Category Archives: Male Privilege

MALE DISPOSABILITY – Empathy Apartheid, Part II – Deflections and Dismissals

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Empathy apartheid takes maintenance. If it isn’t maintained and policed, people’s basic humanity will lead them to show empathy for the people their society has deemed undeserving of it and the system will collapse. So these same people, sadly, use various deflections and dismissals – silencing mechanisms and minimizing tactics to maintain the system. These include:

  • Anti-male shaming tactics
  • Trivialization of injuries to men
  • Victim blaming
  • Erasure by false equivalence
  • Feminism is the answer to men’s problems …and the one that drives them all, just plain old
  • Dehumanization, reducing men to emotionless lumps that can be hurt with impunity because it doesn’t really hurt.

Anti-male shaming tactics – We saw before how anti-male shaming tactics are a feature of empathy apartheid, but they are also an enforcement mechanism. Let’s list them so we can take a look at how this works:

  • Irascibility (Code Red) – calling a man angry for getting angry at being mistreated
  • Cowardice (Code Yellow) – calling a man a coward for avoiding new victimization
  • Hypersensitivity (Code Blue) – calling a man a crybaby for complaining
  • Puerility (Code Green) – calling a man a baby for refusing to be suitably useful to women, to wit, complaining about being used
  • Endangerment (Code Orange) – calling a man frightening in response to his charge that you have harmed him (TDOM expands on this below.)
  • Rationalization (Code Purple) – femsplaining away a man’s complaints
  • Fanaticism (Code Brown) – calling a man an extremist for insisting on equality
  • Gay-shaming (Code Lavender) – this is actually similar to Code Green when it comes ot trying to shut a man down and is usually expressed the same way – “Man up!”
  • Over-generalization (Code gray) – this is the infamous NAFALT (Not all feminists are like that) or some variant – “feminism is not a monolith.”
  • Misogyny( Code Black) – yes, equality is going to feel like misogyny asthe pain of having all that female privilege peeled away hits.
  • Insanity (Code White) – women are very familiar with being on the receiving end of this one, getting called “hysterical”. It works on men too, well enough.
    …and so on.

In a comment on this thread TDOM pointed out:

Trivialization of injuries to men

“Another way of doing this that wasn’t mentioned is the rationalization the perpetrators of this violence are men. So it is men doing it to themselves. This isn’t entirely accurate since the injured party did not injure himself. It is consistent with lumping all men into “class men” and treating them as if they are one person.”

Fungibility – TDOM is talking about “fungibility”, one of the forms of objectification identified by Martha Nussbaum. It is an inability to distingush between “doing it to each other” and “doing it to themsleves” because “they” are all just one undifferentiated mass. Members of some set are objectified by being considered interchangeable. Another term for this is “borgification.” It is a denial of individuality.

Anomalization – Another form this takes is to claim that every instance of harm to men is a one-off; it’s not real discrimination or oppression or whatever term you prefer because it’s not “systemic” or “institutional”. Oh, so the facts of gender disparity in incarceration rates for the same offences, unbalanced educational outcomes, rates of child custody awards, lack of services for male domestic violence victims, lack of services for male rape victims, propensity to arrest male rape victims and charge them with rape, gender disparities in homelessness rates – none of those have anything to do with the legal regime, the court system, the public education system – non e of this is systemic enough to be called systemic?

The Woozle Effect – This is simple; you just fiddle the actual numbers to make male victims look genderless, then you conflate “victims” with “women.”

TDOM continues with:

Blame the victim and make him look like the aggressor

“Another way we do this is to redefine the term “aggressor” to mean someone other than the person who committed the violence. This is what primary aggressor laws are all about. never mind who actually committed the violence, arrest the man because he is larger; arrest the man because he is stronger; arrest the man because he answered the door when the police arrived (and is the one exerting power and control); arrest the man because he is more likely to inflict a more severe injury IF he becomes violent.”

Erasure by false equivalence:

Cicero contributes an example of what TDOM is talking about:

“In the end of men Hannah Rosin mentions a trial where a woman charged with violence against her husband had a psychologist argue on her behalf that her husband made her do it by being weak and codependent, and that THAT was abuse by him and that THAT was the important abuse in the case.”

Are men overwhelmingly the ones who die in war? Well, women have it worse – they are left to mourn and live on alone. Ask Mrs. Clinton. Do young men commit suicide at five times the rate of young women? Well, look at how young women attempt suicide three to four times as often as men! Do men have to jump backwards through hoops to get noticed by women? Well, women have relationships woes too, they often have to settle for less than Prince Charming, sniff, sniff. (See ballgame’s comments on his lack of sympathy for this one.) The murder rates for men are far higher than for women, but it’s really women who are at risk on the street because they get raped. Don’t you see how women really do have it worse????

Yes. I don’t see. I used to fall for this shit, but no more.

Feminism is the answer to men’s problems

Adiabat adds:

“The only one that’s been missed is the dreaded Patriarchy Hurts Men Too (PHMT) and “feminism is already doing that!” deflections. These enable the user to *appear* to empathise with men’s issues but actually ignore the problems that have been raised. They remove the need for the user to empathise with the men affected, “safe” in the knowledge that it’s being handled by some other feminist somewhere else…”

Feminism has the analysis – all your problems are patriarchy, and feminism has the cure – we’ll destroy the patriarchy and set you free. The problem of course is that for decades feminists have been relying on the patriarchy to grant their wishes and enforce the laws and policies they advocate for, so when it comes to the parts of patriarchy that harm men – male disposability, men being valued solely for their utility to women, “what’s yours in the corporate world is mine, what’s mine in running family life is still mine” – feminists are the last ones to destroy any of that.

