Blog Archives
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
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Should Women Play Hard To Get?
Should Men Play Hard To Get?
Should You Ask Why Your Lover Loves You?
Share this:
Spoon-Fed Barbie
Spoon Fed Barbie
Surface appearances can be deceiving, says artist, Yvonne Escalante.
“From the day we are born, our behavior and tastes are controlled by the social status quo. Little girls are fed an idealized image. Barbie has been deconstructed and reassembled for even easier consumption.”
As a first generation American, Escalante’s father had stressed American identity over cultural ties. Today, her work explores the conflict she feels, caught in the kaleidoscope of identity, gender roles, and societal norms.
Here’s what her art says to me.
Like most little girls, I grew up spoon-fed on Barbie. But not just Barbie. She was an emblem of all that mass media, friends and schoolmates, told me to be. A good shopper. Paired with Ken. Skinny and curvy all at once. The emblem of perfect womanhood, where body defines us.
Oddly, all this spoon feeding can lead to a dearth of feeding of any sort. I’ve gone through phases of not eating like I should, hoping to look like what turn out to be phony photoshopped images that don’t even resemble the starving models who posed for the pics.
What did I know?
Of course, skinny isn’t enough. We must be buxom, too. Which leads to unnecessary, and sometimes life-threatening, surgeries in pursuit of Barbie breasts. At least that’s what happens when boobs define us, creating our worth. For too many women and men, surface is all.
When women are told they must acquire surreal measurements, and when obtaining them is the source of self-worth, the pursuit takes unending time and energy.
Obsessed with diet and exercise, women can become distracted from the rest of life; so much so that (as Naomi Wolf can tell you) advances of the women’s movement wane. Frantic pursuit of the perfect body removes agitation for power of greater substance.
Hence, the pacifier. Here, called “Sucker.”
For more on Yvonne Escalante’s work go to ARTslant.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
The Constricting Bodice: Empowerment and Imprisonment?
Men Finding Fewer Women “Porn-Worthy”
Men Are Naturally Attracted To Unnatural Women
Share this:
Tangled Up in Femininity
If femininity came naturally, women wouldn’t need to tie themselves up in knots.
Some can barely walk in spiked heels that hurt. Some relentlessly guard against short skirts offering a quick flash. Some shift their weight around in corset-like contraptions. Others rearrange their faces, breasts and thighs under the knife.
Many squirm into a one-size-fits-all prescription that a husband and children will be 100% fulfilling.
Or, how about twisting yourself into Howcast’s rules for free drinks at a bar?
- Dress sexy, but not slutty, or you’re asking for it. How do you know if you’ve crossed the line? Well, if any men act inappropriately toward you, you must have shown too much boob. Better luck next time!
- Buy yourself one drink right off the bat, so it looks like you’re an independent-minded woman who isn’t trying to get free shit in return for being pretty. I mean, you are doing that, but you don’t want to make it obvious. Men might be turned off if the gendered exchange were made explicit.
In other words, don’t be who you are, be as you are expected, and walk a fine line on top of egg shells.
It all reminds me of a scene from “Brave,” as Natalie Wilson over at Ms. describes it:
Brave also offers a funny take on gender as performance when the very prim and proper Elinor is transformed into a hulking bear with a decidedly non-feminine body. Despite her new furry form, Elinor still “performs” femininity, prancing and posing and doing her best to have “good manners” with her unwieldy claws as she eats berries and fish.
So many of us jam ourselves into straightjackets. But why?
This is the “patriarchal bargain” that Lisa Wade, over at Sociological Images, calls a choice to accept roles that disadvantage women in exchange for whatever power they can wrest from the system. They gain advantages but leave the system intact.
And in fact, Howcast (mockingly?) instructs women to do just that:
Don’t ever stop to question a system that tells women that trading on our appearance, faking interest in people, excluding friends from social outings because they might be annoying to random men you’ve never met, and being manipulative are all totally empowering and socially-acceptable ways to behave as long as ladies get a fairly low-cost item for free in return for our efforts.
Yes. Never question the system.
Because the free drinks are so worth it.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
500 Calories + Pregnancy Hormones = Perfect Body
Beautiful Women’s Hips Are Thinner Than Their Heads?
