Feminism Friday post. It takes me awhile, but this post is more about the concept of masculinity than about porn, really.
Courtney Martin has an interesting review up of Robert Jensen’s new book Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. I really like the review, and she captures a lot of the thoughts I had when I saw Jensen give a speech on pornography—basically a combination of knowing he’s right on one hand, but also feeling he overplays that hand. He’s absolutely right that there’s a huge market for misogynist porn that feeds both a serious anger a lot of men feel towards women in light of declining male power. Watching a lot of the kinds of porn he describes, you get the general idea that the theme is, “Well, you may have a right to compete with us in school and work, but in the end, you’re just a fucktoy.” He’s right that the porn he is describing is wildly racist and a lot of it isn’t even remotely erotic, unless you’re conditioned to find misogyny arousing.
He’s also right that guys who watch this stuff and downplay its impact need to own their shit, and realize that even if they don’t necessarily want to believe they are hating on women, they are in fact getting off on just that and until they get out of denial, things won’t get better for them. Martin assumes her shock at the stuff he describes stems from her lack of contact with pornography, but I’ve seen more than my share of the two-dicks-up-one-ass-spit-in-her-face-make-her-cry stuff and I still flinch to read stuff like this:
I won’t expose you to his analysis at length here, but suffice it to say that he reports such dialogue as this being heard: “Can these fuck toys be any dumber?”
When I say “fucktoy”, then, I’m not employing hyperbole, but a direct quote.
Where I draw the line with Jensen is my feeling that he’s a tad unfair to men who look at porn, a large and diverse group. A lot of them—enough to drive the market, I think—really enjoy the “see bitches get theirs” aspect of porn. Others look at that stuff, but try to concentrate on the fucking, and less on the hate, which is problematic and they need to rethink their behavior, but it’s a much different beast than openly seeking hate. Sort of like the difference between watching “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” or “Gone with the Wind” and openly enjoying the racism vs. watching those movies while trying to tune out the stuff that offends you. The two groups are very different in significant ways. He also ignores some of the counterevidence that popular porn isn’t always tainted by brutal misogyny. Dan Savage has written about the growing popularity of the “cuckold” fantasy, which absolutely dominates written porn for men. Some of it has anti-woman tropes, but by and large it seems this fantasy seems to be a way for straight men to resolve some of their internalized attitudes (specifically the virgin/whore complex) in ways that genuinely celebrate women’s freedom and pleasure.
I won’t belabor the point, since Courtney covers it well, but there is one thing she writes that I need to argue with.
This is where I keep getting snagged in Jensen’s analysis. He is utterly convinced that we live in a culture that—by and large—wants to see women humiliated, submissive, and in pain. He argues for totally eradicating, not reforming, masculinity: “I cannot escape a simple conclusion: If men are going to be full human beings, we first have to stop being men.” His prose reeks of self-hate and desperation.
I’m not sure why eradicating masculinity offends Courtney, but I can’t help but think maybe she’s confusing it with eradicating maleness? I’ve seen Jensen speak; he struck me as someone who is quite full of confidence and conviction, far from the self-hating weasel his critics try to paint him as. When he talks about eradicating “masculinity”, he’s talking about eradicating the social construct of masculinity, especially as it’s defined in America. Think about how masculinity is constructed in America: violent, hateful, out of touch with “softer” emotions like love, irresponsible, stupid, willfully ignorant, and of course with a sexuality based around violence and conquest, not around pleasure and the sharing of it. (Today’s example—how anal sex is only “fun” if it’s a coercive process—is just one of many to add to the mind-numbing amounts of misogynist porn out there.)
The construct of masculinity is largely responsible for everything from rape to the propaganda push leading up to the invasion of Iraq. But masculinity victimizes the true believers, as well as women and men who find themselves on the wrong side of dudes on a masculinity trip. Men die younger than women for a myriad of reasons that relate to the construct of masculinity, from the idea that overeating (especially of fatty red meat) is a proof of masculinity to the unnecessary risk-taking that accompanies displays of masculinity. Masculinity is extremely stressful to men, since it’s not something you ever get to have, but something that you’re always fighting to prove, a battle that’s never completely won but has to begin anew every day. Men sacrifice a lot for masculinity, often destroying their ability to have truly loving and intimate relationships with their friends, family and romantic partners in order to maintain the facade. Feminists have invested a lot of energy into showing how the construct of femininity—from feigned helplessness to restricting ambition to the endless beautifying tasks—cripples women and clips our wings. Isn’t it possible that the construct of masculinity does the same thing to men? Masculinity is a burden; surely men would be better off without it.
You can say what you like about Jensen in a lot of areas, but I think his belief that we need to eradicate masculinity is hardly anti-male. In fact, I’d say it’s fundamentally pro-man, because it’s about letting men out of this cage and setting them on a path to genuine freedom.
Hugo has a post up about pornography; he and I have different opinions on whether or not porn itself is the problem, or just the worst of it. (Which is sadly often the most popular of it.) I’m linking it because it’s interesting, but also because he promises a second part where he’ll address what I’m mainly tackling in this post, which is the construct of masculinity. There are some good quotes in the piece that make it clear that Jensen’s talking about men who buy into masculinity that are the issue at hand, but again, I think there’s reason to think that some of the men who don’t buy into the hardcore masculinity construct are still drawn to porn for boring old erotic reasons. And some of those men put real effort into sorting through the hateful stuff to find pieces that speak to a sexuality about playfulness and pleasure, not about hating women.
This comment especially from Hugo is hard to get around:
The fact that some pornography is produced by and for women, the fact that some explicit material features sexual activity that is truly mutual, doesn’t mitigate the harm done by the industry as a whole. Many defenders of porn cry “But not all porn is like that”, and they point to obscure websites or specialty magazines that occupy a small niche within a much larger, thoroughly misogynistic industry. But it makes no sense — and does women no service — to deny the deleterious impact of mainstream porn on our collective humanity merely because a few tiny sectors of the “adult entertainment industry” produce material that is genuinely egalitarian and redemptive.
Good point, and we shouldn’t turn away from the reality of mainstream porn because we’re defensive of non-mainstream stuff. But I do think there’s a value in bringing up the egalitarian stuff, which is that the existence of alternatives gives people a way to both value the right to a sexual imagination and to offer a critique of the hateful stuff that dominates the industry. If you make hand-waving criticism of just porn, people hear that you’re attacking their fantasies, and that’s not going to sit well. But arguing that erotic materials are just fine, but hate propaganda against women is another ball of wax, you are going to get across to people much better.
Still, read all of the post, since Hugo has some pretty realistic and sad examples of how, in fact, ordinary “good” guys are getting their sexuality warped by the masculinity construct in mainstream porn. He uses the example of facials, which I find fascinating, because what I see that happened is this: Once facials became so popular that people were trying to pretend that they were just sex and not, as they obviously are, a magnified version of spitting in someone’s face, a lot of porn movies began to feature spitting in the women’s faces, just so you couldn’t miss the point even if you wanted to. I’ve never had a guy ask me to do that. I’d probably ask him if I could spit in his eye first if he did.
Yeah, I dunno too much about the porn issue, but I do know about the masculinity. I attended this talk once entitled “Being a Man in the Lousy Modern World.” It was interesting, but I disagreed with the presenter/author’s opinion that voluntary risk-taking was a useful outlet for men.
It’s funny for me in that I’m often viewed as a pretty traditionally masculine guy, but only by people who don’t know me more than superficially. I love doing things that are traditionally “feminine” (amongst other things, I love cooking for my family. It makes me feel good to provide healthy food), as well as things that are traditionally “masculine.” It just shouldn’t matter, and these ideas of masculine and feminine are largely arbitrary in this day and age. But I suppose I’m preaching to the choir on that one.
Okay, here is where we should establish something in advance. “masculinity” can be defined either as
“1. The quality or condition of being masculine.”
or
“2. Something traditionally considered to be characteristic of a male.”
Just watch. This thread will populate with at least a few people like Jensen who try to conflate the two.
“2″ is the outdated models of behaviour. “1″ is the mere state of existence of being male. It seems to me that Jensen errs badly when he says that “I cannot escape a simple conclusion: If men are going to be full human beings, we first have to stop being men.” I can and should stop being “masculine” in that I can and should stop accepting certain outdated and pernicious attitudes, or stop considering that certain positive characteristics (strength, honour, etc.) are restricted to men. But I can’t stop being a man. It’s ludicrous nonsense.
