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I have recently read Robert Jensen’s Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, partially because a reader sent it to me (thank you, Denny, you are the best) and partially because at a certain point one gets tired of making fun of Twisty Faster and wants to engage with an extremist radical feminist with some real intellectual content.
The premise of Getting Off, for those who haven’t read it, is that pornography is oppressive to women: it encourages men to objectify, degrade and even be violent against women, corrupting male sexuality away from intimacy and towards a, well, “pornified” sexuality. This part will address male sexuality as degrading in the book, part two will address the critique of pornography and part three will consider what Jensen got right.
The meat of Getting Off, as a book, is a long description of all the kinds of degrading porn that exist out there. Double penetration! Verbal humiliation! Spanking! Throatfucking! Interracial porn! Gangbangs! Anal to mouth! Pissplay! A veritable storm of sex acts most people do not want to participate in.
The problem with this analysis, I think, is most cogently shown when Jensen describes a porn star’s responses as “difficult to interpret… as anything other than expressions of pain.” He then quotes the DVD commentary of the video, which features the cameraman saying “you see the expression on her face, like, you know what, ‘I’m really, I’m really enjoying this.'”
The point is that it is impossible to ascribe a single meaning to a particular sex act and, in particular, it is impossible to consider a particular sex act inherently degrading and unpleasurable.
Consider missionary-position heterosexual sexual intercourse. It can be a beautiful expression of love and connection. It can be an expression of contempt and hatred. It can be a fun way to spend an afternoon, no more meaningful than a roller-coaster ride. It can be a rape, a violation of a person’s inmost self. It can be a way of affirming life. It can be a rite of passage, gone through with eagerness or far too soon. It can be a way of cementing a relationship. If “regular” sex can be anything from a moment of purest joy to something sad and desperate and kind of pathetic, how could anything else be true of “kinky” sex?
If there’s a chick out there who thinks double penetration is hot because anal stimulation is hot and vaginal stimulation is hot and together they are double-hot, and a gentleman out there who thinks double penetration is hot because he likes the idea of giving her double pleasure, then in what sense are their double-penetration adventures degrading? Fun, mutually pleasurable, mutually happy sex is not degrading if you want the term to continue to have any meaning whatsoever.
I mean, fuck, it is weird to read a dude describing this horrible, degrading, objectifying, abusive sex that no woman would freely consent to and expresses the hatred the viewers have for women and be like… “huh. That was Friday night.”
Given that Jensen would have found this out if he, um, asked anyone who enjoyed participating in comeshots (seriously, comeshots are fun!), it makes me wonder about the source of Jensen’s preconceptions about sexuality. Presumably some of it is the natural human tendency to decide that sex acts the human in question doesn’t like are gross and no one should participate in them ever. (See also: homophobia.) However, I do think some of it has to do with people viewing male sexuality as inherently degrading.
The view of male sexuality as degrading is endemic in our sex-negative culture. Just look at abstinence-only education: women are considered to be precious flowers until the application of a penis, at which point they become lollipops everyone had sucked on or tape ripped off a lot of people’s arms or whatever disgusting and nonsensical analogy the teacher thought up this week. One of the most common forms of slut-shaming is calling a woman “dirty” or “filthy,” presumably because once a woman has had sex with a man she is ruined forever. Women are considered “pure” until they have sex with too many men, at which point they become “impure.” A “gentleman” doesn’t ask a woman to have sex too early on.
Jensen, and the Dworkinite strain of radical feminism he derives from, do the exact same thing. Why is a gangbang, freely and enthusiastically consented to, degrading? Well, because, uh, penises! More than one penis! In a vagina! And lots of men are getting off on it! And the woman is apparently enjoying it, says she is enjoying it, but we know she isn’t because, um, penises! In a vagina!
I see.
Porn shows a bunch of women who really, really enjoy sex. They crave and need cock. They call themselves “sluts” because they’re so full of sexual desire. Their enthusiastic consent could not get any more enthusiastic. And Jensen says it’s rapey because it creates the notion that all women are really like that deep down.
First of all, dude, it’s porn. They kind of have to show sex, it’s their job. However ethical it is, a man respecting a woman’s “no” to sex is not very good pornography. As long as they’re showing it, defaulting to showing women who are enthusiastic about sex is way less rapey than the other option.
