Think all feminists hate men? Think again. This excellent post comes from a site called Everyday Feminism. I agree with all 5 of these - and regular readers will have seen other posts here dealing with these ways we demean and underestimate men.

5 Lies that Distort Male Sexuality and Hurt Men

September 23, 2014 by Jamie Utt

 

Source: Get A News

Trigger Warning: Sexual Violence and Abuse

Some of the most important lessons I’ve learned in life came through sports. They taught me hard work, commitment, and teamwork. They also taught me some of my most foundational lessons about masculinity and sex.

Not all of these messages were problematic and harmful. I often had coaches talk to me in positive (though sometimes paternalistic) ways about “respecting women.” But looking back, most of the messages I received about sex and my masculinity’s role in sex were quite horrifying.

Perhaps one of the most terrifying messages that I received came from an older soccer player named Dave when I was in tenth grade. One day, he was bragging to me about his sexual relationship with his girlfriend, a girl widely recognized as “hot” and “popular.”

In the midst of his braggadocio, he mentioned wanting to perform an incredibly violent sexual act that would violate her consent and would likely lead to serious injury.

He said he was only joking, and I laughed along, but it didn’t sit right with me. No matter how uncomfortable it made me, though, I didn’t dare challenge the “joke.”

After all, to do so would not only have challenged a man I was supposed to look up to, but it might have led to me being further ostracized for being “gay” (because apparently men are gay if they stand up to violence against women, and being gay was the “worst possible thing” I could have been in high school).

To this day, I’m ashamed that I never said anything, but I simply didn’t know how. I was a young man lacking in confidence, and I felt like it was “normal” that we were talking about women in this way.

Though some might write this story off as adolescent immaturity, this story speaks to a wider problem of patriarchal masculinity and how we as men are taught to understand sex and sexuality.

Feminism vs. Patriarchy

For generations now, feminism in its many iterations has done an amazing job of pointing out the terrible impacts of patriarchal masculinity. And, increasingly, feminists have focused on how patriarchy hurts people of all genders.

With the rise of the Internet as a dominant force in so many people’s lives, though, the resistance to feminism has only grown louder and stronger.

The power of the Internet for organizing Men’s Rights Activists, Pick Up Artists, and other anti-feminist groups has meant a surge in numbers of those who see feminism as “anti-male” or who despise the ways that feminism subverts patriarchal masculinity.

And ironically, these groups prey on men who feel hurt, who feel insecure, who feel entitled to sex, but who struggle socially and can’t find fulfilling relationships.

MRAs and PUAs tell insecure men that the problem is feminism, not patriarchy, and in doing so, fuel a particularly violent online (and offline) misogyny.

Yet the hurt and frustration these men face when it comes to sexuality is almost always directly tied to the ways in which patriarchal masculinity distorts male sexuality – which is a battle that feminism fights.

In her book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, bell hooks describes patriarchy as “the single most life-threatening social dis­ease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.”

If we are ever going to engage men more fully in dismantling patriarchy and ending misogyny, we need more men to understand how the messages we receive about sex hurt more than women. These messages hurt us in myriad ways, too.

Thus, though I could likely unpack just about every message about sex that we receive, I want to analyze five of the most prominent messages men are taught about our sexuality.

1.  ‘Sow Your Wild Oats’

This one is also known as “View sex as a conquest, and have sex with as many partners as you possibly can.”

Somewhere in our early twenties, my friend reached out to his dad for some advice about women and relationships. His dad told him that his twenties were not a time to be “tied down” and that he should “sow his wild oats.” Considering that my friend was seeking advice about whether to invest more seriously in a relationship with a woman, the message was clear.

From a very early age, we, as men, get the message from media and from other men that our role in sex is conqueror. I saw in in the way that Dave bragged about his sexual conquest with his “hot” and “popular” girlfriend, and we got the message in the talk with my buddy’s dad.

By feeling pressure to live up to the “sow your wild oats” message, we end up viewing partners as disposable. This obviously hurts our partners, but it also ensures that we never form loving and/or accountable bonds of attachment unless we forsake this messaging!

After all, whether we’re talking about a one-night stand or a long-term relationship, connection (and thus good sex and healthy relationships) is driven by investment, love, and care. This is not to say that all sex needs to happen in the context of love, but we need to invest in connection rather than disconnection to ensure both our partners and we are fulfilled.

2. ‘Always Be in Control’

I’m not sure where exactly it came from, but somewhere along the way, I received the message that I always need to be in control sexually. Sure, it can be “hot” for a woman (because I never received any messaging about what sex with anyone but a woman could or should be) to take control from time to time, but that message was the exception to the rule.

And I don’t think I’m alone.

There’s a reason that in dominant masculine cultures, it’s seen as wildly subversive for a man to be a “bottom” or “submissive” in sex with other men or in BDSM. And there’s a reason that these men are referred to as the “b*tch.”

But releasing control allows us to build accountable and trusting partnerships, as trust cannot live in a relationship characterized by control over another person.

Plus, relationships where one person is always in control sexually are not only boring, but they can stifle our full sexual expression! Relinquishing control allows us to experience things that might bring tremendous fulfillment and pleasure that we otherwise would never have considered!

3. ‘Value Hotness (Traditional Measures of Physical Attractiveness) Above Everything.’

When I watched the video that the UCSB shooter made just before going on his violent rampage, I noticed a particularly disturbing trend: Much of his ramblings about women rejecting him focused on women he deemed “hot” and non-deserving men having sexual access to these women.

And it got me thinking about the ways that I have been taught to value particular types of beauty in my relationships with women.

Considering my earliest sexual experiences were with mainstream pornography, my understanding of sex and sexuality was cemented with a pretty strict construction of beauty. Outside of that, nearly every message I’ve received from other men and from the media point to one thing: Unless a woman is “hot,” she’s not worth my time.

And to this day, this conditioning impacts me both consciously and subconsciously in ways that I have to check and reflect upon. I find myself engaging more intently in a conversation with a woman who is stereotypically “attractive,” and I find myself remembering the names of women I find attractive far more easily than those I do not.

The bizarre part of these tendencies is that they don’t necessarily have anything to do with sex! I am happily in a committed and fulfilling relationship where I’m not looking for sexual partners, yet I still find myself valuing women I find most attractive more than those I don’t.

How does this impact my relationships with the women in my life?

What relationships — sexual and romantic or otherwise — are we closing off because of how we’ve been taught to value physical beauty above all else?

The point is that when we value women as sexual objects, we not only hurt women, but we hurt ourselves in the ways we lose out on friendships, romantic partnerships, fantastic sexual connections, or any other relationships with people who exist outside of a tiny standard of beauty.

When we decolonize our understanding of beauty from patriarchal norms, we open ourselves to a myriad of beautiful human connections with people of all genders.

4. ‘If She Doesn’t Stop You, You’re Good to Go!’