Harry Potter’s Hermione: Less Brainy, Brave. More Sexy
Share this:
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.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Real Women Competing With Porn Stars
Men Are Naturally Attracted To Unnatural Women
Men Aren’t Hard Wired To Find Breasts Attractive
Share this:
What If Women Went Topless?
Unprecedented East Coast heat has prompted Moira Johnston to go topless in New York. Why drown in a hot, puddley bra when you can rip off your top, as so many men do when temperatures rise?
Moira also wants to raise awareness that, “It’s legal for woman to be topless anywhere a guy can be without a shirt since 1992 here in New York State.”
Jamie Peck gave it a try and found the only objectors were those worried about children, which she ponders:
Personally, I think that viewing a bare breast as inherently sexual and hence corrupting of innocence is silly; I’d much rather my hypothetical kid see women of all shapes enjoying the outdoors and being comfortable with their bodies than, say, two fully clothed people dry humping on a bench.
Plenty of men would love this, and judging from the crowd Moira attracts, many do.
But what would happen if women did go topless? All of them, in mass, for a long time?
Men would probably be disappointed as the breast fetish faded away. After all, it doesn’t exist in places where women walk around topless all the time, like tribal societies. And it withered in Europe and Australia in the 80s when breasts were bared in magazine and TV ads, and on billboards, and where women went topless on the beach.
The woman who reported this piece for Stuff appears to be Australian, and she can relate:
Why do we still treat bare breasts as such objects of scandal?
I must admit it’s always puzzled me. Growing up, as I did, in the ’80s, my template for adult womanhood was that it was perfectly natural – nay, expected – to whip ’em out in summer.
We’d turn up to the beach, three or four families or so, stake out a spot, and then the mums and aunts and friends would roll their one-pieces down and pour on the Reef. Consequently my approach to beachgoing is similarly au naturel.
So freeing. And some feminists recommend this breast baring to de-objectify them.
On the downside, women would probably still be judged, and some might feel pressured to uncover when they’d rather not — the inverse of some Arab women who feel pressured to cover when they’d rather not.
Still, women from once-topless societies aren’t expected to have such huge breasts today, saving money and potentially dangerous, unnecessary surgeries. As an ex-pat now living Portugal reveals:
My wife, who teaches at a local university, had an interesting conversation with one of her students. He’s a cosmetic surgeon, one of the very few in southern Portugal who does breast augmentations.
“I’m curious,” said my wife. “What size do most women ask for when they have an augmentation?”
“In Portugal? A B-cup,” he replied.
“A B-cup? That’s all? I’d have thought women who were paying for larger breasts would want something a little more…sizeable.”
“No, a B-cup is the average here, and in Europe. But if you go to the United States, it’s a different story.”
“What do American women ask for?”
“A D-cup,” he said. “The difference between Europe and the US is two cup sizes.”
Interesting to see the law of unintended (or intended) consequences in action.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Men Aren’t Hard Wired To Find Breasts Attractive
Women Learn the Breast Fetish, Too
Women Seeing Women as Sexier than Men
Share this:
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.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Men: Erotic Objects of Women’s Gaze
Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze
Does Porn Objectify? Experts Disagree
Share this:
Magic Mike Turns Tables on Objectification, Desire
I must be obsessed with male strippers, you think, with a third post inspired by “Magic Mike.”
Maybe.
I am obsessed with objectification and desire, and that movie offers the rare turning of tables to see what’s on the other side.
In this table-turning do women experience men in the way that men typically experience them? I’ve already suggested that the answer is no.
However, we’re seeing chinks in the armor.
In “Magic Mike” women’s desire is acknowledged and catered to as the camera hones in on glutes and abs to accommodate the female gaze… and as Matthew McConaughey bends over to give us a full-moon shot.
All this in a place with “no men allowed.” Not formally, as Joanna Schroeder over at the GoodMenProject points out, but because most men don’t want to be there. But that “all-estrogen” space can feel empowering.
And for once women are calling the shots (or feel like they are) demanding, “Take it all off!” and letting ‘em know what they like: “Yeahhh honey, do it again!”