Also, Jensen is not stupid. I’m sure he knows that most people are fully capable of telling apart reality and porn. Much as the average slash fan doesn’t think every man in real life is gay, and the average consumer of female dominiant porn is fully aware that women are not actually superior to the worthless worms that are men, the average vanilla porn consumer doesn’t think that all women are secretly gagging for his cock. That makes me wonder why he thinks that showing women who are enthusiastic about sex with men is so terrible.
Is it possibly because he thinks that women can’t really desire sex with men? Is it because he views male sexuality as degrading, and so the desire for male sexuality as more degrading still? Could the radical feminist possibly have some unexamined patriarchial narratives going on?
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This week, on Ozy Is Annoyed At A Radical Feminist…
Critique of Porn, ur doin it rong.
It’s a common idea that sex-positives think porn should be exempt from gender egalitarian critique. Of course it shouldn’t be, any more than commercials or action movies or romantic comedies or any other area of popular culture should be exempt from gender egalitarian critique. All forms of media have sinned and fallen short of the glory of Social Justice, and it is our job to call them out on it when necessary.
However, it’s important to distinguish between critiquing the popular culture and critiquing the person. Action movies are not exactly what one would call excessively masculist; however, that won’t stop me from sitting down in front of Captain America with a big bowl of popcorn, ready to inform the world that everyone in the movie is secretly having gay sex. The distinction is especially important to make for issues of sexuality, which can be a very private and important part of a person’s life.
It is not wrong to get off on fantasies of non-consent. How could it be? The imaginary people in your head have no meaningful ability to revoke consent, and they’re hardly going to be traumatized for life. The only consequence is your orgasm. As long as you don’t actually want to rape people in real life, fantasies of non-consent are not wrong and can even be enacted with a consenting partner (and a safeword!). Sexual fantasies are almost impossible to remove. Shaming someone for getting off on non-consent (or humiliation, or degradation, or kink, or whatever) has only the effect of making them feel like shit for something they can’t help.
Which is not to say that it is wrong to critique porn. There are lots of very problematic aspects of mainstream porn. It presents a single body type as the most desirable. It shows sex acts that look good on screen more than sex acts that people actually enjoy. It presents unrealistic and exaggerated expectations of men’s sexual attainment. It left at least one boy of my friend’s acquaintance with the idea that women were naturally hairless.
Porn often reflects the sexism of the society that it’s a part of. Since society often views male sexuality as degrading, porn too often depicts value-neutral sex acts like double penetration as degrading. Since society shames sluts, porn too often depicts sluts as awful and worthy of shaming (hello, BangBus, how are you doing?). The objectification of women as tits and ass and vaginas and mouths and men as giant ever-erect penises is a concern. That’s not even getting into porn’s awful racial, queer and trans politics.
In addition, the industry itself has often had abuses. All you have to do is read the life story of Linda Lovelace to realize that, all too often, the porn industry has not adequately valued consent. Many amateur porn videos are leaked by one partner without the consent of the other partner, perhaps after a bad breakup. The straight porn industry almost never uses condoms, leading to several STI scares.
However, it is possible to critique these abuses without critiquing the concept of pornography itself. People are always going to be interested in watching other people fuck. It has been going on for several thousand years at this point– just look at ancient Greek vases! It is possible to develop a sex-positive porn ethos that values consent, safety and mutual enjoyment. Much critique of porn seems extremely sex-negative. After all, action movies are at least as sexist as porn, yet no one suggests that gender egalitarians should stop watching action movies.
One of the primary problems with pornography is that, all too often, given the woeful state of even comprehensive sex education, porn is treated as sex ed. Porn is a fantasy; learning about sex from porn is like learning about guns from action movies. (No, I will not stop with this analogy ever.) But the problem is not with the fantasy, the problem is with the lack of education.
I’m not suggesting people teach how to have anal sex in schools. However, I am suggesting that educational websites such as Scarleteen, sex ed books like the Whole Lesbian Sex Guide (fondly recalled from my middle-school tiny-confused-queer days) and sex-positive blogs that show how sex actually works need to become more prevalent. That way, porn can keep its true purpose– wank material– without interfering in people’s ideas of how sex actually works.
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[The phrase “be a man”] is usually connected to one man’s demand that another man be “stronger,” which is traditionally understood as the ability to suppress emotional reactions and channel that energy into controlling situations and establishing dominance.
Be a man, then, typically translates as: Surrender your humanity.
–Robert Jensen, Getting Off
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Jensen is wrong, epically wrong, about male sexuality, and not particularly good at critiquing porn either. However, that doesn’t mean that everything he thinks is wrong, and in this post I’d like to highlight some of the things he says that I believe are actually interesting and correct.
