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Posts categoriezed as sexuality

I say toenails; you say battleground of cultural warfare. Potato, potahto.

I say toenails; you say battleground of cultural warfare. Potato, potahto. published on 1 Comment on I say toenails; you say battleground of cultural warfare. Potato, potahto.

Another example of why we must never be without Jon Stewart:

Sigh.

I would just leave it there, but there are a few elements to this that managed to slip by un-skewered in Stewart’s commentary:

  1. If the son had been a daughter and photo showed the two of them playing with G.I. Joe action figures or building a fort, I doubt anyone would have raised an eyebrow. Girls do get shamed for being interested in stereotypical “boy” things, but that seems to come a little later and from the direction of their peers rather than talking heads on television who think they are psychologically damaged. I grew up wearing a lot of my brothers’ hand-me-down clothes and there was no issue, but can’t imagine that would have been the case if our genders had been reversed.  
  2. Nail polish, like makeup and clothing styles, is not part of our biological legacy. It’s not as though two million years ago a female homo habilis crushed some berries and painted her nails a festive neon pink because her hormones told her to, and the practice became a phenotypic trait of females of the species. Every woman in the world could stop wearing nail polish tomorrow. Though honestly I’d prefer that to be the case with high heels.  
  3. There is no evidence that J. Crew creative director Jenna Lyons is forcing her son to wear toenail polish, in neon pink or any other color. Every time something like this comes up, people immediately start talking about how the parent of the gender-bending kid shouldn’t force him/her to fight a cultural battle for them. Fine, that’s true. Kids shouldn’t be made to pretend that they are advocating for cultural change that supports the ideology of their parents which they couldn’t possibly understand. But if a boy wants to wear toenail polish, then let him fucking wear toenail polish. And makeup. And a dress, if he feels like it. By the time he’s old enough that his friends start using peer pressure to invoke the cultural gender norms inflicted by their parents on him about what being a boy means (which, by the way, none of them will understand either), he’ll stop of his own accord.  Or maybe he won’t.  
  4. Following from that — who cares if he doesn’t? Maybe he is gay or trans. Maybe he’s a trans woman who happens to be a lipstick lesbian. Maybe he likes breaking the rules. Maybe he’s Eddie Izzard. Maybe he thinks his friends are being jerks and he wants to stand up to them. Maybe he just likes wearing toenail polish. Sure, we could point to example after example of men who liked stereotypically feminine things as children and then turned out “just fine”– aka, stereotypically straight. But that’s kinda missing the point that there’s nothing wrong with them if they don’t. 

 “This is a dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity,” psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow wrote in a FOXNews.com health column about the ad. 

This is as likely to happen as everybody deciding to give homosexuality a go if we stop literally and metaphorically beating the crap out of people for being gay. Which is, not. We couldn’t abandon all trappings of gender identify if we tried, and most people have no interest at all in trying. What they want is the ability to not have people like like Dr. Ablow calling them deranged if they do something contrary to traditional gender roles. Like a guy who wants to be a stay-at-home dad, doesn’t care for sports, and/or has opinions about fashion. Or a woman who works as an engineer, doesn’t want kids, and/or tears it up in Killzone 3. Or, god forbid, a boy who likes wearing pink toenail polish.

1,000 facepalms to Fox News for this idiocy, and 500 each to CNN, ABC, NBC, and whoever else for doing anything other than pointing and laughing at them for it.

Glenn Beck vs. lady parts

Glenn Beck vs. lady parts published on 1 Comment on Glenn Beck vs. lady parts
When a man and a woman love each other very
much, her happy pink ghost has grapes. Pretty sure
this is how many right-wingers understand reproduction

By the way…I’m a hooker who is planning on having 400 abortions. There, I’ve outed myself. Whew! It feels good to get that off my chest. Or out of my womb. Or something.

Because you see, I rely on Planned Parenthood currently for reproductive services and have done so, off and on, for the past few years. And that’s the only kind of woman who would do such a thing.

