I nail mine on, like a real man…

Men and women both put their pants on one leg at a time. Feminists don’t admit this, because they don’t want to admit men and women are different.

What? I suspend my pants in the air with ropes and then bungie jump into them from the roof. I thought everyone did that… o_O

I want to add to the wonderful can opener analogy by pointing out that in the male subject/female object worldview, the fear isn’t just that you’ll have sex with a woman who doesn’t want it, but that a woman you’ve spent a lot of money on no longer feels obligated to have sex with you just because you spent money on her. There are no guarantees for men that they’re going to get sex with a “grateful,” “willing” partner if they just spend enough money, and that pisses a lot of people off. It’s as if you could go to a store and buy a can opener and go home with an empty box, and then be laughed at by the clerk when you went back to the store to get your can opener. People want what they pay for, and when I go to the store and pay good money for a can opener, I fucking well better find a can opener in the box when I open it up. If I don’t, there’s absolutely no doubt in any reasonable person’s mind that I’ve been wronged and deprived of something I was entitled to.

Cute, but I think in her mind there actually is a connection between the two columns, but different than the one you’re seeing.

In fact, I’m pretty sure she sees date rape as the unavoidable result of women voluntarily having sex without demanding a ring, etc. first, and, in her mind, people like Gorman are the victims of women’s greater promiscuity (I don’t mean that word judgmentally).

I think the logic works something like this:

Back in the day, when, Parker and her like tell us, men had to buy dinner and flowers for the privilege of holding hands with a girl, and put a ring on her finger in order to get sex. Well, that was a lot of effort, but at least men knew when it was ok to have sex with a girl. No ring, no sex.

But then these women came along and messed things up by voluntarily having sex with men who hadn’t bought the dinners, the flowers, the ring! And men got confused. Now that some women without rings were consenting to have sex, men had no way of telling whether women had consented to sex or not! And of course the result was that men just had to assume ALL women had consented to sex! But then some uppity women claimed that no, actually, they hadn’t consented to sex. And they started accusing men of rape! But how were men supposed to know that these women hadn’t wanted to have sex? Now that feminists had taken away the only way–rings–men had of telling whether or not women had consented to sex! Date rape is all feminism’s fault!

Well, I could tell lots of stories about how my parents handled their fragile youngest child (who was born about when I should have graduated from Caltech) but the relevant one here is the time my Mom, apropos of nothing I was aware of, let me know that she believed that if it weren’t for “oxytocin,” she’d long ago have castrated my Dad and murdered me.

That’s right-wing morality in a nutshell (or barely avoiding shelling nuts, apparently): morality is what we are compelled to comply with. The notion that human beings might do anything decent because we think there are good reasons is nonsense; it’s all a net of compulsions, and society must be designed to compel order. My mother would prefer to believe she is a mere slave of her providentially designed hormones and would otherwise run amok, rather than take pride in having chosen the life she has.

For some strange reason or other, my little sister decided not to continue at UNR but returned to her tough music college in Boston–and long before I returned home from that holiday about a year ago, I had completely changed my mind about the possibility that she’d be OK staying in Sparks. I still wonder if she might not be better off at some more generic college, but I think she’s been doing OK in Massachusets this year–and just about all my parents’ numerous offspring spent their college years on the far side of a continent, if not the other side of the world (when my father was stationed in Germany) from them.

Oh yes, that magic hormone is surely the key to contentment and bliss…

Same here. My husband and I were basically permanently engaged until I landed a job with benefits, at which point we got married immediately so that he’d be covered under my insurance plans.

I did very little traditional dating in college, and most of my friends were the same. We went out in groups, we met up at parties, we had lots of sex. A year after college, I met my ex-husband at work, fell head over heels and launched a 13-year dysfunctional relationship that included very few traditional dates.

Most of my dating happened post divorce and was purely a function of demographics - more disposable income, more demanding work schedules and less tolerance for late nights and noisy bars equals more intimate dinners and structured events. I have to say, I’m a fan of some of it, but I sure am glad to be done with first dates.

As for the young 20-somethings I know, they seem to be getting married at alarming rates. We have an epidemic of weddings in the next generation this year between my boyfriend’s two oldest daughters and my oldest nephew (ages ranging from 21 to 24). We’ve tried to set a good example as upstanding heathens living in sin, but these kids today pay no attention. They insist on getting married.

To take the analogy a little farther, if volition is a bad thing in one’s appliances, then anything that might increase a tendancy towards volition is by definition a bad thing. So hormones that cause pleasure -> increased seeking of pleasure = bad. Likewise, being traumatized by a rape -> avoidance (of sex, or of guys, or even of just one guy) = bad.

(+ AtomicFruitbat)

Well, that was by no means intended to be a bulletproof analogy. (I cop to the fact that it wasn’t.) What I was getting at was that in terms of the Parker/Sessions worldview, no woman’s reaction to any given sexual encounter is of the first importance. That’s because the thing that matters most to them is (AtomicFruitbat points this out) her marketability. Now in terms of a woman’s marketability, it’s to a woman’s advantage, or to those of her guardians or vendors, or whatever, if she’s been subjected to as little usage as possible. To go back to the can-opener metaphor: if you haven’t got a can opener, you’d rather buy one new than buy one used, wouldn’t you? Sure thing. To carry the can-opener metaphor one step further: if you were considering the purchase of a can-opener, and if the can-opener were pre-owned, you’d be more inclined to buy it if you thought it was new than if you knew it was used, not so? Right you are.

This is the way a certain type of mind works. It’s why, incidentally, the scrap of bait that occaisionally gets dangled in the path of the college damsel: “Just behave yourself and your guy will buy you dinner and flowers and eventually he might even buy you a ring!!“—–is crap. None of this is about any potential value a woman might reap for herself. What it’s about, instead, is how much value she represents. And she represents more value in her virgin condition than she would otherwise. That’s the supposition, anyway.

I suspect that Parker, Sessions et al are not very much bothered at the distress of a woman who’s been forced to have sex because they believe she’s “given up” less than has a woman who willingly turns her body over to a man. I have no proof of that, though. It could be that they tend to regard a rape as just an unfortunate turn in the sex-for-maintainance negotiations which, as they see it, account for most of the interactions between men and women, and imagine that if a woman plays her cards right she might persuade a man to “buy” what he “broke” and thus wind up with a ring, a cake and a gown. Success!!—–but I have no proof of that either.