The Bad Men Project

Image of junk in a trunk by Flickr user rofltosh

So. When did men start calling their genitals "my junk?"  And what the heck is that about?

You know that part about how some men lament that women see them only as "life support systems for wallets" and otherwise aren't really attracted to women?

Most of the women I know kind of... are attracted to men.  (It's called heterosexuality, gang.  Shouldn't be that much of a mystery.)  And the closer to social, legal, and especially economic parity women and men become our economic "worthiness" has even less important than society used to demand that it be.

Meanwhile some time in the last 10-15 year guys started using the word "junk."

Clue: stop doing that.  I mean, if you're a hetero man then it makes sense that you might not be interested in men's genitals, including your own.  Just because you're not interested doesn't mean your partner shares your opinion.  So... show a little pride here gang!

Image by Flickr User Totally Severe

Ever wonder if men are "socially constructed?"  A lot of people think that's feminist claptrap.  But if so then why did it become a huge trending item on both Google and Twitter when Tim Gunn mentioned he'd been celibate for 29 years?  I wrote this at my other blog a while back.  Andrew Sullivan linked to the original. I'm reposting it here.

A Man Who Doesn't Boink?!?!? Weighing In on Tim Gunn's Relatively Ordinary 29 Years of Celibacy

Kind of weird what you get when you run that L.A. Times article about Tim Gunn's 29 years of celibacy" through Regender.com.

The original article is kind of a piece of work. The reporter (and, evidently tens of thousands of people querying Google) are somewhere between shock, fascination, and denial that the Project Runway co-host hasn't had sex since the early 1980s. All the more so because Gunn says it hasn't been a very big deal for him.

The real hoot is that people who (correctly) don't bat an eye that Gunn's last relationship was with a man nevertheless disapprove of his failure to be sexual at all for three decades.

Another weird thing about the original article is that the reporter asked, of all people, a surgeon who specializes almost exclusively in women's health and sexuality to opine on Gunn's "condition." (You'd think they could find at least one psychologist or urologist in LA who regularly sees gay men. Or men period.)

Even weirder, or more like unpleasant, is what the surgeon, Dr. Jennifer R. Berman, has to say.

...Gunn's 29-year, self-imposed dry spell was "not a natural state."

[and]

Berman said that, if she were treating Gunn, she'd like to know: Does he continue to be celibate by choice -- or out of fear? For example, she said, if we lived in a magical world where sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS were not an issue ... would Gunn still abstain from sexual intimacy?

"It's not a natural sort of decision, nor is it biological or physiological -- we are not wired that way," she said. "It sounds like there are issues relating to trust," she added.

Source: The Los Angeles Times

Or, as Jill of I Blame the Patriarchy put it

"If she were treating him for this “illness,” she says, she would get to the bottom of his debilitating trust issues, for Man Must Boink!"

She said it here.

Look, I don't want to single out Berman, or even the reporter, and certainly not all the people who think this is just earth-shattering news. Imagine, a man! Who doesn't have sex! Inconceivable! Almost intolerable!* But that whole "man must boink" business is as clearly socially constructed as a Windsor tie. What's really chilling is that a man who doesn't "boink" isn't just weird, he's broken and wrong and by gum we'd better fix him or else really break him!

Call it the opposite of the other obligatory gender construction, "slut shaming." A man who, when given a choice to take it or leave it picks "leave it" ought to be ashamed of himself. And the only reason people don't shame the crap out of them is there are just a whole lot more places to hide, and a whole lot fewer witnesses (how does one witness not doing it anyway?)

There are a lot of really bad consequences to this assumption that "man must boink." Really bad. And given that, going back as far as the late 1970s researchers have notice that as many as 15% of adult men really would rather not, that's a lot of potential bad stuff. For instance you know that eternal "joke" about how 90% of men masturbate and the other 10% are liars? If you're not one of the 100% who everyone "knows" wants sex then you're going one of a couple of ways, none of them very good and some really bad. For instance you might do really ugly stereotype-ish things because you're trying to "pass." Or you might take the prim/prudish path and say all sex is sin and should only be done "for reproduction." If that. Or you might just lie a lot. But since we live in a misogynist culture pretty much all the ways of "passing" involve misogyny, and since people trying to pass tend to be over the top then, yeah, you can end up with a lot of over-the-top misogyny.

