Nobody should have to say this eight times, yet oddly people have literally walked down streets beating a drum and chanting much the same thing and people still have to say it.
I could go on and on (and on, with references, citations, and social history going back about 4,400 years!) about women as active agents of their own sexuality instead of literal objects of sexuality for others, but instead I’ll just say that nobody should say “we don’t need feminism” until folks like @daddyscrazybunny and @radioactivepussy never have to say it again even once.
dsWhat breaks my heart a little is that the boy almost certainly didn’t have a dad or mom who could give him the corresponding talk.
Back when she still had a fresh eye, Naomi Wolf introduced a super-important concept in a book called the Beauty Myth, basically laying out how Patriarchy indoctrinates women to so so thoroughly judge themselves (and judge each other) by standards of beauty that actual men’s opinions become secondary.
What’s less well understood is that the same Patriarchy indoctrinates men to judge ourselves and each other by similarly detached standards of “worthiness.” As the Canadian comedy character Red Green always put it “if the women can’t find you handsome they should at least find you handy.”
In this toxic atmosphere, boys teach each other that a girl couldn’t possibly be attracted to a man who’s “less handy” than she is with tools, games, grades, income, or accomplishments. And this is almost certainly why the boy was so butt hurt. Especially if his more “worthy” peers (ability to be a marine automatically confers more “worthiness”) wanted her to be on their side rather than his.
This shit is ground deep into men from childhood and for that reason parents in general and fathers in particular need to help their sons (and daughters) understand that girls like boys for way more than their ability to shred on a guitar, get achievements in games, bench press more weight than their peers, work longer hours or rise higher in their jobs.
“Worthiness,” like “beauty,” is only a threshold and pretty low one. Saying it doesn’t matter at all isn’t quite true… you can’t be a 100% net drain on a relationship. But, all due respect to Cee Lo Green, sorry man but if you was richer she still probably wouldn’t be with ya.
The “Worthiness Myth” is a big-time myth. The boy in the story let his worthiness butt-hurt blow his chance with what sounds like an awesome potential girlfriend.
It’s the 21st Century. Feminism has something for everyone including desperate, butt-hurt teenage boys. Teach them that too.
What breaks my heart a little is that the boy almost certainly didn’t have a dad or mom who could give him the corresponding talk.
Back when she still had a fresh eye, Naomi Wolf introduced a super-important concept in a book called the Beauty Myth, basically laying out how Patriarchy indoctrinates women to so so thoroughly judge themselves (and judge each other) by standards of beauty that actual men’s opinions become secondary.
What’s less well understood is that the same Patriarchy indoctrinates men to judge ourselves and each other by similarly detached standards of “worthiness.” As the Canadian comedy character Red Green always put it “if the women can’t find you handsome they should at least find you handy.”
In this toxic atmosphere, boys teach each other that a girl couldn’t possibly be attracted to a man who’s “less handy” than she is with tools, games, grades, income, or accomplishments. And this is almost certainly why the boy was so butt hurt. Especially if his more “worthy” peers (ability to be a marine automatically confers more “worthiness”) wanted her to be on their side rather than his.
This shit is ground deep into men from childhood and for that reason parents in general and fathers in particular need to help their sons (and daughters) understand that girls like boys for way more than their ability to shred on a guitar, get achievements in games, bench press more weight than their peers, work longer hours or rise higher in their jobs.
“Worthiness,” like “beauty,” is only a threshold and pretty low one. Saying it doesn’t matter at all isn’t quite true… you can’t be a 100% net drain on a relationship. But, all due respect to Cee Lo Green, sorry man but if you was richer she still probably wouldn’t be with ya.
The “Worthiness Myth” is a big-time myth. The boy in the story let his worthiness butt-hurt blow his chance with what sounds like an awesome potential girlfriend.
It’s the 21st Century. Feminism has something for everyone including desperate, butt-hurt teenage boys. Teach them that too.
As someone who self-identifies as a feminist and teaches Gender and Women’s Studies, I want to comment on the many posts I see on accounts such as yours that use feminism to support a woman’s desire to engage in such “anti-feminist” practices as submission, masochism, traditional gender roles, etc. This is a long response and I completely understand if you don’t post it as you may feel that I’m disrespectful/angry/too political and, well, too long.
As I understand them, these posters define feminism as a woman’s “freedom to make choices” that are right for her. Whether she heads a Fortune 500 company or stays at home with her children, her choices are empowering because she makes them of her own free will and for herself. This, many of your followers argue, is a central tenet of feminism. Yet, scholars and dictionaries define feminism as “the belief in social, political and economic equality between the sexes. In practice and in history, feminist social movements and academic theories have defined the relationship between the sexes in general and the liberation of women in particular. Feminist movements have attempted to influence politics and social policies through research, education, activism and legislation” (Issitt/Flynn 2016). Note that nowhere does this definition mention “choice.” First-wave feminists fought for the right to vote; second-wave for equal work/educational opportunities; and third-wave for political representation and on behalf of intersectionality (transgender, ethnic, and lesbian women).
