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What’s Wrong With Hooking Up?
By Lisa Wade
Crossposted from Ms. and Sociological Images
Hanna Rosin, senior editor at The Atlantic and author of The End of Men, has written a piece about hook-up culture on and off college campuses for the September issue of her magazine. Given that I’ve done some research on hook-up culture, here are my two cents: Rosin isn’t wrong to argue that the culture offers women sexual opportunities and independence, but she mischaracterizes the objections to hook-up culture and draws too rosy a conclusion.
Those who wring their hands and “lament” hook-up culture, Rosin contends, do so because they think women are giving it up too easily, a practice that will inevitably leave them heartbroken. She writes:
[Critics of hook up culture pine] for an earlier time, when fathers protected ‘innocent’ girls from ‘punks’ and predators, and when girls understood it was their role to also protect themselves.
If this is the problem, the answer is less sex and more (sexless?) relationships. But, Rosin rightly argues, this wrongly stereotypes women as fragile flowers whose self-esteem lies between their legs. It also romanticizes relationships. Drawing on the fantastic research of sociologists Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth A. Armstrong, she explains that young women often find serious relationships with men to be distracting; staying single (and hooking up for fun) is one way to protect their own educational and career paths.
All this is true and so, Rosin concludes, hook-up culture is “an engine of female progress—one being harnessed and driven by women themselves.”
Well, not exactly. Yes, women get to choose to have sex with men casually and many do. And some women truly enjoy hook-up culture, while others who like it less still learn a lot about themselves and feel grateful for the experiences. I make this argument with my colleague, Caroline Heldman, in Hooking Up and Opting Out: Negotiating Sex in the First Year of College [PDF].
But what young women don’t control is the context in which they have sex. The problem with hook-up culture is not casual sex, nor is it the fact that some women are choosing it; it’s the sexism that encourages men to treat women like pawns and requires women to be just as cunning and manipulative if they want to be in the game; it’s the relentless pressure to be hot that makes some women feel like shit all the time and the rest feel like shit some of the time; it’s the heterosexism that marginalizes and excludes true experimentation with same-sex desire; and it’s the intolerance towards people who would rather be in relationships or practice abstinence (considered boring, pathetic or weird by many advocates of hook-up culture, including, perhaps, Rosin).
Fundamentally, what’s wrong with hook-up culture is the antagonistic, competitive and malevolent attitude towards one’s sexual partners. College students largely aren’t experimenting with sexuality nicely. Hook ups aren’t, on the whole, mutually satisfying, strongly consensual, experimental affairs during which both partners express concern for the others’ pleasure. They’re repetitive, awkward and confusing sexual encounters in which men have orgasms more than twice as often as women:
The problem with hook-up culture, then, is not that people are friends with benefits. It’s that they’re not. As one of my students concluded about one of her hook-up partners: “You could have labeled it friends with benefits … without the friendship, maybe?”
Hook-up culture is an “engine of female progress” only if we take for granted that our destination is a caricature of male sexuality, one in which sex is a game with a winner and a loser. But do we really want sex to be competitive? Is “keep[ing] pace with the boys,” as Rosin puts it, really what liberation looks like? I think we can do better.
Crossposted from Ms. Magazine and Sociological Images
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How to Lose a Woman
By Raymond Bechard
Excerpted with permission from “How to Lose a Woman Forever” on The Good Men Project
Raymond Bechard summarizes Travis McGee’s views on women into 22 rules to losing the love of your life forever.
Only a woman of pride, complexity and emotional tension is genuinely worth the act of love, and there are only two ways to get yourself one of them. Either you lie, and stain the relationship with your own sense of guile, or you accept the involvement, the emotional responsibility, the permanence she must by nature crave. I love you can be said only two ways.
Travis McGee, The Deep Blue Good-By, 1964
1. Don’t protect her.
She’s a big girl. There’s no reason to help her feel safe in the way she needs to feel safe. There are no guarantees in life so it’s not rational to expect security in relationships. (And nothing is more rational than love.) Her emotional security is paramount to her. This means she wants to rely on you to always be there for her and count on you to be her best friend. Allow her to feel alone and abandoned, and you will experience both.
2. Don’t respect her.
Simple. Treat her like crap. If she doesn’t take it, she’ll leave and you’ll be miserable. If she does, she’ll stay and you’ll both be miserable. Treating her like the extraordinary woman she is will only increase her expectations, attitude, and hope, and courage, and affection, and love …
3. Don’t listen to her.
Every time she talks either tune her out or try to solve her problems. Do not, under any circumstances come to the realization that her feelings are the problem she needs to communicate to you. She doesn’t want you to DO anything. (After all, if she wanted your help she would ask for it. Seriously, she will.) And if you wanted her to feel closer to you than anyone else in the world you would not listen to her problems, but to her feelings. That takes paying sharp attention to her and learning how to really listen beyond her words. You would have to look at her as a person of near limitless emotional capacity. And all of that would only show her how much you truly value her. Who has that kind of time?