There is no other reason that a normal, healthy person would need Planned Parenthood on a regular basis for something other than abortion, which can be seen in the other 97% of the pie chart on the left below. No sirree bob. None at all.

You can listen to the recording of Glenn Beck at the above link, but I wouldn’t recommend it as it might inspire spewing of your last meal. I don’t watch or listen to Beck normally and my opportunity to do so has decreased significantly now that his show on Fox has been canceled, but he does still have a nationally syndicated radio show that runs for three hours daily, which is what that clip is from. Three hours a day is a lot of time to dispense complete bullshit, so it’s really not surprising that gems like this should come out of his mouth on a regular basis..accompanied, of course, by mockery of people like Lawrence O’Donnell for thinking about the effect that budget cuts for Planned Parenthood would have for women he knows who depend on it.

I can’t be one of those people who regularly dissect the nonsense of Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O’Reilly, because it almost literally pains me to listen to it. There’s something inside me that shrivels up and dies when I hear them, and it seems to be directly tied to the sensation I get when witnessing someone embarrassing or hurting himself. It’s really not pleasant. So if it’s ever important to know what they have to say (which is itself in doubt), I generally rely on transcripts. It’s just that with the quote above, I genuinely could not believe that Glenn Beck said those words without hearing them for myself. Beck is the guy who rambles on about conspiracies and imminent Armageddon. Limbaugh is the guy who says nasty things about women. That’s what I thought, anyway, but apparently I was wrong– that, or Beck’s branching out. Lucky us!

Between Beck and that guy on Fox and Friends who thinks you can get a pap smear at Walgreens, I sometimes wonder if the loudest conservative men have ever even met a woman.  Because honestly, they have this disturbing tendency of speaking about us as if we’re something they have only read of a children’s book.

It’s as if they’re trying to give Colbert material…

It’s as if they’re trying to give Colbert material… published on 1 Comment on It’s as if they’re trying to give Colbert material…

Colbert has been tweeting all sorts of non-factual statements about Kyl today. A sampling:

Jon Kyl calls the underside of his Senate seat: “The Booger Graveyard.” #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement

Jon Kyl sponsored S.410, which would ban happiness.#NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement

Jon Kyl has the world’s most extensive catalogue of snuff films.#NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement

Jon Kyl once ate a badger he hit with his car.#NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement

On being “gender atypical”

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I’ve written before about how LGBT issues are ultimately about gender role conformity in general, and Dan Savage posted on that topic today in relation to the It Gets Better Project:

Got this question last night at Cornell University… 

Cornell professor Ritch Savin-Williams said in the New York Times that he’s concerned that it’s not about gay youth, but about gender-atypical kids. Is the “It Gets Better” campaign too narrowly focused?

The kids who suffer the most from anti-gay bullying—the prime targets—are the gender-nonconforming kids, i.e. the sissies and the tomboys, the kids who can’t pass for straight. And some of the kids who can’t pass for straight are straight. Most kids who are gender nonconforming, or gender atypical, are lesbian, gay, bi, or trans, and the IGBP was created to reach out to these queer kids. But the messages at the IGBP are relevant to straight gender-atypical kids, and we know that straight-but-gender-nonconforming kids are watching the videos, commenting on them, taking hope from them, and contributing their own videos. But, yes, we have to address issues around gender—gender expectations and stereotypes—to truly address anti-gay bullying. We can learn to recognize rough gender norms without stigmatizing or punishing kids who depart from those norms. 

Homophobia doesn’t just punish people who are actually gay, bi, or trans. It punishes everyone who doesn’t match a traditional idea of what maleness and femaleness are.  I was a tree-climbing short-haired tomboy through most of elementary and middle school, and was called a dyke more times than I’d care to remember by the same straight guys who punished each other regularly for deviating from a rigid standard of machismo in the slightest. I feel sorry for them in retrospect, because they were victims of the same rigid, idiotic standards of gender that they inflicted on me.