Maybe we need to start referring to the negative masculinity concept as Masculinity(TM) like Nice-Guy(TM)-ism.
Thanks, Amanda, I’ll have part two up on Monday, especially dealing with the whole shame/guilt/self-hate bit.
A lot of them—enough to drive the market, I think—really enjoy the “see bitches get theirs” aspect of porn.
I doubt it’s even a majority of the men who view porn but, more to the point, I suspect those particular men are the most obsessive consumers of porn, so they’re buying it in much larger amounts than guys who don’t particularly enjoy the creepy/abusive undertones. The regular consumers of a product will always drive the market more than occasional consumers, even if the regular consumers are a numerically small portion of the market.
It’s not a workable solution, but in a weird way if you encouraged occasional consumers to buy more on a regular basis and to buy the less degrading stuff, the market issue in and of itself would probably be resolved. It wouldn’t solve the underlying problem of having that underlayer of creepy guys, though.
So seeker, are all males masculine by virtue of being male? Can females be masculine?
Thanks, Em, exactly my point. The culture uses the same word to describe two wholly different concepts, which is why Amanda chose maleness to describe the sense of being male, and left masculinity to cover the social construct.
There was a long thread about this more than a few months ago, and part of the debate, as I recall, turned around stealing “masculinity” as a phrase. Some (myself included, iirc, argued that ceding such a powerful, totemic word to the mouthbreathers and misogynists was an error, and that we should aggressively redefine “masculine” to incorporate modern and sane concepts to replace the dated and knuckle-dragging ones. Others argued that the word was too closely tied to the negative construct and should be abandoned.
These are parts of the construct of masculinity, but it also includes things like self reliance, self-sacrifice, and innovation. Certainly one can argue that these qualities are expressed in anti-social ways when combined the other, or that these qualities are not emphasized in culture as whole enough. However, the notion that masculinity — as a cultural construct — is responsible for violent porn seems a bit of an over-reach, as violent porn has continued to exist across multiple cultures for several thousand years. The nature and extent of violent porn tends to ebb and flow with upheavals in societies - often as a reaction to particular moral movements. For instance, one can see the increase in child and rape oriented porn as the Victorian era reached its peak. These images wained, though did not disappear completely, after WWI. Porn tends to be a hyper-reaction to social fores - at least that’s my opinion.
this post is fantastic. in my (intro level) gender studies class my prof spent a fair portion of time making clear the differences between “sex” amd “gender” (as the class is called “sex, gender and power) and basically the point she made was the same you make here. being male is your sex, its what youre born, being “masculine” is gender expression, its how you present yourself to the world. as we dont live in vacuums (sp??) our ideas of what is masculine and what is feminine are socially constructed ideas. i dont think theres anything problematic about changing/eradicating “masculinity” as we kno it, same as all the efforts made thus far to change/eliminate the simplistic traditional notions of “femininity” have only furthered women’s abilities to fully express themselves and experience life. if jensen had called for the complete eradication of men, that on the other hand would be problematic and would clearly place him in the self loathing category.
i had never put much thought into “masculinity” or to the pressures men experience in our culture until i read “the will to change: men, masculinity, and love” by bell hooks. if you havent read it i cant recommend it enough.
Re: masculinity vs. maleness. You have this same problem in the general public with the term femininity. In the feminist blogosphere (and presumably women’s studies departments, I wouldn’t know, I got my education at I Blame The Patriarchy), we generally understand the term “femininity” to apply to female drag, all the things we do to be socially acceptable women, and not anything inherent to being an actual woman. But that’s not how the average person understands these terms. And that’s kind of an issue in the general public. How do you discuss these issues when most people associate a lot of positive qualities with both femininity and masculinity? Those are really the only terms I know for gender constructs, but even the concept of gender vs. sex is foreign to large sections of the population.
I’ve mostly gotten out of watching porn, after being introduced to the whole “bang bus” and the variations of “my daughter’s f*cking a n*gger” genres of porn and after trying to watch henti, which is basically just one rape scenario after another.
I think what also plays into a lot of the more degrading porn is that people feel the sex needs to be “dirty” because we’ve been brought up in a culture that for hundreds of years taught that sex and sexual pleausre was “dirty”. When you can rent something like Basic Instinct or Shortbus, I think a lot of these gonzo pornographers feel they keep having to up the ante in order to keep porn something that needs to be hidden, or something that is dangerous and still “dirty”.
Two people (or more) just mutually having sex and enjoying it can be boring for a lot of the male audience, so there has to be that one extra thing that sends the porn into “naughty” territory and it’s often the degradation of women, which plays into the whole “women don’t really want sex until you, the man, SHOW them with your big manly cock how much they really do want the sex you want them to want,” attitudes of a lot of mainstream porn.
But Steve, self reliance, self-sacrifice, and innovation are not qualities exhibited only by men. And it’s because of that that the concept of “masculinity” is harmful; it’s essentialism. While both “femininity” and “masculinity” include positive characteristics, the binary model means that those characteristics are assigned to either men or women, not both. Both men and women are capable of self-sacrifice (”masculine”) and sensitivity (”feminine”).
I think what’s missing in a lot of these types of discussion is that we’re not really talking about individual choice so much as we’re talking about social and cultural forces en masse. It’s pretty obvious that pornography as it exists today largely has as a major theme the subjugation of women. Does it have to be this way? Well..no. It really doesn’t.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. To me, this type of subjagational porn is the equal and opposite reaction of the anti-sex movement. As things are radicalized they get more radical. It’s the way it is.
There’s a lot of things that in reality, most people “don’t” believe, but in group that’s what they’re expected to believe so they believe it. That’s why studying cultural forces and memes are much more important than individual beliefs.
Is pornography the chicken or the egg? In the end, it doesn’t matter. Sometimes you need to do both at the same time to stop the cycle. I wouldn’t suggest further radicalization though, for obvious reasons. Those that suggest mainstreaming non-subjagational porn as a part of a sex-positive culture I think have the best idea
In the last 48 hours on Drudge, I have seen:
2 girls, 1 cup (just leave it alone for the love of christ)
“What a caning feels like”
“Kill her, Kill her”
“Coach accused of filming sex act.”
You don’t need to look to porn to see the destructive effects of this kind of masculinity.
BTW. I’m a guy and I’ll put in my vote for masculinity must die. It doesn’t mean that I’m any less of a male, in fact the theory put forward by the feminist thinkers/writers around the blogosphere.
It’s not elimination. It’s freedom.
I’m not perfect. I try but sometimes it’s hard to not fall into the social expectations. But it’s best not not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Progress is a road, not a toggle switch.
In Israel, Nazi Porn is popular. The porn depicts jewish men being tortured sexually by nazi women, jewish girls being raped, etc.
That doesn’t mean jews who watch it are anti-semitic. Rather, it means that sexuality is linked to culture. It’s a mirror of what is in our culture’s collective unconscious.
I think this porn reflects sexism as a mirror of a terrifying sexism in culture, not because it’s consumers necessarily are misogynists themselves, in the exact same way that isreali’s who watch nazi porn aren’t anti semites.
but you arent looking at the power dynamics here. you cant compare jewish people watching other jewish people being subjugated and abused to men watching women being subjugated and abused. men watching women being subjugated and abused is more akin to neo-nazis watching the anti-semitic porn, becos then its the same power dynamic, the person who has the power watching a fantasy of an expression of that power. the jewish people watching the anti-semetic porn is akin to women watching porn where women are degraded to get off, which changes the entire dynamic of the experience. its about who in the porn you identify with. people fantasizing about being abused is a whole ‘nother can of worms, but its not the same and someone fantasizing about perpetrating the abuse.
oh, and to be 100% clear, i don’t actually mean that all men are akin to neo-nazis, in case i came off as some crazed misandrist. just feeling the need to clarify.
No, jessilikewhoa, you are correct. The roles must be reversed in the Israel example in order for the comparison to make sense.
How you be so awesome?
I just wanted to submit my eternal gratitude for your elegant elucidation of my feelings on the matter.