Jensen summarizes masculinity as having three primary traits: the avoidance of of things too closely connected to women/femininity; the struggle for supremacy in interpersonal relationships and social situations; and the repression of emotions related to womanhood/femininity. I don’t think this is entirely correct (for one thing, he’s missing the whole “men are horny beasts who are always up for it” bit, which is a really obvious omission in a book about porn), but it’s an interesting starting place.
In the most striking metaphor in the book, Jensen describes masculinity as a constant game of King of the Hill, in which men compete to be the one man who has reached the pinnacle and can be considered a Real Man. But even the one man on the top isn’t safe: he must fear someone else, younger and stronger and manlier, pulling him down. The slightest slip or misplaced foot– getting fired from your job, crying, being your girlfriend’s “bitch,” discovering your love of My Little Pony– will destroy your status as King.
One of the most tragic effects that Jensen describes is the loneliness related to conventional masculinity. “The Man Who Would Be King,” Jensen says, “is the Man Who Is Broken And Alone.” Masculinity circumscribes the emotions that are acceptable to express: sexual desire, competition, anger and, most of all, stoicism. However, in order to maintain a functional romantic relationship, you have to express your emotions and communicate openly with each other– skills men in our culture are not encouraged to develop.
If your view of the world is based around a zero-sum competition of masculinity, a macho competition, a literal dick-measuring contest, it limits your ability to engage in real relationships. And that is, fundamentally, sad.
Jensen says, “whatever the benefits of it, whatever power it gives one over others, it’s also exhausting and, in the end, unfulfilling.” The Man Box is, in essence, a cage. It’s a nice cage, don’t get me wrong. You get gilding on the bars and a pillow and nice food. But it is still a cage; the bars being made of social opprobrium instead of iron doesn’t make them any less real.
Patriarchy harms people of all genders. It’s bad to be forced to be strong when you’re weak; it’s bad to be forced to be weak if you’re strong. The latter is just easier to see.
skye said:
Serious question: if it’s not wrong to get off on politically inconvenient fantasies (which I accept), and it’s not wrong to enact those fantasies with consenting partners (which I also accept), then is there a meaningful difference between critiquing the unrealistic aspects of porn and critiquing the fantasies themselves? I’ve heard it described as “well, in a perfect world no one would *have* these fantasies, but we might as well tolerate them while people do”, which I’m uncomfortable with. There has to be room for the person who gets off on depictions of sluts as “awful and worthy of shaming”, of racial stereotypes, of things that would be horrible anywhere outside the realm of consenting adult sexuality.
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Nita said:
If someone grew up in a world without racial stereotypes, what intense emotions would their fantasies hook into? I think people enjoy these scenarios because our society has complicated feelings about sexual enthusiasm, promiscuity, race, status etc.
So, fantasies of this sort are always going to involve something “problematic”, just like sadism and masochism involve various painful things.
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skye said:
Unless we erase past stereotypes, I think it’s very possible for such fetishes to latch onto past dynamics. Things like Nazi roleplay and antebellum slave roleplay already exist, and those periods in history are long over.
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Susebron said:
Nazi roleplay and slave roleplay both play into existing dynamics, though. A better analogy would perhaps be aristocrat/serf roleplay. It certainly exists, but people don’t complain about it to the same degree. Presumably the same fantasies would exist, but they would be harder to mistake for reality.
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megaemolga said:
One of the things that annoy me about anti-porn critiques is that they assume that no one has any sexual imagination. Do they really want me to believe that someone has to watch porn to think up something like double penetration? Or that someone who watches porn with double penetration doesn’t already fantasize about it when masturbating? Or that they will suddenly stop if porn of it is banned.
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InferentialDistance said:
Well, yeah. The only people that think about sex are vile misogynists. Once we free society from their sexist grips, we’ll revert to our platonic asexual ideal forms.[/sarcasm]
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Sniffnoy said:
Obvious but obligatory comment:
Could the radical feminist possibly have some unexamined patriarchial narratives going on?
That’s hardly limited to radical feminism. (As you are well aware. Like I said, obvious but obligatory.)
(Unrelatedly:
No, I will not stop with this analogy ever.
This is the only place I’ve seen you use that analogy, so it appears to me this is not actually the case. 🙂 )
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Leit said:
That analogy’s so handy, though. It explains things like being expected to perform for 2 hours without a barrel jam or the need to reload in between…
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Nornagest said:
If only “tap, rack, flip” worked here.