I had a lot of awkward sex talks with my dad. I guess he wanted to make sure I got the message about condoms and pregnancy and STIs.

Aside from any mention of non-heterosexual sex, looking back on these talks, I notice one glaringly absent topic: consent. In none of these awkward talks during long car trips was consent even mentioned, let alone explored and discussed with nuance and complexity.

This absence reinforced another aspect of sexuality that is “normal” within patriarchal masculinity: “Consent means go until they say stop.” Nowhere was that actually explicitly said, yet every model in the media where much of my understanding of how sexuality would look demonstrated anything different.

And so long as our model for consent relies on the negative, on a partner expressing discontent to keep us from moving forward, we ensure two things.

First, we ensure that we run tremendous risk of hurting our partners by violating their boundaries of consent, and if our partners have received similar messaging, they run the same risk of hurting us and violating our boundaries.

Second, we ensure that overt communication during sex is the exception rather than the rule, and this message means that we don’t have the best sex we could possibly have. A simple rule for good sex is that the more clearly everyone communicates, the better the sex will be.

5. This All Culminates in One Thing: Male Entitlement to Sex

All of this messaging together serves to teach men that we are entitled to sex and to other people’s bodies. And this entitlement hurts everyone.

There is only one outcome for this entitlement: violence.

Of course, #notallmen end up overtly expressing this learned entitlement through violence, but we all get the same messaging, and there are countless ways for us to act on our sexual entitlement by hurting others.

So how does this entitlement show up in the form of violence?

The most extreme form of this violence shows up when men murder out of this entitlement, as we saw in a sensationalized way with the Isla Vista killings and as we see every single day when at least three men kill their intimate partners.

This violence appears in the form of relationship violence, most recently in the public eye because of Ray Rice’s violence against Janay Palmer, and with at least two million men per year beating their intimate partners.

This violence shows up in sexual violence, where, though it is hard to truly study perpetrators of sexual violence, the vast majority of perpetrators of sexual violence are men (yes really, MRAs).
This violence shows up in street harassment, where the vast majority of street harassment is committed by men.

Sadly, I could go on and on with this list, but the common denominator is entitlement that is intimately woven into patriarchal masculinity.

So What Do We Do?

Knowing that patriarchal masculinity distorts male sexuality in ways that hurts people of all genders, we have to find ways to interrupt the cycles of male socialization as we know them.

We need learn from men like those at A Call to Men who are willing to raise boys differently, offering a more inclusive and non-violent masculinity. We have to have the courage to teach our boys that what it means to be a man is to be gentle, to be loving, to be kind, and to see the full humanity in all people.

We have to take a page from the book of The Representation Project who are pushing back against the ways our genders are constructed and portrayed in the media.

We have to push for public policy that holds everyone, particularly men, accountable to healthy and nonviolent relationships.

And we, as men, need to do more to call in other men to considering a new masculinity. When we hear our friends spout some MRA bullshit, we need to call them out and call them in. When we hear men talk in objectifying ways about other people’s bodies, we need to call them out and call them in.

And we need to build relationships with other men that are built upon non-violence, love, accountability, and transformative (rather than patriarchal) masculinity.

Because if we don’t, we all suffer.

Jamie Utt is a Contributing Writer at Everyday Feminism. He is the Founder and Director of Education at CivilSchools, a comprehensive bullying prevention program, a diversity and inclusion consultant, and sexual violence prevention educator based in Minneapolis, MN. He lives with his loving partner and his funtastic dog. He blogs weekly at Change from Within. Learn more about his work at his website here and follow him on Twitter @utt_jamie. Read his articles here and book him for speaking engagements here.

Generation X Finally Grows Up (via Esquire)

As an actual member of Generation X (The Harvard Center uses 1965 to 1984 to define Gen X), this article from Esquire, which riffs on a recent column by A.O. Scott in the NY Times, is both insulting and frustrating. Gen X has been judged in large part by its most visible representatives - actors, musicians, etc. Most of us do not fit so neatly into these stereotypes, which is the insulting and frustrating part.

We are the in-between generation - some say the 13th generation in American history - sandwiched between 80 million Boomers and 78 million Millennials, and nearly half their size at 46 million. Yet, much of the world we live in today was created by Gen Xers:

Jeff Bezos, founder of the retail giant Amazon.com was born in 1964. YouTube was co-founded by three former Paypal employees, Chad Hurley, Steven Shih Chen, and Jawed Karim, born in 1976, 1978, and 1979 respectively. MySpace was first overseen by Brad Greenspan (b. 1975), Chris DeWolfe (b 1966), and Tom Anderson (b. 1970). The creator of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was born in 1976; and Wikipedia, the first collaborative, multilingual online encyclopedia was the brainchild of Jimmy Wales (b. 1966) and Larry Sanger (b. 1968).

Gen X also includes novelist Brett Easton Ellis, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, actors Rob Lowe, Robert Downey, Jr, Halle Berry, Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Uma Thurman, and Drew Barrymore, as well as musicians Trent Reznor, Lenny Kravitz, Tracy Chapman, Shania Twain, Kurt Cobain, Billy Corgan, Dr. Dre, and Ice Cube.

For a more realistic look at Gen X, see this site.

Generation X Finally Grows Up

Nineties icons are ready to face adulthood after all

By Stephen Marche on September 12, 2014


Jennifer Aniston in Cake at TIFF and Ethan Hawke in Boyhood.

Read more of our dispatches from the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival

Generation X is famously the generation that wouldn't grow up. This week, A.O.Scott has written a New York Times obituary for American adulthood, identifying a well-established phenomenon that Adam Sternbergh noticed nearly a decade ago: the rise of adults who are not really adult, at least in the traditional sense. The trend has coincided neatly with the rise (or semi-rise anyway) of the children born to the Boomers. It began in the nineties and has continued to swell since then. Which is why the Toronto International Film Festival this year may actually prove to be something of a turning point. In 2014, several different icons from the nineties, who are right at the heart of Generation X, are trying desperately to be grown-ups. They're even succeeding to some degree. Ethan Hawke, Reese Witherspoon, and even — gasp — Jennifer Aniston have made excellent, deadly serious movies that are, for lack of a better word, mature.

Jennifer Aniston's movie, Cake, may be the event of the festival. Its reception here has been highly reminiscent of the reception Dallas Buyers Club received last year. Standing ovations. Industry people crying in their seats. Matthew McConaughey won an Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club, and it would not surprise me if Aniston repeated the act for Cake. It would certainly be weird if she weren't nominated. That's certainly why the movie exists. The story itself is classic suffering-redemption-porn Academy bait. Aniston plays a woman recovering from a car accident that killed her son. The emotional trauma is secondary to the chronic pain she must endure. Popping massive quantities of Percocet and OxyContin, which she sometimes has to buy in bulk from a Tijuana pharmacist, she doesn't kill herself mainly because she doesn't have the guts.