I hope you’re happy. I’m way frisky, and i can’t stop at the site for a few days til those nearly naked men are not on my screen any more (or until I get some nookie)….grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
But Jeff, doncha know that Canadians are the best hockey players?
I always come away from these discussions of porn a little bewildered. I am definitely not well versed in the trends and evolution of porn as a genre; I haven’t studied it from an academic point of view, and I have consumed far too little of it to know from experience what it’s like overall or what it’s becoming. But… from what very little I know about it, what I consider “garden variety” porn for guys almost always features very horny women who really love sex for its own sake. This, I thought, was the central fantasy expressed in most porn for guys: women who want sex even more than they do, with women aggressively pursuing them. This is the basic premise for the cliched “pizza delivery boy” scenario and “pool cleaner with the horny housewife” type scenarios. So… is this kind of simplistic porn just not done anymore? Or has it been relegated to a small niche or specialty market in favor of the gross misogyny described here?
But as to the main subject of the post, about masculinity itself, Amanda is dead on as usual. I would absolutely love it if the current definition of masculinity would die a quick death. “Masclinity” as a stereotype is a nasty bit of work, and something men would be so much better off without. Ask any man that’s ever been picked on as a boy on the playground about that… and trust me, that’s most of us.
I think you dissect it way too much. Guys watch porn for about four minutes at a time, to accomplish a very specific goal. And they (we) don’t decide what turns us on. We don’t think to ourselves, “I want to see a bitch get treated like a piece of trash.” It’s more like trial and error. You look at one first, and you know what – the plain, vanilla sex with a young looking redneck girl isn’t doing it for me. So you look at the next one. Again, the hot, blonde lesbians aren’t my thing. You look at the next one, and it’s three guys standing around doing gross things to a woman, and, hey, look at that, I’m getting the reaction in my underpants that I was looking for. Am I “hating on women” such that I need to “own my shit” for watching this stuff for three minutes while I masturbate (hypothetically, of course – I don’t watch porn or masturbate)? Outside of that three minutes, we’re not sitting in our offices during the day thinking “Man, I’d like to own some bitch like I saw in that movie last night.” There are probably guys who do this, but most of us don’t look at the women in our office and think “I bet she’d like to take it from three guys like that whore in the video I saw last night.” It’s fake. We don’t project those scenarios on reality. It doesn’t even enter our consciousness, until the next time we want to masturbate and we’re looking for something that stirs our hormones. Shock and novelty excite guys. I really don’t think it’s misogyny.
I’ve noticed a rise in misogynist spam stuck in my filter lately. There’s a definite increase in subject lines that are some variant of “get a bigger dick so those bitches won’t laugh at you anymore” or “my girlfriend can’t handle my big dick now”. I was wondering how much overlap there is between the “penis enlargement spam” industry and the misogynist porn industry; maybe they are both capitalizing on the same “anxious masculinity” issue?
To get back to Jensen himself and the nit that Amanda rightly picked with Courtney’s review: I’ve heard him speak and also had the pleasure of eating lunch with him and a few of my colleagues the next day. I don’t think he’s self-hating at all, based on these admittedly quick impressions.
At lunch, we mostly talked about food, not porn or sex. The upshot of the conversation: I do think he’s got an ascetic streak. I do think he gives short shrift to pleasure. He’s also a bit of a Boy Scout, and I mean that in the nicest possible way, speaking as a gal who grew up in North Dakota, as Jensen did, in the 1960s and 70s.
As a result, I think he has a hard time imagining porn that really caters to female desires and pleasures. Now, unlike Jensen, I haven’t written a book on porn, but I know I’m capable of being turned on by images of men I’ll never meet. So I believe that an erotics centered on women’s desires is possible, even if it’s rarely what we see.
Jensen also really seems like he wants to do the ethically right thing, which means he’s mostly concerned with criticizing abuses that are already out there in the culture, whether it’s misogynist porn here in the U.S. or the conflation of sex and violence at Abu Ghraib. This tends to crowd out any discussion of positive depictions of sexuality.
That’s a problem even for people who see porn as always and inherently corrosive (and obviously not all of us do). We have almost no chance of eliminating misogynist porn. We’d have a better chance of crowding it out of the marketplace with porn that acknowledges women’s desires as well as men’s.
If a man saying that masculinity (as it’s used in terms of gender role) needs to be eradicated is self-hate, aren’t we accusing women who say that (i.e., feminists) of man-hating?
Personally, my own mantra about masculinity is “I’m male. Therefore everything I do is by definition masculine, because someone who’s male is doing it.” In other words, it’s explicitly rejecting a prescriptive, rather than descriptive, definition of what it means to be male. And it should be noted that this usage isn’t intended to be opposed to “femininity”. If I say that cooking is masculine because I do it, I’m not saying that men are better cooks; rather, I just mean there’s no conflict between the act of cooking and maleness.
One of the ways I think that the type of masculinity Amanda describes is really corrosive is the way that it prevents working class men from uniting around so-called “soft” issues like anti-racism, immigrant rights, and even obvious, really basic aspects of human decency like anti-domestic violence campaigns. I think a lot of men would like to support anti-domestic violence campaigns but are scared to because it will make them seem unmasculine (this was my experience in Australian campaigns of this sort, anyway).
Many of these types of campaigns help workers gain solidarity with each other, and even sexist working men would benefit. But they shy away from seeming soft or weak, and the right especially use this to divide and rule working men. To whatever extent the “white men don’t vote democrat” claims are true, I think those men are being affected by this type of machismo.
(And for my 2 cents worth, to the extent that men and women are fundamentally different, feminine and masculine refer to those differences. So I think we can reform masculinity and femininity, but we can’t abolish them entirely - even if they end up simply meaning “the physical difference between men and women”, such differences will always exist and need to be defined. As I understand it there is some kind of post-modern feminist view which supports that theory, but I’m buggered if I can remember even a single name to attach to it in defense of my view…).
So seeker, are all males masculine by virtue of being male?
The basic trope behind masculinity is “strength”. At the naive level, it’s muscles. At its worst, it’s domination of others and resorting to violence. At its best, it’s strength of will, responsibility, doing the difficult but necessary tasks.
Can females be masculine?
Yes. Or to be more exact, to be worthwhile people, male and female, we have to be both “strong” and “caring”.
Am I “hating on women” such that I need to “own my shit” for watching this stuff for three minutes while I masturbate (hypothetically, of course – I don’t watch porn or masturbate)?
1. Yes.
2. You’re almost certainly lying about the masturbation. More than 95% of men with functional sex organs masturbate, no matter age, marital status, sexual orientation, &c. I masturbate, and assume so does every single man I know, and the vast majority of women.
Continuing. You see, when you say that you’re looking for the stuff that “gets a reaction”…well, fine, but why is hateful pornography what gets a reaction? This is why you have to own what gets you off — because it’s a window into your psyche. I know what I find erotic, and I know what it says about me, because I took it out, unpacked it, looked at it, shuddered slightly, and accepted it.
Hate porn doesn’t work for me; never has, never will. I’m no less abnormal than everyone else when it comes to sex and sexuality, but I never found women being degraded to be an exciting scenario. Indeed, one of the reasons I’ve found written erotica to be infinitely more stimulating that actual movies is that in a written story, you can actually find well-rounded, quasi-realistic characters, and that’s important to me, because I’m attracted to actual women, not “fucktoys.”
That said, in a society as deeply misogynistic and racist as ours, it’s no surprise that porn comes out that is misogynistic and racist. If hate porn gets you off, well, de gustibus non est disputandum…but then again, why it’s what does it for you is a legitimate question, one that you’ll be better off exploring than ignoring.
To be fair, there’s plenty of badly written smut (using the smut/porn distinction here to mean written vs. visual) that’s not much better than the sort of porn being complained about.
To be fair, there’s plenty of badly written smut (using the smut/porn distinction here to mean written vs. visual) that’s not much better than the sort of porn being complained about.
Indeed. The Signal-to-Noise ratio is about 1:100000, unfortunately. Written erotica has a lot of bad about it, but you’re more likely to find something decent there, as opposed to vids, where the S-to-N is approximately 0:infinity.