Simple dehumanization

Then there is simple plain old dehumanization. Judgy Bitch discusses a form of this, the notion that women are complex creatures and men are simple, emotionless robots, specifically when it comes to sex. She discusses two Daily Mail articles by a woman named Shona Sibary in which she complains that a female equivalent of Viagra is unsatisfactory because for women sex is about more than just getting it wet, unlike men, who just need to get it hard, apparently. (Judgy Bitch is a fun read anyway, someone who gets to the root of white woman entitlement princess thinking with a chainsaw.) Then she goes deeper and discusses what emotional violence sexual rejection in a marriage is, and how Sibary’s assumptions all rely on denying that men feel any of that pain at all, that this is really all about making the women feel “desirable and desired” and that’s the sum total of marital sexual bliss. She gets how this is dehumanizing and she gets why it happens, what the point is.

A lot of the Real Man Narrative comes into play here. All those admonitions to “suck it up” and to “man up” are often just a way of telling a man to ignore his own pain because it makes him less of a man to ask anyone else to pay attention to it.

This cannot be an exhaustive list. Please nominate more types of deflections and dismissals.

MALE DISPOSABILITY – Empathy Apartheid

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Empathy apartheid refers to the caste system we have in our culture that determines whose suffering deserves empathy and whose does not. This system works along gender and racial lines. There’s not much question that when Natalee Holloway was kidnapped in Aruba and Fox News flogged the story the entire summer of 2006, that her story would have gotten exponentially less attention if she had been black. But the main parameter of this system of empathy apartheid is along gender lines.

Empathy apartheid is what I call the system of cultural norms that erases male suffering and silences any mention of it, to the point that those suffering no longer admit to themselves they are suffering.

First let’s look at the forms empathy apartheid takes:

1. Trivialization of injuries to men – this comes in several forms. One is simple minimization – “Oh, it’s not that bad when it happens to a man, not like when it happens to a woman.” A form of this minimization is “erasure by false equivalence.” So if the issue is the fact that men make up the overwhelming majority of deaths in wartime, compare that death rate to women being widowed in war (What an oppression, to survive where others die!) or if that fails, play the rape card (even though it turns out the rates for rape may not in fact be so different.)

2. Simply ignore these injuries – when a man is raped, define rape so that his rape is not counted as a rape. Or when that’s impossible, tell him he must have wanted sex because men always want sex, or that he “got lucky”. When a wife attacks her husband at home and draws blood or breaks bones, don’t record the incident as domestic violence, or better yet, arrest him as the perpetrator!

3. Blame the victim and make him look like the aggressor – “You bastard; you’re the perp, not the victim!” So as above, when a man suffers domestic abuse, you arrest him instead of the perpetrator. When a man suffers abuse, find some way any way to excuse the wife and accuse him of “making her” do it.

4. And when all these other tactics fail, when the evidence piles up and is just too undeniable, there is always anomalization – “Yeah, false rape accusations do happen, but it some (false) vanishingly small percentage of accusations (so why bother about it?).”

Now let’s look at the mechanisms that enable and enforce empathy apartheid:

1. The Real Man Narrative – every little boy is familiar with the outlines of the Real Man Narrative by the time he starts school. Often it’s peers in the neighborhood, often slightly older little girls who think their job to norm little boys, who start this.

2. Anti-Male Shaming Language – here is a good list of anti-male shaming tactics. They all will work to defeat just about any attempt a man might make to get some harm to him acknowledged, though of course Code Blue, Code Lavender or Green and even Code Red or Black are the main weapons of choice.

3. The Male Privilege Narrative – this is an essentialist fallacy that lumps all men into Class Men, attributes unilateral privilege to this class and then blithely refuses to admit that any member of this privileged class can be on the suffering end of any situation. It’s facile and shallow, but it has the virtue of being simplistic and false.

The value of the Male Privilege Narrative is the exploitable victim cred it grants women who want to deploy it. If men are privileged, then women are dispossessed, exploited and oppressed, and they have a right to demand restitution, and to keep demanding it until they feel justice has been fulfilled. It’s weaponized victim status.

4. Objectification, specifically instrumentality, denial of autonomy, ownership and violability – when all else fails, just revert to the standard gender norms where men are disposable – disposable as cannon fodder, industrial labor where men do all the dangerous, dirty and difficult work of society, disposable fathers who remain in their children’s lives only at the pleasure of the mother, or only as life support for the checking accounts the mother uses to “support” the children.

Men are only good for what they do for others – not human beings but human doings. Whether man wants to do a particular job or not is of no importance, he had better do it or risk being considered less than a man (see the Real Man Narrative). His wife owns his labor and the fruits of that labor, and in ENTITLED to a 50/50 share of all household assets regardless of her own actual contribution, or to maintenance of one form or another. And if something happens, if he gets injured or killed carrying out these duties – oh well, that’s just what it costs to be a man.

Here’s an example of this empathy apartheid when it dresses in moral righteousness. In this example Fidelbogen was commenting in a thread with a young women who was saying sexist and classist things. He called her on that and said her comments were vile and vicious. She responded with the classic “It doesn’t matter if it’s happening to straight white men” empathy apartheid we are all so familiar with. She has this neat little taxonomy of the Righteous on the one hand, bad treatment of whom can properly be called vile, and then the Evil Ones on the other side, bad treatment of whom is not to be criticized.
She is basically either a sociopath or is “performing” sociopathy very skillfully, and that goes for her whole line of reasoning and anyone else who uses it.

Empathy apartheid is a strategic weapon that can be employed in confrontations with members of the excluded class. This works two ways. The first reason this works is that you are free to inflict whatever wounds you can in the knowledge that his protests will go unheard. We see this at work in domestic violence incidents, for one glaring example. The second goes even deeper – if one category of people is excluded form empathy, it is likely that the opposite category will benefit from extra empathy. This means you can attack someone and portray yourself as the injured party, as the damsel in distress.

