Category Archives: women
Guys, Girls Swap Roles at a Bar
Men ordering Raspberry Kamikazes at a bar as women make passes — and get shut down? This bit of videoed role swapping has gone viral.
The reel holds stereotypes but even they can contain kernels of truth. And anything that moves us out of our taken-for-granted ways sheds light.
Outside the video real women can order any sort of drink they want, but guys had better keep to manly brews or risk scorn. So in that way women have a bit more freedom.
But a freedom that is gained by ranking men over women. If women order manly drinks they aren’t lowering themselves, but when men order girly drinks they are. (Even the terms “manly” and “girly” are charged.)
Meanwhile, both sexes seem to think the other has more power. Probably because we get frustrated when we don’t have it.
Men have the power to assert themselves. They needn’t wait around to be asked. And if they want sex, well, that’s expected. But women must wait to be asked. And they may worry about reputations, leaving them more shamed and less sexually expressed. Repression lowers sex drive, too, lending women the passive power to care less. And whoever cares less has more power. But here, only with a sacrifice of sexual pleasure.
In the video all is topsy-turvy. Girls try to cut in and dance with guys who are dancing with each other — and get shafted. They intrude into private conversations and get spurned. Polite men utter, “Not now please.” Others are less civil.
The message can come across: “You’re not good enough.” It can be tough on a gal.
But it’s tough for guys too. An annoying girl moans, “Those are amazing jeans. They’d look so much better on my bedroom floor.”
A girl spies a guy in an unbuttoned button-down and beckons, “Hey, I like your necklace. Is that the key to your heart? … Don’t button it up! Oh, come on!”
Male objectification may be paired with assault as women grab men’s butts or pressure them to drink shots to lower their resistance.
Guys who want sex must face the repercussions of, “good guys don’t.” The next morning a young man fumbles for his clothes as the woman he has slept with cool-confidently asks if she should call him a cab. Embarrassed, he sneaks away in shame.
As Joanna Schroeder over at The Good Men Project observes, it all “seems so much more rude, more intrusive, more exclusive, more violent, sillier or more intimidating” when the tables are turned.
But with this new slant, maybe we can all gain a bit more understanding and empathy.
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Religious Cruelties
![article-0-0D220DA8000005DC-480_468x503[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/article-0-0d220da8000005dc-480_468x5031.jpg?w=279&h=300)
Some wonder how morality can exist without religion. Yet too often religion submerges morality.
I recently wrote about religious men seeking therapy to overcome same-sex attraction. But the “therapy,” itself, seemed evil as men were shocked, given drugs to create nausea, told to strip naked and touch themselves in front of a counselor, or were forced to beat their mothers’ effigies.
Not long ago an Irish woman died because her doctors would not perform an abortion:
Despite her rising pain, doctors refused her request for an abortion for three days because the fetus had a heartbeat. She died in the hospital from blood poisoning three days after the fetus died and was surgically removed.
Her husband was left asking,
When they knew the baby was not going to survive, why not think about the bigger life which was the mother, my wife Savita? And they didn’t.
In the not-so-distant past some devout Irish doctors broke their patients’ pelvises to prevent miscarriage. The painful operation often caused chronic back pain, incontinence, and crippling. As one woman explained,
It ruined my life. I have two titanium knees, a bad back and I think about it every day. It was 53 years ago… They were torturers. They didn’t care. I was a thing.
Another described the procedure:
I saw the hacksaw. He started cutting my bone and my blood spurted up like a fountain. [She remembers the doctor looking annoyed that he had gotten her blood on his glasses]. You’ll never get rid of [the pain] until you’re not living anymore.
Not long ago a Polish woman named Edyta died because each doctor she approached refused to treat her colon condition, fearing an operation might lead to miscarriage or abortion. She could have expected refusals had she lived in Italy, Hungary, or Croatia, too, because in each of these places doctors may refuse treatment on moral grounds. Apparently, letting a woman die is not a part of the moral compass. The fetus died, anyway.
In North African countries the clitoris or vulvas of young girls are routinely cut with dirty razors and parts are removed to deaden sexual sensitivity, “making them pure.” Some die of infection, many are crippled, and most live in pain.