Much will be made of the "look" of Jennifer Aniston in this movie. She wears no makeup and is covered in scars, including her face. "Ravaged" would be the correct word. No matter what she does to herself physically, however, she's still going to be Rachel and everyone watching will sympathize with her instantly. That sympathy is a powerful weapon given the subject of chronic pain. The character's constant, unremitting discomfort, which is alleviated only by drugged stupor, makes the audience's skin crawl. There is not a moment to settle down and relax, not one. You feel bad for her the entire 98 minutes. The misery is compounded, and complicated, by the fact that Aniston's character is a bitch — a self-aware bitch, but a bitch nonetheless. It's a courageous position to take: This woman's pain does not mean that she is a good person. Rather the opposite: The pain just makes her already nasty traits nastier. This is much, much braver than any other attempt by Aniston to recreate herself. She is willing to trade in on her strengths as an actress while pushing the audience as far as they can go. In other words, she is acting like somebody who wants to make something truly great and is willing to make personal sacrifices to help achieve it. In other words, she is acting like a grown-up. 

Ethan Hawke, too, is doing some maturing this year, a year that may also turn out to be McConaugheyesque for him. He was in Boyhood, of course, one of the greatest films ever made about the nature of maturity and immaturity. And he has come to the festival with two great follow-ups. The most unlikely is a documentary about Seymour Bernstein, a classical pianist who teaches lessons in his single-room apartment in Manhattan, as he has done for nearly 59 years. It is a quiet, contained portrait of a single eccentric individual that nonetheless reaches far enough to ask questions about what the nature of art may be, what qualifies as a successful life, and where craft and ecstasy meet in the psychology of the artist. It is a film, really, about what creative work means. And it eschews the usual banalities about authenticity and personal expression in favor of a straight look into the minutiae of the business. Apparently Hawke had finally, mercifully abandoned the bullshit of Dead Poets Society and (shudder) Reality Bites.

Then there's Reese Witherspoon in Wild, which is most explicitly about maturation. The film version of Cheryl Strayed's memoir about hiking the Pacific Coast Trail, it is literally a pilgrimage away from the bad behavior of her youth — heroin, screwing random guys — and away from her grief at her mother's death, into a new life, into as she says "becoming the woman my mother thought I could be." In other words she had become an adult. The woman who was Tracy Flick in Election has finally grown up. The woman from Legally Blond has finally grown up.

All these actors are, or were, icons of the grand Peter Pan syndrome that has generally gripped culture, and which A.O Scott is the latest to identify. But I wonder if Scott may have spoken too soon. Adulthood hunger is starting to rear its head, although it's also possible that his piece is a symptom of the desire for maturity as much as an identification of its reality. At least these three actors show a kind of reprieve in the onslaught of kids' stories being the only stories. Eventually, acting like a kid gets boring. One of the most unexpected results of growing up is that everything gets much more interesting, even as it gets much harder and much more complicated.

"All you need is money or power, the notion goes, and beautiful lovers present themselves to you for the taking." Well, not so much.

For the majority of men and women, the major factor in choosing a partner is twinship (to use a Self Psychology term), meaning "this person is like me," and companionship - we want someone who's company we enjoy.

I suspect there are people of both sexes who choose partners for wealth or beauty, but those relationships are probably not going to last very long.

The Myth of Wealthy Men and Beautiful Women

Similarity and companionship are the currency of attraction, for better or worse.

James Hamblin | July 15 2014

Francis Cugat/Wikimedia

In one illustrious study of love (“human sexual selection”) in 1986, psychologists David Buss and Michael Barnes asked people to rank 76 characteristics: What do you value most in a potential mate?

The winner wasn’t beauty, and it wasn’t wealth. Number one was "kind and understanding," followed by "exciting personality" and then "intelligent." Men did say they valued appearances more highly than women did, and women said they valued "good earning capacity" more highly than men did—but neither ranked measures of physical attractiveness or socioeconomic status among their top considerations.

People, though, are liars. Experiments that don’t rely on self-reporting regularly show that physical attractiveness is exquisitely, at times incomparably, important to both men and women. Status (however you want to measure it: income, formal education, et cetera) is often not far behind. In real-life dating studies, which get closer to genuine intentions, physical attractiveness and earning potential strongly predict romantic attraction.

While people tend to prefer people similar to themselves in terms of traits like religiousness or thriftiness, when it comes to beauty and income, more is almost always seen as better. On these “consensually-ranked” traits, people seem to aspire to partners who rank more highly than themselves. They don’t want a match so much as a jackpot.

The stereotypical example of that is known in sociology as a “beauty-status exchange”—an attractive person marries a wealthy or otherwise powerful person, and both win. It’s the classic story of an elderly polymath-billionaire who has sustained damning burns to the face who marries a swimsuit model who can’t find Paris on a map but really wants to go there, because it’s romantic.

All you need is money or power, the notion goes, and beautiful lovers present themselves to you for the taking.

When Homer Simpson once came into a 500-pound surfeit of sugar, his id instinct was to turn it into fortune and sexual prosperity. “In America," he said, half dreaming after a night spent guarding the mound in his backyard, "first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women.” That’s an homage to Scarface (in the movie the quote was “money” instead of “sugar”), and it’s where both Simpson and Tony Montana went emphatically astray.

University of Notre Dame sociologist Elizabeth McClintock has done exhaustive research on the idea of people exchanging traits. Her work was published last month in American Sociological Review, looking at data from 1,507 couples in various stages of relationships, including dating, cohabiting, and married. “Beauty-status exchange accords with the popular conception of romantic partner selection as a competitive market process,” McClintock wrote, “a conception widely accepted in both popular culture and academia.” She referred specifically to the gendered version, “in which an economically successful man partners with a beautiful 'trophy wife,'" as commonplace.

But McClintock found that outside of ailing tycoons and Donald Trump, in the practical world it basically doesn’t exist. Where it does, it doesn’t last. The dominant force in mating is matching.

What appears to be an exchange of beauty for socioeconomic status is often actually not an exchange, McClintock wrote, but a series of matched virtues. Economically successful women partner with economically successful men, and physically attractive women partner with physically attractive men.

“Sometimes you hear that really nice guys get hot girls,” McClintock told me, “[but] I found that really nice guys get really nice girls. [Being nice] is not really buying you any currency in the attractiveness realm. If the guys are hot, too, then sure, they can get a hot girl.”

Because people of high socioeconomic status are, on average, rated as more physically attractive than people of lower status, many correlations between one partner's appearance and the other partner's status are spurious and misconstrued.

“Women spend a lot more time trying to look good than men do,” McClintock said. “That creates a lot of mess in this data. If you don’t take that into account then you actually see there’s a lot of these guys who are partnered with women who are better looking than them, which is just because, on average, women are better looking. Men are partnering 'up' in attractiveness. And men earn more than women—we’ve got that 70-percent wage gap—so women marry 'up' in income. You’ve got to take these things into account before concluding that women are trading beauty for money.”