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Leit said:
That’s what you get, going with an internal magazine and a monobloc frame and barrel.
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osberend said:
Dammit, I knew I should have gone with belt-fed, water-cooled genitals!
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Henry Gorman said:
Why shouldn’t we encourage people to teach anal sex in schools? It’s something that can be painful and dangerous when done wrong, something which a lot of teenagers are probably going to try anyway, and also something frequently critical to the sex lives of a marginalized demographic (gay men). I know that butt stuff probably won’t be accepted in schools for some time to come, but I think it would be really valuable if somebody did tell kids to take it slow and use a lot of lube.
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Bugmaster said:
Yeah, that was my reaction too. In fact, they should teach how to have sex of all kinds, with the emphasis on safety and mutual pleasure. As far as I can tell, the current sex ed programs are limited to either teaching teenagers how to avoid having sex (which is a waste of time), or to teaching them how to use protection correctly. There’s nothing wrong with knowing how to use protection, it’s important, but that’s not all there is to sex.
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Henry Gorman said:
I agree! I also think that it would be really valuable to have more instruction about communication and consent (which are really important for keeping sex safe and pleasurable).
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Matthew said:
I’d think it would be better to create a modular curriculum, and let everyone be aware of what modules exist, but not necessarily make everyone study every module.
More concretely — I think anal sex, whether gay or straight, is disgusting. I don’t care if other people do it — whatever consenting adults want to do is their business and nobody else’s — but it would have been negative-utility to make me spend time learning about it. I’m not going to use the information, and it’s unpleasant to have to listen to it.
(Of course, if pornography is any indication, I seem to be in a tiny minority. That’s still not a reason to make me do it, though.)
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osberend said:
@Matthew: There are two obvious problems with that. One is that social pressures (from both parents and peers) exist (and coming up with delivery mechanisms that don’t risk anyone finding out is effectively impossible), and so people may avoid taking modules that are relevant to their interests, in order to avoid being stigmatized.
The other is that people (especially teens) do not consistently plan on (even potentially) doing everything sexual that they end up doing.
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Bugmaster said:
I feel about anal sex the same way Matthew does, but I still agree with osberend. I’m willing to trade off my disgust in exchange for someone else’s continued health. Of course, this is me today speaking; I might have felt different as a teen, it’s hard to say…
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Nita said:
Yes. In a real-life debate about homosexuality, someone brought up objects lost in rectums as evidence of harm . Dear everyone, please use only toys with a flared base for anal play, regardless of your orientation!
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osberend said:
In a real-life debate about homosexuality, someone brought up objects lost in rectums as evidence of harm.
. . . what.
I mean, stereotypical association of gay men with buttsex, sure, sure, but the stereotype in question chiefly involve sticking a penis in there. If your partner’s penis lacks a flared base, you have much more urgent problems than the possibility of it getting lost up your ass.
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Evan Gaensbauer said:
I attended a high school where in Grade 12, the final year before graduation, teaching us about anal sex was included in sex education. This included telling us about “going slow and using lots of lube”. This was in Vancouver, Canada, the most liberal place in Canada (basically a cross between Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco, in Canada). Also, it was a school that was in a liberal part of town, and the sex educators (for lack of a better term) themselves were very sex-positive, and open-minded. However, the two women teaching the session informed us they were trying a new curriculum for sex education. So, for all I know, they only taught students about anal sex my year, and after I graduated the pilot program might have been abandoned after some parents made a stink, or whatever. However, there is at least one place at which this conversation has taken place.
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Jiro said:
“The objectification of women as tits and ass and vaginas and mouths and men as giant ever-erect penises is a concern.”
What does objectification even mean with respect to porn, if you think some porn objectifies and some doesn’t? Ozy has disclaimed the idea that porn is evil just because it depicts fantasies of non-consent, so it can’t just mean that women are being treated as objects within the context of the porn’s narrative. And if the porn counts as objectification because you don’t care about the actresses aside from their role in the porn, that would make all porn objectification (as well as all movies of whatever type) and Ozy has disclaimed that too. What ways are left in which porn can be objectification?
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Let said:
IMO the objectification argument in general doesn’t make much sense. (I think Yvain or someone else made a post about meaning of objectification?)
But yeah, assuming there is something objectification and it’s bad, WHY is it bad to do it a film? The actors aren’t harmed. We “objectify” people in non-pornographic films too.