Most of which (though not all) could be mitigated (though probably not eliminated) if the asshats at USAToday and "experts" from the L.A. Times would keep their ignorant, stereotype-enforcing pie holes shut.

A few years ago I got a brainstorm from one of Twisty Faster's posts and decided that in a lot of ways it makes more sense to say that men are the "sex class" (meaning they're the class constructed to be reflexively, uncontrollably, obligately sexual) while women might be better designated as the "no sex" class where it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable that a woman would ever experience, let alone admit, sexual interest. In either case, people who don't fit their respective stereotypes aren't just thought to be somewhere on the normal bell curve, and they're not just considered maybe a little quirky, and they're not maybe just in a less-obvious part of the population, they're broken, sick, wrong, and actually kind of a threat. One that needs to be "mended," or explained away or even outright denied.

The opprobrium heaped on Gunn just makes the case. He's male but not obligately sexual and he's suddenly weirder than if he had three buttocks.

More proof, by the way, that society's patriarchal. And classed. And gendered.

Me? I'm not on the same part of the bell curve as Gunn but since my first trip through a gym lockerroom in 7th grade I've experienced intense pressure not just to "be a man" but to be compulsively sexual. Sexual's fine -- I like being sexual -- but compulsively? No, that's not been good at all -- it pushed me into places I'd rather not have gone, before I was ready to go there, and I'm just continuing to confront, over and over, the places that pressure told me to go that I really should never have gone and wish I hadn't.

I wish Tim Gunn and all the other asexual and unsexual people in the world the best of luck, sure, but even more I wish they got a little more understanding too. Actually, more than that, earnestly hope someday they'll be as tolerated and accepted as "not broken" as anybody else.

Ugg. Sorry about the rant. Hope it doesn't sound like man'splaining, it's just... I've got a lot of frustration about this. And I'm really glad you brought it up, Jill, because if we're ever going to get out of the patriarchy/gender trap (I know we have different opinions about whether we can) we're going to have to get people to stop contemplating psychiatric "fixes" for men who don't fit the "and the other 10% are lying" stereotype.

People want to believe men "think with their little head" so badly it hurts.  Us.

Image from Mike Ruppecht (cached as a bandwidth courtesy.)

Feminists have noted with considerable annoyance that straight, generally Anglo-American or European men are often assumed to be the default "normal" against which all others (not just women but ethnic, geographic, anatomical, and orientational "minorities") are measured.  We're sort of the default "zero ground" or background noise, which makes everyone else "fascinating" to science, statistics, and of course both men's and women's magazines and talk shows. 

But that assumption has a cost, not only for "others" but for men.  I wrote this in a comment in someone else's blog a few years ago, about what can happen when you uncouple the idea of men as the standard and just start looking at us as one of several focal points on the graph.

Here’s an example of what I think gets missed when you assume men are the neutral ruler everyone else is measured against. It’s economic, not biological, but I think it really drives the point home. You know the notorious statistic that women earn 79 to 85 cents on the dollar compared men? I’ve noticed that even people who don’t think that’s a problem put it in those terms: women earn some percentage different from standard-reference men.

So one day I put my shirt on inside out or something and while I was straightening that out the thought went through my head “men earn $1.21 to $1.15 cents on the dollar compared to women.” And while I was kind of goggling at the novelty of that construction I asked myself a question that as far as I know has never in the world been asked: what are employers buying with that extra 15-21 cents? And then (since at the time I was a stay at home dad in love to my eyebrows with my children, my home, and my daytime friends and activities) I asked myself what are men selling for that extra fifteen to twenty-one cents? And as soon as I did I didn’t really like the answer — what men sacrifice for that small difference in money is large chunks of what could otherwise be well-rounded life.

The point being that moving away from a perspective of assumed-male reference lets you examine your assumptions about the reference as well.