The study concludes that women aren’t really out for men with more wealth than themselves, nor are men looking for women who outshine them in beauty. Rather, hearteningly, people really are looking for ... compatibility and companionship. Finding those things is driven by matching one's strengths with a partner who’s similarly endowed, rather than trying to barter kindness for hotness, humor for conscientiousness, cultural savvy for handyman-ship, or graduate degrees for marketable skills.

At least partly because physically attractive individuals are treated preferentially by the world at large, they enjoy improved school performance, greater occupational success, and higher earnings. So these variables can be hard to isolate.

“It would be very hard to separate out class and attractiveness,” McClintock said, “because they’re just so fundamentally linked. I can’t control for that—but I don’t see how anybody could.”

Past research has found that both physical attractiveness and education “help a woman achieve upward mobility through marriage (defined as marrying a man of higher occupational status than her father),” McClintock noted in the journal article, “and help her marry a man of high occupational status, in absolute terms.” But these studies regularly excluded any evaluation of the men’s physical attractiveness, and so didn’t address the simple fact that it might just be two attractive people being attracted to one another, probably in attractive clothes in an attractive place, both perpetually well slept. Any “exchange” was an illusion.

McClintock has also found that the pervasive tendency toward rating higher-status people as more attractive seems to perpetuate itself . "Because of that," she said, "there’s a bias toward seeing women who are married to high-status men—who are themselves high-status—as being more attractive. It creates this self-affirming circle where we never even stop to ask if we perceive the man as good-looking. We just say she’s good-looking, he’s high status—and she’s good-looking in part because the couple is high-status."

“Assuming that the importance of beauty and status is gendered may cause researchers to overlook men’s attractiveness and women’s socioeconomic resources,” Eli Finkel, a psychologist at Northwestern University, told New York magazine, praising McClintock’s work. In so doing, scientists misidentify matching as exchange.

“Scientists are humans, too,” Finkel claimed, “and we can be inadvertently blinded by beliefs about how the world works. The studies that only looked at men’s (but not women’s) income and only looked at women’s (but not men’s) attractiveness were problematic in that way, as was the peer review process that allowed flawed papers like that to be published.”

“Controlling for both partners’ physical attractiveness may not eliminate the relationship between female beauty and male status,” McClintock wrote, “but it should at least reduce this relationship substantially.”

Even as its pervasiveness in popular culture is waning, the gendered beauty-status exchange model is harmful in several insidious ways, McClintock said. “It trivializes the importance of women’s careers in a social sense: It’s telling women that what matters is your looks, and your other accomplishments and qualities don’t matter on the partner market. The truth is, people are evaluating women for their looks, and they’re evaluating men for their looks. Women are as shallow as men when it comes to appearance, and they should focus on their own accomplishments. If women want an accomplished guy, that’s going to come with being accomplished.”

So this is just one more place where upward mobility is, it seems, a myth. But in this case, no love is lost. Within the gendered beauty-status exchange model, physical attractiveness “might enable class mobility for women,” yes, McClintock wrote, but not without ensuring the women’s economic dependency on her husband and anachronistically ignoring her valuation of his physical attractiveness.

“It also sets up this idea of marriage being mercenary,” McClintock said, “which doesn’t fit with our usual conception that we kind of like our spouse and we want someone that we get along with. It’s not just this trade of his money for her beauty, and he’s going to dump her as soon as she starts to get some wrinkles around her eyes.”

I enjoy this show - and although I have noticed stereotypical and limited portrayals of men on the show, specially the males who work at the prison, this article takes that analysis to a whole other level.

I think I will continue to suspend my analytical mind until I have gotten through the 2nd season.

Orange Is the New Black's Irresponsible Portrayal of Men

The victims of the prison system the Netflix show satirizes are overwhelmingly male. Leaving them out reinforces old stereotypes that hurt both genders.

Noah Berlatsky Jun 30 2014


Orange Is the New Black has been justly praised for its representation of groups who are often either marginalized or completely invisible in most mainstream media. The show has prominent, complex roles for black women, Latinas, lesbian and bisexual women, and perhaps the first major role for a trans woman played by a trans woman, the wonderful Laverne Cox. There remains, however, one important group that the show barely, and inadequately, represents.

That group is men.

This may seem like a silly complaint. Men, after all, are amply represented in the media, in major and minor rolls, whether on Game of Thrones or Mad Men or Breaking Bad or The Wire. For that matter, there are in fact a number of male characters on OITNB, such as counselor Sam Healey (Michael Harney) who gets a typical guy-plot about struggling against disillusionment and prejudice to be a good man. Why should OITNB, unique in being devoted to women, bother with more men?


The reason: While media is full of men, real-life prisons are even more so. Men are incarcerated at more than 10 times the rate of women. In 2012, there were 109,000 women in prison. That's a high number—but it's dwarfed by a male prison population that in 2012 reached just over 1,462,000. In 2011, men made up about 93 percent of prisoners.

Of course, Orange is the New Black is under no obligation to accurately represent prison demographics, and just because they're a minority in prison doesn't mean that women's stories there aren't important. The problem is that the ways in which OITNB focuses on women rather than men seem to be linked to stereotypically gendered ideas about who can be a victim and who can't.

The few male prisoners who are shown on OITNB are presented in almost aggressively stereotypical ways. Early in the second season, when Piper (Taylor Schilling) is being moved to Chicago to testify in a drug trial, we're shown a number of male inmates being transported as well. They are presented as a threatening, uniform mass. The one prisoner who is given a more substantial role is a black man who makes frightening sexual verbal advances towards Piper; he's a contract killer and refers to himself, apparently without irony, as a "super-predator." He eventually delivers a message for Piper in exchange for her dirty panties. The one male prisoner we meet, then, is violent and abusive, with a sexual kink that is presented as laughable and repulsive. He deviant, dangerous, and the show seems to think that he is exactly where he belong—behind bars.

Female prisoners on the show are treated very differently. They may be violent and may be queer, but they are, for the most part, presented as sympathetic. This seems like a feminist move, on the surface. But the inability to extend that sympathy to male inmates, raises a disturbing possibility: that the show is condescending to women while reinforcing old and destructive attitudes about men.

Adam Jones argues in his book Gender Inclusive that empathy for victims is often, in our culture, dependent on the victim being a woman. As he says, "We live in a culture that is trained to view the violent victimization of women as a much more serious offense than the violent victimization of men."

Jones includes a wide range of supportive evidence. Male victims of domestic violence are almost entirely ignored, though domestic violence is perpetrated by men and women at about equal rates (though, Jones points out, violence by men is disproportionately more serious because of strength and weight difference.) In Bosnia, human-rights organizations focused on the (horrible, important) suffering of women rape victims and refugees, while largely ignoring the mass, gender-targeted killing of "battle-age" men. Similarly, violent attacks on women receive much more media attention than violent attacks on men, though men are substantially more likely to be attacked.

