Blog Archives
Seeing Women as Magic and Evil
Some men see women as both magic and evil.
This occurred to me as I read a post on the lure of overeating:
Food was both magic and evil. That’s a noxious combination, known to create obsessions and addictions.
Sounds a lot like the men who hate pretty women.
Obsessed and addicted? Sounds about right. How else to explain the enduring idea that seeing a woman leads to attraction, which leads to rape, complete with horrible analogies comparing men to beasts and women to (wait for it) food?
Men who hate pretty women wouldn’t hate them so much if they didn’t love them, too.
Men Who Wear Frocks
Some guys wear dresses. Why?
“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.
How To Suppress A Woman’s Desire
Women typically have lower sexual desire and drive than men in our society, according to both sex surveys and statistics on sexual dysfunction. Our culture may be largely to blame. Consider this:
We are bombarded by “sexy women” but not “sexy men”
Whether on billboards, TV ads, Dancing With The Stars, Olympic ice skating, or professional football, women are half-dressed and men are fully-clothed. The camera hones in on women’s breasts and butts and ignores men. Sure, we are seeing more hot men these days thanks to Taylor Lautner and Ryan Gosling. But People’s “Sexiest Men” typically portrays gorgeous faces, loose T-shirts and few bods. Even the clothing that women and men walk around in show off women’s bodies and, more often, hide men’s
Doing Dumb Stuff to Prove Manhood
When David Wexler’s wife asked him to hold her purse for a moment he was suddenly filled with shame, seeing his masculinity at risk:
Loaded down with shopping bags, my wife asked me to grab her purse and carry it across the plaza. That’s all. Yet even though I knew I was being stupid, I couldn’t do it. The 15 seconds being seen carrying a purse were beyond my capacities as a card-carrying male…
Shame may be the least understood dimension of men’s inner experience — by both men themselves and the people who live with them.
Shame-o-phobia is what therapist, David Wexler calls the sort of thing that leaves men questioning their manhood over stupid stuff. Like The Freezing Water Test:
Friendly = I Want Sex?
Coming into sexuality is so confusing. At least it was for me.
Beyond the no-win of being ridiculed for not doing “it,” verses becoming the main topic of conversation if you do, there were other perplexities.
Most of my classmates had had something resembling sex by eighth grade. I was more naive, which some found hard to believe: Since I had more guy friends than girl friends how could I have been anything but a slut?
Girls and guys both seemed to think so.
Then along came another no-win as my friendliness was taken for flirtation. When I turned guys down I was called a tease.
On my fifteenth birthday a guy friend bought me a build-a-bear and asked me out. When I explained that I only saw him as a friend he got extremely angry. He told me that by being nice to him, laughing at his jokes and spending time together, I was leading him on and that was not fair. I was dumbfounded. How could being a good person now be turned against me? The only response I was capable of was, “Well, do you want me to be a bitch to you?”
My Boyfriend, the Objectifier
When I first heard feminists complain about sexual objectification I didn’t get it. Why didn’t they want women to be sexy?
Turns out, I didn’t understand what objectification was.
Put simply, it is about seeing someone as nothing but an object – one that is sexual in nature – that exists for someone else’s pleasure. Objects don’t have feelings, thoughts or life goals, so you needn’t worry about hurting them.
So I finally got it intellectually. But I didn’t fully get how it played out until I met “Mike” (that’s what I’ll call him). And years later saw Mike’s way of seeing in a Ms. Magazine article discussing objectifying ads.
Guys: Romantic? Or Just Want One Thing?
Some reports say guys are getting more romantic. Others say they just want one thing, preferably from celluloid porn stars.
Which is it?
On the one hand guys are getting sexually addicted to their computer screens. Davy Rothbart explains that the “fireworks and whiz-bangs” of extreme porn is to real women what an Imax 3-D movie is to a flipbook. (Though he thinks it’s a problem.)
And after a tour of college campuses, Naomi Wolf concluded that far from turbocharging women’s objectification and turning men into wild, raping beasts, Internet porn is turning men off real women.
But others have found young men becoming more romantic than their older brothers and fathers. Ninety-five percent of whom would prefer to have sex with someone they love over sex with a “hot” woman. Over half only want sex with someone they love.
What’s with the conflicting data?