SarahMC, yes - that is my point. Masculinity and Femininity are cultural constructs, not necessarily bound to a particular sex. If we are going to engage in the notion that one of those constructs is worse then the other, then we must recognize the positive aspects in that construct. If however, we wish to pull apart those constructs and state that de-humanization is bad and empathy is good, that too much passivity is as undesirable as too much aggression, then we need to remove those attributes from the constructs.
As I said, I do not believe that violent porn is anything new — though it may seem more brutal due to technological changes — nor do I believe it is inherent to the construct of masculinity — though I believe it gains prominence during times of social upheaval which effect attributes adjacent to the construct.
“I’m male. Therefore everything I do is by definition masculine, because someone who’s male is doing it.”
Ditto. The funny thing is the same people who want to confine male behavior with proscriptive norms of stereotypical masculinity say that gender behavior is innate. If being masculine comes naturally to us, why worry and self-monitor in order to maintain it? If, on the other hand, there is very little innate difference between men and women (which seems likely), I don’t see a reason to artificially create differences. Don’t differences just tend to separate people?
I heard somewhere that the current porn market is becoming increasingly dominated by amateur porn. My experience with amateur porn is that it’s mostly just couples fucking (although it is more stylized and with more physically ideal partners than the average couple-fuck); do the studies that note the prevalence of degrading porn take into account the amateur stuff?
I actually admit that it’s hard to find good porn sometimes because the hateful to women stuff is so common.
It’s really annoying as it’s a GIGANTIC turnoff for me.
I mean seriously, if the women is crying, etc, then it’s actually pretty disgusting.
How could someone enjoy that???
It boggles my mind and makes me sick.
“It was interesting, but I disagreed with the presenter/author’s opinion that voluntary risk-taking was a useful outlet for men.”
Physical risk? Insane risk? What kind of risk? The sentence doesn’t make much sense by itself. Can I assume some sort of extraordinary risk is being suggested? Both men and women need to take risks to live their normal lives. Having a child or starting a business both entail risk. Not sure how to parse the above sentence.
It really depends what you mean by “amateur.” I’ve encountered the following very different uses of it:
1. Homemade porn produced for a narrow audience
2. Homemade porn produced for a wide audience
3. Industry-produced porn featuring women who don’t have “name recognition” (”gonzo” porn, Girls Gone Wild type stuff, etc.)
Thing is, while category 1 is often (not always) relatively non-degrading, a lot of the stuff in category 2 is heavily influenced by “mainstream” industry porn (e.g., women are referred to as “bitch,” “whore” or “slut,” and the acts tend to imitate those found in mainstream porn), and category 3 is where you find a lot of the really horrible misogynistic material.
I suspect a statement about “the current porn market” is referring to categories 2 and 3 (and possibly only category 3.)
SarahMC, thank you! Although, based on reading your posts over on Feministing, I think we agree on 95% of the stuff being discussed. (I’m not even sure there’s a 5% that we don’t agree on, I’m just assuming since we aren’t the same person…as far as I know.) And thank you so much to Amanda for this post! Again, over on Feministing, there seems to be so much bizarre defensiveness around this subject. I, as a feminist, would love to obliterate this gender binary/essentialist thing, including our whacked out definitions of what is masculine and what is feminine. It’s just silly to deside that something is just manly or just womanly. And, I really do like the differentiation between maleness and masculinity as a way to speak to what is innate (your maleness) and what is constructed (my femininity).
Beyond that, Wallace, you are either woefully naive or just don’t want to deal with the guilt that comes when you have to admit to yourself that misogyny gets you off on occasion. That’s a scary thing to have to own, but you can’t make positive change for yourself or for the women in your life until you do. I say woefully naive, b/c I assume from all the “we’s” in you post that you are a man, and have thus, not been on the receiving end of sex from a man who does in fact let his porn preferences leak into the bedroom, or even just into his behavior towards women in general. I, on the other hand, have. And not just once with one guy who took it all a little too literally. And talking to other women has shown me that my experiences were not freak occurrences. Deal with that. When you do, everyone will be better for it.
SarahMC, thank you! Although, based on reading your posts over on Feministing, I think we agree on 95% of the stuff being discussed. (I’m not even sure there’s a 5% that we don’t agree on, I’m just assuming since we aren’t the same person…as far as I know.) And thank you so much to Amanda for this post! Again, over on Feministing, there seems to be so much bizarre defensiveness around this subject. I, as a feminist, would love to obliterate this gender binary/essentialist thing, including our whacked out definitions of what is masculine and what is feminine. It’s just silly to deside that something is just manly or just womanly. And, I really do like the differentiation between maleness and masculinity as a way to speak to what is innate (your maleness) and what is constructed (my femininity).
Beyond that, Wallace, you are either woefully naive or just don’t want to deal with the guilt that comes when you have to admit to yourself that misogyny gets you off on occasion. That’s a scary thing to have to own, but you can’t make positive change for yourself or for the women in your life until you do. I say woefully naive, b/c I assume from all the “we’s” in you post that you are a man, and have thus, not been on the receiving end of sex from a man who does in fact let his porn preferences leak into the bedroom, or even just into his behavior towards women in general. I, on the other hand, have. And not just once with one guy who took it all a little too literally. And talking to other women has shown me that my experiences were not freak occurrences. Deal with that. When you do, everyone will be better for it.
SarahMC, thank you! Although, based on reading your posts over on Feministing, I think we agree on 95% of the stuff being discussed. (I’m not even sure there’s a 5% that we don’t agree on, I’m just assuming since we aren’t the same person…as far as I know.) And thank you so much to Amanda for this post! Again, over on Feministing, there seems to be so much bizarre defensiveness around this subject. I, as a feminist, would love to obliterate this gender binary/essentialist thing, including our whacked out definitions of what is masculine and what is feminine. It’s just silly to deside that something is just manly or just womanly. And, I really do like the differentiation between maleness and masculinity as a way to speak to what is innate (your maleness) and what is constructed (my femininity).
Beyond that, Wallace, you are either woefully naive or just don’t want to deal with the guilt that comes when you have to admit to yourself that misogyny gets you off on occasion. That’s a scary thing to have to own, but you can’t make positive change for yourself or for the women in your life until you do. I say woefully naive, b/c I assume from all the “we’s” in you post that you are a man, and have thus, not been on the receiving end of sex from a man who does in fact let his porn preferences leak into the bedroom, or even just into his behavior towards women in general. I, on the other hand, have. And not just once with one guy who took it all a little too literally. And talking to other women has shown me that my experiences were not freak occurrences. Deal with that. When you do, everyone will be better for it.
I seem to be having some posting problems, but I’ll try one more time, and if I end up quadruple-posted, I’ll hang my head in shame tomorrow:
SarahMC, thank you! Although, based on reading your posts over on Feministing, I think we agree on 95% of the stuff being discussed. (I’m not even sure there’s a 5% that we don’t agree on, I’m just assuming since we aren’t the same person…as far as I know.) And thank you so much to Amanda for this post! Again, over on Feministing, there seems to be so much bizarre defensiveness around this subject. I, as a feminist, would love to obliterate this gender binary/essentialist thing, including our whacked out definitions of what is masculine and what is feminine. It’s just silly to deside that something is just manly or just womanly. And, I really do like the differentiation between maleness and masculinity as a way to speak to what is innate (your maleness) and what is constructed (my femininity).
Beyond that, Wallace, you are either woefully naive or just don’t want to deal with the guilt that comes when you have to admit to yourself that misogyny gets you off on occasion. That’s a scary thing to have to own, but you can’t make positive change for yourself or for the women in your life until you do. I say woefully naive, b/c I assume from all the “we’s” in you post that you are a man, and have thus, not been on the receiving end of sex from a man who does in fact let his porn preferences leak into the bedroom, or even just into his behavior towards women in general. I, on the other hand, have. And not just once with one guy who took it all a little too literally. And talking to other women has shown me that my experiences were not freak occurrences. Deal with that. When you do, everyone will be better for it.
Fingers crossed that this goes up!
I actually admit that it’s hard to find good porn sometimes because the hateful to women stuff is so common.
So what the hell is the deal with all the female-authored and -targetted vampire-erotica all of a sudden, ranging from the fairly tame to the completely explicit?