In other words, male victimization is seen as natural, or not worth commenting on. As a result, Jones argues, it is difficult to see that, "the most severe and institutionalized human rights abuses in the United States are overwhelmingly inflicted upon men, especially—though far from exclusively—younger, poorer, and minority men."

I don't know that I agree that men are the victims of the worst human rights abuses in this country, nor am I sure that ranking abuses in that way is helpful. But I think Jones is absolutely right that part of the reason we see our violent, abusive prison system as acceptable is because we have trouble seeing violence against young, black men as violence. That's why, Jones argues, men are 17 percent more likely to be put in prison than women for similar crimes, and serve an additional year in prison when they are incarcerated.

According to Orange Is the New Black, though, men in prison are "super-predators" while women in prison are, often, innocent victims, doomed by circumstances and their own painful but touching character flaws. OITNB underlines this most clearly in its flashbacks, where we see each inmate’s life-story as a tragic melodrama (a significantly gendered genre) leading to prison.

Though there are a couple of exceptions (like cancer-victim Rosa, a former bank-robbing adrenaline junkie, or sociopathic new villain Vee (Lorraine Toussaint)) for the most part the characters land behind bars because of a tragic lack of love. Taystee (Danielle Brooks) is a foster-child who craves a mother; Suzanne (Uzo Aduba) is a black adoptee of a white family hungry for affection and acceptance; Morello (Yael Stone) is a stalker fixated on romantic love; even Sister Ingalls (Beth Fowler), the nun, has a story framed around her failure to connect with Jesus in her heart. The backstories don't really focus on systemic injustices. Instead, they show how individual weaknesses lead the women to prison. A woman in OITNB goes to the bad when her impulse for love is thwarted.

In contrast, a former prisoner reviewing the series at the Washington City Paper said, "I get the need for drama and stories, but if the lady who runs this show wanted to be realistic, most of these flashbacks would be about 8 seconds long." She adds:

I mean that a lot of the girls I knew in prison were in there for really uncomplicated and undramatic reasons. Like, an accurate flashback scene would be a black girl sitting on the couch watching TV, and her boyfriend...says “Hey, baby, do you mind if I leave this shit here for my cousin to pick up?” And she says “OK,” without even looking up from QVC. And then, boom, cut to her serving 10 years.

The prison pipeline is routine—and, just as significantly, it's a routine involving, and closely connected, to men.

As Yasmin Nair points out, heroin in OITNB is presented as some sort of absolute, corrupting, verboten evil—precisely the attitude that has created our decades-old incarceration binge. Minority, marginalized men, often deliberately segregated and barred from most employment, turn to the drug trade. The state typically uses moral panic around drug use as an opportunity to police, harass, and imprison them.

Occasionally, women—especially minority women—end up getting caught in the gears too. That doesn't make for a dramatic, personal story about victimized individuals who want love. It's just the boring, soul-crushing, everyday grind of institutional oppression, mostly aimed at controlling minority men who are perceived, by virtue of their race and gender, as a violent threat just for existing. Destroying the lives of minority women is, in that context, mostly an accidental bonus oppression.

This isn't to say that minority women aren't discriminated against in many, many ways. The fact that Orange Is The New Black has been able to attract such a range of phenomenally talented women actors of color speaks loudly about the shamefully limited opportunities for black and Latina women in television and film. But despite its path-breaking representation of minority women, the show remains trapped by gender preconceptions that aren't path-breaking at all. OITNB is so eager to sympathize with broken-hearted women and their individual sadnesses that it has no time to consider the institutional machinery of injustice that, in this case, has little directly to do with either individuals or women. It's hard to see how such a distorted view of incarceration helps prisoners of any gender.

This event occurred at the University of Minnesota in March of this year (2014). This conversation is a companion to the Office for Equity and Diversity's Critical Conversations about Diversity and Social Justice series at the University of Minnesota. Co-sponsored by the University Libraries.

Breaking the Man Box: Reconstructing Masculinity in America

Friday, March 28, 2014

Watch this event here!   (requires Microsoft Silverlight)


What does it mean to be a man? Historically, certain images of masculinity have been foundational to American beliefs and values. Challenging these rigid constructs has resulted in major shifts in American society, opening up opportunities for new ideas about gender, identities, and behaviors. How are Women/Gender Studies challenging traditional cultural behaviors? How are ideas about masculinity shifting and helping families raise feminist sons? This conversation engages panelists and participants in an examination of manhood, maleness and masculinity by discussing cultural contexts such as sports, gaming and guns; male power in the market place; ethnic masculinities; paternity and parenting; artistic expression; and sexual expression and identity.

This is a companion to the Office for Equity and Diversity's Critical Conversations about Diversity and Social Justice series at the University of Minnesota. Co-sponsored by the University Libraries.

If you are interested in learning more about this topic, check out some of the highlighted resources.

Books

• Affirmative reaction: New formations of White masculinity by Hamilton Carroll
• Artistic impressions: Figure skating, masculinity, and the limits of sport by Mary Louise Adams
• Boyhoods: Rethinking masculinities by Ken Corbett
• The caveman mystique: Pop-Darwinism and the debates over sex, violence, and science by Martha McCaughey
• The Chican@ hip hop nation: Politics of a new millennial mestizaje by Pancho McFarland
• Deconstructing Tyrone: A new look at black masculinity in the hip-hop generation by Natalie Y. Moore
• Dude, you're a fag: Masculinity and sexuality in high school by C.J. Pascoe
• Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities
• For colored boys who have considered suicide when the rainbow is still not enough: Coming of age, coming out, and coming home by Keith Boykin
• Guyland: The perilous world where boys become men by Michael S. Kimmel
• Looking for Leroy: Illegible black masculinities (Postmillennial pop) by Mark Anthony Neal
• New Black Man by Mark Anthony Neal
• Pimps, wimps, studs, thugs and gentlemen:Essays on media images of masculinity by Elwood Watson
• We real cool: Black men and masculinity by bell hooks

Videos

A call to men by Tony Porter from TEDWomen 2010



How movies teach manhood by Colin Stokes TEDxBeaconStreet 2012



Violence against women—it's a men's issue by Jackson Katz TEDxFiDiWomen 2012



Ten responses to the phrase 'Man Up' by Guante

Articles

• Superflies into Superkillers: Black Masculinity in Film from Blaxploitation to New Black Realism by Katharine Bausch
  Journal of Popular Culture, 2013 Apr, Vol.46(2), pp.257-276
• Meat, morals, and masculinity by M.B. Ruby and S.J. Heine in Appetite, April 2011, Vol.56(2), pp.447-450
• An Analysis of Hyper-Masculinity in Magazine Advertisements by M. Vokey, B. Tefft, and C. Tysiaczny in Sex Roles, 2013, Vol.68(9-10), pp.562-576
• The Spectre of the Wheezy Dad: Masculinity, Fatherhood and Ageing by Fiona Shirani in Sociology, 2013, Vol.47(6), pp.1104-1119
• Please be that guy: 7 Men who are transforming masculinity from the Change From Within Blog

Panelists

• Kyle “Guante” Tran Myhre, hip hop artist, two-time National Poetry Slam champion, social justice activist, and educator
• Gavin Grivna, Director, University of Minnesota Housing and Residential Life,University of Minnesota Men's Network
• Zenzele Isoke, Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota Gender & Women’s Studies
• Jason Jackson, Assistant Director, University of Minnesota GLBTA Programs Office,Tongues Untied

Moderator

• Owen Marciano, Co-Chair, University of Minnesota Transgender Commission

This page was created by Jody Gray, Diversity Outreach Librarian.