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Jiro said:
“I think Yvain or someone else made a post about meaning of objectification?”
Ozy did: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/04/fetishization/ . And if I go by that, that would seem to say that either all porn or no porn is objectification, depending on exactly what counts as treating people as things.
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thirqual said:
By Scott, after Ozy had writter the article Jiro linked: My objections to obectification.
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Let said:
Sorry Ozy (“Soz”???? 😀 ) but the post thirqual linked was the one I was thinking of.
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Nita said:
Oh God. Bars made of opprobrium. This is amazing.
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Leit said:
Mined on planet Porndora, after displacing some blue people with really poor self-esteem from their giant tree.
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osberend said:
And directly onto another! Heyo!
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Koken said:
I think the depiction of masculinity as competitive and alienating at the end there is a bit strong. It seems to me that there are also distinctively masculine images of friendship and solidarity to draw on.
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Godzllarissa said:
Is the title meant to be a pun?
Anyway, awesome (both the pun and the post(s)).
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stillnotking said:
I see what you did there.
As wrong-headed as the “male-marketed porn is rapey” critique is, when it comes from women, I can understand it as a product of the vast gulf between male and female sexual fantasy — my critique of a Harlequin novel probably wouldn’t be particularly on point, either. When a man makes the same criticisms, it adds an additional layer of creepiness: either he sees rape and degradation where the rest of us don’t, and likes them, or he’s just telling women what he thinks they want to hear.
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Nita said:
I’m not sure whether to laugh or be offended.
Perhaps Jensen simply prefers gentle lovemaking, and trying to understand other people’s preferences without talking to them has led him to a wrong conclusion.
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stillnotking said:
That vast gulf is also vastly well-documented. It’s one of the most robust gender differences anyone has identified. See Donald Symons, for example.
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Nita said:
Do you recommend anything in particular?
Apparently he’s co-written a book about slash fic. Well, as a consumer of both slash and video pornography, I can testify that there is a lot of overlap.
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stillnotking said:
I was mostly thinking of The Evolution of Human Sexuality. I haven’t read Warrior Lovers, but it seems to cover similar ground.
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Nita said:
Hmm. So, I’ve leafed through “The Evolution of Human Sexuality”, and there are a few things I could say.
But first, could you describe your idea of this “vast gulf between male and female sexual fantasy” a bit, just to make sure we’re not talking past each other?
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jossedley said:
My feeling is that most people – men and women – find themselves competing. Certainly the axes of competition vary, and the goals, but if multiple people want the same unsharable thing, whether its status or resources or what, then there’s going to be some competition.
There are ways to cooperate, and to not be a jerk, but I think that’s true within both the “masculine” and “feminine” bundles as we currently experience them.
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Leit said:
:%s/people/Americans/g
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jossedley said:
That’s definitely possible, but my working hypothesis is that most times, all you can do is shift the grouds of competition.
I’ll grant that a society with a rigid allocation of rights may have less overt competition than one that aims to be meriticratic, but I still suspect there’s competition among the high lords, their bannermen, and the smallfolk/ the politburo, the party, and the masses (or whatever they’re called), just different compeition.
There are a bunch of revolutions that seek to remake human nature, but most of them end up shifting competition into different areas. My bet is that even bonobos compete, just in different ways than chimps.
But I’m not expert, so its definitely possible that I’m wrong.
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Leit said:
Damn you for replying to my joke comment and making me take this (semi)seriously. /s
Folks from the US are genuinely competitive to a degree that looks unnatural. They’re not alone – Aussies, lovely bastards that they are, can turn anything into a friendly competition. On the other hand there’s places like Denmark, where competing is seen as a bit unwholesome.
Most of us sit somewhere in the middle, I’d say. The urge for competition is deep-rooted and difficult to sublimate. The trouble comes in when you have a culture that doesn’t consider one to have gained until a competitor has lost.
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jossedley said:
Well, I consider it productive, because this is a super-interesting digression – thanks for sticking with me.
I think the “Man Box” is a bit of a cariacature/scapegoat – competition for status is just a fact, IMHO, and the masculine idea includes the idea of sportsmanship – a “real man” can lose with grace, because paralyzing fear of losing, or a bad reaction to losing is itself un-“manly.”
To move back to competition for entertainment, which is the interesting digression, I think that’s instructive.
My in-laws (men and women) are unusually recreationally competive even for Americans – they are always up for any game of anything, and they always play to win, and they spend a fair amount of time comparing themselves to everyone around them. (How many romantic partners, who got a job doing what, who’s going on vacation where, whose kids are doing what).