Honestly, as a man deeply disturbed by degrading porn and wholly uninterested in the breathing realdoll side of mainstream porn, you have no idea how rare non-degrading porn with women who seem to actually be enjoying themselves is. NO. IDEA. We’re talking less than 1% percent here.
Lawrence Krubner: Unnecessary physical risks. Not necessarily terribly dangerous ones though; things like what he did. Paddling across Canada in a birch bark canoe, re-creating the MacKenzie expedition, or doing an insane 1-month aikido course that the Tokyo riot police do (and it really is insane. Literally. Not at all healthy to train like they do in that programme). There was more to it than that, but that’s what I was talking about for risks.
“I think there’s reason to think that some of the men who don’t buy into the hardcore masculinity construct are still drawn to porn for boring old erotic reasons.”
I’m actually not too sure about this sentiment. As a feminist guy who has watched a lot of porn (a lot of it is “mainstream”, as in I haven’t watched anything that is violent intentionally, just stuff that is more along the lines of indulging the nympho fantasy, which is still misogynist along a “fucktoy” line, certainly) in my eleven years of internet use and periods of having a channel that shows porn movies at midnight every night, I have seriously started doubting the erotic aspect of masturbation. I mean, really, masturbation is a thrill when you discover it, and certainly feels pretty good. But I’ve seriously begun seeing it as more of a habit quite disconnected with sex in any meaningful term (I realize, of course, that trying to define troubling aspects of sexuality out of sexuality is a fool’s errand in that it is more likely to blind us to the problems).
I started feeling, a few months ago, that masturbation was simply something I did when I was bored, not for sexual gratification. It felt, in short, like my penis had by and large been co-opted by watching porn rather than sex. It has certainly influenced my views on women as related to sex in some ways, but I wonder if the bigger impact isn’t on in effect to lessen, in some ways, the “worth” of my self-gratification. Porn-watching is a bit fucked up, but I think it’s a bit more complicated than misoginy on screen -> misoginy in the mind. I think it’s more that mandatory porn watching for men leads to a disconnect with their own sexuality, which naturally forms a very effective breeding ground for misoginy.
As for masculinity, there is nothing at all anti-male of wanting to tear down that particular perversion of humanity.
2. You’re almost certainly lying about the masturbation.
Jeff Fecke: Actually, I think Wallace was joking.
gah, this might be a repost now:
“I think there’s reason to think that some of the men who don’t buy into the hardcore masculinity construct are still drawn to porn for boring old erotic reasons.”
I’m actually not too sure about this sentiment. As a feminist guy who has watched a lot of porn (a lot of it is “mainstream”, as in I haven’t watched anything that is violent intentionally, just stuff that is more along the lines of indulging the nympho fantasy, which is still misogynist along a “fucktoy” line, certainly) in my eleven years of internet use and periods of having a channel that shows porn movies at midnight every night, I have seriously started doubting the erotic aspect of masturbation. I mean, really, masturbation is a thrill when you discover it, and certainly feels pretty good. But I’ve seriously begun seeing it as more of a habit quite disconnected with sex in any meaningful term (I realize, of course, that trying to define troubling aspects of sexuality out of sexuality is a fool’s errand in that it is more likely to blind us to the problems).
I started feeling, a few months ago, that masturbation was simply something I did when I was bored, not for sexual gratification. It felt, in short, like my penis had by and large been co-opted by watching porn rather than sex. It has certainly influenced my views on women as related to sex in some ways, but I wonder if the bigger impact isn’t on in effect to lessen, in some ways, the “worth” of my self-gratification. Porn-watching is a bit fucked up, but I think it’s a bit more complicated than misoginy on screen -> misoginy in the mind. I think it’s more that mandatory porn watching for men leads to a disconnect with their own sexuality, which naturally forms a very effective breeding ground for misoginy.
As for masculinity, there is nothing at all anti-male of wanting to tear down that particular perversion of humanity.
So what the hell is the deal with all the female-authored and -targetted vampire-erotica all of a sudden, ranging from the fairly tame to the completely explicit?
Firstly if you think that has a hope in hell of coming close to the disemination of “porn” (as in the direct industry) you’d be wrong, and secondly of all of this the most popular and mainstream is in many ways hateful towards women and deals quite badly with female desire.
If you take a look at the critiques of Laurel K. Hamiltons later works you can see fans complaining about the fact that she only writes female characters being forced by circumstance into having sex and in at least one case outright rape (it was re-written for the paperback but it’s still there in the original).
(My comment doesn’t seem to be showing up, I’m unsure whether it’s this “modern technology” or just me. Here we go again.)
So what the hell is the deal with all the female-authored and -targetted vampire-erotica all of a sudden, ranging from the fairly tame to the completely explicit?
Firstly if you think that has a hope in hell of coming close to the disemination of “porn” (as in the direct industry) you’d be wrong, and secondly of all of this the most popular and mainstream is in many ways hateful towards women and deals quite badly with female desire.
If you take a look at the critiques of Laurel K. Hamiltons later works you can see fans complaining about the fact that she only writes female characters being forced by circumstance into having sex and in at least one case outright rape (it was re-written for the paperback but it’s still there in the original).
Steve, seeker, and others who suggest we ought to reclaim the label of “masculinity:”
If we reform the definition of “masculinity” to refer to genuinely positive human qualities, why would we expect any of these qualities to be more typically or more properly found in men and less in women? Whereas of course “masculinity” as it is currently defined by our society does include, indeed demands, clearly negative qualities such as being prone to aggression, emotional insensitivity, etc–and then, in our society’s conventional scheme, “properly feminine” women are expected to do the hard, and unrewarded and unhonored, work of cleaning up after the predictable social messes these qualities could be expected to make, unchecked. Women are given the responsibility of restraining men from their designated “nature” without the authority.
Fundamentally, the whole notion that men should be “masculine” and women “feminine” is a demand for a social division of labor, which, if it is not founded in strict biological fact, would mean (I say, it does mean) that everyone is required to neglect aspects of their own characters they are perfectly capable of developing, in order to obsessively develop others they may or may not be individually good at, all for the sake of perpetuating a fundamentally divided society. And division almost certainly means inequality as well. “Separate but equal” as an abstract possibility seems mighty unlikely to happen in real life, and real history has thoroughly discredited the idea.
So, while no one wants to erase the human qualities that defenders of “masculinity” claim (when defending themselves against humane criticisms at any rate) are “masculinity” at its best, it is hard for me to imagine why any of these qualities would be found more in men than women, and still less why they should. Nor is there any reason to think that men developing the qualities commonly called “feminine” would become less capable of exercising “masculine” virtues insofar as they are truly virtues Vice versa women have long mastered the art of being as “masculine” as they need to be, without thereby becoming less female in any reasonable sense.
The division fundamentally exists to put both genders in a straighjacket, limiting everyone.
It’s hard for me to see what value there is in keeping the divisive labels, instead of just admiring people for their strengths and accomplishments without regard to gender at all. If we must label them we can call them human virtues.
I always equated masculinity with stoicism.
These are parts of the construct of masculinity, but it also includes things like self reliance, self-sacrifice, and innovation.
I’d argue that there was this part of masculinity in the past, but it’s mostly a nostalgia trip now for wingnuts who love old school patriarchy. Self-reliance has maybe been a fantasy, but not really much of the construct of 20th and 21st century masculinity that relies so heavily on unpaid female labor to maintain itself. The stereotype of the filthy bachelor pad implies that missing female presence to make the man in question function properly. Self-sacrifice? Men in our culture are seen as taking even the mildest barely-sacrifices (like the sacrifice of the distant and utterly improbably sacrifice of theoretical sex with hundreds of nubile women in the future in order to get married) with temper tantrums that women are supposed to patiently indulge. Innovation? Eh, only if it comes at the price of anti-intellectualism—increasingly, in our culture, the gentleman scholar is disappearing as a stereotype, because women are increasingly academic. Rule #1 of masculinity is that it’s absolutely Not Female. Now that women are becoming intellectual movers and shakers, men attached to masculinity are rejecting intellectualism.
Also, what SarahMC said. Because masculinity is Not Female, whenever women try to participate in an activity that is considered “masculine”, people flip out because they realize that if women infilitrate, then the masculine men will feel the need to exit stage left. So women’s increasing opportunities are, in this model, a direct assault on male opportunities. That’s why there’s so much hostility towards Title IX—if sports truly become associated with women, then a lot of men will leave in a masculinity-protecting huff. I say better to abandon the masculinity than to abandon things like books and sports.