MALE DISPOSABILITY – Erasing male rape victims, Part II – Tamen evaluates a British and a Norwegian study on rape victims and finds invalidating methodological errors

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Typhonblue asked Tamen about a British study of crime, the CESW, especially about the rape statistics:

“I looked at the source documents. Is the reason why there is such a low rate of men reporting “serious sexual assault” in both the alternative and current questionnaires?”

Tamen answered:

“Yes, there are two reasons I can see right away.

1) The number is low because it doesn’t count men raped by envelopment (I guess you knew this):

Serious sexual assault in the current questionnaire only includes rape by penetration by a penis or an object (sexual assault by penetration) and doesn’t include “being made to penetrate”. This in line with UK’s Sexual Offence Act of 2003 which defines rape in a way that requires that the perpetrator has a penis he penetrates the victim with (no female rapists in the UK, although I believe a woman has been convicted for accessory to rape when she encouraged, enabled and abetted a man who raped another woman).

Serious sexual assault in the alternative question set includes in addition to a comprehensive list of ways to be penetrated by a penis, body part or object the choice “Did some other sex act not described above” alternative which might be a fit for rape by envelopment. But if one read the methodology report carefully one finds that any respondents who answered “Did some other sex act not described above” is counted as non-victims.

As we know from the NISVS 2010 Report a large portion of men who are raped are raped by envelopment. In the NISVS 2010 it was 1.4% vs 4.8%, In CWES it’s impossible to say since “being made to penetrate” is not a single category, but is lumped in with “sexual touching”, but 0.5% – 0.3% are raped and 1.1% – 2.5% report sexual touching. I am afraid that doesn’t tell us much as I suspect sexual touching will not catch many of the male victims of rape by envelopment. I for one would never label what happened to me for mere “sexual touching”.

2) The number is low because it doesn’t count a large subset of victims who have been raped (as defined by the SOA2003):

The CSEW asked about incidents happening since the respondents turned 16. NISVS 2010 also included CSA in the lifetime numbers where they found that 25% of the men who experienced rape (as defined by CDC) did so when they were 10 or younger (12.7% for women). What percentage of male victims were victimized before the age of 16 is not reported in the NISVS 2010. If the age demographic of male victims in the UK is similar to male victims in the US then a large subset of victims are not reported in the tables in the linked report.”

Tamen expanded on this in an earlier comment at Reddit MensRights

http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1dbc0h/crime_survey_for_england_and_wales_victims_of/

” It has been brought to my attention that the Crime Survery for England and Wales (CESW) did a split-sample experience to evaluate a new question set. I have criticized the published report of the CESW (which apparently is based on the answers from the original question set) in a comment at FeministCritics.

Home Office published a methodology report titled Analysis of the 2010/11 British Crime Survey intimate personal violence split-sample experiment with an analysis of the differences between the old and the new questionaires. Among some of the more interesting findings was that the rate of men reporting victimization increased with the new question set. In fact the new question set found that more men than women reported having been sexually assaulted by their partner the last year (Table 2 page 22).

So what question does this prompts from the analysts?

If the alternative question set is favoured then are further amendments needed to minimise the risk of reporting experiences that should not be classed as IPV? Should these be limited to the stalking questions, less serious sexual assault questions or to others?

The cynic in me is pretty sure which incidents they think are overreported (not really IPV).

But then I was really floored. What I will quote here is related to the following question (NIPV35AA- NIPV35AF) in the new CSEW questionaire:

You said that someone has forced you to have sexual intercourse or take part in some other sexual act when you were not capable of consent or when you made it clear you did not want to. What did they do to you?

If this has happened more than once since you were 16, please select all those that apply.

We need this level of detail to allow us to classify the exact type of sexual assault experienced.

Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis
Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers)
Penetrated your mouth with their penis
Did some other sex act not described above
Don’t know
Don’t want to answer
Any male who has been made to penetrate someone else would answer “Did some other sex act not described above”. Let’s see how that is analysed:

In the analysis presented here those respondents who said that they had only experienced ‘some other sex act not described above’ were categorised as non-victims to ensure that the category of serious sexual assault retained the same definition as in the current question set (this is not an option in the current question set).

WHAT!? Non-victims!?”

This is the comment at Feminist Critics that Tamen refers to:

“I recently was made aware by a feminist Redditor of a report of sexual offences based on (among others) the Crime Survey for England and Wales. The report found a much higher victmization rate for females than for men. I took a closer look and what follows is a slightly edited version of the reply I made her:

The UK uses the archaic common law definition of rape in its Sexual Offences Act 2003 – it defines rape in a way that requires that the perpetrator must have a penis.
It defines Assault by penetration in a way that requires that the victim’s body has been penetrated by an object or part of the perpetrators body.

The Brits have their own version of the NCVS called CSEW – Crime Survey for England and Wales. The most recent one was published January 2013. The Ministry of Justice, Home Office and the Office for National Statistics published in January a report looking specifically at the sexual offences part of the CSEW as well as police reports, court proceeding, sentencing, duration of cases, offender management and offender histories (recidivist rates, multiple convictions etc.). The report was published January 10th 2013 and is called:

An Overview of Sexual Offending in England and Wales.

Let’s examine to what extent this report counts male victims of rape (including rape by envelopment) to see if it’s possible to estimate the number of male victims in the UK in a similar manner to how one could find the male number of male rape victims in the US by looking at the “being made to penetrate” category.

Rape and Assault by penetration are grouped by the report in a category called: “Most serious sexual offence.”