Even though they try not to be PITA about it, they can be annoying, but one of the things that softens the blow once you get to know them is that they are genuinely good sports. They want to win everything, but they can lose with grace and be happy for whoever won while they are simultaneously frustrated with themselves for losing.
So there’s some cultural friction when they come into contact with less overtly competitive types in the family, and both sides work to mediate that friction, but I’m not sure their lifestyle is any better or worse than mine. It probably depends on the distribution of outcomes.
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Leit said:
Sportsmanship also bleeds over into supporting others. It’s sadly where a lot of the “lol, gay” attitude toward sportsmen comes from. Apparently we’re allowed to be stoic or ironic, but not genuinely caring. Seems healthy.
Your family sounds a little overbearing, but I bet all someone would have to say would be “oh, I play [x]/lift [y]/do [z]” and they’d physically welcome them with open arms. A lot of physical/competitive types seem like that, and it’s awesome.
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osberend said:
@Leit: Folks from the US are genuinely competitive to a degree that looks unnatural. [. . .] On the other hand there’s places like Denmark, where competing is seen as a bit unwholesome.
Yeah . . . between excessive competitiveness and Jante Law, I’ll take the former in an instant, warts and all.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
Whenever I read extreme radfem criticism of porn, I find myself half agreeing.
For instance, it creeps me the fuck out how much porn depicts rape without acknowledging it as such. I’m cool with consent play. I’m cool with whatever extreme act you want to get off to, but in a culture that already has some major issues with consent, I’m worried the porn industry as a whole is feeding into that by refusing to acknowledge what it is they’re depicting.
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stillnotking said:
Almost no mainstream male-marketed porn depicts rape, explicit or implicit. If anything, the typical male fantasy goes in the opposite direction: cartoonishly exuberant female consent.
Women are much more likely to have rape fantasies than men are. One of my exes was into it, and I couldn’t oblige her. It made me too uncomfortable even to pretend to rape someone.
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Nita said:
So, is that the vast gulf between male and female fantasies that you mentioned earlier?
Also, here are a few video captions from mainstream (IMO) porn aggregators:
“Her mom and dad trick her into sex”
“not anal, please” (more of a D/s thing, maybe?)
“It’s your choice either you get arrested or you take care of my hard on”
“stupid sister loses bet and is punished”
And thirdly, rape and cartoonishly exuberant enthusiasm / lust can be a part of the same scenario, so it’s odd to call them opposite directions.
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Nita said:
Oh wait, it was “His mom and dad trick her into sex”. Sorry.
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stillnotking said:
It’s more a consequence of the vast gulf. I’ve seen the difference summarized as: Men want women who want to fuck; women want men who want to fuck her. From what I’ve been told, rape fantasy’s appeal to women is that a man is so overwhelmingly attracted to her that he can’t even respect her boundaries.
I guarantee you that I could find twenty videos without the slightest problematic consent-related issue for every one that does. I just glanced at the front page of Pornhub, and none of the featured videos had anything to do with being tricked or coerced into sex. I don’t want to make this blog too family-unfriendly, but four of the titles were exhortations (by women) for men to perform various sex acts on them, and one was a cuckold video, another interesting topic in itself.
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Nita said:
Wait, how does this model explain slash fic? From what I’ve heard, men are more likely to be aroused by depictions of women, and women are more likely to be aroused by depictions of sex (and sex-related feelings). And the stuff Jensen doesn’t like definitely sounds like “depistions of sex”.
But, as I said earlier, there is a lot of overlap, as well as things like /r/ladyboners, which shouldn’t exist if Symons is right.
So, you rate the rapeyness of mainstream video porn at about 5 percent? That sounds reasonable 🙂
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stillnotking said:
Yeah, 5%-ish sounds about right. It’s low enough to be considered a fetish. A large majority of men are not sexually aroused by the idea of compelling women to have sex with us — indeed, quite the opposite. There’s something downright unmanly about it; rapists, like the clients of prostitutes, have the aura of “sexual loser” about them from the prototypical male POV.
Contrast with how many of the plots of romance novels involve the heroine having to sleep with the pirate king to save the family fortune, or being relentlessly pursued to the point of stalker behavior by her paramour, or even enduring Fifty Shades-style outright abuse.