4. Look at her like an object.
All your life you’ve been sizing women up, judging them, taking in their physical being the same way you do with cars, boats or maybe fishing gear. Women are their words, their silence, their movement, the expressions, their work, their art, their friends, their children, their emotions, their thoughts, their hearts and their minds. They are more complex than anything else in the world. If you’re lucky, you might be smart enough to take on the challenge of understanding one someday.
5. Take her for granted.
Let her know she’s nothing special. Devalue everything she does, especially the things she does for you. If you want to make her miserable, sad, hopeless, or just lose her self-esteem make sure she knows she really doesn’t mean that much to you. You can’t be bothered with the fact that she’ll be looking for some kind of positive affirmation from you every day. And giving it to her is not something you can do once a month or week, on holidays or special occasions. She knows you appreciate her when you work at it all the time, especially those times when you don’t have to.
6. Don’t let her know she is important.
This one’s easy. If her father let her know that she is important as a person and you don’t show her the same thing, she won’t even consider a real relationship with you (because she knows you’re wrong.) However, if he didn’t teach her these things (making him a heartless jerk) then you have to go along with him. Otherwise, if you try to prove her father wrong and treat her with the love and respect she deserves, she will fight you. She may never unbelieve her father’s lie. But if you do choose to take on the job, commit to it like a man.
7. Don’t let her know she is interesting.
Don’t show any interest in her life, her passions, her story, her friends, work, hobbies, troubles, etc. Showing her she bores you is the best way to prove to her that she will never be her best with you.
8. Cheat.
No joking around on this one. Don’t cheat. Have the courage to say no or the decency to end the relationship. Stop and think of the damage you are doing to her for the rest of her life. However, if you want to permanently kill a good section her heart then go ahead. Tell yourself whatever you want. She will never recover, especially if she stays with you.
9. Don’t commit.
She’ll feel fine if you can’t commit to anything, large or small. Can’t make little plans because of work or your family or your friends or your other interests? No problem. She’ll make plans without you. Can’t make big plans like spending the rest of your life with her? She’ll make those plans without you as well.
10. Don’t kiss her.
If you don’t want her, don’t touch her. And especially don’t kiss her. However, if you want to be a man, shut up and take five completely uninterrupted minutes every day to hold her and kiss her.
11. Don’t cherish and adore her.
Don’t pay any attention to the needs she’s had since she was a child. Yes she is all grown up, but there is a part of the little girl she once was still living inside her. She needs your help in telling the little girl that everything is going to be okay because she is truly loved. Yeah, she can certainly handle that on her own, or with somebody else.
12. Don’t provide for her.
Screw Travis McGee. It’s the 21st Century and women should be able to carry their own weight. Sorry, but if you can’t provide for her financially she will never be able to completely rely on you. She needs to count on you no matter what happens. Unpredictability is her worst enemy and the world is becoming more unpredictable every day. You must be her safe harbor, her one place to go when it all goes to hell.
13. Don’t compliment her.
If you want her to find proof that she is attractive from someone else, don’t show her how attracted you are to her. If you want her to know how much you adore her, tell her how your attraction to her makes you feel. “Seeing your eyes makes me feel like I’m really home,” is better than, “You have nice eyes.” But don’t do that. You’d have to examine all the great feelings she gives you. And who needs that much self awareness?
14. Ignore Adventure.
Needing security must mean she wants routine and dullness, right? Do you realize how much a woman wants adventure? Not the adventure of being with you or the ups and downs of your relationship, but the adventures—large and small—you embark on together. She wants to be safe/secure enough in you so that you are the only one she will dare travel with on the adventures she desires so deeply.
15. Don’t surprise her.
Going to the trouble to be spontaneous or romantic without her knowing proves to her that she is precious to you. She needs to see you going to a lot of trouble for her to truly know she is loved and safe. That’s a lot of work.
16. Don’t romance her.
Your first date was a long time ago. No need to act like that idiot anymore. It’s probably best to just settle into a routine and ignore her need for unique expressions of your love for her. On the other hand, if you bring her out on a “first date” once in a while, or go out of your way for her romantically, you will reset the emotional freshness of her heart and your relationship.
17. Don’t be a hero.
She may not want you to solve all her problems, but she definitely wants a champion. Who the hell even knows what that means? It’s a fine line to walk. And it’s only attempted by the truest of men with the utmost courage and conviction.
18. Don’t take her anywhere.
She is feeling things emotionally that you will never even come close to. Imagine all emotions—good and bad—are rocks. Someone hands two identical rocks to you and to your woman. To you it feels like a rock. To her it’s a boulder. The weight of all that, all day, every day, gets to be a burden. Whether you take her to dinner, a spa, on vacation, or just sit and watch her try on dresses, you will be her hero for taking her out from under her own personal pile of boulders.
19. Don’t change your habits.
Let pride be your guide. Never improve. You’ve gone far too long becoming just as perfect as you are. Why switch up your game now? Remember, compromise and consideration has no place in relationships … unless you want them to work. Anyway, who has strength enough to be flexible?