My point here is not to say "but, men have it bad too."  In the world of gross stereotypes everybody has it bad, so it's not even remarkable than men would. 

Instead my point is until we stop making men the default assumption it will continue to be hard to ask questions like "what are employers buying that extra 15 or 25 cents on the dollar?" Or "what are men giving up to get it?" And especially "is it worth it?"

Photo by Flickr user intvgene. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Proto-ruminations on the "Good Men" problem.  From 10/25/2007 on my old (occasionally nsfw) blog.

This seems like as good a time as any to point out that men should not be into feminism because it's "the right thing to do." Men should not go into feminism "even though there's nothing in it for them." And men really, really shouldn't get into feminism in hopes they might get laid (or finally get laid.)

First of all because each of those reasons is based on totally false premises in the first place. But more importantly because stories about "should" and "ought" are just the 21st Century equivalent of men opening doors for women: more of what we're trying to get away from!

Instead from better health to longer lives to more financial independence to better sex there are plenty of staggeringly obvious reasons why men should be jumping into feminism with both feet. In fact, the supporting evidence is so obvious that one of the biggest reasons all over that just might be...

just might be...

just might be that we think we should, or that we ought to, or that it has to inconvenience us, that it's a zero-sum game, that us guys just have to fondly step aside because it's "Teh Ladies'" turn.

F'shea right. The blinders go on the horse, Galahad, not the rider.

---

Quick note: When I talk about issues related to feminism I really try to talk in terms of the way men relate to it. With regards to this topic, though, the idea that men should support feminism simply because "it's the right thing to do" spans both genders. I'm not going to say that women asking men to do something "because it's the right thing to do" is playing into generations of oppressive conditioning... but I will say that when that argument is made it seems to trigger all the wrong reflexes in men.

In retrospect part of the main post was even more tangled than I usually get.  What I meant to say is that it's a problem if a guy's only involvement in feminism is to "do the right thing."  There are enough other good reasons that a failure to recognize them is itself a symptom suggesting he's up to his neck in his own gender indoctrination.

Image from flickr user Andrea Kirkby.  Used under creative commons license.

John Lennon of The Beatles wrote the song "Girl" no later than Nov. 11, 1965 -- the day it was released on their chart-topping album Rubber Soul.

In 1965 feminism in America, often considered to have been sparked by the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was at best about two and a half years old.

And yet Lennon felt compelled to write these accusatory lyrics about what he felt was the role of men in that pre-feminist world. (Emphasis mine.)

Was she told when she was young that fame would lead to pleasure.
Did she understand it when they said
That a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure?
Will she still believe it when he's dead?
Ah, girl!

Crucial question: Who's the "they" in "when they said..." whatever it was they said when she was young?

Remember, if she was more than two and a half years old "they" weren't feminists. But whoever it was instead their construction of men couldn't have been more clear.

Now as it happens, John Lennon claimed the in the song song was really a metaphor for the church (emphasis mine)

I was just talking about Christianity in that - a thing like you have to be tortured to attain heaven. [...] - be tortured and then it'll be alright, which seems to be a bit true but not in their concept of it. But I didn't believe in that, that you have to be tortured to attain anything, it just so happens that you were."

That last sentence is pure gold. Somebody wants men to interpret their (but only their) suffering as a sign of worthiness. And indeed it's been pretty convenient to those somebodys to prod men into further sacrifice, further pain, further injury, further self-neglect, and all in hopes of "earning" something that in all likelihood will either be freely given (like acknowledgement, love, sex, etc.) or not worth the cost (a fancier car for working so late you never see your kids awake? Twenty five cents more on the hourly dollar for ten fewer years of life?

What really gets me is how hard it is to see this.  How hard to see the ways we enforce it not just in others but in ourselves.  It's an indoctrination that runs deep.  And we're so deep in it we don't even think it's there.  So deep that we go looking for someone else to blame.

So should you meet, or imagine you're involved with, a "girl" like the metaphorical one in Lennon's song it's a good idea to ask yourself: who told her?  