Nicole Daedone - As Above, So (Very Different) Below: On the Masculine and Feminine

Interesting . . . . I'm not sure how I feel about this. The masculine/feminine dichotomy, even when used to represent psychological features inherent in all people, perpetuates the "essentialism"  argument that men and women, masculine and feminine (the two are ALWAYS conflated, like it or not) are essentially different (the whole men are from Massachusetts and women are from Vermont thing).

I don't even buy into the "masculine is about action, feminine is about connection" stuff anymore. It's a comforting stereotype allowing people to make broad, unsubstantiated generalizations.

I am more aligned with gender fluidity, and the dropping of labels for how one embodies gender. But I recognize that mine is a minority position. So for the rest to the people, there is this . . . .

Nicole Daedone is an author, consultant, teacher and entrepreneur in service of bringing a more fulfilling sense of orgasm to the world. Voted one of Vanity Fair’s Twelve Women Who Changed the Way We Look at Sex, Nicole first came to prominence as the leader of the Slow Sex Movement and the innovator of the 15 minute orgasm. Throughout her work, Nicole has expanded the horizons of sexual experience, which has earned her invitations to share the stage as a speaker alongside other luminaries such as Neil Stauss, Tony Robbins, Naomi Wolfe and Esther Perel, as well as inclusion in Tim Ferris’ breakthrough book “The Four Hour Body.” Nicole brings a no-nonsense, empirical approach to the question most of us ask, “How do I have a better sex life?” But much more than that, her life has been spent exploring the impact our full human potential in the arena of sex and what benefits that can bring to not just individuals and couples, but to communities, organizations and societies as a whole. What becomes possible for our lives, our health, our happiness, and our prosperity when we learn to live in a continual state of orgasm? This is the territory Nicole continues to explore today.

• For more about OneTaste and OM, visit www.onetaste.us. 
• Nicole’s blog appears at www.nicoledaedone.com

* * * * * * * * * *

As Above, So (Very Different) Below: On the Masculine and Feminine

February 2, 2014 | Nicole Daedone



Recently I was reading an article about male-female dynamics that said the number one complaint women have about men is that all guys want is sex. The number two complaint is that he doesn’t even know what he’s doing once he gets there. The man’s number one complaint, for his part, was that women make everything so difficult.

I loved this. Not because I am a fan of the war of the sexes (if there is such a thing) but because it points toward something so much bigger. If we pull back the lens, these very day-to-day complaints start looking like clues in the mysterious game that I like to call “Masculine/Feminine.” Part of me cringes to use those terms. They have been co-opted by a whole lot of people who use them a whole lot differently than I do. So let me be clear. Masculine/Feminine is not a synonym for male/female or man/woman. The latter are rough approximations of a very nuanced truth, the incarnation of masculine/feminine qualities painted with very broad strokes. Man/woman is an impressionist’s version of a water lily; masculine/feminine is the lily itself, with all its uniqueness and subtleties and gradients.

So you can look at the complaints men and women have about each other as clunky approximations of the deeper, more precise, and more relevant forces working in the world. The forces I call “masculine” and “feminine.” Male/female are physical-realm analogues of underlying principles, which are begging to be brought into relationship within each of us. We see in the male/female dynamic the desire for wholeness within ourselves. This article will explore how to bring the two into communication, and to see how to maintain connection.

So, a request. If you look at what follows as being associated directly with men and women, rather than the forces of masculine and feminine that are within all of us, you could easily accuse me of gross generalizations and gender stereotyping. So just don’t do that, okay? When I use “her,” know that I am referring to the feminine within all of us; when I use “him,” the masculine. Thanks in advance for your understanding.

The basic experience of masculine is the desire to act. The masculine force is forward-moving, direct, focused and bright. It is powerful, but it does not generate power. You might think of it as the turbine on a ship; it’s what makes the ship go. It’s the part that is easy to see from the outside but without the coal-fired engine down below, it’s not going anywhere.

The coal-fired engine is the force of the feminine. It is dark, rich, unpredictable, and generative. The feminine is where true power comes from; it is the creative force that fuels the turbine of the masculine so the ship can move forward. Without cooperation between the two, the ship is going nowhere.

Once each of us learns to be at ease in both positions–to go above, where the masculine operates, and below, where the feminine is found, and to understand the customs of each domain within ourselves–we will finally be able to transition out of polarized role-playing (man as “masculine” and woman as “feminine”) and into something infinitely deeper.

* * *

So we’re on the same page: we all have masculine and feminine forces within us, and both need to be activated in order for us to feel whole, complete, catalyzed. Here’s the quandary. To come together, the masculine and feminine must cooperate. They must work together. For starters, both of them need the creative energy of the feminine in order to get into flow. The feminine cannot access her power alone; she needs him to help pull it out of her. It requires a kind of mining, and mining is the masculine’s specialty.

But problems arise right away, for his approach to mining alienates her. She desires gentle coaxing; he seems to bark orders. The feminine feels like she’s getting yelled at from above. To her, he sounds all-knowing, entitled, and demanding. He may be saying, “Let’s go to the store.” But for some reason she hears, “You are incompetent. Why didn’t you go to the store already?”

For his part, the masculine can barely understand a word out of her mouth. Truth is she can’t always put into words what she wants to say. Because words are not a problem for him, he assumes that she is being evasive, dramatic or tricky. He gets frustrated. She gets hurt. He’s just trying to help, and can’t understand why she can’t just take the help he’s offering. Why she can’t get herself into shape.

The feminine has impediments the masculine doesn’t understand. She has flows and rhythms that she needs to answer to. He’s up there looking down, and things look so obvious; just do it, already! She’s down there with gunfire and emotions, saying, “Yeah, you think it’s so easy, you come down here and do it!” She’s the man in the trenches. He’s the general.

Of course she wants his guidance. He has a bigger view from up above. Of course she wants some vision and perspective. But she does not operate in the suggested ways. Not because she is defiant, not because she is oblivious, but because she has a different set of circumstances to contend with.

