Blog Archives
Men Who Wear Frocks
Some guys wear dresses. Why?
“Vivienne”
“Vivienne” is what one cross-dressing man calls himself when he’s in drag. Vivienne also blogs on her cross-dressing experience over at BluestockingBlue, where she seeks to understand why she does it.
Before delving into Vivienne’s musings, let’s do a little Transvestite 101.
First, you might be surprised to learn that most cross-dressers, a.k.a. transvestites, are straight men.
Straight men?
While biological males who are transgendered or transsexual don’t see themselves as men, transvestites do. They are men who are trying to express something of the feminine within, which is so often submerged. And, cross-dressing often holds a sexual appeal for them.
That appeal helps explain why they’re usually straight. These guys are turned-on by women, and for them, dressing like one can be arousing.
Now back to Vivienne, who wrote a four-part series on a documentary called “Why Men Wear Frocks.” The film was produced by British artist, and tranny, Grayson Perry. To read more, start with Part 1 on her site.
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Flaunting It: Damned if Do, Don’t
Dear girls,
Last night, as we sometimes do, our family sat around the dining table and looked through the summer’s social media photos.
We have teenage sons, and so naturally there are quite a few pictures of you lovely ladies to wade through. Wow – you sure took a bunch of selfies in your skimpy pj’s this summer!
I get it – you’re in your room, so you’re heading to bed, right? But then I can’t help but notice the red carpet pose, the extra-arched back, and the sultry pout. What’s up? None of these positions is one I naturally assume before sleep.
That post doesn’t reflect who you are at all! We think you are lovely and interesting, and usually very smart. But, we had to cringe and wonder what you were trying to do?
Girls, if you think you’ve made an on-line mistake (we all do), RUN to your accounts and take down the selfies that makes it too easy for friends to see you in only one dimension.
You are growing into a real beauty, inside and out.
Act like her, speak like her, post like her.
Those are a few lines lifted from a Given Breath blog post that went viral. To read the whole thing, unedited and intact, go here.
Kyoto Redbird responded, focusing less on the girls’ behavior than on our society’s messages. To see her full response, unedited and intact, go here.
Kyoto Redbird is a college-educated 20-something who finds navigating around a contradictory — and too often hostile — view of women difficult and frustrating.
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Turning Indian Girls Into Boys
Indian parents are paying to have their daughters turned into sons through sex-change operations that cost about 145,000 rupees ($3,200). Up to 300 girls have been surgically turned into boys in one city.
The procedure involves fashioning a penis from the little girls’ female organs. Afterwards they are injected with male hormones, which they will need to take throughout their lives. The procedure will leave these children impotent and infertile in adulthood. No sons or daughters for them.
The Madhya Pradesh government is investigating.
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Gender-Swapping Grammar Lessons
A Chrome app called Jailbreak the Patriarchy switches gendered words and makes for an eye-opening experience.
This app has inspired me to go a little further to see how the world looks when gender changes. So I’ve spiced it up by changing gendered names, etc., too.
“I Kissed A Boy (And I Liked It)” (male singer, of course)
I kissed a boy and I liked it,
the taste of his cherry chapstick.
I kissed a boy just to try it,
I hope my girlfriend don’t mind it.
It felt so wrong,
it felt so right.
Don’t mean I’m in love tonight.
I kissed a boy and I liked it.
Or how about this headline:
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Feminine Things Make You Look More Womanly, Right?
Look at the images below and then look at the faces. When does the feminine face turn masculine?
Now look at these images and then look the faces. Once again, when does the feminine face turn masculine?
You’d think that feminine things would make women look more womanly. And maybe they do in some contexts. But when researchers asked people to look at gendered objects like those above, and then judge how masculine or feminine each face appeared, the results were counter-intuitive.
Researchers found that people who looked at feminine objects thought the faces seemed more masculine, and vice versa when masculine objects appeared. Just like me.
The researchers say this happens as an “adaptation effect,” which Lisa Wade over at Sociological Images describes as,
a neurological phenomenon in which “looking at something for a long time makes you more likely to see its opposite” (source). For example if you look at a white screen after looking at a red one for a while, the white screen will appear green (red’s opposite). Or, if you look at lines moving right for a while and then look at static lines, they will appear to move left.
Apparently, our brains see both people and things as gendered — and those genders are “opposite.” But as Dr. Wade points out, “We are ‘opposite sexes,’ then, but only in our minds.”
Source: Sociological Images
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Why We Lie About Sex Partner #’s
We lie about our number of sex partners more than other stuff. Why is that?