Whoever it was probably told us first.

It starts with a "P..."

Head's Up: This post discusses specific forms of sexual violence in order to indicate how narrowly such violence is typically defined.  I use the word "rape" as a specific legal and social term.

So in comments Jacob Taylor took issue with my fairly routine assertion that if men want male victims of sexual violence to be taken seriously we to take women victims seriously.

You demand a quid pro quo condition that male survivors and their advocates must meet before anyone should support them.

You're really not going to find anything in this blog that says men have to make sacrifices to "earn" anything from women. And if I ever, ever say men need to make sacrifices or otherwise pay women before "anyone should support them" it'll either be a serious typo or I'll need medical attention.  And so it's unlikely that I'm ever going to say that if men earn enough cookies we'll get taken seriously.

Instead I'm saying that as long as there are jerks out there like Todd Aikin saying it's only rape if an assault is so brutal the female victims organs of reproduction go into failure then society isn't going to take seriously what happens to men. And I'm saying as long as there jerks like Whoopi Goldberg saying it's not "rape rape" if all the attacker does is drug a minor girl, chase her screaming through the house when the drugs weren't strong enough, subdue her and anally penetrate her" then society isn't going to take seriously what happens to men. And I'm saying that as long as all the other smug dirtbags who say violence less than Aikin's or Goldberg's definitions -- stuff like threats, intoxication, "date rape," etc., is all a just a big misunderstanding or malicious "crying rape" go unchallenged then society isn't going to take seriously what happens to male victims.

So when I say men should take female victims seriously I mean we need to be landing like a ton of bricks on the likes of Aikin and Goldberg when claim that for all intents and purposes not even women can be raped. Because as you've probably noticed, the people who define the universe of sexual violence that narrowly aren't even going to register what happens to men until it's so bad that authorities (again,overwhelmingly male) simply have no way left to deny it.  Sure, that (finally) happens in cases like Mary Letourno, and Penn State (and all state pens!), and pedophile priests where it's so overwhelmingly obvious even the newspapers start to pay attention.  But for the most part?  They've never heard of it and aren't interested finding out.

Helping them get their heads out of their butts about <em>all</em> victims of non-Aikin/Goldberg violence -- the kind society doesn't even take seriously when it happens to women! -- therefore helps everybody.  Which is why I say it's important to for advocates for ,a;e victims of violence to take seriously female victims of violence.

If you look at it that way, the way I look at it, then it probably won't look so much like "quid pro quo." And if you see it that way then if someone claimed I'm just saying men have to somehow "pay" women to take our problem seriously then you'd probably be as annoyed and frustrated as I get.

Instead what I'm saying is that society is completely bound up with the deep, historical, and completely gender-defined idea that "rape" is something that can only happen to women -- "good" women at that!  It can happen at the hands of strangers.  Under the most horrifically violent circumstances. And it says that anything and maybe everything else is lies, avoidance, or even consensual "cuckoldry."

For this reason I don't think taking assault against women seriously is some kind of "quid pro quo" to getting men taken seriously. Nor do I endorse doing it to "earn" respect or cookies or any of the rest of that patriarchy-inspired crap the way "Good Men" Galahads do it.

Instead I'm saying men who care about male victims should take female victims seriously because until society starts taking them seriously it's not going to take male victims seriously either.

This would be so whether or not the Feminist Illuminati Conspiracy ever gets on board. Because for all the squalling feminism is obviously not the problem. Not unless you think the abuse-condoning Joe Paterno was a radical feminist. Not unless you think the entire abuse-condoning Catholic hierarchy is radically feminist. Not unless you think Scott (Dilbert) Adams is a raging feminist. And so on. Those guys are a much bigger obstacle, and their kind has been around thousands of years longer than feminism. So blaming feminism for anything is, as I've said repeatedly, like the bull charging the cape instead of the matador.

In a post in the Wall Street Journal titled "Why Most Men Aren’t Man Enough to Handle Web Porn", Alain de Botton, a philosopher and writer, resorts to the deux ex machana of sociobiology/evolutionary-psychology to... explain that men's genes render us helpless, weak, and damaged if given more than an occasional glimpse of a female knee or elbow. (Emphasis mine.)

