of reasons why women think men look sexier fully clothed.
But why do gay men find male strippers sexy when straight women don’t? I’ll visit that question next week.
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sex in the third person
Poet, Susan L. Daniels @SusanDanielsEden, was inspired by my post “Sex Objects Who Don’t Enjoy Sex” to write this poem. Thank you Susan.
if I and you
shifted to she and he
when we should be
just us
lost in the heat
of this we
fusing
there would be no
true union
just she
filtering feeling
through a camera lens
a voyeur
assessing performance
from across the room
Susan L Daniels is a firm believer that politics are personal, that faith is expressed through action, and that life is something that must be loved and lived authentically–or why bother with any of it?
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It’s Not Easy Being A Man
Norah Vincent passed as a man for a year and a half. She wrote a book about the experience, Self-Made Man, which was published in 2006. When one gender visits the world of another it can be eye-opening, so let’s take a peek at one part of the woman-turned-man experience.
Turns out, it’s not easy being a man.
Norah had thought she’d love joining the privileged man-club that, until her transition, she had only glimpsed from the outside. Instead, she felt strangely inadequate.
For instance, as a lesbian, she’d expected to have great fun dating women. But it was arduous. In her new man-role she felt an expectation to lead, take charge. This made her feel small in her costume.
I felt this especially keenly on one of my earliest dates, waiting for a woman at a fancy restaurant I’d chosen. I was sitting alone in one of those cavernous red leather booths that you see at old-world steak houses, and I was holding the menu, which also happened to be red and enormous, and I felt absolutely ridiculous, like the painful geek in a teen movie who is trying to score with an older woman. I felt tiny and insignificant.
Living with pressure to always show strength, never let down your guard, and yet never measuring up, she observed:
I guess maybe that’s one of the secrets of manhood that no man tells if he can help it. Every man’s armor is borrowed and 10 sizes too big, and beneath it, he’s naked and insecure and hoping you won’t see.
Michael Kimmel, a leading researcher on men and masculinity, agrees, including that quote in a book he wrote called Guyland.
Men have to prove they are men. Women don’t have to prove they are women.
Yes, gender-ranking strikes again. Men are bestowed higher rank in society, and so men feel they must earn that high status. But it’s hard because ranking men over women is not natural.
So men are under constant pressure to show strength, lead, walk like a man, talk like a man, sit like a man… or as Jackson Katz put it, wear a tough guise: look tough, talk tough, and be tough guys.
Some harm themselves or others proving their fearlessness through dangerous drinking or dangerous driving or avoiding doctors. Some work to turn “weak” feelings like sadness and depression into “strong” feelings like anger. But then wives get beaten and women get raped, and some boys are bullied to build others up. Or guys cave to peer pressure just to dodge being called gay, wuss, fag… or girl.
But most times they’re just trying to live up to the high expectations of manhood that demand strength, power, confidence, invulnerability, leadership and success, which may become benefit or burden — or both.
On her time being a guy, Vincent declares:
I know that a lot of my discomfort came precisely from being a woman all along, remaining one even in my disguise. But I also know that another respectable portion of my distress came, as it did to the men I met in (my men’s group) and elsewhere, from the way the world greeted me in that disguise, a disguise that was almost as much of a put-on for my men friends as it was for me. That, maybe, was the last twist of my adventure. I passed in a man’s world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was a masked ball. Only in my men’s group did I see these masks removed and scrutinized. Only then did I know that my disguise was the one thing I had in common with every guy in the room.
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Guys Are Getting More Romantic
Guys are all about getting sex and avoiding love. Guys want random sex more than committed relationships. Women, the old ball and chain…
That’s what stereotypes say. But that’s not what guys say. A large-scale survey called “That’s What He Said” found that young men between the ages of 15 and 19 are more romantic than past generations.
That’s right, 95% of them would rather have sex with their girlfriends or someone they love than with a random girl they don’t know and don’t care about. In fact, over half of these guys don’t want to have sex with a woman unless they really love her. And three-quarters want to lose their virginity to someone they love.
The lead researcher told the New York Times:
In fact, (the young men) often used strong, almost hyper-romantic language to talk about love. (A) boy whose condom broke told me the most important thing to him was being in love with his girlfriend and “giving her everything I can.”
Interestingly, while 61% do say they’d rather have sex with a “super hot” woman than with someone who is smart and funny, 78% would choose a relationship with someone who is smart and funny over super hot. So it logically follows from the above data that if a young man is in a relationship with Smart-and-Funny he’d rather have sex with her, too, right?
Further, if they must choose between sex and love, most choose love. Two thirds would rather have a girlfriend and no sex than sex and no girlfriend. These young men say they could be happy in a sexless relationship.
Sounds mind blowing.
Yet these findings resonate with a recent study of sex on college campuses where casual hookups are supposedly all the rage — yet really aren’t — as well as another large-scale study reported in the 2006 American Sociological Review which found that teen boys were just as emotionally engaged in their relationships as girls.
The researchers cite one surprising force behind the change. Now that internet porn can so easily feed their sex drive, young men can seek love and not worry so much about sex. But young men should be warned: overindulging may lead them to lose sexual interest in real women. (See my post Porn Can Cause E.D.?)
But young men today also have greater emotional depth, or are at least more willing to express it, than men of past generations. That may be due to less sexism and homophobia, leaving men better able to tap into and express emotion, and feeling less need to act macho and prove their manhood and heterosexuality by screwing a girl.
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