A man being forced to have oral, vaginal or anal intercourse with a woman without his consent is a victim of sexual assault by the law. The definition of sexual assault is:
Section 3 of the Act makes it an offence for any male or female to intentionally touch another person sexually without his or her consent. A person found guilty of this offence could be sent to prison for a maximum of ten years.

Meaning that by UK law a man raped by a woman forcing him to have unprotected vaginal sex with her without his consent are put in the same category as a woman being touched on the butt by a man — not to defend the latter, but there is a difference between those two.

It’s even worse in the CSEW survey because there it’s being categorized as “Other sexual offences”, which includes exposure, sexual activity with children (excluding rape and sexual assault) and sexually threatening behaviour.

In fact, when I look at the questionnaire used for the CSEW survey they base their findings on, I actually found a set of questions which male victims of rape by envelopment may answer affirmatively:

Since you were 16, has anyone ever forced you to have sexual intercourse or take part in some other sexual act, when you were not capable of consent or when you made it clear you did not want to?

By sexual intercourse we mean vaginal, anal or oral penetration.
This may have been a partner, a family member, a friend or work colleague, someone you knew casually, or a stranger.

If the respondent answered yes to the above they are asked another question (NIPV35AA- NIPV35AF):

You said that someone has forced you to have sexual intercourse or take part in some other sexual act when you were not capable of consent or when you made it clear you did not want to. What did they do to you?

If this has happened more than once since you were 16, please select all those that apply.

We need this level of detail to allow us to classify the exact type of sexual assault experienced.
* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis
* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers)
* Penetrated your mouth with their penis
* Did some other sex act not described above
* Don’t know
* Don’t want to answer

Here one would think that any male victims of “being made to penetrate someone else” must answer “(4) Did some other sex act not described above” to be counted correctly. However, the question itself listed “some other sex act” as something separate from sexual intercourse — thus perhaps confusing the respondent. Conceivably, victims of a forced kiss, a grope and so on could also answer “yes” here, as those could be understood to be some sex act other than intercourse. As I understand it, respondents are more likely to respond to questions which describe the acts rather than the name of the act or a bag-name of a set of acts. It also really doesn’t matter that this question was under the heading “SERIOUS SEXUAL ASSAULT”, because if the answer is “4″ then it’s being put in the category “Other sexual offences” in the summary, tables and charts in the report.

Contrast that with this question asked under the section: “SERIOUS SEXUAL ASSAULT”:

Since the age of 16, has ANYONE ever done any of the following things to you, when you made it clear that you did not agree or when you were not capable of consent? This may have been a partner, a family member, someone you knew casually, or a stranger.

* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis, even if only slightly
* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers) even if only slightly
* Penetrated your mouth with their penis even if only slightly
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis, but did not succeed
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers) but did not succeed
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your mouth with their penis but did not succeed
This is very specific, just about every possible combination of a way a victim can be penetrated is listed. It is therefore likely to catch more respondents.

There is a follow-up question to those who reported more than one sexual assault: they ask about the nature of the last one (SSA6A- SSA6I) and the answer alternatives are:
* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis, even if only slightly
* Penetrated your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers) even if only slightly
* Penetrated your mouth with their penis even if only slightly
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your [vagina or anus/anus] with their penis, but did not succeed
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your [vagina or anus/anus] with an object (including fingers) but did not succeed
* ATTEMPTED to penetrate your mouth with their penis but did not succeed
* Something else
* Don’t know/can’t remember
* Don’t wish to answer

Here our hypothetical male victim of forced intercourse with a female perpetrator has to answer “7 Something else”.

Again, as soon as he does answer 7 he is put into the “Other sexual offences” category in the report.

This survey does a poor job of capturing men who have been raped by envelopment. The way questions are designed almost ensure that it will under-report male victims who were made to penetrate someone else. Grouping the percentage of men who actually had been made to penetrate someone else together with the likely-higher percentages of victims having been groped, flashed and so on effectively hides how many men are victims of “being made to penetrate someone else”. It also helps maintain the belief that women are victimized by sexual offenses more than men.
It reminds me of the commonly-voiced notion that more girls than boys experience childhood sexual abuse (CSA). Statistics and studies often leave it at that. However, the picture does change a bit when another study found that while more women have experienced CSA, women are more likely to report “touching,” and it turns out that an equal number of girls and boys experience CSA in the form of rape (intercourse).
[Comment slightly edited for clarity. —ballgame]

http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2009/01/05/can-women-rape-men-rp/#comment-504891

 

In answer to a question with regard to the situation in Norway on the comment thread for Mary Koss post Tamen responded:

“Thank you for your question Dr. Ramore.
I wasn’t aware of any studies done on male victims in Norway. Now you have spurred me on to dig a bit more to see what there is and I found that there has been a few studies done among youths, for instance:

Mossige S, Huang L. The prevalence of sexual offences and abuse within a Norwegian youth population Nor J Epidemiol 2010; 20(1):53-62 (in Norwegian with a short english abstract. It uses numbers from two large national youth surveys done in 2004 and 2007.
I haven’t read it in detail yet, but I haven’t found any clear description of the definition of rape which they use. They operate with some categories called “unwanted intercourse” (one for oral, one for anal and one for vaginal) which is separate from rape. I presume this is due to rape requiring physical force or threat of physical force in Norwegian law (unless the victim is incapable of giving consent, for instance by being unconscious). Amnesty and others have been lobbying for removing the requirement of physical force (or threat of physical force) from the legal definition of rape – making it only dependent on absense of consent.

