pro-sex; anti-porn.

1. when i was in high school, a bunch of my friends were self-proclaimed otakus. they participated in the weekly anime club, where they gathered to watch (gasp) anime; their media consumption was dominated by manga and anime. in this environment, it was only a matter of time before someone (or several someones) showed up at school with porn.

okay, so drawings of a sex scene seem pretty tame compared to the shit you find online these days but the depravity of these comic books was striking. i never actually read the one involving tentacle-rape, though i heard... more than i wanted... about it.

but what stood out to me the most was that a culture that was so repressed could produce such depraved pornography. where did this come from? i wondered.

this question went unanswered for until several years later when a student in my acting class did a scene from jekyll and hyde. after the scene the teacher waxed philosophical, as she was wont to do. in her monologue she mentioned how interesting it is that the victorian era was one of the most repressed eras in western history, and it produced so much depravity: jekyll and hyde, dracula, frankenstein, jack the ripper...

and a realized what now seems obvious (to me): if you repress such an essential aspect of humanity that completely, it still needs a way to express itself. But because you aren't allowing for natural expression it become pressurized, far more intense and volatile than normal. So when it does become manifest, it will often be far more extreme than it would be normally.


2. in the early 80s a group of feminists abandoned more concrete activism in favor of an argument: pro-sex or anti-porn? Pro-sex said sexual freedom is an important part to women's freedom; anti-porn argued that porn was the cornerstone of female oppression.

for my part the whole argument is like, why even bother? #canhazusefulfeminism?

okay, yes the cornerstone of porn has been male dominance over women, with physical and verbal abuse present in a vast majority of porn videos. but the pornography industry makes billions of dollars a year; today it's ubiquitous. We assume that all men over the age of 12 watch porn regularly (even if this isn't true) and that a not inconsequential proportion of women do so as well. Books have been published documenting the negative effects of watching porn, but it makes money so, just as this industry juggernaut was undaunted by the 80s sex wars, production hasn't flagged.

but what's most distinct about that production is the way it moves towards extremism. from a producer's point of view it only makes sense:  there are only so many times you can film two people having  normal sex, what most real life human beings engage in. to be able to keep producing more videos, you have to keep upping the stakes, upping the sensationalism. the result is often intense violence and degrading depictions of women as men exert power over them.

which people watch.


3. while not entirely responsible (capitalism cannot be let off the hook) american culture's repressive attitudes about sex contributes to this.

okay, yes, i hear the protests: we talk about sex all the time. porn is becoming mainstream. sex is everywhere: on tv, in books, on the billboards. but this is a commodification of sex, meanwhile a good percentage of this country does not have access to birth-control because there is this group of people with considerable lobbying power who believe that abstinence works.

the contradiction is absurd: you are bombarded with sexual imagery from the first minute you're old enough to actually process what's on the tv, and then you are told: "this is bad, don't do it" (some terms and conditions may apply... like being married)

the best thing that annie sprinkle ever said (imo) was her indictment that we live in a sex-negative society and that this ultimately damages everyone because we do not have space to develop sexual identities independent of things like... say, violent tentacle porn. but you know what, guys? hey guys! newsflash! human beings have been having sex since human beings existed. and we were a lot less fucked up about it before we founded a religion that declared sex the "original sin".

so really, those 80s feminists got it wrong: it's not a question of pro-sex OR anti-porn. Ultimately these are the same thing: porn is a phenomenon fed by the sex-negatives attitudes of our society which in turn feeds the attitude, and so on and so forth in an eternal feedback loop. Only once we as a culture (not we, as feminists or we, as any other faction but we, as a nation) acknowledge this can we actually begin to change the way we treat ourselves and those around us and learn to respect this basic aspect of humanity.

lock and key: the lock

“A key that opens all locks is an awesome key, but a lock that all keys open is a shitty lock.”

the lock

if something is compared to a lock it is implicit that it is protecting something. And if something is protected then it must need to be protected, which is to say it is desirable; it is a commodity. To say that a woman’s vagina is a lock is to say that it is “protecting” her sexuality, which, we are taught, is a commodity that is only supposed to “open to” one man. So in the metaphor, the lock is shitty because it not “protecting” the commodity (her virginity/sexuality) from other men.