Only problem is that objectification is damaging. When women or men are objectified their looks and their sexuality become their worth – in their own minds and in the minds of others.
Those who objectify themselves are prone to body shame, low self-esteem, depression, eating disorders and sexual dysfunction. They even have more difficulty navigating everyday life because they’re so distracted by how their body looks.
And the objectified are treated like “things,” meant to serve others’ desires. They are things that lack thought or emotion, so they are not offered empathy. And when they age and lose their sex appeal they are worth nothing at all.
Do we really want to turn others into objects? (Keep in mind that it is possible to be sexy without being a sex object.)
But looking closer we see the table is only half-turned: women are also objectified, even in this film. While not revealing any male body parts that are prohibited on a public beach, the film hones in on naked breasts from time to time. One of the strippers even passes his wife around and encourages the guys to fondle her breasts because “she loves it.”
Meanwhile, the simulated sex on stage often mimics male pleasure, with women’s heads shoved against cocks and men humping women’s faces or behinds. How about a little clitoral action?
And in a movie that promises to take us out of our boxes we end up right back inside the virgin/whore dichotomy as Magic Mike chooses between the sexually adventurous Joanna and the virginal Brooke. No surprise, really, who triumphs.
So things have changed and they’ve stayed the same, which provokes the question: Where do we want to go?
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Women Seeing Women as Sexier than Men
Anything Good About Being A Sex Object?
Does Porn Objectify? Experts Disagree
Share this:
Gays Find Strippers Sexy; Women Don’t?
Male strippers have beautiful bodies. And women find them sexy. But probably not sexy in a way that gets them too aroused.
Last week I considered the lack of excitement. Turns out, women don’t get too turned on by male nudity, at all. When sex researcher, Meredith Chivers, wired women up and showed them sexual images, straight women experienced no arousal — physically or subjectively — when looking at fit naked guys working out. Another time women watched a nude man walking and the only thing that aroused them less were bonobos, an ape species, having sex.
Is it because the male body simply isn’t sexually exciting?
Probably not, since gay men did get aroused looking at nude men.
Why are gay men turned on by male nudity when straight women aren’t? There are various possibilities. And it’s not that women just aren’t visual, after all, women were more aroused by a nude woman exercising than by a nude man. And, some women enjoy porn.
The fact that gay culture celebrates and eroticizes the male body in a way that straight culture does not could play a role.
And then there’s repression. Men are rarely slut-shamed for being sexual. On the other hand, gays are too often taunted as fags or queers. Still, research on men and women who have lived in repressive cultures, like Victorian England, find men less affected (perhaps because they are also less repressed). But even gay men are less affected than lesbians by homophobia-induced repression (even though homophobia is more strongly directed at gay men). Maybe because the male sex drive is stronger, due in part to higher levels of testosterone, while twice as much of their brain is taken up with sex.
Meanwhile, men’s bodies give them better feedback than women’s do. When blood rushes to the penis a man knows it. He feels very excited. But when blood rushes to a woman’s vagina, she can be clueless. Again, this difference may be biological, or due to greater female repression, or because men are less affected by repression, or all of the above. Indiana University researchers believe that women are less responsive for both anatomical and psychosocial reasons.
We don’t have the definitive answer on why gay men get aroused by male strippers when straight women don’t so much, but here’s a little food for thought to munch on.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Why Aren’t Male Strippers Sexy?
Men: Erotic Objects of Women’s Gaze
Men, Women React to Male/Female Nudity
Share this:
Why Aren’t Male Strippers Sexy?
Channing Tatum in “Magic Mike”
The typical atmosphere in such an establishment isn’t one of arousal and longing, the kind that reliably fills the air in a female strip club. As far as I can tell, female patrons are typically cracking up, shielding their eyes in mock horror or cartoonishly objectifying male dancers as a performance for their friends.
Her observations come by way of the new movie, Magic Mike, which gets a lot right, she says, but shows male stripping as it mostly is: “goofball, absurd and sometimes repulsive,” which is how she describes her own first – and last — male strip show outing:
Onstage was an overly tanned dark-and-handsome type dressed like a race car driver. He slowly unzipped his onesie while popping his knee to the throbbing techno music, which was accented by sounds of a car engine revving. Once naked, he took his flaccid penis in his hand, stretched it out as far as he could and let go; it snapped back to his body and flopped around as he wiggled his eyebrows at the crowd.