Mark Foxwell NAILS it. This gender straightjacket model ruins it for everyone. I know I don’t find it hard to be ‘masculine’ because, as a freaking human being rather then a rigid set of skills and attributes, I have the ability to be self-sufficient, to protect others, to be ambitious and to be innovative. No sweat. I’m human, these things are part of me.
And, conversely, it’s isn’t that hard to be ‘feminine’ since being empathic and helping others is also, yeah, a thing that *humans* have, not just humans with vaginas.
This stuff pisses me off. It’s criminal the way we take bright, creative human beings and demand that they destroy whole parts of themselves. I know I get the predictable hostility and hatred when I ‘dare’ to use the parts of myself that are marked as ‘for men only.’ FEH.
I’m with Jensen. And Amanda got it right too- it’s not about human beings, you or me or my boyfriend or my dad or whatever. It’s about the construct. It does nothing but create misery. Lets kill it with fire.
Speaking of unnecessary physical risks, there’s this creepy article from MSNBC on heroism, specifically Chub Armand. Basically, it says;
1. Heroes are saps.
2. Because they don’t pass on their genes.
3. Only men can be heroes.
4. Because 8 out of 9 nominees for the Carnegie Medal are men.
5. “Chub” Armand was a sap.
6. Because he has no son.
7. And his daughter and grand daughters don’t count for squat.
But… from what very little I know about it, what I consider “garden variety” porn for guys almost always features very horny women who really love sex for its own sake. This, I thought, was the central fantasy expressed in most porn for guys: women who want sex even more than they do, with women aggressively pursuing them. This is the basic premise for the cliched “pizza delivery boy” scenario and “pool cleaner with the horny housewife” type scenarios. So… is this kind of simplistic porn just not done anymore?
Not as much as it used to be. But it’s worth noting that the “insatiable female” was in itself a humiliation fantasy. It’s never just a woman who really likes sex; it’s someone who’s got a veneer of desperation, who begs for it. But I suppose in a sense it was a harmless enough power fantasy, because it was a direct reaction to real women’s socially-mandated reluctance to have sex (lest you be called a slut), which we’re all aware can help create a reaction in men that’s best described as “pathetic (think: Nice Guys®). The nympho fantasy is a way of turning the tables, making women the ones who have to beg this time. It’s telling that as society relaxed a little and made it seem not-humiliating for women to like sex, porn had to up the humiliation ante.
Indeed, one of the reasons I’ve found written erotica to be infinitely more stimulating that actual movies is that in a written story, you can actually find well-rounded, quasi-realistic characters, and that’s important to me, because I’m attracted to actual women, not “fucktoys.”
I love your comment Jeff, but this part was especially telling. You’re 100% right that the fictional characters on the page tend to be more “real” seeming than the real women in porn videos. What does that say about how much mainstream porn degrades women’s basic humanity? (Well, everyone’s in this case, since the men don’t seem like human either, just robots with two functions: be assholes and hump.)
As someone who has consumed his share of porn, I would like dearly to believe this, but I have my doubts. I leave it to each individual man to determine for himself what exactly draws him to porn (although I do reserve the right to find some explanations more plausible than others), but in my case something more than an innocent, easily-disclaimable pursuit of the “erotic” seems to be operating. A big part of Jensen’s project, which I support, is collapsing the distinction between “good” and “bad” men, and while an avowedly pro-feminist male like myself might be troubled by even an accidental resemblance to the kind of guy who “really” gets off on woman-hating porn, the possibility of such hasn’t prevented me from consuming large quantities of the stuff just the same. If all it takes is me saying that I don’t “openly” seek the worst of the worst, who could ever call me a liar? While I appreciate you giving borderline cases like me the benefit of the doubt, I’m just as willing to be confronted by those who would hold me to a tougher standard.
Although it’s true that mainstream porn intersects with the erotic (almost trivially, as if by accident), it is more crucially about men fucking women, and its propagandistic triumph lies in its conditioning even us “good” guys to conflate the latter (men fucking women) with the former (the erotic itself). The bulk of pornography posits a dreamt-of world in which access to women’s bodies is simply there for the asking, and it’s pure self-flattery for me to entertain the idea that it’s simply a matter of blocking out the bad parts, let alone expect others to uncritically accept such an argument. Not that you would let me off the hook that easily, but I think it’s important not to encourage the sort of special pleading that would-be “allies” often use to avoid being called on their shit.
Imani I don’t think you could accurately say that I was ever “drawn into porn”, it was more of a deliberate leap on my part, starting at age 6 or so, produced by a sincere desire to see lots of naked women.
Porn exists for masturbation, plain and simple. Aside from academic studies, and the occasional “let’s put on a porno and eat popcorn” party, people don’t watch porn for non-mastubatory purposes. I think we could safely say that 99% of porn consumption is directly related to masturbation, because let’s face it, porn is tremendously boring from any other context.
As for masculinity, I’m all in favor of demolishing the concept. The bad stuff is, well bad, and the good attributes ascribed to masculinity are hardly restricted to men, as has been pointed out by dozens of other people here.
The problem with saying that is people who will confuse a desire to eradicate the social construct “masculinity” with eleminating the actual male sex.
Men on the right apparently live in a state of constant pants wetting terror of something bad happening to their penis, they will take any opportunity they can find to scream their castration-fear induced rage, and proposing an end to masculinity is really going to trigger that. Sounds like fun, actually, I always like watching the right wing talking heads grab their crotches protectively…..
I find it puzzling that you see Jensen as ignoring the existence of men who “try to concentrate on the fucking, and less on the hate.” I don’t have the book handy at the moment, so can’t cite pages, but for instance, I know that at one point he draws a distinction between men for whom the misogyny is the attraction, and men for whom it clearly *does not impede* their arousal and orgasm. (And that’s true whether or not they’re in some sense trying to screen it out.) If a man is even capable of watching a woman be humiliated and getting off — if such images do not immediately cause him to go limp and feel really depressed, rather than aroused — then the misogyny is already running pretty deep there, and the getting off can only reinforce it.
So I don’t think it’s fair to say that Jensen ignores these differences, but rather that he is disinclined to let men in the “not actually *seeking* the misogyny” camp get very far off the hook at all.
I haven’t read Jensen, so all I’m going on are the descriptions of his project, but I’m skeptical if I understand it correctly. You can’t ‘kill off’ a specific gender construction. They don’t die - sadly, perhaps, or perhaps not - they evolve over time. That is documentable - just as different notions of what it has “meant” to be a woman - or to be acceptably feminine - have changed over time (with great wild swings, easy to thrill undergraduate audiences with - the sexually insatiable women of Shakespeare’s world to the frigid non-orgasmic women of late Victorian imagining), so have popular notions of what it has “meant” to be a man - or to be acceptably masculine for that time and place.
Besides the slippery terminology that is unfamiliar to most outside academia (maleness =/ masculinity), there is the difficult jargon laden world of studies that point out that there are at any one time several versions of masculinity (or femininity) to choose among, mostly divisible along the obvious lines of race and class, but also region and ethnicity.
Which version of masculinity is Jensen trying to ‘kill off’? And why?
The two versions that get the most public criticism these days are the working class white male/urban lower class black male versions. Those versions have already been culturally isolated and those men increasingly cut off from socially sanctioned access to the traditionally powerful and appealing words associated with positive maleness - bravery, honor, nobility, courage - and left with only the nasty baggage. Lots of reckless violence to no particular purpose.
With lots of victims, especially women and children.
From the review, it sounds a lot like Jensen is part of that pile on. Not that the violence doesn’t need criticism and defusing and refocusing. But I’m not sure that violent porn is so much a cause as a symptom.
The bulk of pornography posits a dreamt-of world in which access to women’s bodies is simply there for the asking, and it’s pure self-flattery for me to entertain the idea that it’s simply a matter of blocking out the bad parts, let alone expect others to uncritically accept such an argument.
What if it’s not an ‘argument’, or even exactly self-flattery (though much of it includes flattery), so much as it’s just fantasy pleasure? (Which admittedly has a whole bunch of misogyny admixed.)