Consider pornography. Part of the problem is that it’s extremely tempting to some people, as alcohol and crack cocaine are. Commentators who don’t investigate the issue much, who might once have had a peek inside Playboy or caught a preview of a naughty film on the television channel of a hotel rest too easy that there’s no problem. But there is. A largely unwitting alliance made up of Cisco, Dell Oracle Microsoft and thousands of pornographic providers have now found a way of exploiting a design flaw in the male gender. A brain originally designed to cope with nothing more tempting than an occasional glimpse of a tribesperson across the savannah is lost with what’s now on offer on the net at the click of a button: when confronted with offers to participate continuously in scenarios outstripping any that could be dreamt up by the diseased mind of the Marquis de Sade. There is nothing robust enough in our psychological make-up to compensate for developments in our technological capacities.

Source: WSJ Speakeasy

By the way was I being hyperbolic when I said "more than an occasional glimpse of a female knee or... elbow? Here's de Botton again:

Could a rational adult really change their life on account of the sighting of a pair of beguiling female knees or elbows? Would one not have to be mental weakling in order to be severely affected by a group of half-naked teenagers sauntering provocatively down the beachfront? ... It is not an insult to human beauty to suggest that the matter may not be quite so simple. Indeed, it is a tribute to the power of beauty to think otherwise.

Yep. Get out the chadors, habits, wimples, and burkas, ladies! According to Mr. de Botton us poor men can't be your moral and spiritual betters beings unless you're buttoned up to your eyebrows. Because Catholic teaching! Because Muslim traditions! Because St. Augustine! Because... well.. Philosophy!

A portion of our libido has to be forced underground, repression was not just for the Catholics, the Muslims and the Victorians, it has to be with us for eternity. Because we have to go to work, commit ourselves to relationships, care for our children and explore our own minds, we cannot allow our sexual urges to express themselves without limit, online or otherwise; it would destroy us. Sex is a force from which we should not realistically ever expect or want to be entirely be “liberated.”

Is it really necessary to point out that neither Mr. de Botton, nor the ancient authorities he cites, nor the archaic traditions he endorses, nor even the dubious genetic inferiority he dreams up arise from feminism? Is it really necessary to note that each and every citation is of a pillar, icon, or institution of fundamental (even fundamentalist!) patriarchy?

The man's not drawing inspiration from Andrea Dworkin here, he's drawing it from John Harvey Kellogg!

Is it necessary to point out that his proposed solution is not suggesting that men deal with their problem by bucking up, or at least zipping up? That his solution for menis instead for women to cover up!

You can grouse all day long about feminism, gang, but nobody hates men like the Patriarchy hates men.

Image from Quickmeme.

So on a previous post, Thanks to the Expiration of the VAWA, Stereotype-Busting Studies Like the NISVS 2010 Report Are in Jeopardy, where I lamented the passing of the VAWA and said

The Executive summary of the CDC’s The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 Summary Report … provided hard evidence that based on available information, … the reservoir of probable victims of intimate partner violence is at least half again as large as prior studies assuming only female victims would lead us to believe.

Someone named Sig replied in comments that no,

That information has been available since the 1970s. Its just that it has been systematically covered up by the feminist movement. With VAWA and feminist agendas finally out of the way, we will have much better flow of information.

Is he saying if it hadn't been for the "feminist movement" suppressing all that evidence there wouldn't be any male victims at all? Or that no one would deny there are male victims? Or what?

If so then why when I was sexually assaulted by a young woman in 1959 or 1960, when the feminist "movement" didn't yet exist, the men and women in my neighborhood didn't take what happened to me very seriously? Why did I have to wait till 1980 or 1981 for the director of a feminist-separatist crisis center / women's shelter to tell me that a) what had happened to me was a sexual assault, that b) men can be assaulted, that c) men can be assaulted by women, and d) such assaults accounted for at least 10% of cases?