I’m refreshing my memory of Symons — I just got the Kindle edition of Evolution. I don’t think he would argue that /r/ladyboners shouldn’t exist, but he would argue that it’s likely to have a much smaller subscriber base than /r/gonewild (true), that the pictures in it would have less nudity (also true), that the focus of the pictures would usually not be on the men’s genitals (debatable, but seems mostly true), and that a higher proportion of its subscribers are homosexual (unknown),
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osberend said:
I think it’s also important to distinguish between the prevalence of rape-themed pornography and would-be-rape-if-it-were-real pornography. Because Debbie Does Dallas, for example, doesn’t have rape as an explicit theme, but some of the scenes in it pretty obviously lack valid consent.
Frankly, the existence of openly rape-themed porn bothers me less than the existence of rape-presented-as-just-sex porn, because it strikes me as less likely to inculcate dangerous ideas in people who didn’t already have them.
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Jacob Schmidt said:
Considering a good deal of what I’m talking about comes from Brazzers, possibly the most famous porn company, “Almost no mainstream male-marketed porn depicts rape, explicit or implicit” seems outright false.
I can accept that it’s in a minority, but it is not rare, unusual, or obscure.
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osberend said:
Jacob: Brazzers is most famous? What about Vivid? Or, for that matter, Hustler or Playboy?
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Jacob Schmidt said:
Honestly never heard of Vivid. Hustler and Playboy I associate with magazines and articles, rather than video porn production.
I probably should have specified video porn: if Playboy or Hustler are a major part of the market, its gone under my nose entirely.
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Nita said:
@ stillnotking
So, basically, you’re saying that men fantasize about women who really, really want to fuck them, while women fantasize about men who really, really want to fuck them?
The 50 Shades narrative, although badly written, is the good old story of Beauty and the Beast — if you keep being a Good and Patient Girl, you can turn a beastly thing (sadistic sociopath) into a lovely prince (gentle dominant). So, more fairy tale than porn, but I guess people will use whatever material they can get.
But to compare apples to apples, you should look for porn where a man is coerced into sex or dominated by one or more women — and it does exist.
I chose /r/ladyboners as an example specifically to disentangle sexy events, which according to Symons women do find arousing, but don’t seek out, from the male body, which women shouldn’t find arousing because:
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osberend said:
@Jacob: Vivid Entertainment is a major producer of pornographic movies, although their web presence is kinda unimpressive. I suspect that actually may be the more fundamental split here: Even though I overwhelmingly watch porn online, the pornographic companies that I most readily think of are ones with a major offline presence. Hustler definitely produces videos as well as magazines; I’m pretty sure that playboy does as well.
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stillnotking said:
I’m saying that women fantasize about men who really, really want to fuck them in particular. The classic feminine erotic-fantasy narrative is something like: Boy meets girl; boy falls uncontrollably in love with girl; obstacles intervene; boy does something dramatic to prove how much he loves girl; happily ever after. The classic masculine erotic-fantasy narrative is more like: Boy comes over to fix girl’s cable; girl doesn’t have the cash, but wonders if there’s some other arrangement they could come to. Also, her girlfriend happens to be using her shower. (You can imagine where it goes from there, Mr. Lebowski.)
Are you disagreeing with the proximate or ultimate level of Symons’ claim? I mean, it seems accurate to me that women are generally much less motivated to look at men’s genitals than men are to look at women’s, and he lays out the evidence himself (e.g. the failure of Playgirl magazine). If you disagree that the difference was caused by sexual selection in the ancestral environment, well, that’s another discussion.
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Ginkgo said:
“So, is that the vast gulf between male and female fantasies that you mentioned earlier?”
It sure is the vast gulf between my sexuality and that of all those hordes of women jamming the theaters and flocking to see Fifty Shades of Grey.
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stillnotking said:
Fifty Shades of Grey, Men’s Edition.
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osberend said:
@stillnotking: Oh, man, that’s great. It works on levels.
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Nita said:
@ stillnotking
Ohhh, now I understand. You’re confusing erotic and romantic fantasies. This is perfectly understandable, because “erotic” novels for women typically contain both. On the other hand, male romantic fantasies feature as side-plots in mainstream media, such as action movies and games.
If you’re curious what purely erotic fantasies are like, you should take a look at shorter stories. For instance, here’s some fanfiction:
one man, one woman
threesomes and such
Well, women certainly seem less inclined to pay for looking at photos of men. But people who pay for porn are a mystery to me in general, so any conclusions I draw might be dubious.