The whole concept of ‘facials’ is, indeed, stupid, and an example of the aforementioned self-flattery, and misogyny. Who is actually into having semen all over their face? Very few people, I bet.
I’m not sure why eradicating masculinity offends Courtney, but I can’t help but think maybe she’s confusing it with eradicating maleness?
This confuses me as well. Frankly, this plan sounds threatening to me as well. What is ‘masculinity’ to you, if not a form of maleness? Just a sense of machismo? A tendency to be agressive and competitive? A desire to be dominant over the ‘feminine’?
What is the ‘masculine’ to you, so I have an idea of what is to be eliminated? And why not, instead, try to get the ‘masculine’ to change into something less pathological, rather than straight-up killing it?
This notion that the penis has no connection to the mind is just denial.
It’s not possible to be turned on sexually by an image your mind does not find appealing in some way. It may not be a conscious attraction but it is there. Just ‘cause you don’t know about your issues doesn’t mean you don’t got issues.
Even if masculinity is somehow morphed into something less pathological, something that embraces more positive qualities, there is still a problem.
No matter what it means, there is one thing about masculinity that never changes: it is the opposite of “femininity.” If you say masculinity means X, then it necessarily follows that femininity is not X. Whether X is a good quality or bad quality does not matter.
So, masculinity and femininity are oppposites. Why is that a problem, exactly?
Personally I think theres a time for masculinity, and a time for femininity. Desiring to eradicate either isn’t going to do much good. And taking either to its stereotypical extreme is unhealthy.
As for the porno thing, does this exist in gay porn too? You know, is there one “submissive” guy or whatever thats humiliated?
Oh, and the pic at the top reminded me of one of the most hilarious 1960s PSAs I’ve ever seen.
PERVERSION FOR PROFIT!
Well, gee, all of this an no mention of how much this sounds like Stoltenberg’s, “Refusing to Be a Man?”
Granted the link to Courtney Martin’s review is borked at this time, but Stoltenberg’s position (from memory) was that manhood was not just a state of biological being, but a constant struggle for dorminance, and that refusing to engage in that struggle marks one as “not a man” in our dominant culture. Rejecting male privilege means accepting the risk that comes with the loss of status.
atheist: Well, one objection is that for many of us, our experience and our desires don’t fit neatly into such restrictive binaries.
Thank you, Jeff.
Both men and women can get off, if that’s really the goal, using nothing but their own bodies–ask any teenager.
Fantasy is fantasy, and one’s not automatically a monster for getting off to a violent scene in one’s head (if they’re not doing anything to anyone else). But if something violent or demeaning was usually what did it for me, I’d be pretty worried about myself and want to know why. (This is about ME, not picking on anyone else).
As things stand now, it’s so normalized that people who don’t think much about anything just shrug, accept the misogyny as status quo and pat themselves on the back because they don’t really DO that shit to real people (even as they’re fantasizing about it when they have sex with a real person). I’m not worried about those people who actually DO think about why something turns them on.
I agree that masculinity and femininity as constructed sex roles should be thrown out. They’re not useful to individuals at all, unless you like being shoved into a box and told to stay there.
Please, let’s stop calling the glorification of tyranny (Might is right!) and bigotry against women and girls “masculinity.” Please.
I agree that we’re way too “polite” when it comes to the sexualization of violent hate in the media, especially porn (We can condemn film fiction like Birth of a Nation and not this?). Mainstream porn exploits the awesome power of sex to fuel violent hate. However, unlike religion or other forces vulnerable to exploitation, sexuality is a biological tour de force. These images that document actual behavior–not “fantasy”–are designed to provoke strong emotional reactions. We’re all biologically wired to be aroused by images of nudity and sex, so any exposure will warp you. Combine that with masturbatory conditioning and you’ve got the ultimate indoctrination device.
You’re 100% right that the fictional characters on the page tend to be more “real” seeming than the real women in porn videos. What does that say about how much mainstream porn degrades women’s basic humanity? (Well, everyone’s in this case, since the men don’t seem like human either, just robots with two functions: be assholes and hump.)
You’re overanalyzing. It’s basic economics and math.
The average (story-style, not just all-sex) porn movie runs, what, just over an hour? Say 75 minutes. In that 75 minutes there will be, on average, say 6 sex scenes (at least that’s what I recall from the days when I watched it). That’s 12.5 minutes to do the sex scene and set up the bare minimum of plot. That’s not a huge amount of time for character development. More or more complicated sex scenes leaves, of course, even less time.
Everyone has to be a sex machine because that’s all they have time for.
They do make films that run longer and take the time to do character development and have something of a plot, but as those films actually start costing real money to make there are a lot fewer of them. As a result most porn ends up being the mindless compilation of sex scenes.
Something written has the luxury of having more time to spend on the non-sex stuff because the sex itself takes up less time than it does on screen. “He worked his magic with his tongue for a few minutes.” takes a few seconds to write and a second to read while it would take, well, several minutes to see on film and a lot longer than that to shoot (resetting cameras and lights, retakes because something went wrong, yadda yadda).
A writer therefore has the luxury of being able to do more.
atheist: Well, one objection is that for many of us, our experience and our desires don’t fit neatly into such restrictive binaries.
Right, but the argument wasn’t “I refuse to participate in masculinity because it’s too restrictive”, the argument was, “Masculinity should be eradicated”. These two positions seem very different to me.
It’s been noted here and elsewhere that the explosion of free porn available through the Internet has forced professional pornographers to more and more “X-treme” levels to distingush themselves in the market place. As a 39-year-old straight guy who hasn’t gotten tired of looking at and masturbating to photos of women happy to pose naked, it’s been all-too-easy to avoid the degrading drift of what is apparently considered “mainstream porn,” and when I’m exposed to it (either by accident or in sociological critique), I don’t feel a lot of ownership of it.
Nevertheless, I still have enough residual shame of sex that I don’t discuss my porn consumption with my male friends, but if I did I’d contribute to a (re-)construction of masculinity by asserting that “real men don’t pay for porn.” There’s simply too much amateur porn for free to bother supporting an industry that needs to debase its participants (producers and consumers) to stay in the black.
I don’t have a lot of exposure to “kids these days,” but I’m as skeptical of anedotal evidence of teenage boys demanding facials as I was of earlier reports of the widespread trend of “rainbow parties.” I do, however, think everyone suffers from American society’s dreadful neglect of sexual education, which wasn’t any better 25 years ago before “Girls Gone Wild” and bukkake.com. As long as we’re afraid to tell our children the truth about sex, they’ll take any information they can get.
Any helpful reclamation of the concept of “masculinity” would include sexual education that isn’t just about how to prevent (or initiate) pregnancy and to avoid disease, but also (as Amanda has written previously) how to have fun. Because it is, for everyone.
Yup. It’s not for lack of trying to find it. It’s just.not.there.
From that base, it’s impossible not to follow that man and woman are opposites, and from there arises oppositional sexism.
Amanda, I’m sorry, I respectfully disagree with you. You are suggesting that attributes which may be classified as ‘bad’ are all that comprise the construct of masculinity, and that other ‘good’ attributes may deconstructed to show how they reinforce the prior ‘bad’ attributes, or are construct neutral. The constructs are far more complex and pervasive then this. The classification of attributes as good or bad are always a response to social-political shifts - at a time of war, violence and aggression are considered culturally ‘good’; after wars stability and nurturing are ‘good’.
You are conflating the economic and political system of patriarchy with the social construct of masculinity. While certainly they influence one another there is no reason to believe that one requires the other to exist. Patriarchy can easily exist with a significantly reduced definition of masculinity - one which say only encompasses peers of a realm. Masculinity may survive outside of a particular power structure as simply a series of cultural attributes - a linguistic signifier.
My point remains that it is the attributes that need reenforcement and criticism, not the construct. I do not believe, as some have suggested, that Masculinity needs to be reclaimed; rather, that it, and Femininity, need to be reduced as prominent constructs. Elimination of these constructs is nearly impossible, due to strong socio-linguistic forces; however, by reducing the import of the constructs we may increase the value of the ‘good’ attributes across culture as a whole. By simply saying masculinity is bad we arrive at a point of contention as to what masculinity is comprised of. By stating that de-humanization is bad we make a more universal statement.