this idea does a number of things. For one it completely denies women’s right to their sexuality; it is a commodity that belongs to men or a man. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, really. There are few things that our culture excels at more than propagating the myth that women are not sexual (except inasmuch as they exist to please men). According to this concept, a woman’s sexuality is locked away except when the one man who is “her key” wants it.

but if he wants another “lock” in the mean time and can get it… high five dude! You tap that ass!

of course the whole concept is unquestionably male in origin: women don’t need “protecting” from other men (rape being the obvious pit-fall but in the interest of time I will leave that for another post). We don’t need to “lock” ourselves up to keep men “out”; being that we are autonomous individuals (in theory at any rate) we are fully capable of choosing whom we want or don’t want. And we can make that decision based on a long list of criteria, in the same way a man can choose who he wants for a mate. (Of course choosing doesn’t always mean you get the one your go after.)

but the point is, a woman only needs “protecting” if she is the exclusive property of one man. This is an ancient concept, which can be traced back to basic evolutionary roots: the only way for a man to ensure the offspring is his is to “own” the woman. In today’s world, however, this is an obsolete, discriminatory practice, which could arguably be called a form a slavery.

harrassment.

i am a moderator on a dating website. every day i see dozens of women flagging men for catcall-y messages. these are not the sorts of flame messages i discuss in "men, women and rejection"; they are not explicitly hostile or hateful but they reveal a sexism that is perhaps more insidious.

some examples include [sic]:

"Didn't I tell you that I think you got a fatty down there?​"
"I bet you've heard it before, but you have great breasts! I'd love to see you naked! Do you want to fuck? :)"
"I'd stick it in your_butthole"


i did not blacklist these men. perhaps i should have, but i didn't.


when i first started this job, i firmly agreed with the dominant cultural attitude about sexual harassment: "get over it" "it's not worth getting upset" "you're on the internet; you need a thick skin". this was before i started doing research, before i began actively cultivating an awareness of sexual politics, gender relationships and, feminist ideologies about sexism.

now i am left with a conundrum:

if i were to remove every entitled son of a bitch who sends a woman a disrespectful message, i would have to blacklist somewhere in the area of 75% of the male users.

but telling the women to get over it is not the right answer either. how can i not stand up for women in this rampantly disrespectful environment? how can i feel okay about having let all three of those guys continue using the site when those messages clearly made women users uncomfortable? sure, it's hardly more disrespectful than the real world but here i have some power: i can decide who deserves the privilege of usership. and who doesn't.

and what does sexual harassment even mean online? if the third commenter doesn't follow up when the woman doesn't answer, can it be written off as an idle query? just a guy looking for fun. "boys will be boys" it's not threatening. she is using a dating website one purpose of which is to facilitate sex. anal sex is not inherently disrespectful or threatening.

should it be written off? or should i have blacklisted him for simply having the gall to say that in his first message?

and what about the women who are open to these sorts of things? plenty of people use the site who are looking for sex, women and men. and what about sexual conservatism in this country? i am much less likely to be offended if someone propositions me about a threesome or anal sex or anything, really than some of my friends because, even if i am not personally interested, i know there are others who are and i respect that.

and then there's a problem of connotation. i'm almost positive the man who wrote the second comment thought it was a compliment. but the woman who flagged him was offended.

how the hell is anyone supposed to navigate these waters?



ps. what about boob shots. should those be deleted? men's chest shots?

Men, Women & Rejection: An OKCupid Feedback Loop

In my time delving into the bowels of the online dating world, I have noticed a very disturbing trend in the interactions between heterosexual men and women. Two aspects, of a high rejection rate maintained by most women users and the anonymity and unaccountability of the Internet, work together to cultivate intense misogyny in the men of online dating.