In other places brothers kill sisters over any “sexual impropriety,” including marrying who you want, being alone with a boy, looking at a boy, or rape.
In Saudi Arabia girls in night clothes were once forced back into a burning building to die so as to protect men from their immodesty.
The religious Taliban ordered a girl’s nose and ears cut off when she ran away from her abusive in-laws.
And don’t forget the Inquisition, the Crusades and the witch hunts.
I could go on.
Really, how callus can your religious beliefs make you?
The Golden Rule must be hiding around here somewhere.
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“Fat Actress” Is Most Desirable Woman
![hunger-games-katniss-everdeen_458[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/hunger-games-katniss-everdeen_4581.jpg?w=225&h=300)
It seems that just yesterday Jennifer Lawrence was deemed a fat actress — in Hollyweird, anyway. But now she’s been named “Most Desirable Woman” by more than 2.4 million AskMen readers. Also on the list were her sisters in non-starvation, Christina Hendricks and Kim Kardashian.
But actually, different sizes, shapes, colors and ages are on this list, too. And in a truly revolutionary move:
These men were tasked with voting on more than just sex appeal, taking into account character, intelligence, talent, sense of humor, professional success, achievements in 2012 and potential for 2013.
And as a result, “a new breed of women have changed the definition of ‘desirability’” read one headline.
And so the list includes non-voluptuous celebs with Mila Kunis at #2, along with Kristen Stewart and Kate Middleton.
Women of different colors were named: Rihanna, Selena Gomez and Lucy Liu, among them.
You needn’t be a classic beauty, either. Check out Emma Stone and Claire Danes, who got her start playing a very ordinary teen.
Even the over-40 set was lauded, including Sofia Vergara, Sarah Silverman and Rachel Weisz.
Powerful women were also among the most desirable, including Michelle Obama, Marissa Mayer, President and CEO of Yahoo! and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of the Russian activist-punk group Pussy Riot.
As feminism has spread men have become less intimidated by, and more appreciative of, strong women. James Bassil, the Editor-In-Chief of AskMen, put it this way:
The top-rated women on AskMen’s 12th edition of the Top 99 Most Desirable Women list speaks to men’s growing comfort with strong and independent partners.
It speaks to men’s growing confidence in themselves, as well.
I’m not thrilled about ranking women. But perhaps this varied list that moves beyond looks will encourage more women to move outside the one-dimensionality of narrow beauty norms and help us to broaden and grow greater confidence in ourselves, too.
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How Women Feel About Porn
![women-internet-pornograph-007[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/women-internet-pornograph-0071.jpg?w=300&h=180)
When it comes to women and porn, you’re going to get a lot of different reactions. Sometimes women’s feelings conflict with one another. Sometimes a woman’s feelings conflict within herself.
For some, it’s an acquired taste. A woman named Aaliyah was grossed out the first time she saw an explicit video at a high school homecoming party. Now she looks at porn about once a month, but she likes movies with a story. And she’s disgusted by the brutal stuff. Like Aaliyah, most female fans like a different type than men – less hard-core, more plot.
When it comes to strip clubs many women are tolerant or even enthusiastic. Forty-three percent of Cosmo’s readers and 51% of Elle’s had visited a strip club. And most didn’t mind if their partners indulged (52%). Of course, Cosmo and Elle fans aren’t your typical American woman.
Still, only one out of 50 site subscribers are women. Or apparently women. The main billing agent for these sites flag feminine names because the charges too often result in angry wives or moms refusing to pay.
Then there are women who want to like porn to be “cool” or to be a good girlfriend, but who actually don’t so much. A woman named Ashley says all her female friends act like they are good with porn, but she doesn’t buy it. She thinks they go along because, “Guys think it’s really uncool for women to get pissed off about it.” Another woman named Mia said that at first she wanted to be the cool girlfriend. But after a while it seemed her guy was more turned on by the TV than her.
At the other end, one third of women who are married to cybersex buffs consider it cheating and feel betrayed. As a woman named Ashley explained, “Because you’re getting off to other people, not the person you’re with. How is that supposed to make me feel?”
Or, women resent time not spent with families — and with them, in bed or otherwise. One said she felt thrown away.