College students were surveyed on over 100 different behaviors, each of which are thought to be either feminine or masculine. Half the students were also hooked up to a polygraph machine (which didn’t work, but they thought it did).
Many men said they liked to cook, write poetry and pet kittens. A number of women had changed a tire or driven 90 mph. Lie detector or not, the answers were the same. People told the truth about behavior that didn’t fit gender norms.
Until it came to sex. Then, men exaggerated the number of partners they’d had, while women subtracted.
Researchers aren’t sure why.
I can speculate.
First, we have a long history of men repressing women’s sexuality so that men will know who daddy is. Among other things, “impure” women have been shamed and shunned. Evolutionary psychologists say men don’t want to squander resources on kids who aren’t their own. I have some other ideas on “why,” which I’ll discuss later. Regardless, today in the western world women still face plenty of slut-shaming.
Add to that, pressures on young men to prove manhood through sexual prowess with women.
For young men — especially those in fraternities and sports teams — having lots of sex with lots of women is a huge measuring stick. Men aren’t measured so much by whether they might like to pet a kitten or write poetry. And neither of these things are obsessed over and ritualized.
But men often use sex to see who’s on top. It’s a major game. There is even a “how to” book on nailing women that is entitled, The Game. In this, men compete by conquering women — meaning, who can get more women to “submit” to having sex with him? As they succeed they “score.” Men are congratulated and high-fived all around. They earn the proverbial (or literal) notch on the belt, or headboard.
This game may explain why it’s so important for women to bring their numbers down. Even as women increasingly gain equality in sexual behavior, there is not yet an even playing field. Men discussing “the game” of hookup culture say that women lose a bit of status when they “give it up.”
Between this game culture and a long and strong history of keeping women chaste so that men know who dad is, sexually adventurous women have routinely been demeaned as “easy,” or worse: slut, whore, ho’, tramp, skank, nympho, hussy… the list goes on. What positive word labels a woman who enjoys having sex with lots of men? Even here, today, men may still take the walk of fame as women take the walk of shame after a casual romp.
In a society that has not quite overcome shaming and faming it is no surprise that women and men cling to gender expectations that have such big effects.
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Are Men Really More Polygamous?
Men are polygamous and women are monogamous, right? At least relatively speaking. That’s what evolutionary psychology keeps shoving down our throats. But the math doesn’t work.
In one study — consistent with many others — women claimed they’d had about six partners while men said they’d had about 12. So mathematicians tried to figure out how that could work.
Let’s see… prostitutes don’t do surveys and some guys may be having sex outside the US.
But the math still won’t work.
And really, how can men be polygamous if women are monogamous?
Other researchers hooked people up to a lie detector and asked the same question. The polygraph didn’t work but respondents thought it did. Result: both men and women claimed four partners.
A new study of college students also found that men exaggerate and women minimize. Compared with participants who were hooked up to (non-working) lie detectors, men typically added one fake partner and women subtracted a real one.
And, women had more partners than men, among the polygraph group. So are women more polygamous? (Perhaps women were more likely to be having sex with older men while men were less likely to be having sex with younger women?)
One of the study researchers suggested we should question the veracity of sex research, given people’s tendency to lie about their sex lives — more so than about other things, according to “lie detection.”
Important, because we often judge ourselves in light of survey findings.
Maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about fitting in with how we’re “supposed to be,” and focus instead on what most of us say we want from sex: pleasure and connection.
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“Eve Teasing” Gets Guys Off the Hook
![Eve-teasing[1]](https://broadblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/eve-teasing1.jpg?w=300&h=225)
Egypt’s fight for freedom and democracy is increasingly met with public sexual assaults. In addition to assault, rape and sexual harassment, rape-like virginity tests and tortures may also be administered. Or perhaps a woman will be dragged naked on the ground.
There’s a reason for that.
Many sexist men fear women’s power or the chaos of a receding patriarchy. But women’s rights are also symbolic of freedom for all, so best to snuff it out and demoralize other agitators.
The tormentors are aided, wittingly or not, by the media. As Laura Bates at The Women’s Media Center points out, article titles typically label it all “sexual-harassment” even though the behavior is much crueler: “grabbing, groping, stripping, touching and penetrating—acts that are more accurately described as ‘sexual assault’ or ‘rape.’”
She says the dismissive language is part of a wider trend:
In India, the term “Eve teasing” is popularly used to describe the public harassment, assault, or molestation of women. The term has gained global familiarity, spreading to other countries including Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal and being used by the international media.