Jen McCreight channels her 13-year-old self to reply to Savage:

I like boys, and I have a huuuuge crush on one who I think likes me back. But I’m a tomboy and I always have been. . .  And that’s why everyone thinks I’m a lesbian. I don’t care if people are gay, but the way they say the word hurts so much. They whisper it like I’m dirty or broken. Girls don’t like changing by me in gym class, even though I’m more concerned that my underwear is dorky than what they look like in their underwear. I know it’ll probably stop when I get a boyfriend (if that ever happens, sigh) but that just makes me feel worse, knowing that the kids who really are gay can’t hide like that and have to put up with this forever. But when I’m feeling down, I can watch the It Gets Better Project videos and know I’m not alone. So this big letter was to say “thank you.”

Getting fixed

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Essure is a form of female sterilization or “permanent birth control” that a lot of women are choosing these days over tubal ligation. It’s a simpler procedure that isn’t as invasive and doesn’t require as much recovery time. I think that’s great, and will probably be getting it myself within the next year or two. But I’m not so sure about a particular method of promoting it– making men even more scared of getting vasectomies. Okay, that’s not the intended effect of this video. The intent is to show in a funny way that “men and women have something in common– both want to avoid the knife.” And it describes the process of coming around to being willing to get a vasectomy as “manning up,” as in, maybe you can’t wait for your man to do it. Really?

Showing guys cringing in sympathetic pain while watching a surgical procedure and belittling them for not being enthusiastic about getting it themselves = hilarious!

First of all, not everyone who is interested in curtailing his or her baby-making abilities is in a relationship. Not for everyone is it a decision about which party is going to get the permanent birth control. And with those for which it is, is it really best to encourage the idea that birth control is the woman’s problem by default by making vasectomy seem even more scary and horrible? Because you know, that impression is already pretty firmly entrenched. The idea that it makes you less of a man to be infertile is also already well-established. And I don’t think the best way to fight that is by saying that the real way to be less of a man is to be unwilling to get vasectomized. Because, umm…that would mean that the male partners of women who get Essure who don’t get sterilized themselves are not real men.Yeah, let’s leave the whole “manliness” thing out of it.

Essure might be far less of an ordeal than a tubal ligation, but it still isn’t a picnic. It also requires going back to your doctor three months after the initial procedure to get confirmation which involves inserting dye into the uterus and getting x-rayed, which is the worst part according to accounts I’ve read. Both Essure and a vasectomy may be covered by insurance, but the total cost for the former looks to be twice as much or more.  And it’s entirely possible that a couple might opt to be as safe as possible and get themselves both sterilized.

So how about not promoting one solution by denigrating the other? Both are legitimate answers to a question being asked by certain subsets of the population– “I’m not big on this whole fertility thing (anymore). What’s the best way for me to end that?” We don’t have to make it easier for men to abdicate responsibility for birth control in general in order to embrace a new form of it for women. In my humble view, the more options there are and the easier they are for anybody to get/use, the better.

We’ve all got our own stuff

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Again on Colorlines (I’m really happy to have discovered that site), Thoi Lu discusses black male feminism:

In light of the recent 11-year-old Latina who was reportedly gang raped by 18 black men in Cleveland and news of Chris Brown’s continuing meltdowns, Texas, a few black male writers have stepped up to the plate to explicitly discuss their journey toward becoming feminists. Byron Hurt of The Root wrote last last week on “Why I am a Male Feminist,” which prompted G.D. of PostBourgie to also write candidly about the topic two days later. Hurt admitted that observing the way his father would invoke fear in his mother during arguments by virtue of his greater size influenced his own relationships with women. He fell into feminism accidentally; Hurt interviewed for a position with the Mentors in Violence Prevention Project, not knowing that it was designed to use the status of athletes to make gender violence socially unacceptable. After hearing how women protected themselves from sexual assault and rape, his conception of feminism radically changed:

Like most guys, I had bought into the stereotype that all feminists were white, lesbian, unattractive male bashers who hated all men… Not only does feminism give woman a voice, but it also clears the way for men to free themselves from the stranglehold of traditional masculinity. When we hurt the women in our lives, we hurt ourselves, and we hurt our community, too.