The other element is that beneath this game, she knows that she holds the power that they both need. He in his position doesn’t understand why she won’t just give it to him. It’s simple enough, from his perspective. Just give it to me and we will both be happy. When she can’t—she just can’t—he perceives it as manipulation, sloth, recklessness. In truth, they are both bound together by the same dilemma. Her sex is power, electricity, fuel. Both want it converted to a usable form, which is what happens when they meet. But he gets frustrated trying to “get it right,” and she gets frustrated because she can’t just “give it away.” He has to earn it.

Her inability to offer well-thought-out, articulate reasons leads him to believe that she is not very smart. So he speaks to her as if she’s stupid, which offends her. After all, she has the power he needs. Should he not treat her with a little more care?

Moreover, isn’t it obvious? If he doesn’t earn it, he won’t respect it. If he doesn’t respect it, he won’t know what to do with it. He will risk wasting it and how will her power and vision be activated in the world without him? So what she is waiting for is a kind of reverence. Not adoration. Simple reverence for what she is carrying inside of her. Reverence slows his impatience, softens his entitlement, adds subtlety to his directness. Then she involuntarily opens. But to the masculine, reverence is humbling. To admit how deeply he desires to serve? To recognize that it will be through surrender rather than force that he will get it? Humbling indeed.

But it is the only way. In fact, both masculine and feminine must surrender to the power of the lower. It is only in this surrender that the power can actually begin to ascend. They are not surrendering to one another; they are surrendering to the power that exists inside of her.

Surrender comes more naturally to her than to him. She is closer to the creative source, and understands how to surrender to it intuitively. This is where we get it all mixed up when we get to the concrete experience of male-female relating. Because the feminine knows the pleasure of surrender, women tend to surrender to the men they love. More aptly said, we abandon ourselves to them in the attempt to surrender enough for two. We try to surrender for both of us. The feminine is formless, so has an easier time tying herself into the shape she thinks she should be in. But desire will not take that which is not offered. So she can attract, entice, seduce—but she cannot surrender for him. For he himself is also standing at the edge of the cliff, asking to be taken with complete abandon. He must offer himself. Only then will he receive the life in which he can become himself. She must do the same, but to the orgasm itself, not the signifier which is the man. Both dive into the same pool together—the pool of feminine, of Orgasm in its truest sense—and from that pool they emerge refreshed.

Read the whole article.

Paul Rosenberg on David Brooks’ and Chuck Todd's Twisted Rhetoric on Obama's “Manhood Problem" (Salon)

This kind of nonsense is infuriating. Because President Obama does not want to engage militarily with Russia to force them out of the Ukraine, then somehow Obama is not really an "alpha male" (Todd) and has a "manhood problem" (Brooks).

For perspective, this is what Steve Benen noted at Maddowblog noted about Obama's use of force as president:

It was this president who escalated the use of force against al Qaeda; it was this president that launched the mission that killed bin Laden; it was this president who increased the use of predator drones to strike at terrorist suspects (including killing Americans affiliated with al Qaeda living abroad); it was this president who helped assemble an international coalition to strike at the Gadhafi regime in Libya; and on and on.

Far from being a pacifist based on this record. Perhaps his rhetoric is not he cowboy bravado we
heard from Bush, or that we are getting from Putin, but talk is cheap. Bush bungled the whole 9/11 response, and Obama has cleaned up the mess, and in fact has taken even broader steps in the futile "war on terror."

In fact, Obama has been so willing to use force that does not endanger American soldiers that the far left in this country (what there is of it) has called him a thug - which is white code for a scary black man.

When one is a pragmatist and a realist, looking often for the middle way through conflict, neither side is going to support such an agenda - the conservatives brand him unmanly and the liberals brand him a brutish man. It's a no-win public image war, so one might as well do what he things is best.

David Brooks’ twisted “manhood”: Questioning Obama’s masculinity isn’t just racist, it’s wrong

Obama foreign policy's rooted in successful realist tradition. Questioning his manhood is rooted in white supremacy

Paul Rosenberg | Tuesday, Apr 22

Chuck Todd, David Brooks (Credit: NBC News/AP/Nam Y. Huh)
This just in: New York Times columnist David Brooks and NBC’s Chuck Todd want you to know that President Obama has “a manhood problem” — or at least the appearance of one. That’s the conclusion the two white men reached on “Meet the Press” on Sunday (transcript), following comments by another white man, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Corker warned, “I think we’re going to lose eastern Ukraine,” which would be “a geopolitical disaster,” resulting from “an era of permissiveness the U.S. has created around the world.”

But that perception doesn’t only belong to Republicans. No, it was international, Brooks claimed:

Basically since Yalta we’ve had an assumption that borders are basically going to be borders and once that comes into question if in Ukraine or in Crimea or anywhere else, then all over the world all bets are off. And let’s face it, Obama, whether deservedly or not, does have a — I’ll say it crudely — but a manhood problem in the Middle East. (editor’s note: the bolding is ours) Is he tough enough to stand up to somebody like Assad or somebody like Putin? I think a lot of the rap is unfair but certainly in the Middle East there is an assumption that he’s not tough enough.

And Todd asserted that the Obama administration itself shared this perception:

By the way, internally, they fear this. You know, it’s not just Bob Corker saying it, okay, questioning whether the president is being alpha male. That’s essentially what he’s saying: He’s not alpha dog enough. His rhetoric isn’t tough enough. (blogger's note: bolding is mine) They agree with the policy decisions that they’re making. Nobody is saying– but it is sort of the rhetoric. Internally this is a question.

Here’s the video:



Of course, Todd provided no sourcing for this claim. He wouldn’t be an insider if he didn’t depend on sources he can’t name. It’s such a manly way to do politics, sniping from the shadows.

There’s so much BS involved here, one hardly knows where to start. Because it can cloud out everything else, it’s best to hold back the black masculinity aspect, and start with foreign policy facts. First off, as Steve Benen noted at Maddowblog, the assumption Obama is “not tough enough” flies in the face of “overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” even using Brooks-approved standards:

It was this president who escalated the use of force against al Qaeda; it was this president that launched the mission that killed bin Laden; it was this president who increased the use of predator drones to strike at terrorist suspects (including killing Americans affiliated with al Qaeda living abroad); it was this president who helped assemble an international coalition to strike at the Gadhafi regime in Libya; and on and on.

If you knew literally nothing about the last five years, you might hear this chatter about “manhood” and “alpha males” and assume that President Obama was a pacifist, reluctant to use military force under any circumstances. But given what we know about what actually happened over the last five years, the scuttlebutt is just bizarre.

What Obama actually is — Surprise! Surprise! — is a foreign policy realist, which is to say he belongs to the sober mainstream of U.S. foreign policy thinking since World War II. The realists stand in stark contrast to the neocons, along with their deluded sidekicks, the liberal hawks. As Stephen Walt explained last week in Foreign Policy, realists have often come off as doves, because war is almost always a bad idea from a levelheaded realist perspective, particularly for a superpower as dominant as the U.S. has been since 1945.