Women may also worry that they aren’t enough, or aren’t good enough, or attractive enough. Their body image suffers. And then their sex life wanes.
Those who encountered porn when they were very young may like it more. In a book called “Pornified,” which tells of men’s and women’s experiences with pornography, the women who seemed to like it most had encountered it as young girls, liked it right away, and kept going with it. I’ve found similar instances among my students who say they discovered it young and found it arousing. I should add that girls who stumble upon it are more likely than boys to be upset, by a rate of 35% to 6%. About 40% of boys and girls felt their first encounter was no big deal.
Maybe young girls like it more because they aren’t concerned with how they look compared to other women, they have no boyfriends to feel jealous about, and they are less repressed. Repression can increase over time as women learn that sexually interested women are sluts, as they become distracted by their “imperfect” bodies, or suffer from sexual abuse.
When it comes to porn, women are of many minds.
Source: Pornified
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Murder-Suicide and Jock Culture
In a murder-suicide Kansas City Chiefs linebacker, Jovan Belcher, shot and killed his 22-year-old girlfriend and then killed himself at the young age of 25. Their baby daughter, Zoey, is now motherless and fatherless.
In a recent New York Times piece, Frank Bruni pondered the effect of football culture on athletes and how it may have influenced the killings:
While it’s too soon to say whether Belcher himself was a victim of that culture, it’s worth noting that the known facts and emerging details of his story echo themes all too familiar in pro football over recent years: domestic violence, substance abuse, erratic behavior, gun possession, bullets fired, suicide.
Bruni considers this range of problems. I’ll look at how the culture harms relationships and buttresses hostility and violence against women.
When sociologist, Timothy Jon Curry, spent time hanging with athletes he found a “locker room culture” that demeaned women and celebrated violence against them.
Not all guys were the same. Some talked about women as real people and discussed their relationships, usually in quite tones with a best friend. But if someone overheard, they’d get slapped down. Because any “real man” knows that men should not be dependent on or vulnerable to women.
In a hushed conversation in one corner of the locker room a guy told his best friend, “I’ve got to talk to you about my girlfriend.”
But the others jibed him:
Yeah, tell us what she’s got.
Boy, you’re in trouble now.
You’ll have to leave our part of the room. This is where the men are.
More often guys talked boisterously – and often with hostility — about women as sex objects and conquests. All to enhance their hetero manly-men images.
Girlfriends were slammed. An assistant coach held up a picture of an obese woman that he called “Frank’s girlfriend.” Another sneered, “When she sits around the house, she really sits around the house.” Or, “She’s so ugly that her mother took her everywhere so she wouldn’t have to kiss her goodbye.”
Other times the guys seemed to celebrate rape:
Hey Pete, did you know Terry is a sexual dynamo? Well he said he was with two different girls in the same day and both girls were begging, and I emphasize begging, for him to stop.
Even moms were not immune:
She’s too young to be his mother!
Man, I’d hurt her if I got a hold of her.
I’d tear her up.
I’d break her hips.
Yeah, she was hot!
So here we have male bonding, men “being men,” men being different from women and in a way that controls and dominates them.
Curry says it all makes successful, loving, nurturing relationships difficult and supports violence against women. In fact, he says, there’s evidence that years of living in this sort of culture desensitizes guys to women’s rights and supports male supremacy.
And judging from one dead linebacker, his dead partner and orphaned daughter, that’s not good for anyone.
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11-Year-Old Blamed For Her Rape
![rapist-victim-blaming[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/rapist-victim-blaming1.jpg?w=300&h=199)
“It should not be this hard to get it through anybody’s head that an 11-year-old child who’s been repeatedly abused is not the problem.”
That’s Mary Elizabeth Williams over at Salon bemoaning that a young girl has been repeatedly blamed for a gang rape meted out by 20 boys and men.
The townspeople of Cleveland, Texas began the indictment, complaining that:
She dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground.
The New York Times reporter who covered the case seemed to think the charge held merit, obediently recording the concerns.
Next, she was blamed in court.