While Hurt’s father’s presence was inescapable, G.D. wrote, “mine was imperceptible.” He had an absent father figure and was raised by “black women who were fantastically smarter and more competent than I was.”  G.D. internalized how his mother always cautioned his twin sister to be responsible while in public, in a way he didn’t have to. Also, during a college summer, one of his female friends woke up in an empty dorm room in a bare bed and had to file a police report and get a rape kit, which was another situation he couldn’t fathom living through. At the least, however, he admits to his own ignorance:

I am routinely very, very dumb about this shit as a heterosexual dude — with all the tunnel vision and privilege that attends that location. The relationship those realities have to my blackness is a muddled one; sometimes they’re independent, sometimes they act in concert. But if growing up black and poor and male provided an unlikely bridge to anti-sexist thinking, so has feminism complicated the way I think about blackness and class.

Feminism as an ideology has a reputation for being a privilege of white women. They have been the ones who have generally been wealthier and more educated, the ones with the time and money to go off to university and take Women’s Studies courses and sit around discussing the patriarchy and learning to appreciate the value of a vagina. Black women were too busy working. They didn’t have time to do the kind of navel-gazing white women did in the 60’s (and still today) about the feminine mystique and the legitimacy of working outside the home, because they were already doing it. The issues they faced weren’t quite the same. So black women felt that their struggles were not being properly represented by a movement that purported to speak on behalf of Womankind. If in actuality it’s all about the interests of upper class white women, then we might as well just say so, but hopefully none of us actually want that to be the case. If we mean that, then being a feminist should be about representing the concerns of all women. If there is a single woman of any sort anywhere in the world who is being mistreated and her choices in life denied, we should all be feminists for her…shouldn’t we?

There are multiple dimensions to distribution of power in life, and it’s not surprising that one minority group should view one or more other minorities groups with oppressive eyes very similar to the ones with which they themselves are viewed. Hence, you get rich minorities looking down on the poor, white minorities looking down on minorities of different races, male minorities looking down on females, straight minorities looking down on non-straights, cisgender minorities looking down on transgenders, and various religious minorities looking down on each other and on non-believers. I’m sure there are more examples, but that’s a good representative sampling. I can see how if you’re anything but a white straight rich cisgender male, it would be easy to pick one or more minority groups to look down on order to get some sense of superiority. It’s not shocking at all that there are white feminist racists and homophobes, and blacks who are passionately concerned with racial equality but are themselves homophobic and/or misogynistic. Having your own struggle doesn’t automatically flip on some kind of empathy switch for other people’s struggles, as nice as that would be.

I don’t think I need to imply that men should speak for women in order to say that it’s an absolute pleasure to see/hear of them speaking up on our behalf. Often we’re not there to speak up for ourselves, and it has never made sense to me to think that it’s okay to make sexist/racist/homophobic/etc. comments just because someone who represents the group you’re talking about isn’t present. This post from from A Division By Zer0 makes the point that there are some men out there who think that rape is okay, provided you don’t call it “rape.” It’s sort of like murder, in that “murder” is the name for killing that is definitely wrong, and “rape” is the a name for a kind of sexual contact that is definitely wrong. But just as there are people who murder while considering it acceptable killing (for whatever reason), there are people who rape or would be willing to rape while considering it plain ol’ sex. The argument goes that by trivializing rape around such people, you are confirming in their minds that it is in fact trivial–giving them the impression that it’s normal to think the way they do, that there’s nothing wrong with it. The same is true of casual sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia. If the victims of these prejudices are the only ones to ever speak up in reaction to them, they will never be eliminated. That’s why we need feminist men, along with straight LGBT rights advocates, white racial equality advocates, and wealthy people who not only give to charity but don’t think of the poor as stupid, helpless, or otherwise inherently lesser.  

I realize how very kumbaya this sounds, but we all have to stand up for all of us. There’s just no other way.