And so she asks why these strip shows are libido-killers and offers her thoughts. On some points we overlap, on others we don’t (for instance, I think evolutionary psych is full of crap). Here are my own musings:
Some of what I’ve written before applies here. For instance, male bodies aren’t sexualized in our culture. Since I’ve discussed this in pieces like, “Men: Erotic Objects of Women’s Gaze,” or “Women Seeing Women as Sexier than Men.” I won’t dwell on the point. But whether out of homophobia or because women have only recently become involved in creating media, literature, art, or anything else that could eroticize the male form, we see few sexualized images of men. So lusting after men isn’t something that women learn to do.
Some say women are just more erotic, yet breasts are only sensualized in places where they are either hidden or selectively hidden and revealed. The U.S. is so obsessed by the secreted breast that even women can develop a fetish. There’s no biological reason for that.
Repressed sexuality may also make it more difficult for women to respond to the visual. I don’t have data on this other than personal experience and talking with other women about it, but a few of us were better able to respond to visual stimulation when we were very young and less repressed.
Forces of repression? I’ve discussed this before (so see refs), but it arises as women are told that sex is bad – for them – and slut-shamed, from being the ones who get screwed and f’d, from being told not to touch themselves (males are more likely to figure out pleasure sources due to differences in anatomy), and from sexual abuse.
Making matters worse, when men do show skin they can look “gay.” This seems to occur because women are so used to nudity being meant for the male gaze that they come to see nude males through male eyes, too. That’s jarring, not a turn-on.
Men doing women-things (stripping) might be jarring, too.
Another problem is that straight women get more aroused by being desired than by desiring men. (Being desired by men they’re interested in, not by any ol’ guy.) Probably due to culture. While women don’t learn to see men as sex objects, they do come to see themselves that way. So in a convoluted form they can become aroused by experiencing how men are experiencing them. Yet another factor preventing women from desiring men in a fetished way.
And then floppiness could add to the problem, erasing any fantasy of being desired by the stripper. Flaccidity – at least on a twenty-something — communicates that he’s just not that into you. (Maybe a male strip clubber’s fantasy is helped when no obvious bodily sign tells him that the female stripper’s not into him.) But standing at attention might not work with a whole houseful of ladies anyway, since he’s still not necessarily into you.
Also, even if the stripper were erect, women may still have the same reaction that they have to strange men who flash or sext them: repulsion, trauma or laughter.
Yes, women have a very different reaction to the male member on a stranger than the men they love.
There are plenty of reasons why women think men look sexier fully clothed.
But why do gay men find male strippers sexy when straight women don’t? I’ll visit that question next week.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Men, Women React to Male/Female Nudity
Sexy Weiner?
Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze
Share this:
The Constricting Bodice as Empowerment and Imprisonment?
Angela Fortain, Bodice
“The bodice, the corset and the bra can be instruments of empowerment, or torture.”
– Angela Fortain
In her series “Overt Underthings” artist, Angela Fortain, considers a paradox: Distorting the body can both liberate and imprison, she says. Society dictates constraining fashions which, once dawned, create power over others.
Power over others?
By way of men’s desire, women’s envy.
The power to shape space as others turn in our direction.
Favors.
Lower status bowing to higher. Standing based on beauty – and what to make of that?
The power to gain love? Or sex? And must one undergo body-torture to attain either?
How might power become less available inside the constrained body?
Are the powers bestowed – or removed – substantive or superficial?
Finally, Fortain muses, “Separating the sensual object that once transformed the wearer into an object of sexuality allows us to examine the object, and our own desire.”
The power of objects… our own desire?
Fortain’s work provokes more questions than answers. As art should.
For more on Angela Fortain’s work go to ARTslant.
Popular Posts on BroadBlogs
Spoon Fed Barbie
Men Are Naturally Attracted To Unnatural Women
Surprises in Indiana University Sex Survey
BroadBlogs 