A Woman Slut-Shames, in Verse
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By Rebecca Gardner
I’m always surprised at how women can foster sexism, themselves. I heard Nicki Minaj’s “Stupid Hoe” the other day and thought of the problem. She uses tough-girl guises, but she is far from modeling powerful womanhood.
The title, itself, says men may do as they please. Women may not.
Or how about these lines:
ice my wrists’ and I piss on bitches
you can suck my diz-nik,
if you take this jizz-ez.
Seeing through sexist eyes, she asserts that one woman might be superior to another, but she will never equal a man. And “piss(ing) on bitches” hardly promotes female solidarity or empowerment. The jab puts other women down just to raise Minaj up.
Meanwhile, she raps-idizes on male pleasure and the “diz-nik” as a symbol of male supremacy while the genitalia of “stupid hoes” fall short.
“Pretty bitches can only get in my posse”
In her video, Minaj wears several wigs, mostly blonde and coupled with big breasts, a big butt, and a fit body. She transforms herself into viewing pleasure – pleasure for men. And unless a woman is “beautiful,” she cannot be Minaj’s friend. She’s just a “stupid hoe.”
Beauty norms are unquestioned, eliminating room for individuality and self-expression while the camera pans from her butt to her bust, like that’s all she is, like that’s all sex is, and as if her power emerges only sexually.
And then she imprisons herself in a cage – not so powerful, after all. The camera flashes between images of her head and a leopard’s, creating a sense of Minaj as animal, sub-human.
“Stupid Hoe” cries out “hoe” nearly 50 times, and the n-word more than once. This sexist racism paints a clear picture: Minaj identifies with privileged white males.
Bitches play the back cause they know I’m the front man
Why does Minaj exalt white men — and herself — at black women’s expense?
She may have simply internalized racist and sexist norms so that these “isms” now live, unquestioned, in her head.
Or she shrewdly plays a game. She gains whatever power and status she can wrest from powerful men, while leaving a system that oppresses women intact. She gains even as she loses in this patriarchal bargain.
Underneath it all lies an illusion of power.
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Sexual Objectification, The Harm
![Dolce-Gabbana-Ad-Sexist[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/dolce-gabbana-ad-sexist1.jpg?w=300&h=224)
By Caroline Heldman (Cross-posted at Ms. and Caroline Heldman’s Blog)
This is the second part in a series about how girls and women can navigate a culture that treats them like sex objects. (Part 1 can be found here.)
Sexual objectification is nothing new, but this latest era is characterized by greater exposure to advertising and increased sexual explicitness in advertising [PDF], magazines, television shows, movies [PDF], video games, music videos, television news, and “reality” television.
In a culture with widespread sexual objectification, women (especially) tend to view themselves as objects of desire for others. This internalized sexual objectification has been linked to problems with mental health (clinical depression, “habitual body monitoring”), eating disorders, body shame, self-worth and life satisfaction, cognitive functioning, motor functioning, sexual dysfunction [PDF], access to leadership [PDF] and political efficacy [PDF]. Women of all ethnicities internalize objectification, as do men to a far lesser extent.
Beyond the internal effects, sexually objectified women are dehumanized by others and seen as less competent and less worthy of empathy by both men and women. Furthermore, exposure to images of sexually objectified women causes male viewers to be more tolerant of sexual harassment and rape myths (false notions about rape). Add to this the countless hours that some girls/women spend primping to garner heterosexual male attention, and the erasure of middle-aged and elderly women who have little value in a society that places women’s primary value on their sexualized bodies.
Theorists [PDF] have contributed to understanding the harm of objectification culture by pointing out the difference between sexy and sexual. If one thinks of the subject/object dichotomy that dominates Western culture, subjects act and objects are acted upon. Subjects are sexual, while objects are sexy.
Pop culture sells women and girls a hurtful fiction that their value lies in how sexy they appear to others; they learn at a very young age that their sexuality is for others. At the same time, sexuality is stigmatized in women but encouraged in men. We learn that men want and women want-to-be-wanted. The yardstick for women’s value (sexiness) automatically puts them in a subordinate societal position, regardless of how well they otherwise measure up. Perfectly sexy women are perfectly subordinate.