Follow-up: New York Times responds to complaints about their reporting

Follow-up: New York Times responds to complaints about their reporting published on No Comments on Follow-up: New York Times responds to complaints about their reporting

…poorly:

The Times responded Wednesday evening to The Cutline: “Neighbors’ comments about the girl, which we reported in the story, seemed to reflect concern about what they saw as a lack of supervision that may have left her at risk,” said Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for the paper. “As for residents’ references to the accused having to ‘live with this for the rest of their lives,’ those are views we found in our reporting. They are not our reporter’s reactions, but the reactions of disbelief by townspeople over the news of a mass assault on a defenseless 11-year-old.” 

With all due respect, Ms. Ha, I think you kind of missed the point.

More Savage loving

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Conversation continues about interpretation of Dan Savage’s sexual ethics.  Savage himself responds to Lindsay Beyerstein thusly:

Terry and I wouldn’t describe ourselves as monogamous-apart-from-an-occassional because we wouldn’t—couldn’t—feel comfortable using the word “monogamous” in reference to ourselves, not even monogamous-with-an-asterisks, because technically we’re, you know, not. But we kindasorta hate the term non-monogamous because when a gay couple describes themselves as non-monogamous people—gay and straight—assume a degree of promiscuousness that 1. we wouldn’t be comfortable engaging in and 2. we’re not actually engaging in. People don’t make the same assumption about non-monogamous straight couples because it’s generally more difficult for straight people to get laid. That’s why we usually describe our loving, bill-paying, childrearing life partnership as “monogamish.” Mostly monogamous but stuff happens. Some other stuff. Sometimes. Not all the times. It’s a term that I’d like to popularize. Our monogamish relationship—and I suspect that we’re not the only monogamish couple out there—has allowed us to integrate “sexual fulfillment with the other good things in life” quite nicely, thanks.

On Big Think, Dueholm complains that Savage doesn’t hold up monogamy as an ideal.  He’s right– Savage doesn’t, because he clearly doesn’t think it is ideal.  He doesn’t say it’s something for which we all should strive, but if we fail it’s understandable.  He says that it isn’t necessarily something we should all strive for, period.  We should strive for what we want, and not everybody wants monogamy.

How not to represent rape: a report on a Texas travesty

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A horrible crime happened in Cleveland, Texas.  A small town just northeast of Houston, it has a population of only 9,000 people, but that apparently includes up to 18 boys and men who were willing to take part in the gang rape of an eleven year old girl.  I imagine that the fallout from this event will be extensive and the investigation will take quite some time (it began just after Thanksgiving of last year), but the coverage in the New York Times has already come under fire because of how it chose to portray the story.  The offending passages:

The case has rocked this East Texas community to its core and left many residents in the working-class neighborhood where the attack took place with unanswered questions. Among them is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?“It’s just destroyed our community,” said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.” . . .Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said. “Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record. “How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?”

After reading the article my first reaction was “Wow, blame the victim much?”  And I apparently wasn’t alone–  Jezebel, Feministing, and Slate all have commentaries about how the article appears to focus on how the men and boys in this community are going to suffer from this incident and what could have prompted them to behave in this way, up to and including the suggestion that the victim is actually to blame for what happened to her. It is of course worth being concerned about whether people who actually weren’t involved in the crime might have been accused unjustly, but that specific worry isn’t actually mentioned in the body of the article.  Nor are the obvious attempts by members of the community to find some way to pin responsibility for the rape on this young girl labeled for what they are– victim-blaming.  Libby Copeland wonders

How can the New York Times fail to frame these quotes properly, to point out the stunning cultural misogyny that allows a brutal gang rape to be reinterpreted as vigilante moral policing? To report these details bare, without context, puts the misogyny squarely in the voice of the Times.  The kindest reading of what makes people blame the victims of rape is fear. We don’t want to imagine that what happened to this 11-year-old could happen to us or to our daughters, so we rationalize that it couldn’t, that we are not like her. But there’s much more going on. There’s deep-seated fear of and disgust for women and female sexuality. We don’t have the same reaction to a boy getting beat up as we do to a girl getting raped; we don’t tend to wonder what the boy did to provoke the bully.Here’s the thing: Any attempt to gain emotional distance on rape by transferring just a tiny portion, just one percent, of the blame onto the victim is an absolute moral wrong. It subtracts from the agency of the individual doing the raping. He is completely culpable. It is his crime — or, in the case of 18 young men and boys, it is theirs.