They found the following:

About 1 in 10 rape victims are male (4.3% vs 0.4%)
About 1 in 10 victims of attempted rape are male (7.1% vs 0.7%).
Unwanted sexual experiences:
Someone has exposed themselves to you
Someone has touched in a sexual manner
You have touched yourself in sexual manner in front of others
You have touched someone else in a sexual manner
You had to masturbate while someone watched
You’ve had intercourse (vaginal)
You’ve had oral sex
You’ve had anal sex
You’ve had another form of sex
You have experienced one or more experiencesfrom the list
I’ll list the results from the more serious experiences:

1 of 3 who report unwanted vaginal intercourse are male (12% vs 6.5%)
7.7% of girls vs 5.8% of boys reported unwanted oral sex
2.5% of girls vs 1.5% of boys reported unwanted anal sex
35.6% of girls and 22.5% of boys report that they’ve experienced one or more items on the list of unwanted sexual experiences.

They survey asked about the perpetrator in the first and in the last experience. Girls report 99% male perpetrators and 1% female perpetrators – the same for both the first and last. Boys report 50-60% female perpetrator and 50-40% male perpetrators.
The largest category for perpetrator for both girls and boys are “friend, boyfriend/girlfriend or acquaintance”.

What form was the first unwanted sexual experience – voluntarily or under duress/force.
The question was; how well does the following statements describe what happened
Type: Girls vs Boys who answered that the statement described the experienced well.

Too young to understand: 25.8% vs 15.3%
Participated voluntarily, but regretted afterwards: 11.8% vs 8.9%
Was tricked/conned: 27% vs 13.9%
Was persuaded: 20.3% vs 10.5%
Mild pressure: 26.9% vs 10.3%
Strong pressure: 23% vs 7.4%
Physical force (constrained/pinned down, threats of violence or violence): 31.1% vs 9.6%”

Genderratic thanks Tamen for his analysis of these two studies.

He makes his case pretty conclusively that they appear structured to conceal male rape victimization. What makes this especially is that both these studies were government funded, funded by the very citizens who these studies erase.

DOUBLE STANDARDS – Jon Hamm and the Female Gaze

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His eyes are up here, you pervert!

Actor Jon Hamm has been targeted for a whole lot of snickering about his genitals of the sort that no female actor has ever been, to my memory.

Ths is in the context of decades of blue-nosed hectoring abut “sexual objectification” when men look at women’s breasts – only now when the shoe is on the other foot, it’s quite alright for women to twitter over some guy’s bulge.

Bullshit. Make up your minds. The we can agree together on a standard of behavior. You don’t get to waffle and play cute and whine “But this is different…..!”

 

Hamm was instructed to wear more concealing underwear on the set because he was showing too much. Where’s all that indignation about hijab and how it’s not women’s responsibility…..

And let’s stipulate to something: breasts and penises are not equal when it comes to gawking. This is a point that seems to elude Alyssa Rosenberg. Andrew Sullivan tries to give her credit for sympathizing, when she really isn’t; she dismisses his complaint with a false equivalence to the way women actors’ breasts are gawked at.

Remember the flap over Seth McFarlane’s ditty at the Oscars, the one about “we see your boobs”. High dudgeon, lots of young wisps harrumphing like stodgy matrons over the crudity, the effrontery, the lack of respect for women… Remember that one? So where’s the dudgeon now? Have they all fallen silent?

Crickets chirping…..

This is how breasts and penises differ when it comes to being gawked at. Where men dress to hide their penises, women dress to flaunt them. It’s quite possible to wear clothes that reduce the visual signature of your breasts, but Western women don’t dress like that (and men thank them for that!). And that’s fine. But then they don’t get to turn around and castigate men for doing what they intend them to do as a way to manufacture plausible deniability of some supposed, bogus moral looseness. “Flaunt it if you’ve got it” and then just own it. Please, a little honesty would clear the air wonderfully.

This is what would be equivalent – when is the last time you heard a woman actor’s vagina discussed or snickered about in the press or on the internet? Alyssa Rosenberg mentions Ann Hathaway’s nipples below; what do we know about Ann Hathaway’s vagina? For all we know it could be the size of the Grand Canyon. Why is no one snickering about that? Because we don’t know and because we have the sense not to go there when it’s a woman – as we should not.

And why would we anyway – camel toes aren’t really as photogenic anyway.

Let’s say we make an exception for actors. Actors get paid to show it, especially women. And while you personally may think that’s unfair, that is after all the deal they make of their own very free and very well-rewarded will, but it makes my point. A woman actor’s career lifespan is limited by age in a way a man’s is not necessarily. (Although male actors have about the same shelf life in the main as women, let’s not be coy; when was the last time you heard anything about Josh Hartnett?). Limited by her age, not by her acting skills, which presumably improve with practice – so that’s what women actors are selling, their looks and attractiveness. So why the dudgeon when someone points that out in a song?

Now penises - what happens when a man shows his penis in public? Very rarely does he get a movie contract for it. Does he? Or that a new nickname for the Sex Offender Registry? So the actor exception does not apply in this case. Request denied.

And another thing. Rosenberg doesn’t know what objectification is. When she says:

“What makes Hamm different from, say, Anne Hathaway, who had to weather discussion about the appearance of her nipples in her Academy Awards dress, is that Hamm isn’t used to being objectified.”

(Right, because the nipples she is flashing, and I do mean FLASHING, through sheer fabric - are totes identical to her genitals. Not really the same thing at all, is it?)

She is showing both that she doesn’t know what objectification is and that she is ignorant of men’s lives and the multitude of ways men are objectified in society – cannon fodder, disposable industrial labor, subjectivity denied, silenced about their issues with traditionalist macho narratives and feminist privilege narratives and obfuscations…

Here’s the deal: Women who are all affronted that Jon Hamm is showing, you’re perving. You’re perving. Don’t even bother denying it. Women keep your pervy eyes off Jon Hamm’s crotch.