But, on some level we are “opposites”, and it’s unavoidable. To me, the problem is when someone decides that opposites must fight, and one must dominate.
What is the ‘masculine’ to you, so I have an idea of what is to be eliminated? And why not, instead, try to get the ‘masculine’ to change into something less pathological, rather than straight-up killing it?
Atheist, the idea that what’s “masculine” is opposite to what’s “feminine” needs to die. It’s only purpose is to keep everyone insecure to make them more pliable to those in power.
Unless you’re talking about what one body can do as opposed to another (like bear a child or father one) there’s just no damned reason to say any particular attribute is “masculine” or “feminine”. Men and women both have strength (or not), both are self-reliant (or not), both have integrity (or not), etc.
Also, if sex roles were really so binary, transsexuals would be applauded for knowing their true selves. Instead they (often) get a lot of crap. This implies that it’s less about there really being a difference between the sexes’ brains (as far as society’s concerned) and more about keeping everybody in neat little compartments because they’re easier to control that way.
Sex roles are prescriptive, not descriptive. They’re not really describing the way the sexes are–they’re telling people of both sexes what they must be to be a true man or woman.
Dammit. I meant to say “if the sexes and their emotional attributes were really so different”. Sex roles are binary, that’s their whole reason for existing.
Interesting. If you think about it, that is also a summation of the dynamic faced by people trying to live a pure Christian ethic. Most of life is a struggle, either for yourself or for your social group. Pure Christianity implies walking away from a position of strength and privilege and dealing with all others as equals.I’m not making any particular point, nor do I hold a brief for Christianity. I merely find the parallel interesting.
atheist: But masculinity in regards to the dominant culture is normative and prescriptive to such an extend that I think there is serious doubt as to whether one can have masculinity in any form that would be recognized as such today, and the freedom to refuse to participate in it without social consequences.
If you present yourself as a man, you have two choices. Engage in masculinity or risk being identified as “queer” and therefore become a legitimate target for discrimination, harassment and violence. Masculinity isn’t some fashion like Disco that you can try on for a decade and then move on the next. It is central for defining patterns of dominance.
Remove those patterns of dominance and what do you have? Little more that a set of vague platitudes.
steve: I draw a different lesson from socio-linguistics. Not too long ago, the second-person pronoun in English was a major vehicle for expressing class dominance. If I choose to address thy arguments using the thou pronoun form, I would imply that thou art in a significantly lower class position compared to me, and I could address thee as if one was a servant or subordinate.
As it is, both the language and the class divisions that the language emphasized have changed over time, such that the t-v distinction in English has become archaic.
As culture changes, so does language. But I think Stolternberg’s point and I suspect Jensen’s is that masculinity and gender liberation are mutually incompatible with each other as compasses for behavior, because participation in oppressive norms of behavior are necessary if one is going to be accepted as “masculine” in the dominant culture.
No matter what it means, there is one thing about masculinity that never changes: it is the opposite of “femininity.” If you say masculinity means X, then it necessarily follows that femininity is not X. Whether X is a good quality or bad quality does not matter.
I would argue pretty strongly that this isn’t the case. In fact I think a strong case has been made that the idea of masculinity as the opposite of femininity is itself a very modern construct.
In Europe and its western colonies (this is the world I know best and I cannot speak to Asian or African norms here), manhood (masculinity is itself a very modern word and concept) was culturally and socially constructed as the opposite of *childhood* and not of womanhood until almost the end of the 18th century.
Women and men weren’t thought of as opposites or even as binary pairs. In the west, anyway, they tended to be thought of as entirely different life forms. (That’s part of where one of the basic assertions of feminism comes from - insisting that women *are* human and not something weird and not quite the same comes from combatting this idea that women truly aren’t human in a world where man=human.)
It isn’t an exact analogy by any means - but think of mules. A mare (female horse) can give birth to more horses - with stallion sires - or mules - with donkey sires. Mules and Horses aren’t the opposite of each other - they are just really, really different, despite the shared bloodlines.
I’m noticing that many of the posters who identify as male seem (to me) very nervous about the idea of “ending masculinity”.
I can’t see a woman (who’s already posting on feminist blogs) being upset about losing “femininity” as a construct. In fact, most feminist women I know define “feminine” for themselves as “whatever the hell I feel like doing”, unless they’re deliberately putting the word “feminine” in quotes and talking about the sex role definition that’s pushed on us.
I wonder if it’s internalized misogyny on our part (the “feminine” as inferior, so why not get rid of it). Or maybe it would feel threatening if men were saying, “We need to get rid of femininity, it’s useless.” (Also, it’s hard to distinguish between what’s constructed and what’s instrinsic when they’re all lumped together under “feminine”).
Just curious. Do those who identify as male think they’d be losing anything if they just said, “Masculine means ME because I’m a guy; now bug off, I’m late for my needlepoint class”? It seems if one’s already reading a feminist blog, that should kind of be the whole point.
If you’re saying people should be judged and treated as individuals based on who they are rather than what set of chromosomes they have, then I don’t have a problem with what you’re saying.
I think it really depends on what you mean by “market”. I don’t think anyone else here has started posting links to their favorite non-degrading porn, so I’m not going to break the seal, but a lot of amateur porn is traded by the people who make it, not for any profit other than exhibitionism, the validation of people telling them they’re hot, or in return for other porn. I doubt there’s any way to tell to what extent this complements or replaces industrial porn production. As well you should. If there’s one place in which we let our guard down and honestly seek what we want, it’s in porn–hence the usually-hidden racism so ingrained in our culture is right up front in porn. Despite that, porn viewers, especially those getting it for free, are very forgiving–it’s not that they want to see hate and violence, it’s that they’re pretty good at ignoring it if it’s not what they want to be seeing. The degree to which it affects the viewer regardless of this filtering process is, it seems, Jensen’s main point.Amanda, I’m sorry, I respectfully disagree with you. You are suggesting that attributes which may be classified as ‘bad’ are all that comprise the construct of masculinity, and that other ‘good’ attributes may deconstructed to show how they reinforce the prior ‘bad’ attributes, or are construct neutral.
Not really. I accept that masculinity used to be a concept that justified male superiority by attributing all these good qualities to men (and saying women don’t have them). But the feminist revolution has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that was is deemed “masculine” is largely Not Female, and as women begin to claim good masculine traits as human traits that women can have, those traits drop away from masculinity. Even though, for instance, a lot of people demand masculinity to be an attribute in a President, it’s not a very good kind of masculinity. Bush’s masculinity was established by his beer-drinking immature jovial nature, his asshole tendency to give people shallow nicknames, and his willingness to replace a general bullying attitude for the more traditional (and used-to-be masculine) attributes of responsible diplomacy.
So, masculinity and femininity are oppposites. Why is that a problem, exactly?
Simple. Say we define something as “masculine”, like participation in sports. In order to preserve the construct, we must oppress women, and deny them the right to play sports. One or the other has to go, the construct or women’s rights. I’m for the construct going.
“Bush’s masculinity was established by his beer-drinking immature jovial nature, his asshole tendency to give people shallow nicknames, and his willingness to replace a general bullying attitude for the more traditional (and used-to-be masculine) attributes of responsible diplomacy.”
If that’s a working definition of today’s masculinity, good riddance - the sooner the better…
Also whether they’re ignoring their own hidden desires, maybe? “It’s not my fault–I can’t find “nice” porn so I have to watch this”? (Never even considering the wild idea of just NOT watching it, and instead getting off using their own brains for stimulation).
If it really grossed them out, they’d wouldn’t watch it–they’d say “Okay, ugh, forget this” and turn it off. If they CAN filter it out, what does that say?
industrial porn is not erotic, period. Watching five minutes of some aging bodybuilder’s ball bag sway back and forth as he pistons some pimply butted girl’s vagina is not stimulating.
By convention, the male lead must pull out and stroke his dong to climax because the schmuck consumer is reduced to stroking his dong to climax. Ejaculation also provides visual confirmation that this is a real hardcore film, and not some Skinemax simulation. I guess if you’ve never had sex, when you finally do you want to imitate the porn conventions, but they are porn conventions that have little relation to satisfying partner sex. Coming inside feels so good I have never wanted to pull out and stroke myself to release. I learned eons ago that coitus interruptus was not effective b