Anyone who engages in online dating knows a few basic facts. Alice Paloma covers many of them in her post Original Self Summary but here’s a quick review: in general, demand for 21 - 35 year old women is far greater than supply. Many women receive dozens of messages a day, while men are lucky if they get one a week. As is the nature of the supply/demand dynamic, the women users can be very selective. This creates a “paradigm of rejection” and a power dynamic in which women have far higher status than men. Indeed, many women never respond to a first message; the rejection is implicit in the absence. In fact, according to one OKC employee, the most common form of rejection is “no reply”.

With such a low success rate, it's only a matter of time before even the most optimistic men (men who are looking for relationships, who read women's profiles and who send relevant messages) start to feel downtrodden and bitter. This can lead any combination of the following effects/results:

1.) The Form Letter

Many men draft one Form Letter and proceed to send it out to as many women as possible (as suggested in the post, "A Touch of Psychopathy'"). This turns online dating into a numbers game; the more women you contact the more likely someone will respond. However this approach has a major pitfall: most people can spot a form letter by the end of the first sentence and women, as we’ve already seen, can be very picky. Couple this with a near-empty profile (a result of the unconfirmed assumption that women won’t bother to read the profile) and many men never get a response. It becomes a feedback loop.

2.) The Profile Rant

In the year since I started trolling OKC’s Flagmod feature, I have seen several dozen examples in which men use the Self-Summary section of the profile to vent their frustrations at what their experiences with completely unreasonable expectations of certain OKC women users. (It is impossible for me to tell how many women fall into this trap of expectations.) The Profile Rant in and of itself is not necessarily bad; in fact often they hit the nail right on the head about women’s selectivity. The problem here is, although this usually starts with an honest, if exasperated attempt to educate the women users they have a strong tendency to devolve into misogyny.

3.) The Rejection Flame and/or The Flame War

You know that feeling when you just really want to cuss someone out for being a total asshole (or not) but you don’t cause then you’d be a huge fucking douchetard? Welcome to the Internet: where assholes (developmental age: six) can call each other names with complete impunity. Yes, in fact I have worked with six-year-olds and the only difference is the level of creativity and vulgarity.

Some examples of Rejection Flame include [sic]:

“dumb cunt”

“Ok, sorry you Nazi slut.”

“You stupid cunt go fuck yourself”

Obviously there are more and less extreme manifestations of this. In fact Alice's comment in "Original Self Summary" is a very apt summary of the attitudes of many women users which have helped create this paradigm: "I am hot and most men want to have sex with me.  It’s becoming quite boring.  I don’t plan on having sex with anyone that isn’t worth having sex with.  I can afford to be extremely picky." Miconian's response [“You aren't very smart, you aren't very interesting, and you certainly are not "hot" by any reasonable definition”] is a textbook case of Rejection Flame in which someone arbitrarily takes out his frustration on a complete stranger.

While most people just block the user and/or flag the message, in certain situations (read: when both parties are assholes, developmental age: six) Rejection Flame seeds a Flame War.

If you spend any amount of time on online forums or chatrooms you’ve encountered a Flame War or two (or two hundred). Due to the same environmental factors that enable Rejection Flame, complete strangers can and do get into vicious arguments and engage in behavior that they would never condone if they could be held accountable for their actions. I have no way of knowing whether these men learned misogyny from rejection or if their latent or disguised sexism is merely revealed by these moments of supreme frustration. Most likely it is some of both. But nevertheless, this climate provides a window into a particular manifestation of male misogyny.

Because I see many conversations between many users I am able to discern these patterns but I’ll conjecture that most people are unaware of how endemic this dynamic is to OKCupid. My hope is that, once more people know about this, we can challenge this paradigm. To be clear, I am not blaming one gender or the other. These observable trends quickly develop into feedback loops and in order to break them we have to change the way both men and women conduct themselves online. I’m not saying this will be easy but at the very least we may start a dialogue and in my experience, the best way to change anything is to get people talking about it.

Disclaimers:

I don’t know if these models show up on other dating sites but the systemic forces of the Internet are basically constant so my hypothesis is yes.

This is an examination of specifically hetero-normative dynamics based on trends, not statistics.

Men are not the only users who exhibit these behaviors, although the way it manifests in women users tends to be slightly different. But this is a separate issue for a separate essay.