Why? She was unquestionably part of the "feminist movement." Why was she so casually forthcoming? I mean I already "knew" that men can't be raped so it would have been easy as pie for her to nod her head and let me continue believing it. Instead she was right up front about it. And, I have to say, the knowledge she freely shared helped me reconcile just a whole shit-ton of conflicting feelings I'd had till then.

If Sig was right that there was a feminist conspiracy to deny it and, worse, cover it up why would she have said anything at all?

The truth instead is that there's a social conspiracy to deny what happens, to cover it up, to whitewash over it, to look the other way, to both innocently and sometimes maliciously misinterpret what happens -- just like the jackass who helped the women in the neighborhood rescue me did when I was 4 or 5. Because really? It didn't exactly help that he said half enviously and half jokingly that I "was getting an early start." I'm pretty sure Feminists didn't go back in their time machines to put him up to that.

If feminists sometimes get caught up in that paradigm about men as always the initiators and never needing consent well, sure, they grow up as indoctrinated to believe that shit as anyone else does.

The difference is that once you start looking at the issues in earnest, as feminists have tended to do, you actually become disposed to see what's happening. And be prepared to recognize it and to call it what it really is.

As opposed to the "Sir Galahad" types -- the cops, politicians, prosecutors, judges, and other "Good Men" -- who put most of the measures people like Sig keep complaining about on the books because they just want to "help the little ladies out." And, therefore ignore anything that might befall men because like true patriarchs they don't give a crap what happens to us because to the men who are still mostly in charge other men like us are, yes, expendable.

Point being you can complain about "Teh Fehminist Chonspiracy" year in and year out (as guys like Sig have) but you'll notice it hasn't done much good. But that's not because feminists are a conspiracy more vast than the combined Elders of Zion and the Bavarian Illuminati, it's because they're really not the problem in the first place.

And by the way, no, if Sig's kind ever gets the "feminist agenda" out of the way, the way they've gotten the VAWA out of the way, there won't be "a much better flow of information." Not least because, again, do you really think once the men who are trying to crush the feminist agenda get their feet back on women's necks they'll suddenly start caring more about men? You think they're going to make foot soldiers like you jump through fewer hoops to prove your "worthiness" and "earn" relationships with women they're fighting to restore their control of? And most of all, does anybody really think the silverbacks are going to think of male victims of sexual violence (whether victims of men or women) as more important or relevant than they do now? Not too fucking likely, mates.

Photo of me reading Gary Larson's The Far Side Gallery to my daughter.

I ought to just say "that is all" and leave it at that.  Because it shouldn't take much thinking about it to understand the difference between blaming men's problems on the Patriarchy (a.k.a. oppressive, primarily-male-imposed constraints and conditions on male behavior) and blaming men's problems on feminism (a movement that, at best has only been around since the early-mid 1900s whereas Patriarchy's been amputating male potential since at least the Code of Hammurabi was still rough notes on wet clay tablets.)

And therefore it shouldn't take much thinking to recognize that if you're really into men's rights you'll hear about an intiative that might empower women and say "AND there are these things we can do to help empower men," whereas if you're just against feminists you'll hear about an initiative that might empower women and say "BUT them feeemales already have too much 'power.'" 

I've tried it both ways.  "And let's do this too" works way better and gets you way further than "But my problem is more important than yours."

So a little more than a year ago at my other (mostly safe for work) blog I wrote a post about "jokes" about sexual violence in prisons: Still Not a Joke — Good Awareness Campaign From Just Detention International.

It got picked up on Tumblr.

So far it's been reblogged more than 13,000 times.

You never know when you're going to make a difference.

Patriarchy demands that men should value themselves by the (external) approval they earn from others, as collected in the currency of "worthiness," of "respect" or "status," of "scoring" with women, of "promotion" by their superiors, and so on.  I've been thinking lately that the way men (everyone, actually) should at least try on valuing ourselves by the difference we make in the world.  If that's true then I made a difference, for 13,000+ people and their followers no less, by passing along that picture.  Back when I used to just derail complain about sexual violence in prison in comments on other people's blogs I might have only reached a few dozen.