That’s my job. Yeah, no. He says he’s tired of it; that’s all the rest of us need to know. Are we all clear on that , ladies?

 No. Here’s the actual deal. I have no right to tell what you can and can’t do with your eyes. JUST AS YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO TELL A MAN WHAT HE CAN DO WITH HIS EYES.

So make up your mind. Either you are entitled to gawk at Jon Hamm’s crotch and have nothing to say when men stare at your boobs that you put on proud display, or else keep your eyes off of people’s genitals.

And no, you don’t get to have it both ways. You don’t get to giggle and bat your eyes and say a lady is entitled to change her mind – back and forth, back and forth. No.

 

EDIT: Re: Crickets - I spoke too soon. Brava, Arwa Mahdawi! She says a lot of the right things. But then she goes and stuffs her foot in her mouth:

“However, for the most part, men are still more relaxed about their bodies than women.”

And then the snide insinuation it’s all a publicity stunt. Why, Ms. Mahdawi, if anyone made the same suggestion about a woman fussing about having her vagina snickered at and discussed, it would be all furthering the rape culture and shit.

Oh well. It was nice while it lasted. Keep trying, Ms. Mahdawi. Treating people equally takes practice.

Nice try at empathy. It’s probably not really natural to you anyway.

 

BRANDING – Feminist elitism and why it’s not a fatal deficiency, and how feminists can regain credibility as caring about the rest of us

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Ally Fogg is having a good conversation on why so many young women and people in general have generally “feminist” beliefs and attitudes – gender equality, self-determination in matters of gender – or beliefs and attitudes that feminists say are feminist, or that they claim as feminist, are uncomfortable with calling themselves feminist.

In the course of the conversation Quiet Riot Girl remarked that feminism has been elitist from the beginning, which by itself imposes enough shortcomings, but then goes on to compound the problem by claiming to be all broad-based and democratic and open to diversity of opinion and then to go on and claim to be the broad solution to gender issues.

There’s really no question or discussion to be had about the elitism of early feminism. Just look at the way the suffragettes are dressed in all those photographs. It is impossible to any manual labor at all dressed that way, and this was in an age when anyone who couldn’t afford servants – the 99% – took all day to the laundry for a week, first firing the stove to heat the water, then facing the back-breaking labor of hand washing, wringing and hanging…. And then there was the work of cooking – more firing the stove, plucking the bird if you could afford one……

I answered that it’s the whole vanguard party model. And it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. If the elites don’t do this work, who else has the time or resources to do it?

Have you ever heard this story about Zhou Enlai? You remember Zhou Enlai, the one people shed actual tears for?

Once Khruschev was visiting Beijing. At the reception he got loud and boastful – “This is the difference between our country and yours: I was born poor and now I am running the country, while you were born rich and you are still running the country”. And indeed, Zhou Enlai was from a very privileged background.

Zhou Enlai considered for a moment. “That’s very true, but there is this difference: We are both traitors to our classes.”

So elitism doesn’t have to doom a movement, but those elites have to transcend their elitism and their focus on their own issues. (See also Womanism and critiques of white feminism). It’s hard, because selfishness is how their class managed to climb over everyone else and become elites.

Elitism doesn’t have to doom a movement – all the elites have to do is turn on their class, in this case privileged Western white women, to convince us they care about us. They have to help the MRM in the process of disassembling thier female privilege, in other words, building real gender equality. Since they routinely claim that equality between the genders is where their hearts are already, what “real feminism” is, it should be no big deal.

Quiet Riot Girl doubted it would happen because it would require feminists to actually give a shit about men. Nevva hoppen, as they say.

I answered that I agreed, it won’t happen, and here it is another failure to transcend. It is a failure to transcend their traditional enculturation. Male disposability is a pillar of traditional, “patriarchal society”. You simply cannot get the model to work without it.

The answer is for feminists to go deeper into their feminist rejection of traditionalism, even the traditionalism that has crept into feminism. So good-bye to the demonization of male sexuality, which is so Victorian – so good-bye to “rape culture” and “testosterone poisoning” and the penis as weapon imagery; good-bye to male hyperagency – good-bye “patriarchy” and “male privilege” and “male dominance” and female victimhood.

In other words the answer for feminists is to perfect and complete their feminism.

It will be a hard purge and I for one can hardly wait for the show trials.

PARENTING – Katie McDonough refutes herself and proves the point of an article on mommy-blocking

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….. by calling the article mansplaining. That’s right – parenting is women’s work and when man says anything about, including complaining about obstruction by the mother, it’s “mansplaining”. How’s that for mommy-blocking? Thanks, Katie McDonough, for settling that so fast.

McDonough starts out superficial and stays there. Here’s one:

“And really, Bruce Feiler? You’re comfortable giving men a pass on parenting because “When a mother criticizes her partner’s child-care efforts, it causes him to lose confidence and withdraw?” That’s the best you’ve got?

Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

That’s not thinking, McDonough, that’s just snark. Mommy-blocking is behavior – constant criticism, surveillance and second-guessing, a directive approach to inter-parental communication – that comes out of a sexist attitude about a father’s place in his child’s life. It’s going to take more than adolescent snark to deal with the issue.

McDonough elides all the enforcement tactics at a mother’s disposal to back up her mommy-blocking behavior – specious accusuations of domestic violence  a la the VAWA-approved “I’m afwaid! He fwightens meeeee!!!” to get him out of the house, to baseless but oh-so-believable accusations of sexual abuse to get him more permanently out of the way.

Then she moves on to irelvancies, in this case the idea that mothers get judged more than men about parenting (…so supposedly this justifies mothers taking control of all of it. More self-refutation.)

