girls get in free.

"hey guys, you going to a club tonight? be sure you bring enough chicks with you; the bouncers might not let you in..."

the practice of letting girls in for free or at discount to encourage them to go to clubs is common place to say the least, a practical application of the idea that you can't have a good party if there isn't enough eye-candy to grind up against.

it is a curious act of reverse-discrimination, showing preference to women even though the only thing they did to earn it was to be born with two x chromosomes. but ultimately it is for the benefit of the guys who (according to cultural mythos) are all looking for some hot piece of ass to take home at the end of the night; no one likes a stag party (unless it's at a strip club) because there's no chance of getting lucky.

the problem is that it reinforces the deeply embedded idea that women are there for the sake of men, that if a dude goes to a club or party, it is his due to get that women be there for him. women get in free because the implication is that they'll be giving out much more...


this summer a friend informed me of a practice where club managers actually pay attractive twenty-something women to sit in the club, drink a bottle of top-shelf (on the house), and look like they're having a really fucking good time.

i know a lot of people will tell me this is not at all like prostitution; others will tell me that girls who pose topless and covered in a fine mist in diesel jeans ads are also not like prostitutes.

they're right: prostitutes make a lot more money.

but to me, this all looks like sex-work. in each case, women are being paid to do something because they are "sexy". the message sent is: "dudes, you might get laid" ... that no money is exchanged for the actual sex act does not change the essence of it.

that said, i for one, can't say i would turn down a paying gig in which i sit on my butt, get drunk and basically have an awesome fucking time... so go figure.

make-up.

spring 2012, living room. i was on my computer on the couch, one of my housemates (housemate a) was at the table, also on a computer. this is after all the age we living, everyone always attached to one device or another. but i digress:

enter the third housemate (housemate b) and a friend. this friend was chronically unemployed and she was talking about an interview she'd gone on the week before for a temp position. she was explaining how, as someone who's been a "full-time" temp for years, she is familiar with the process and the rules and, most importantly, the dress. in other words, she had a wardrobe full of business formal-wear. but the woman who interviewed her specifically commented on what she was wearing, suggesting that there was something... wrong with it.

she walked out the interview room deeply confused. what was wrong with what she was wearing? she could not figure it out.

at this point, housemate a spoke up. "she wants you to wear make-up," she explained; the critique had been code.

"so she wants you to look like a hooker?" asked housemate b.

"no," housemate a demurred before going on to elaborate about standards of beauty and something about women of a certain age.


i never said anything. but listening as they discussed the apparent arbitrariness of the situation, the implications were obvious to me:

a man would never in a million years be obliquely criticized for not wearing make-up. the mere idea is laughably absurd. and yet the expectation that women wear make-up is so deeply ingrained that she can lose serious points in a job interview for not adequately adhering to the standard

that this is a form of discrimination is irrefutable, but it's far subtler than many forms of discrimination women experience on the workforce. it would be near impossible to legislate against it (especially considering our current congress' inability to legislate anything). we live in a world where we learn that women are to be looked at so of course it's only natural that women be properly beautiful in the in the office. never mind that what she looks like has no impact on how well she does her job (except perhaps inasmuch as men harass her for being too attractive or not attractive enough; it's a lose-lose situation)

but if she denies the cult of beauty she is dying a cornerstone of cultural existence in the united states. and in a capitalist society that makes billions selling women the "essence of beauty" we just can't have that, can we.

"i like masculine men"

We live in a world of opposites, a world that defines X as the exclusion of everything that is Y, and vice versa. White is “not black”. On is “not off”. This paradigm allows no room for flow or mutability or change. To be one thing is to necessarily reject everything contained by it’s “opposite”.

This is the basis upon which the masculine-feminine dichotomy rests.

So what does it mean to be “feminine” or “masculine” (read: in the US/the Western World)? Typical feminine qualities include sensitive, submissive, gentle, supportive, delicate, soft, weak. Masculine qualities are things like aggression, dominance, insensitivity, ambition, hardness, physical fitness, strength, power.

Looking at these lists, they appear fairly mutually exclusive. The problem is that human beings are not distinct programs; we are not lists. We are full of contradictions and quirks and things that just do not make sense. You cannot contain a human being within “ons” and “offs”.

So even though submissive and dominant are defined as opposites it is completely possible that an individual be both. Perhaps not at the same time, sure, but both these qualities can be present in the same personality without that person being a paradox.

Or maybe that’s the point. We are paradoxes; we can be both delicate and powerful, both empathetic and insensitive, both powerful and weak.

But.

As a culture (the US), we blanket deny this mutability. What else spawned the “crisis of masculinity” but 70s feminist taking on “masculine” traits? Feminists are, to this day, shamed for not being “feminine” enough, while men become “pussies” and “bitches” and “gay” for not beating their chests loudly enough.

This is ultimately hurtful for everyone. How can you possibly be emotionally healthy if, by virtue of gender, you are required to deny one half of the emotional spectrum? How can you be a full, rounded, interesting, productive human being if you are constantly policing yourself for signs that you might be behaving like the wrong sex?