“Eve teasing.” Eve, a weak, lying temptress. Suspicion is cast upon the woman, herself.
And if it’s all her fault, she feels shame. Leopard, over at Crates and Ribbons, says shame can lead a woman to see her whole self as flawed with self-worth fading until she can no longer face public scrutiny and defend herself.
“Eve” joined by “teasing” tells us that the crime is small, “a bit of fun,” Bates says. It’s not serious or threatening and the perpetrators mean no harm. Anyone who objects can’t take a joke.
Yet,
The problem is so severe that it has caused at least 14 women to commit suicide in Bangladesh, young men have been murdered in Mumbai for trying to protect their female friends, a 17-year-old Indian girl has acid thrown in her face for daring to resist it. It doesn’t seem particularly funny.
If women are at fault and the “teasers” mean no real harm, who will stop the assaults?
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Diet Coke Gardener: Objectified Like Women?
Check out the Diet Coke ad above.
Do you react like these women?
- Aaaah, awesome 😀
- I was like :O when i saw this commercial
- ooh la la! like like like, all I need, no sugar, no calories! 😀
And Coke’s personal favorite:
- Hot damn I need a Coke.
Or like these men?
- Bad commercial, kinda degrading for women…
- kinda sexist, no? Imagine a group of guys rolling the coke can to a hot girl, that then gets splattered with coke on her top and takes it off while they stare… yeah … id wanna see that commercial!
- Bitches!
- I feel very violated as a man to be viewed as a slave laboring, sex toy meant for the amusement of females. It’s almost to hard to bear watching this demonstrable evidence of female oppression in our society. I don’t think women would be laughing if this video was the contrary. Women are nothing but misandristic swines. We have to unite my brothers and break this new established misandry system. Wahh
Here’s my translation of the guy-talk:
Oh no, do I have to start competing with guys who look like THAT?! (We ladies can relate having had to compete with Brooklyn Decker-types for years.)
Or:
I don’t like how he’s demeaned before he’s ogled. (On being demeaned — or being demeaned and ogled — the ladies can relate and commiserate.)
An alternative translation:
Women aren’t the only ones who are objectified! And women like to objectify, too, so quit yer whining!
If so, these guys think this ad is equivalent to what women are pelted with every day. It’s not.
First, sexiness is a part of the human experience. So if either men or women are portrayed as sexy some of the time, no big deal. Our sexuality is a part of our humanity.
The problem comes, in part, from bombardment by an impossible beauty ideal, leaving plenty of women feeling bad about themselves. Guys increasingly face this problem, but not at nearly the same level.
Also, women are almost ALWAYS the sexy ones, and that is the PRIMARY way they are portrayed. The imbalance communicates that women exist to sexually please men. That’s their main purpose, and without reciprocation.
And then women are hurt by men who learn — however unconsciously – to think of women as sexual-pleasure objects. So women may be treated as things and not people. Some men will use and abuse them. Their lovers may only care about their own pleasure and not make emotional connection. Their lovers may treat them like interchangeable objects. They may rudely ogle others while ignoring their partner. Taken to extreme, some men kidnap women for sex slavery, or go to prostitutes who have been kidnapped and enslaved.
Because if women are just objects, no feelings to worry over.
If women and men were BOTH portrayed in multidimensional ways, with one part being “sexy” — and outside of impossible body ideals (variety is the spice of life!) then “sexy” images needn’t be a problem for either gender.
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Gender-Bending Ads
What if you lived in a world where gender-as-we-know-it were switched?
As you drive to work you see billboards with scantily clad men drawing your attention to products that they gracefully caress. Other men bend over in ways that make you want sex with them. In some ads women lord it over submissive men.
You arrive at your ad agency, and as Creative Director you take a look at new ideas your copywriters have brought:
1) A dead man lies in an open trunk with his legs hanging over the trunk’s edge to show off some Jimmy Choo shoes. A woman stands nearby holding a murder weapon.
2) The silhouette of a man with a beer body and a foam head appears. Copy reads, “You never forget your first guy.”
3) Two women surgeons sit near a male patient who is sprawled over an operating table, dressed in just a thong. A scalpel “knife’s” his body in an ad for a TV show called “Nip Tuck.”
4) A man didn’t make coffee right so his wife spanks him.
In this world women are the dominant sex consumers who expect men to “turn them on,” passively open to them, and submit to them — sexually and otherwise. And if they don’t behave, the men will be punished.
Here’s a video on how such a world would look:
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