“Now, let’s ignore how Feiler goes on to tell Dell’Antonia that she is only imagining being judged more harshly as a parent than her husband, (“So the next time you hear (or imagine) those whispers or see (or invent) those raised eyebrows…”)

 Why not ignore it, since you are so ready to tell Feiler he’s only imaging the scope and depth of maternal gate-keeping?

McDonough writes generally good stuff. This was just an off day probably. Or maybe this just looked so obvious to her that she didn’t think it required any thought or research. Well, everyone is entitled to a stinker now and then.

 

 

 

DOUBLE STANDARDS – Feds look into discipline rates in Seattle schools

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“SEATTLE (AP) — The U.S. Department of Education is investigating the high rate at which black students are disciplined in Seattle Public Schools, a problem that has plagued the district for decades.”

Well good for the feds; it’s high time.

This is in the context of a general culture-wide conception of black people as especially troublesome, violent, crime-prone – requiring special measures to restrain all that, for their own good of course. That’s always been the justification. That’s the justification offered for the way police interact with young black men. School is supposed to be a safe place for children? Pffft… These schools, and probably the same is true across the country, are indoctrinating these kids, and all their peers watching all this too, in the same racist lies as society at large does.

This article concerns Seattle but I doubt the situation down the road in Tacoma is much different. I don’t know the statistics for Tacoma but I do know that when I taught there almost 20 years ago a lot of elementary school teachers assumed and expected black kids to be more unruly or more troublesome even when they plainly were not. It was vague and subtle, but that is exactly the unaddressed “common sense” nonsense that quite often forms the basis for disciplinary decisions – harshness of penalties, judgment on who started what, etc.

“According to district data, in the 2011-2012 school year, nearly 13 percent of black high school students received at least one short-term suspension. The equivalent figure for white students was just under 4 percent. In middle schools, the rate was 7 percent of white students and 27 percent of blacks.”

Racial double standards are not the only double standards when it comes ot disciplinary actions in schools, are they?

So I wonder what the school districts records would show on discipline rates for boys and girls. Because as we all know, boys are just more unruly in class, concentrate less, color outside the lines more. Boys are just trouble – throw rocks at them. Actually that’s only if you can’t handle your male students as well as your female students – if you are professionally incompetent, in other words.

I really would love to see those disciplinary stats for Seattle broken down by gender, as well as the hidden disciplinary stats – the stats that show Ritalin and Adderal usage as administered in the schools.

Do you think there will be many surprises?

HYPOAGENCY – Hypoagency and Blaming Everything on Men

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I’m going to be doing a series on hypoagency and hyperagency. Typhonblue identified these as the core of the gender system we find so problematic and the more I look at them the more that analysis is confirmed.

Because this is series, I am soliciting examples of both.

Female hypoagency is what we call the cultural tendency to deny that women have agency. We are talking about imputed rather than real lack of agency. This means that when a woman does something, her agency in that act is denied, so that if that act is something bad, she will be immune from blame.

A necessary corollary of female hypoagency is male hyperagency. Under male hyperagency men are held responsible for all the things women are not.
I hope the sexism is obvious enough not to need further explanation and that the misogyny and misandry of this system is obvious too. One common form this takes is projecting women’s inaction, failures or the negative consequences of their actions onto men, as a culturral norm.

So in this first look at female hypoagency we are going to look at female immunity and how it works both in the general culture and in feminism, which claims to criticize and analyze that general culture. This is basically a list of things as they come to mind, nothing comprehensive or exhaustive, and I encourage readers to nominate other material.

Here we go:

WAR – This is the claim that “men start wars” and that war is a male problem that men foist off onto innocent civilian bystanders. This relies on a completely uninformed and naïve understanding of war as some kind of sport that all those rough boys go off and do and the stray rounds fall on peace-loving innocent bystanders – in other words a complete denial of the benefits that women and others on the winning side derive from war, and a denial of women’s role in sending men to war.

POLITICS – This is the claim that men have all the power because they hold the majority of political office, despite the fact that women outnumber men as voters, so are responsible for all these male politicians being voted in. This ignores the troublesome fact that women make up the majority of voters. The engrained belief in hypoagency is what makes this denialism possible.

BENEVOLENT SEXISM – Every time women enjoy any kind of advantage due to gender – “privilege” – that has to be spun as being due to male action, or else it has to be spun as some kind of disadvantage. Labeling an advantage “benevolent sexism” accomplishes that.

This is not to deny that benevolent sexism is a fair way to describe what’s going on. For one thing, it damned sure is sexism – sexist against men, and we don’t experience it as particularly benevolent, not in the least. But on the other hand the Golden Cage is also harmful to women. Well, that’s just one more reason to identify and destroy all forms of female privilege.

These are the big, umbrella categories. Help with specific examples.

IT’S SHIT LIKE THIS, FEMINISTS – This Is Why Male Rape Survivors Don’t Come Forward (or Gendered Victim-Blaming)

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Background: James Landrith was a 22-year-old active duty Marine 25 years ago when he showed mercy to the pregnant wife of a friend and sheltered her for the night, and then awoke to find her straddling him, with his penis in her, raping him. She threatened him with rape charges if he ever reported her rape of him. He knew he – a fit, young Marine – would have exactly zero chance of ever being believed, and even if her were believed, of ever having her rape of him regarded as rape. He was in the real rape culture, where women have unimpeded access and a full right to a man’s body.

He finally went public in 2008 and posted this article on his blog. Then it was picked up on Pajamas Media, a rather right-leaning group blog. The comments section became a cesspit of knuckle-dragging victim-blaming and sexist denialism, led by quite a few men, although one especially toxic commenter was a woman. Naturally his strongest supporters were female rape victims.