I say all this because I’m bothered that defenses of the lifestyle choices represented here describe feminism as synonymous with “choice” without acknowledging that only a select few have the means to make these choices. In fact, it’s not feminism that enables a woman to stay at home and/or cede financial control to her dominant partner; rather, it is her and her partner’s ethnicity and status (statistically, U.S. lifestyle communities are overwhelmingly white and middle-class; while I realize that not all of you self-identify as such, exceptions are not the norm; https://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/bdsm_its_less_transgressive_than_you_think/). For those who disagree, please understand that your definition of feminism rests on privilege that billions of economically disadvantaged women world-wide do not share. As you engage in your safe, sane, consensual, legal lifestyle choices, please be aware of some potential consequences (such as the dominant partner’s sudden inability to earn a living, for example) and please be aware of how lucky you are that your class and ethnicity allow you to do so.
This brings me to my next point: please stop making feminists – even a percentage of feminists – out to be the ones most critical of these choices. First of all, we’re not (though I concede that some feminists are anti-porn); secondly, you stereotype feminists as rigid, angry, combative, and man-hating; and, thirdly, you dismiss our very real accomplishments. Right now, feminists are fighting to keep Planned Parenthoods – often the only places low-income women can get mammograms, birth control, and STDs treatment – open in far too many states. We are fighting to correct the gender pay gap, which still means that women earn eighty cents for every dollar that men make (https://iwpr.org/issue/employment-education-economic-change/pay-equity-discrimination/). And, globally, we are fighting war-time sexual violence, which is an epidemic in Somalia and Uganda, to name only a few countries (https://www.unicef.org/sowc96pk/sexviol.htm). We are not, quite frankly, taking the time to fight against your lifestyle choices. If you want to resent anyone, resent those who believe they have a right to control your body (https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/09/opinions/the-important-issue-about-women-trump-has-raised-ben-ghiat/index.html). The leap from forced birth (and here, yes, feminism is about choice) to forced heteronormative lifestyles is not a big one given that both deny bodily autonomy.
So, if someone who self-identifies as feminist criticizes your lifestyle, I ask that you please engage with that person as an individual rather than using that exchange to attack feminism on the basis of this one or even relatively few encounters. You would not wish others to make reductive generalizations about your lifestyles based on a few extreme interactions; I ask that you grant feminists the same courtesy.
Thank you for your time and attention.
Sincerely,
Ffeminst3
I’m rehashing a previous response to this because I read it a little differently the second time.
Ffeminist3 has a 100% fair point. There’s a shit ton more to feminism than “freedom to make choices,” which in the grand scheme of things is actually pretty low on the overall hierarchy of needs anyway. And from a choice perspective being able to affect relationship dynamics imposed on ~99.981% of men AND women over at least the last 6,500 years and call it “freedom” or “choice” is about as obliviously privileged as Marie Antoinette and her buddies wearing silk brocade gowns and calling themselves milkmaids.
(And yeah I said men too because you know what kind of pressure and even violence men in some cultures face if they don’t police their daughters or beat their wives the way we make Domly/Subby play out of? Indoctrination plays both ways.)
If you bend things around you can construct things like the right to education, right to own property, right not to be used sexually in combat or police-custody situations, or to supervise or represent men in business or law as “choices” and “freedom.” But as the old timer said, with enough ifs you can also put Paris in a bottle.
I’m a big, happy, and proud kinkster.
And therefore “freedom to choose” is right around the bottom of my list of reasons for doing what I do.
Like most actual kinksters I do what I do because it’s intentionally transgressive. I mean it’s called kink because it’s the opposite of what I know is decent and honorable and right. I do it because I’m goddamned terrified of the capital-P Patriarchal capital-S System and I hate it worse than vipers.
And I do it with people who feel the same way about it. If we didn’t know it was weird to get off on the shit we do it wouldn’t be “kinky!”
I do it because it’s exactly perverted — a stress reaction to social expectations that treating equal, autonomous human peers like children or thrills or pets or objects is the right thing to do if they have somewhere a penis might get put into.
I do it because I’ve been goddamn kinked!
But here’s the deal: every way I’m “supposed” to treat my partners sexually is also inherited from patriarchal indoctrination — treating women with more deference than I would my male friends of similar weight, size, income, etc., for instance. Going down on her but never imagining she’d “demean” herself by going down on me. Choosing Harvey Kellogg’s “missionary” position to minimize the risk of arousing her “animal spirits,” etc.