It is absurd that we socialize our children so thoroughly that many people are not even aware of this paradigm of opposites, rather than teaching them that sometimes you need to be strong but other times it’s okay to cry. We are finally working to break down the laws that told us pink/purple is a girl’s color, and blue a boy’s, but we are not looking at the paradigm that spawned these rules. Six states have legalized gay marriage, but even in those that haven’t more and more people are learning to respect the blurriness that is inherent in identity, no matter what your gender or whom you choose to have sex with.

But this shift cannot be completed until we acknowledge that men sometimes feel weak, while women sometime feel strong; that women can be dominant without being safely packaged within the “dominatrix” trop, and men can be gentle, supportive friends and lovers. Only when we have embraced this truth, with the war truly be won.

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?

aggression and male powerlessness before a "sexual" woman.

in May I was on a fourth or fifth date with a guy I’d been casually seeing for a few months (we didn’t hang out very often due to the fact that he lived in Jersey, an hour away on NJ Transit, which suited me and my desires for dating perfectly). We’d both had a few drinks by this point and the conversation turned toward feminism (on which I’d just started doing some really in-depth research in the last month or so), and my views on what I’d been calling “Closet Sexism” in Western society for years and would periodically rail against, despite my lack of vocabulary and rounded out knowledge.

            However, just a few days earlier I had started reading a book by second-wave feminist Susan Douglas in which she attacks that same idea (she calls it “Enlightened Sexism”) and so it was a bit of an inevitability that the topic would come up.

            My date listened to my arguments quite respectfully, asked a few questions, and challenged some of my ideas, which I sometimes had to concede due to lack of knowledge or to avoid getting into any serious fight. It was altogether a very egalitarian discussion, until we got to the issue of jobs. He pointed out that more women are employed than men (in retrospect I’m sorry I didn’t site this, and ask if there was a more legitimate reason for this fall in male employment than laziness.) Instead I pointed out that in 2009 the top five jobs for women were secretaries, registered nurses, elementary & middle school teachers, cashiers, and retail sales persons.

            It was at this point that my date said something that left me speechless. He suggested that when a woman enters a group of men, the dynamic changes and the men start competing for the woman sexually, which undermines the productivity of the group.

            Although it is true that adding a member of the opposite sex to a previously single-sex situation does change the dynamic, I was furious at the idea that this should be an excuse— to suggest that women should be excluded from jobs because men cannot control themselves is deeply insulting to me. We are all adults here and yes we all have a sex drive (to some degree or another) but this is the 21st century. We have put people on the moon, for fuck's sake. I'm sorry you're horny, deal with it.
            Additionally, it implicitly legitimizes sexual harassment in the workplace. "Boys will be boys, right? They can't help themselves when in the presence of a woman, poor dears; they're just powerless."
            I sputtered and shouted about this for several minutes but we were seeing a show and had to leave so I stopped in the bathroom while he went outside to smoke. When I rejoined him, I apologized for my outburst, for the possibility that I might have come on too strong.

            This brings me to my punch line in the story: in spite of what I saw (and still see) as my legitimate outrage, I felt compelled to apologize for perhaps being too aggressive. I can’t tell you when I learned that in our society an “aggressive” woman (one who exhibits strong emotions of any sort) is quickly labeled a “bitch” but the conditioning is there; even while I hate getting called “sweet” or any variation on that theme, I could not escape the conditioning that said that such an outburst was not kosher, for which I must therefore apologize.

sex-negative.

in the united states we have a largely unquestioned assumption that sex is bad, "dirty." it is largely taken for granted that teenagers who have sex will be negatively affected by it. (see: "abstinence", meaning self-restraint or self-denial, a word used both for sex and for drugs) this is both ridiculous and true. (like most things human there is a messiness and a tendency towards contradiction which logic can't really successfully reconcile)

it is ridiculous because genetically, evolutionarily speaking, when children hit puberty their bodies are preparing themselves to reproduce so in fact, sexual exploration is completely natural and probably necessary at that age. people refer to sexual desire as "need" and "hunger" for a reason: we do need it

nevertheless, teens are affected negatively, all across the country. BUT i will contend that the problem is not the sex itself (as commentators and researchers and religious extremists all tout); it's the attitudes we hold about sex that are so damaging. the simple fact is that we do not give adolescents the resources to understand and respect what is happening to them as they grow up. i, for instance, had very little awareness/understanding of it; it just kinda happened and I dealt with it as best i could. furthermore, because of the stigma against sex, i did not feel comfortable talking about sex in a candid way with anyone, neither adults nor peers.

so what we have is children reaching puberty in a wildly over-sexualized culture where everywhere you turn you are bombarded with sexual imagery but without any safe forum or way for them to learn about it free of pejoration or stigma against it. no shit kids don't know what to do with themselves; no shit they throw themselves into hook-ups and violent relationships. they don't know any better because adults DON'T TEACH THEM.

we live in a sex-negative society and the problem is NOT sex. the problem is cultural.

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.