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stillnotking said:
I’m saying that romantic is erotic for most women, much more than it is for most men. (For some value of “romantic” — it’s a slippery word, and I suspect men and women have a slightly different idea of that, too, as you alluded.) Great as Archive Of Our Own is, I don’t think it quite approaches the popularity of, say, The Notebook. Or Pornhub.
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Nita said:
@ stillnotking
Well, I haven’t seen The Notebook, so I don’t know if there’s anything erotic in it.
But yeah, videos produced by major industries tend to be more popular than written stories self-published by amateurs. It might be more informative to compare AO3 to literotica or something, but I’m not sure about literotica’s demographics.
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roe said:
Quote: “The point is that it is impossible to ascribe a single meaning to a particular sex act and, in particular, it is impossible to consider a particular sex act inherently degrading and unpleasurable.”
Thank you – this is awesome and true.
Quote: “Jensen describes masculinity as a constant game of King of the Hill, in which men compete to be the one man who has reached the pinnacle and can be considered a Real Man. But even the one man on the top isn’t safe: he must fear someone else, younger and stronger and manlier, pulling him down. ”
This, IMO, is at least as much of a caricature of masculinity as Jensen discusses earlier viz. porn and seems to be making the same type of error – zooming in on a *single facet* of a complex phenomena and replacing the totality with the part.
The point of male hierarchy & competition isn’t to set up some “red in tooth & claw” status contest, the point is to enforce accountability commensurate with your status and make everybody better and more focused on whatever task the group is tackling. In considering the status-seeking aspect of masculinity, he’s entirely missed the point of why it’s there.
“However, in order to maintain a functional romantic relationship, you have to express your emotions and communicate openly with each other– skills men in our culture are not encouraged to develop.”
Manosphere writer Ian Ironwood, on *caritas* and the traditional relationship between masculinity & femininity:
“Within the realm of a marriage, Caritas occurs when the husband is in dire emotional straights and in need of comfort, and the wife is willing and able to provide the emotional security that he needs to weather on. When a husband presents an emotionless facade to hide what he perceives (with some justification) as weakness, then he gets labeled “emotionally distant”, “detached”, “withdrawn” and “un-engaged”, all common complaints of wives about their husbands in poorly faring marriages. In an effort to be strong, he becomes rigid, and because of his rigidity the order he brings to the table is brittle. He is not displaying his need for Cartitas, and without a need then there’s no way his wife can dispense the Caritas she needs to. A wife who cannot nurture is a terrible thing to behold.”
The thing being, not to say “traditionalism! Yay!” but to point out that (if Ian is correct) – if we want to understand how men comfortably communicate vulnerably, well, maybe there’s wisdom there…
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ADifferentAnonymous said:
I have a bit of a concern over the ‘man box’ theme I see developing and the way it’s being handled. (If these are replays it’s kinda too late, but I’ll put this out there.) I’m not directly disputing anything you write, but it seems to be written without an understanding of what the ideals traditionally considered masculine mean to some people. I find the male archetype well enough aligned with my values that it offers more positive value as a role model than harm as a box. E.g., I very deeply want to be stoic, and exhorting myself to ‘be a man’ is very helpful in achieving that.
Anyway, because you’re generally awesome, I imagine you want people who want the role model to be able to enjoy the role model and people who feel trapped by it to be able to drop it down a deep hole. But past versions of myself, less wise and unfamiliar with Ozy, would have been alienated by the ‘man cage’ talk, and I imagine others on the internet would be as well, and that’s avoidable with a little acknowledgment.
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ADifferentAnonymous said:
Let me illustrate with a parable: you’ve just learned of a civilization with a sort of zodiac system it takes very seriously. Based on seemingly mystical consideratons at birth, people are assigned a type. Your type determines a huge number of things about your life: what personality traits you’re expected to have, what vices will be excused, what jobs you can have, what recreation you should enjoy, even which types you can have romantic relationships with and what your role in those relationships can be. It is claimed that the types are different but equal, but this appears rather dubious.
You can no doubt imagine the oppressed people trapped in the confines of their type. But perhaps you can also imagine people who have embraced and internalized their types as deep parts of their identity and are happy with them. Faced with evidence of such people, and some evidence that the type assignment predicts traits significantly better than chance, you might start to be cautious about your project of dismantling the type system, and sprinkle in some “If you like your personality, you can keep it” disclaimers.
(number of types is two, assignment process is anatomy).
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Nornagest said:
But in the next release we’ll replace birthsigns with stones, so all is well.
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