And just to prove there is no daylight between right-wing gender traditionalists and radfem gender traditionalists, at least on the subject of rape, this has kicked up again. This time the knuckle-dragging rape denialist man-haters came right after James:

Well, today I was treated to some of the worst victim-blaming I’ve received yet from rape denialists and self-appointed gender police. I’m so tired of this garbage. Why is this okay? Why is this tolerated? Why are so many people still pretending that this shit doesn’t happen to male survivors as well? I’m over being nice. I’m over tolerating the excuse-making bystanders and the colluders. I’m over all of it.

THIS * is why so many male rape survivors stay silent. THIS is why so many of our lives end prematurely and violently – especially those who deal with MST (Military Sexual Trauma). THIS is why most of us will NEVER tell ANYONE. THIS is why so many of us will never heal. THIS is why it appears that so many male survivors seem absent in the fight against sexual violence. Not only do we have to fight against the same victim-blaming from low IQ knuckle-dragging troglodytes that female survivors deal with regularly, we are also targeted often by women who have decided that men can’t be raped and if they are – then they are liars who must be bullied, mocked, harassed and shouted down into shameful silence.

 

* Yes, these links all go to James’ article. I couldn’t get to the sites he was linking to because of a filter issue but even if I had been able, go to his site anyway. He deserves the hits.

James continues:

I’m trying not to hate. I’m trying to calm down. It is going to be really difficult. I don’t know how successful that will be going forward. People are too damned evil and some of them are just plain worthless. Male survivors, just like our sisters in healing, have a lot of work ahead to fight these types of sick, disgusting, worthless excuses for humanity. For now, I’m just going to have to feel these emotions and try to keep on target. I’m not going anywhere and I’m not shutting up, but I am pissed off and beyond my levels of tolerance for disgusting asshattery right now. Please understand and let me breathe through it. I’m not sure how not to be pissed off right now. I need to accept that.

This all happens in a wider context of trivialization of male rape, smearing of male rape victims as liars, whiners, less-than-men or right on to accusing them of being the rapist in the rape, as John Markley catalogues here. How’s that for victim-blaming and rape denial and rape apology?

As John goes on to say, “Like many feminists, much of what Murphy says parallels traditionalist attitudes, but here mere parallel gives way to outright convergence.”

This is the issue for feminists: If these vile rape apologist articles are not representative of feminism, then feminists need to say more than “That’s not my feminism.” – much more. Because we are not talking about your precious feminism, we are talking about everyone’s feminism, the feminism of all feminists, and if this is in some way unrepresentative of the movement as a whole, then feminists need to say explicitly that this anti-feminist and that these people are anti-feminist, that they are not feminists at all. Anything less is solidarity with these vile, contemptible people if you still, despite failing to condemn them, call yourself by the same title they call themselves.

So far though it has been a womanist rather than a feminist who has been the clearest on the issue of male rape victims. Not a surprise, really.

DOUBLE STANDARDS – Women in Combat and the Constitutionality of Male-Only Draft Registration

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Here’s an interesting development, one that other people predicted. Now that women have been admitted to the maneuver arms the issue of the male-only draft has come up again.

The Volokh Conspiracy is a respected center-right law blog. Here’s an article that discusses the constitutionality of the draft in view of this change in policy and also of a court case in 1981 that the exemption of women from the draft was based on. In that case the court found that since women were excluded from combat roles, there was no good reason to draft them. That is pretty shaky reasoning, but even that excuse is gone now.

And then here is a post on Andrew Sullivan’s blog that consists of comments emailed in on the desirability of a draft. These commenters point out the various ways a draft and even just requiring registration for the draft is useless, unnecessary and wasteful.

Here is an earlier post at Sullivan’s that claims that in this perilous age it is insane to leave ourselves so unready. It’s a completely ignorant argument. A draft is on balance detrimental to military readiness and the national defense because it will saddle the military with swarms of sub-standard unusable people. This will sap resources from actual valid missions. So much for the national defense argument.

There are good reasons for a draft, but none of them are directly military. In a huge diverse nation common, residential national service does tow really big things. For one thing it puts people in close and continuous contact, the more arduous the conditions the better, who would probably never meet. It strengthens social bonds across all regions and classes. It also calls on people to invest a piece of their own selves, to or three years of their lives, to building up society, years that they are not investing in their own personal career advancement. This would be some kind of civilian service. There are lots of things that need to be done in this country, and by now it ought to be clear that yet another government contractor in northern Virginia leaching off the taxpayers is not the most efficient way to get all this done.

Draft people – everyone without exemption – if you must, but use them in roles and in jobs where their sacrifice of a couple of years out of their lives will do the nation some real good.

EDIT: Commenter dungone makes soem very good points in a comment below:

In all honesty, this is not the time to be talking about the merits of the draft. Just start drafting women. Period. And I don’t really care what anyone thinks about the implausibility of making this come to pass. If the Supreme Court wants to twist itself into pretzel for the whole world to see and laugh at, then let them. It would just be free publicity for men’s rights.

This is absolutley correct. The need for the draft as a mechanism of social equality is so compelling that its military uselessness is secondary. A draft can fill other needs in public service anyway. He continues:

With all of these recent developments, I have actually changed my stance on being generally against the draft before to being generally for it, now. The reason is that a gender-neutral draft would probably improve the quality of life within the military while also serving as a greater driver of public opinion against war. Whereas on the other hand, an all-volunteer force continue to serve as a stealth draft for men as it always had.

The stealth draft. Exactly. The all-volunteer force has become a stealth draft that selects on the basis of gender and class.

In the interests of social justice and gender parity, the draft should be used to adjust the end-strength of the military – set recruitment targets for class and gender and then fill shortfalls against those targets with the draft. Who could object to a social justice initiative?