Amanda Marcotte blames this strange story-telling on journalistic objectivity gone too far:

I was under the impression that gang raping children is generally assumed to be such a horrific crime that reporters don’t have to strike a studied neutral pose, as you would with more overtly controversial issues, but apparently not. I feel strongly there’s a missed opportunity here.  I grew up in a rural Texas town on the other end of the state, and have more than a passing familiarity with how common it is for these kinds of communities to be shockingly tolerant of gang rape.  I don’t think it’s radical to point out that victim-blaming and assailant-sympathizing in a community sends permission signals to would-be rapists and makes crimes like this likelier to occur.  This could have been an opportunity to write a story examining the relationship between victim-blaming attitudes and the rapes themselves, much in the way that the murder of James Byrd in nearby Jasper in 1998 became an occasion to look at how racism still thrives in the South and created the context for hate crimes.

I agree, but such a story wouldn’t have been less objective– it would have been more objective, because objectivity isn’t simply dutifully recording people’s opinions and representing them in print.  It requires actually telling the facts of the story, including the fact that blaming the victim is what your sources are doing.  The story pays almost no attention at all to what the girl who was attacked in this way might have experienced or how difficult it must be to survive it physically and emotionally, but instead discusses how men might have been “drawn into” attacking her and how this ordeal must be affecting them.  I’m not sure it’s possible to be excessively neutral or objective, but it’s certainly possible to write an article that gives a definite impression of sympathy for the perpetrators, and that’s what happened here.  Marcotte is willing to give the article’s author, James McKinley, the benefit of the doubt and assume that he had no intention of lending credence to Cleveland residents who saw fit to speculate on how the girl provoked her own victimization.  I would like to do so as well, but if that’s the case I’m still mystified as to why the piece was written in this way and these specific quotes used without comment.  That isn’t a “studied neutral pose;” it’s just bad and biased reporting.

ETA: I missed this sardonic comment by Mac Mclelland at Mother Jones.  Money quote:

This is the point at which, as the writer’s editor, I would send him an email. “Dear James,” it would say. “Thanks for getting this in! I have some concerns that we’ve only got quotes from people who are worried about the suspects (‘The arrests have left many wondering who will be taken into custody next’) and think the girl was asking for it, especially since, even if she actually begged for it, the fact that she is 11 makes the incident stupendously reprehensible (not to mention still illegal). We don’t want anyone wrongly thinking you are being lazy or thoughtless or misogynist! Please advise if literally no other kinds of quotes are available because every single person who lives in Cleveland, Texas, is a monster.” 

Dan Savage as sexual ethicist

Dan Savage as sexual ethicist published on 2 Comments on Dan Savage as sexual ethicist
As president?  Well, maybe not…but we could do
and have done a lot worse for that, too.

Lutheran pastor Benjamin Dueholm wrote an interesting and thorough article on this subject for Washington Monthly.  It’s definitely worth a read, though I disagree with some of his analysis.  So does Amanda Marcotte, who ripped into the article to some extent for sexist/heteoronormative bias, and Lindsay Beyerstein, who points out that Savage isn’t nearly as opposed to monogamy as he is generally portrayed.  It’s true; he isn’t– though he also doesn’t believe that everybody should be monogamous, or that people who cheat in a monogamous  relationship are necessarily the scum of the earth and should never be forgiven.

Dueholm’s careful description of Savage’s ethos points out that in relationships he emphasizes honesty, autonomy, reciprocity, and willingness to give, which I would characterize as a mature respect for one’s partner. Just as different things make different people happy, different relationships can flourish under varied conditions and one size definitely doesn’t fit all.  Savage’s willingness to acknowledge that and address individual relationships on their own terms is, I think, what has made and kept his column (and now podcast) so popular for so long.  If we as a country were going to appoint a sexual ethics czar, we could do a lot worse.