20. Hate apologizing.
If you wanted to make this work, you would love apologizing. Point out your mistakes and apologize for them until she tells you to stop. But, that will only make her trust you and rely on your decency and trustworthiness as a man.
21. Don’t learn what emotional intimacy is.
Forget that emotional intimacy is the utterly close connection that will exist only when you are truly committed to and trust one another. It means you are both devoted to the well being and individual growth of the other, that you fully trust her and her you. It means knowing with absolute certainty that you are perfectly safe with each other. So, you would have to take the time to find a woman with whom you can build trust and be yourself. Worst of all it would mean not just accepting her for who she is, but celebrating who she is.
22. Don’t man up and deal with it.
You have issues. Everybody does. But you’re strong enough to handle them and not let them affect your life or your relationships. Certainly, you don’t need to deal with your past, your humiliations, shame, failures, addictions, etc. Getting help and staying strong only means you’re weak.
If none of these rules make sense then you need to meet my friend, Travis McGee. He is waiting for you on his boat, The Busted Flush, docked at slip F-18 at the Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale.
Let me know what you think about this list, ladies and gents.
You might also enjoy How to Lose a Guy Forever on The Good Men Project
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Women Don’t Need Men
More than ever, “mankind” is becoming a misnomer. With advanced understanding, we now know that women are both necessary and sufficient for reproduction, and men are neither.
So says Greg Hampikian, a Boise State biology professor. Expounding in the Times on how much women — and not men — are needed to propagate the species, he offers examples like this:
Your life as an egg actually started in your mother’s developing ovary, before she was born; you were wrapped in your mother’s fetal body as it developed within your grandmother.
Wow! I had never realized that.
Then after leaving our mother’s body, suckling provided our nourishment.
But there’s more: Mom sampled our diseases by holding and kissing us and then countered our infections by making antibodies that she passed on through her milk.
The in’s and out’s of our dependence on mom contrast with our short encounter with dad, when our egg-selves met “some very odd tiny cells that he had shed.” Turns out, these same cells may be transmitted to mom via turkey baster.
Prof. Hampikian wondered if there was anything irreplaceable about men. A female colleague replied, “They’re entertaining.”
Amanda Marcotte, over at Slate, feels the fear is overblown.
What do men imagine will happen if we don’t need them anymore? Will we magically stop having boy children? Go on mass murdering sprees to rid ourselves of the burden of men? Are all women just one equal paycheck away from killing all the men?
More interestingly, she points out that this is not a new concern. The fear that women won’t need men always arises when women grow more independent. One blogger feels the whole right-wing obsession with controlling women is bound up in a worry that we don’t really need men.
The oddest concern I have heard came from a friend who belongs to the church I grew up in. There, all males get priesthood at age 12. Women never do. (And I have complained about this!) But my male friend worried that,
If women get the priesthood then they won’t need men, anymore.
Really? Then why do women from other churches – and women who don’t belong to any church – bother to love men and even get married?
So yeah, women don’t need actual men to create babies, given the sperm banks at our disposal.
But who knows, maybe guys do come in handy for love, relationship and sex. As Ms. Marcotte points out:
There are lots of things we don’t need but we still want: flat screen TVs, YouTube videos of cats, expensive microbrews, fathers. Doesn’t mean we don’t want them.
And why would you rather be needed than wanted, anyway?
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Fatal Attraction: Relationship Slayed By What Sparked It
When a relationship is killed by whatever had sparked it, that’s a fatal attraction.
Living in a culture that sexualizes male dominance, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a friend of mine was once drawn to the “take charge,” male dominant qualities of one of her lovers. So attracted that she married him. A few years later she left him for the same reason. Many women romanticize male dominance only to find that it’s not so much fun to be bossed around and never get your way in real life.
Or, we might look for someone to balance us out. Another friend was attracted to the free-spirited artistic quality of his ex-wife. She seemed a nice counterweight to his ordered, mathematical mind. But after a few years her carefree ways morphed into chaos. Complimentary souls won’t necessarily complete us.
Some women are attracted to men who show a deep interest in them. A boyfriend’s obsession and jealousy makes her feel really loved. But after he starts beating her because other men looked her way, she eventually sees he has a possessive, abusive personality.
The most common fatal attraction involves friendliness. One 20-year-old found her boyfriend’s humor and sociability appealing when they first met. Now, asked about his least attractive quality, she points to his friendliness, saying “He often flirts with others.”
Physical attractiveness can also become an unexpected turn off. A forty-one year old man had initially been drawn to his girlfriend’s sexy, exotic Asian looks. He had also liked her outgoing, flirty personality. But over time that all became a problem as he came to see her as “disloyal and mercurial.”
The list goes on. A woman is attracted to a man’s sense of humor but later complains that he’s never serious. A man is drawn to his partner’s nurturing nature, but comes to see her as smothering. A woman admires her husband’s ambition, but then sees him as a workaholic.
There is a real tendency to become disillusioned with qualities that initially attract us.
I guess there can be too much of a good thing.
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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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