As 20-year-old Jared Cruise stood trial his defense attorney, Steve Taylor, told the jury that she had never reported the rape to police. And that,
She had never shed a tear nor voiced a single complaint about her sexual encounters with any of the 20 males accused of assaulting her two years ago.
When he asked if she had been a “willing participant” she said, “Yes, sir.”
Actually, on her affidavit she said that the men had threatened to beat her if she did not do as she was told. That may have seemed to her like willing compliance.
Taylor then accused her of being, “Like the spider and the fly. Wasn’t she saying, ‘Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly?’”
Her attorney retorted, “I wouldn’t call her a spider. I’d say she was just an 11-year-old girl.”
Taylor scolded, “I hope nothing like this ever happens to your two teenage sons.”
Because, as Williams points out,
Apparently those four months of sustained sexual abuse against a child are something that happened to Jared Len Cruise and 19 other guys.
The girl’s lawyer then played the rape video, saying, “Look at how proud [Cruise] is on that video as his buddies say ‘beat that ho.’”
“Beat that ho.” Yes, that sounds exactly like what a little eleven-year-old would tempt men to do to her.
Victim-blaming often works because so many blame girls and women for their assaults.
Too many believe that women take pleasure in rape even though it doesn’t involve foreplay or clitoral stimulation. And most women need emotional connection to enjoy sex. Since men get off on straight intercourse many think it’s great for women too.
Why didn’t she report the assault to police? She may have felt ashamed or not known that she could. She may have feared the men’s further retribution. Abused kids often feel powerless and unsure what to do. And how do we know that she never cried?
Last week Cruise was convicted of assault. I guess the jury didn’t believe that an 11-year-old “wanted it.”
But if she’d been older, would he still have been convicted?
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Woman, Not the Sum of Flawed Parts
![anistonpubis[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/anistonpubis11.jpg)
By Linda Bakke
Star Magazine. Full of faces covered by question marks, bodies sliced up. Women diminished to the details of their flaws, circled in bold. A dissection of celebrities’ body parts.
I was working as a receptionist at a hair salon when I discovered Star. I picked it up and paged through. It was awful. I could not put it down.
One article divulged a star’s “hairy secret,” detailing the frequency of her waxing regimen and suggesting her pubic area was overly hairy. A two page spread highlighted shameful “sausage fingers.” Another asked who had the worst toes.
It all oddly evoked the serial killers who keep articles – or worse, dismembered body parts – as trophies.
And what is the triumph here? A sensed superiority over the goddess’ faults as we lie in judgment?
And who can blame us? Their supposedly error-free bodies stress us out! Destroying them and their presumed perfection just might lift our spirits.
But maybe scrutinizing them only returns scrutiny to us, as the judgments tell us we must correct our own “blemishes,” whether buttocks, breasts, fingers or toes.
The message: women’s imperfections cannot be tolerated.
As we eat it up, we fail to see how we become victims, too, unconsciously nodding agreement that this treatment of women is acceptable.
While the pictures and text underline our preoccupation with facade over character, men’s bodily foibles are untouched by these tabloids. Who can imagine placing a man in such light?
Hopefully one day we will take on realistic and healthy expectations so that women will no longer be seen as the sum of flawed parts.
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Twilight vs. Porn
![10886003_det[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/10886003_det12.jpg)
Women often worry that porn raises men’s expectations about what their bodies should look like and what they should do in bed. And why does he want to have virtual sex with those other women, anyway? So women can end up feeling like they’re not enough or not good enough.
Men may worry that Twilight raises women’s expectations for a “one true love” that is deep and intense with a man who only has eyes for her. Who can meet to such standards?!
Men craving sex with lots of women and women wanting sex with one true love. Funny how the visions are so often at odds with each other.
In fact, the appeal of Twilight for young girls may be the opposite of porn. Porn is all about getting sex. But as Edward yearns for Bella — yet avoids intimacy for fear of killing her in vampire bloodlust — Twilight is more like abstinence porn. Sex without sex. As a writer for Psychology Today put it:
Let’s get back to the sex, or lack of it, which is what hooks girls on the first volume: female readers love that Edward sleeps beside Bella and apparently only wants to kiss her neck.
So in Twilight girls can imagine safe crushes on boys who love them, while avoiding all the complex, confusing and scary adult realities of sex.