The documentary Miss Representation has received considerable mainstream attention, one indicator that the public is now recognizing the damaging effects of sexual objectification of women.
Widespread sexual objectification in U.S. popular culture creates a toxic environment for girls and women. The next two posts in this series provide ideas for navigating objectification culture in personally and politically meaningful ways.
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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
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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
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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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The Brain on Love vs Lust
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Is it love? Or lust?
Scientists compared the brains of those who looked at erotica or at their significant other. Turns out love and lust are connected, but show up differently in the brain.
The brain on lust lights up the striatum region that is aroused by pleasures like “food, orgasms, or getting stoned, eating a whole bag of Funyuns, and sprinkling crumbs all over the couch just to mess with your OCD roommate,” as Doug Barry, at Jezebel put it.
Love also shows up in the striatum, but triggers the section that associates things with pleasure or reward. As the beloved continually gives pleasure she becomes the reward, herself. In this way, feelings of sexual desire turn into love.
The lover actually becomes an addictive habit. In fact, love lights up the same part of the brain as drug addiction as we become hooked on our lover.
Rutgers anthropologist, Helen Fisher, calls romantic love a stronger craving than sex, pointing out that people who don’t get sex don’t kill themselves. She says love is “a motivation system, it’s a drive, it’s part of the reward system of the brain,” a need that compels us toward a specific partner in pursuit of “life’s greatest prize.”
Habits and addictions both get bad raps, and often should. But here they’re not so bad as love is the bonding mechanism of relationship. Love activates the need to defend the interests of our children or lover, says study researcher Jim Pfaus. In a complex society like ours, this creates greater family and social stability.
Luckily, these habits of the heart are a good thing.
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Gay Bashing with “Therapy”
![mmw-reparative-therapy[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/mmw-reparative-therapy14.jpg)
Gay “conversion therapy” claims men can overcome same-sex attraction by way of simple torture techniques.
Psychologist Douglas Haldeman says early treatments of the 1960s and 70s included:
Aversion therapy, such as shocking patients on the hands and/or genitals, or giving them nausea-inducing drugs while showing them same-sex erotica. In electroconvulsive therapy an electric shock was used to induce a seizure, with side effects such as memory loss.
Reparative therapy tells gay men to behave in ways that limit a full life, cutting off the feminine side that all of us possess. For instance, avoid art museums, opera, symphonies… and women, except for romantic purposes.
A group called Jonah has used techniques like having gay men strip naked in front of a counselor or having them beat up mother effigies. Now they’re facing a lawsuit for emotional damage and deceptive practices. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Co-founder, Arthur Goldberg once went to prison for financial fraud, and neither he nor “counselor” and co-founding partner, Alan Downing, are licensed therapists.
Former client, Michael Ferguson is now 30 and working toward a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Utah. He came to Jonah because his Mormon faith taught him that heterosexual marriage was a prerequisite for exaltation. When Jonah didn’t work, his counselors blamed him instead of their program, all of which lead to depression. He now says,
It becomes fraudulent, even cruel to say that if you really want to change you could — that’s an awful thing to tell somebody.
In “therapy” he was also required to beat an effigy of his mother, as his councilors claimed that homosexuality arises when “normal masculine development” is repressed by “distant fathers” and “overbearing mothers.”
I was encouraged to develop anger and rage toward my parents. The notion that your parents caused this is a horrible lie. They ask you to blame your mother for being loving and wonderful.
Another client, Chaim Levin, 23, was raised in an Orthodox Jewish community where being gay was “unthinkable,” he said.
Chaim attended $650 weekend retreats for a year and a half. He finally quit when his counselor told him to remove his clothes and touch himself so that he could, “reconnect with his masculinity.” (One wonders if his coach is a closeted gay homophobe getting his kicks.) Mr. Levin felt degraded, humiliated, and still gay.
The American Psychiatric Association says this “therapy” can cause “depression, anxiety and self-destructive behavior” while reinforcing “self-hatred already experienced by the patient.” That’s just what happened to Michael and Chaim.
Thousands of men have spent heaps of money seeking to please God or family, but without results. The only thing gay “conversion therapy” demonstrates is that sexual orientation is not a lifestyle choice.
The young men seek to avoid evil, yet a “therapy” that resembles gay bashing can only be called evil. Being gay is not.
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