It’s all perverted. My embrace of kink is an alienated stress reaction to that too.
So one and a half full-throated cheers for Ffeminist3 for calling bullshit on the “freedom to choose” justification for conformity to the (exaggerated) status quo. And for rightly calling out buttewhispers who accuse feminists of being anti-sex, anti-kink, or anti-fun.
But only one and a half cheers for Ffeminist3 because they’re straw-manning power-exchange kink as well. Not everyone in kink can hold forth on Shulamuth Firestone and Andrea Dworkin, and of those who do not all agree with Mary Daly or Susan Brownmiller. But a hell of a lot actually can and do. And quite a few more have the same deep, dark, and visceral love/hate relationships with their kinky (ie bent, twisted, out-of-true) sexualities I do. And they’re more often than not critically aware of the contradictions between their transgressive modes of sexual expression and their political, cultural, and economic aspirations for all of humanity.
Yeah, maybe some kinksters really think what they do is “feminist” strictly and exclusively because they think feminism means only “freedom to choose” frankly anti-feminist sexual ideologies. But, you know, most of us don’t.
Learn more about feminism before you knock it. But also learn more about power-exchange kink before you knock that too.
Kinksters and feminists have better uses of their time than stereotyping and straw-personing each other.
(Hope this makes more sense and has fewer typos than the last time.)
For the (historical) record, on my old, original blog I spent a lot of time heaping scorn and verbal abuse on the huge array of “sociobiology,” it’s allegedly more fact-based bastard child “evolutionary psychology,” and the various trolls, MRAs and incels who devour it like flies on shit.
The basic thrust of all these “disciplines” builds down to, basically, explaining why creepers can’t get dates. Usually, the theory always goes, women are feckless gold diggers with strong preferences for racist bugaboos.
My counteragument was always that historically, in, you know, actual capital-P Patriarchy all “sexual selection” took place between… heads of households cutting deals with other heads of households using marriage of offspring and vassals as tokens of exchange.
The studies aggregated in the link above backs up my (fairly well-informed) intuition with academic vigor.
Clue: in 200 “hunter gatherer” societies the average age of marriage for men is roughly age 21. And berate age for “women” girls? 14!🤮
And one of the key determinants for the man’s “reproductive success? marriage selection? His affinity or utility to… the “bride’s” father.
Not a lot of room there for sociobiology’s fetishization of ovulation, semen consumption, preferences for “alph” males or scorn for “betas,” women’s oddity of coming from straight vanilla intercourse, etc.
Glad to see it all laid it more clearly than I ever felt I was able to.
Also fuck that shit. Give me a decent society where women can be CEOs, authors, and scientists instead of getting sidelined as self-cleaning cock sleeves. Update: because if nothing else that kind of society give me, and us, far more, and vastly hotter sex than 10,000 knee-squeezing “alpha male” wannabes and their generally pinched and transaction-oriented Patriarchal ideals could possibly imagine.
(Hint: you think women aren’t interested in stoop-chested MRAs, good luck imagining they’d do better sucking up to theirl fathers back I. The “good old days.” Because ahahahah, yeah, no.
Do people have any goddamn idea how much more “what did she expect” says about them than about who they’re talking about?
Scolding victims means you agree with the old-school feminists that violent sexual assault isn’t about sex, it’s about violence. It means the old-school feminists were right that you believe violent sexual assault is a useful tool for social control of women. It means you believe violent sexual assault is a good form of punishment for trivial social transgressions.
Putting it in the kind of right-wing “law n’ order” terms conservatives are always bandying about, scolding victims = mollycoddling criminals. it means privileging criminals over their victims.
I sincerely doubt that anyone reading this has ever said “what did she expect to happen.” I’m offering this as an invitation to fry the ears off anyone you hear say shit like this, in terms that might percolate through the useless fleshy growth between their shoulders.
Nice inversion of the stereotypical treatment of women by class or occupation in this! Princesses, executives, “alpha” Submissives, and others can engage in lusty lack of deference between the sheets because their power and authority in day-to-day life is never in question. Street/subsistence sex workers (a.k.a. “whores”) are commonly perceived as members of the “undeserving poor” underclass, and are typically treated as callously- and sometimes gruesomely-discardable manual labor… and should be treated with basic human dignity.
There’s something just profoundly wrong about the usual aphorisms like “a lady in the street, a whore between the sheets” or “treat a lady like a whore and a whore like a lady.” Because, um, treat women of any class, status, or profession like, you know, fellow human beings?