But it’s not just naïve girls who fall for Twilight. So do their older sisters and moms. But while their male partners are turned on by hard-core porn’s over-the-top fireworks, Twilight is all about the subtlest sex. Here’s how a blogger at Huffington Post described it. Twilight is all about the:
building of sexual tension. So much so that when Edward brushes Bella’s arm, you can almost feel him brushing yours… They get to really know each other, their passion is allowed to build, we revel in the innocence, the time it used to take to truly build a relationship. Do you remember how amazing your first true kiss was?
A Salon blogger continues:
Instead of relying on tight shots of penetration, these books get their sexual spark from extreme emotional close-ups. The ‘money shot’ in these novels typically isn’t a geyser of bodily fluids but rather a declaration of love, or a man on bended knee.
I was struck by the male/female difference when I heard Meryl Streep and director, David Frankel discuss their movie “Hope Springs.” Frankel said the movie’s themes were universal because, “Who thinks they’re having enough sex?” But Meryl Streep suggested the nuances behind the desire:
If my team were here – women – they’d say it’s not necessarily sex, it’s what sex pulls from you… brings you to. It’s connectedness, it’s intimacy, it’s being known, it’s being seen, it’s being felt, it’s being wanted. The whole thing… But yes, you can reduce it to that part.
For many women, a guy can do the exact same moves and it can feel like nothing if you don’t feel emotionally connected to him, and it can be off the charts amazing when you do.
I suspect the female/male difference is due more to nurture than nature, but it’s a pretty strong pattern. Fortunately, not all men and women fit these molds. Some girls do just wanna have the fun of porn sex and some guys do seek consummate love. Or, what’s wanted may change with context.
But too often, like star-crossed lovers whose pairing is “thwarted by a malign star,” it’s an unfortunate trick of nature – or society — that men and women so often sexually connect at cross purposes.
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Overcoming Scars of Abuse
Today I am reposting a story of one woman’s recovery (still in progress) from her traumatic ordeal of childhood sexual abuse. This story comes from HumanitysDarkerSide, and I hope it might help others.
Broadblogs wrote an article called Why We Have Sex based upon the findings of CM Meston and DM Buss at the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas. These two researchers wrote an article called Why Humans Have Sex in 2007. In their article Meston and Buss cite 237 reasons that students at UofT had listed as their reasons for having sex.
I commented on Georgia’s post and ended up being asked if I would like to write something about my own experiences and the effects of medication on myself.
One of the reasons being listed for having sex in Meston and Buss’ article is force. Sometimes sex isn’t a voluntary thing and in my case the force happened at a very early age and seriously messed up my head when it came to anything sexual. Well, not just that, as anyone who has run into PTSD will attest to.
PTSD, or post-traumatic stress syndrome is a strange thing. It is basically a severe reaction to trauma expressing itself in as varied manners as re-experiencing the original trauma(s) through flashbacks or nightmares, avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, and increased arousal—such as difficulty falling or staying asleep, anger, and hypervigilance.
In my case I experienced pretty severe nightmares and hypervigilance (and probably some anger). As I was 7 when the whole thing started, this was normal to me and I thought most people experienced life the way I did. Turns out they don’t. Some who get PTSD as adults remember life before and a state of non-PTSD. In some ways I would imagine that could be worse (although maybe not). Depends on the trauma and the psyche of the person struck down with it.
I would guess that most people would see me as a boring person with a weird sense of humor. It is that strange sense of humor that has carried me. After the awkward teens and early twenties, I came to realize that life was just one gigantic joke and the only defense was to laugh at it. Laughter has been my friend throughout my life, laughing at myself and the world and it has gotten me through some rough spots (my psyche).
Anyways, I got married and when I met my husband I was a virgin (well except for CSA that is). I’d seen some porn, read books with sexual content and talked to people. But, you know, people just don’t talk about sex and death – the two great taboos in life. I didn’t get that sex could even be pleasurable and was afraid during sex. I wanted it, got horny and all of that, but when it came to actually doing it, well.