“For realists, international politics takes place in a dog-eat-dog world, where states keep a wary eye on potential rivals and constantly seek ways to improve their own positions,” Walt wrote, but he goes on to outline “four obvious reasons why realists are inclined to be dovish, especially here in the United States.” The first is that “realism encourages close attention to the material elements of power,” which have favored the U.S. ever since the end of World War II. During the Cold War, Walt notes, “The Soviet economy was much smaller and less efficient than America’s and its allies were also less powerful or reliable than ours.” We were sure to prevail in the long run, provided we didn’t undo ourselves “through bloated defense budgets or foolish foreign adventures.” Putin’s Russia, obviously, is far less powerful than the Soviet Union. The realist logic is stronger than ever.

Walt’s second point is the realist belief that “states tend to balance against threats rather than bandwagon with them.” Faced with clear-cut aggression, it’s relatively easy to pull together a strong coalition — become the aggressors, even just arguably, and the logic reverses against you. Hence, realists “understood that other states might take various steps to counter the United States if it threw its own weight around too often or too carelessly.” What’s more, far from bolstering your credibility, belligerence could be counterproductive: “realists understood that wasting resources on pointless wars might actually undermine your credibility, especially if it left the nation weaker or war-weary.”

Walt’s third point is so obvious — “[R]ealists also understand that war was an unpredictable business, and even powerful states sometimes blunder into costly conflicts” — that it only needs a one-word explication: Vietnam.

But Walt’s fourth point may be the most telling, for situating foreign policy in a domestic political framework: “[R]ealists are less prone to demonize opponents because they recognize that all states face competitive pressures and that most countries will act ruthlessly in order to protect their interests.”

For conservatives, however, demonizing opponents, and implicating them all in each other’s bad deeds, is the whole point, the very essence of their tribal politics. After 9/11, neocons came to the fore because their enemy “other” was most readily demonized — even if Saddam Hussein was actually bin Laden’s bitterest ideological foe. Things have changed a lot since then, as other demonizing frameworks have been deployed against Obama. A favorite one — Obama himself as Hitler — clashes violently with the notion of Obama as an incompetent weakling. But demonizing narratives don’t have to be consistent, so long as they are consistently frightening to the point that rational thought becomes impossible. And that’s what we see from conservatives today.

The racial aspect adds another dimension. Obama’s entire political career has been defined by pushing back against the “threatening, black alpha-male” stereotype. Conciliation, not confrontation, is not just his style, but the core of his substance as well. The slightest break from this stance can trigger immediate backlash — as was seen in the knee-jerk response to his comment saying police acted “stupidly” when they arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates for trespassing in his own home. Since then, conservative activists and media have manufactured countless similar offenses as Obama has consistently failed to produce them himself. He has a “deep-seated hatred of white people,” as Glenn Beck alleged, without a scintilla of evidence, when Obama held his “beer summit” to atone for his momentary lapse of inconvenient truth-telling. And that has been the right-wing narrative subtext ever since. But the textual evidence has been virtually nonexistent, because Obama’s personality and his politics have been so deeply wedded to compromise and conciliation.

Now, suddenly, it’s possible for conservatives to finally admit Obama’s not a dictatorial tyrant — now that they’ve found a way to hold it against him!

This swift reversal should not be surprising. White male anxiety about black manhood has always been so deeply irrational that it can switch polarities multiple times in a single racist rant. On a much larger, historical scale, in ”Darwin’s Athletes,” one of the most striking reversals John Hoberman notes came about when blacks first began demonstrating their athletic prowess. Before that, white supremacy had been asserted across the boards — whites were superior to blacks in every way — mentally, physically, morally, spiritually. But when top black athletes emerged to disprove that, white supremacy reconfigured itself: Brute physical superiority was suddenly equated axiomatically with inferiority in every other realm.

Naturally, that’s been a problem for white manhood ever since — even without considering the long history of top black scholar athletes, from Paul Robeson to Richard Sherman. The more that physicality, per se, is demonized in the black male, the more problematic it becomes for white males asserting their own masculine identities, particularly their power over women. This inherent, largely buried contradiction lies close to the core of the GOP’s current problems, simultaneously losing the votes of women and minorities in a long demographic decline.

Faced with this reality, the GOP has no choice. No matter how riddled with contradictions it may be, faulting Barack Obama for his performance of masculinity is the only possible move Republicans have left. And if they can get away with it on “Meet the Press,” then who’s to say they’re wrong?

Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg. 

More Paul Rosenberg.

Male Rape Is NOT Hilarious

Via Jezebel - a challenging video and a nice response from Mark Shrayber. The following text accompanies to video on YouTube"

Published on Mar 26, 2014
Warning: There will be triggers for some viewers but, if you watch, please watch the whole thing before passing judgment.

Written and Performed by Andrew Bailey
Camera: Justin Carter

This is the recording of a monologue originally performed at the Atomic Vaudeville Cabaret in June of 2012. | www.baileylaughs.com | atomicvaudeville.wix.com/atomic-vaudevil­le

It's a little challenging to watch, but if you do watch, stay until the end.

This Video Brilliantly Skewers the Idea That Male Rape is Hilarious

Mark Shrayber


When this video was first sent to me, it took me several minutes to bring myself to watch it. The screenshot on YouTube is of a smiling, anxious-looking male in his 20s and I braced myself for a ten minute defense of the use of rape jokes in comedy. What I saw was much more heartbreaking.

In only two minutes, actor and writer Andrew Bailey takes you on an emotional roller coaster with his painful monologue. Bailey introduces himself as Will and immediately launches into a defense of why rape is hilarious (but only when it happens to males). And about ten seconds after that, the monologue takes a very real turn when Will breaks away from a defense of how funny Adam Sandler is to discuss the fact that Lynndie Englund, one of the 11 soldiers convicted for the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, wasn't a monster, she was a comic genius. And then Will drops a bombshell: He was molested at 13 by a teacher who was not a pedophile, but a woman. And it was awesome, because he'd always wanted to have sex and here he was doing it with a trusted adult.

Despite its short duration, the video is difficult to watch in one sitting. Even knowing that this is a monologue and may not be based on personal experience doesn't make it any easier because the experience Will describes is the experience of many. Just watching Will's eyes as he explains that what happened to him wasn't rape ("it was statutory") and how good it felt physically is painful. And it gets even harder when he discusses the reaction of others and tries to convince himself that everything is all right, but it's not.

An adult taking advantage of a child's trust will always take an emotional toll. This is true no matter how hard the victim tries to tell themselves that they wanted it (especially if the victim is socially pressured to want sex). The video is an excellent addition to the discussion of rape humor and the problem of sexual violence against males. Hopefully this video will challenge flippant attitudes common toward rape and particularly statutory rape so that we can have a serious discussion about how to help victims and help prevent this serious crime.