Until we get over the bone-deep assumption that sex workers are natural recipients of sexual violence… and until we get it through our tiny goddamn walnut-sized brains that sex workers are as deserving of nose and forehead kisses as anyone else… I don’t want to hear anyone yammer about “feminazis.”
I mean, yeah, those “lesbian separatist feminists” of the 1970s were the shock troops, but society needed shocking. Still does.
Pull your hair and choke you like a princess and then kiss your forehead like a whore? Hell yeah, that sounds pretty good.
yes but obvi only in a kink scene or something, i’ve been sent messages where someone was trying to dom me and called me “slut” when i tried to say that i would rather talk first and i don’t care for that shit /at all/
This! The biggest goddamn mistake people make is imagining that something you enjoy during sex with a partner would be just as enjoyable without. Or that something that turns you on when your partner does it turns you when random strangers do. Or that something that excites you when you’re horny turns you on when you’re just trying to get to work, or drop the kids off, or finish your report, or order a goddamn cup of coffee.
Consider that a lot of guys get off extra hard when their lover presses a fingertip against their asshole when they’re coming. And yet pretty much no guy is likely to appreciate someone touching their asshole while they’re making a presentation at work.
Sexual Domination and Submission is… um… sexual. One of the things that makes it a kink as opposed to, oh, say, “how everyday life works” is that it’s shit you actively don’t want to happen in regular life!
D/S happens between equal partners. If you’re not equal partners it’s not kink it’s abuse and/or codependence, criminal behavior or criminal victimization.
Being treated with animal lust by your lover is hot, being treated like an animal, um, isn’t.
Men are not inherently violent, predatory, or dangerous. Any feminist project worthy of the name needs to acknowledge that this behavior is taught. The idea of men being biologically predisposed to being abusers or rapists is actively used against abuse and rape survivors / victims
(does the phrase “boys will be boys” ring a bell at all to you?) and will never, ever work in our favor.
Saying men are inherently shit is literally anti-feminism
Men are not born as garbage, they are TAUGHT to be garbage
That’s one of the whole points of feminism
Exactly! And part of our platform is the immediate need for change in how people view (and teach/encourage/spread) toxic masculinity!!
Um. Except for some self-admittely traumatized 2nd-wave Feminists from the 1970s you’ll be extremely hard-pressed to find many feminists who say men are inherently violent, etc.
Even Andrea Dworkin, who was about as radical as they get, said the legal and social structure of society made sex in marriage indistinguishable from rape. Because under the law at the time wives literally couldn’t legally say no to their husbands. And therefore couldn’t meaningfully consent either. Without the right to have “no” respected there’s (literally!) literally no such thing as meaningful consent! But even Dworkin distinguished between social conditioning and innate behavior!
You know who does say men are inherently animalistic, low-impulse-control, predatory, and dangerous? Anti-feminist men and (omg, especially) anti-feminist women!
Lorenna Bobbitt cut her husband’s dick off because he beat the shit out of her, drank all the money, and just generally made her life a living hell. Was that a huge feminist triumph? Oh hell no! There were plenty of social and community services available to Bobbett in her town, including women’s shelters, abuse hotline, and counseling services. However as a “good, conservative Christian girl” she’d been advised to stay with her abusive asshole husband and stay far, far away from them thar feminiisteres. And so instead of doing any of the right things she could have done to protect herself she waited till she was desperate and terrified and cut his dick off with a kitchen knife after he’d passed out drunk!
If she’d been even a little bit feminist she’d have been safe and he wouldn’t have a franken-dick. (Authorities found his dick where she’d thrown it in a field and reattached it.)
Oh, and check out “conservative” “Christian” stalwart Mike Huckabee thinks men are so perverted and aggressive that they’ll get goddam sex changes so they can peek or prey on women in restrooms! (As if transwomen wanted anything more than to avoid being molested themselves!) He’s also admitted with his bare face hanging out that since he always wanted to sneak into girl’s lockerrooms, all boys and men must want to.
Like I say, men and anti-feminist women hate men. Fear them. Want to control them. In a way that feminists pretty much… don’t.
Do feminists get irked with men? Sure they do! But it’s because they believe men, like women, are human beings not animals. And get pretty annoyed when they live up to Huckabee’s expectations of bestial behavior instead of, you know, human standards.
So, yeah, anyway, good luck finding a (living) influential feminist who says “men are garbage” or “abort all male babies” or any of the other booshwah misogynist pill holes like Rush Limbaugh, Mike Huckabee, Ann Coulter, Phyllis Schlafly, and 10,000 pedophile priests, adulterous preachers, and #metoo pundits squirt out their butts about “feminizazis.”