Thankfully, my husband is the kindest, gentlest and most patient person on this planet and he worked with me and tried to make things good for me. But you know, there is only so much you can do on your own. Poor guy, living with a CSA survivor is not easy. No matter how optimistic a person is, having trouble with your sex life just hurts both parties.
I tried psycho-therapy. Hah, what a joke. Talking through the effects of PTSD as something that was supposed to help. Sometimes I wondered if I or my therapist was in need of help.
Then I found my psychiatrist – my voodoo queen – magician galore. Granted, it took years and years before I did find her, but this is my miracle person. We used three tools in getting acceptance of myself into my mind, heart and body. Cause you know, CSA people just don’t have a healthy view of themselves.
Tool one was cognitive therapy. Folks, this stuff actually works. It really does. What happens is a re-wiring of the way you think of yourself and the world. Yes, it is an ongoing process and some parts will probably have to be a life-project, but it works. I can now do this all by myself because I know how it works.
Tool two was EMDR. What the hell is EMDR, you ask. Before I tried it I put it in the same category as homeopathy. But it’s just a kind of hypnosis light. It should be tried with a therapist that knows what on earth they are doing and it does not work for everything. However, research in Holland and Germany shows that it is good with PTSD. Just do a search on Google for Dutch and German research on EMDR and you will have plenty of articles to choose from.
Tool three was medication. People, you know this, but it cannot be stated enough times. No new psychological medication without therapy. There are side-effects with every bleeding medical product out there and you might need help coping with them.
At first we tried beta-blockers. My god. The first time I tried them this super-tense feeling in my chest lessened and I fell asleep from sheer relief. I’d walked around being hyper-alert all of the time and that really isn’t good for you. My world changed, but tension around sex was still high. No wonder, as this was my major trigger.
Then a miracle happened. And I am serious about this. A major miracle happened. My psychiatrist suggested that I try something called venlafaxin – an efexor depot medication. Instead of being scared every time I had sex I was loving it. Sure, it had taken years for me to get there and my husband had had to endure my pain for a long time, but I have actually gotten to experience the joys of having sex. How cool is that? And we all know that my husband has been having the time of his life along with me.
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What Women Want: Twilight
A lot of men take my women’s psych course because they want to know what women want.
Maybe they should watch Twilight instead.
A woman I know of named Tracie Lamb was surprised that her daughters were more engrossed in Twilight than in their Hawaiian vacation. She knew the book series had soldover 100 million copies and that the films have made about a billion dollars. Curious, she started reading and became absorbed, herself. Wondering about the book’s allure, she made a record of what made her “tingle” and amassed a cornucopia of “invaluable information for the opposite sex.”
Here are her musings from a piece called, “Wanna Know What Women Want?”
Women want to captivate the men they love as Edward is captivated by Bella. He gazes at her. He watches her sleep. A sexy waitress flirts with him, but he only has eyes for his love:
She smiled at him again. “You have a nice evening.” He didn’t look away from me as he thanked her.
Later he tells her, “You’re not like anyone I’ve ever known. You fascinate me.”
Edward also listens to Bella, and he wants to know everything about her.
He seemed engrossed in our conversation… He says, “I want to know what you’re thinking – everything.”
Edward is completely devoted, telling Bella that, “You are my life now… I will always want you forever… You’re like my own personal brand of heroin.” (Well, love has been described as being like a drug.)
And instead of being on a quest to satisfy his sexual hunger he seeks to control it because he wants to protect Bella. (He fears he will drain her blood with his vampire instinct unless he controls himself.) That may make him sexy-safe for girls who are just discovering their sexuality, but his desire to protect, generally, is itself a strong draw. He’s not just strong, but his strength is directed at aiding his love. He’s always there for her. And she is more important than his own self and his own wants.
Now mind you, women may want to take care of themselves and their men, but they also like a man who takes care of them and who makes them feel safe and secure. So it goes both ways.
Edward’s brand of love may not appeal to every woman, but it sure appeals to a lot of them.
Tracie concludes with these words:
When a man looks at a woman, he sees the woman. When a woman looks at a man, she sees herself reflected in his eyes. What’s important is not how you look to her, but how you look at her and how you look out for her. It’s how you make her feel: fascinating, cherished, protected.
Next week: Twilight vs. Porn
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