Tag Archives: Desire and objectification

“I can’t see you with a fat chick”: shame, homosociality, and desire

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The title is godawful, but this Village Voice article is both interesting and important: Guys Who Like Fat Chicks.

Men who are sexually attracted to heavy women are more numerous than we’re led to believe, Camile Dodero writes, and that has important implications both for our understanding of male sexuality and for our ongoing conversation about weight and desire. The title of the piece, however, frames the attraction to fat women as an unusual fetish, an odd quirk that only a few men share. That’s unfortunate, because the article is more nuanced than that, exploring the ways in which fat has been stigmatized and heavier women have been both exploited and desexualized. The familiar myths (such as fat women’s much-hyped desperation for a relationship) are debunked. And though the article still centers men’s attraction to heavier women rather than women themselves, it’s a useful conversation starter.

In 2006, I wrote a post called Men, Women, Homosociality and Weight. So much of men’s focus on thin women, I pointed out, is wrapped up in the desire to gain status in the eyes of other men. One of the most basic tasks for heterosexual men is a simple one: learning to separate what it is that they personally find desirable from their desire to impress others. Our ruthlessly fat-phobic culture doesn’t give fat people “trophy” status, even if (as the article suggests) many men are sexually drawn to heavier women. I wrote five years ago:

Men are taught to find “hot” what other men find “hot.” The whole notion of a “trophy girlfriend” is based on the reality that a great many men use female desireability to establish status with other men. And in our current cultural climate where thinness is idealized, a slender partner is almost always going to be worth more than a heavy one. For men who have not yet extricated themselves from homosocial competition, their own self-esteem and sense of intra-male status may decline in direct proportion to their girlfriend’s weight gain.

Let me stress that this is absolutely not women’s problem to solve! My goal is not to make women who gain weight feel bad; protecting a fragile male ego is not a woman’s responsibility. The key thing men need to do is get honest about their own desire to use female desireability to establish status in the eyes of other men. And here’s where pro-feminist men can do a terrific service by challenging one another and holding each other accountable for the ways in which we are tempted to use our wives and girlfriends as trophies.

When I linked to the Village Voice piece on my Facebook yesterday, a friend asked if I had ever dated a “fat chick.” It reminded me that when my 2006 post appeared, one of my colleagues, a very heavy woman with whom I am very close, remarked “I could never see you with a fat girlfriend.”

I wasn’t surprised by the comment. When it comes to relationships, we expect a disconnect between what people say and what they do. Many heavy women do have painful stories of men who were quite happy to fuck them in private but refuse to date them in public. Continue reading →

Perfectionism, Libido, and Older Men/Younger Women links, plus a conference

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Different websites have radically different commenting communities. This has been driven home to me in recent months as my pieces have been republished at other places. It’s not that various blogs and magazines have widely divergent rules for commenting; it’s that they often seem to have completely different readers.

For example, my post on the problem of older men sexualizing younger women attracted a storm of male criticism at the Good Men Project. What runs on Tuesday at GMP runs on Thursdays at The Frisky. Though you need to be logged in to read responses at the latter site, the largely female readership at The Frisky offered a starkly different take. Though the responses were more positive, as one might expect, many young women who are in relationships with older men were strongly critical of what they saw as my refusal to differentiate between teens and early twenty-somethings.

Jezebel kindly reprints my post on the Damaging Expectation of Higher Male Desire. It got only a handful of responses here, but about 80 so far (and counting) at their place.

And I’m very grateful to Chloe at Feministing for driving some Friday traffic to yesterday’s post “If I Were Thinner, I’d Have the Right to Expect More”: on perfectionism and the scarcity model.

And I’ll be speaking (and moderating) at the Applied Women’s Studies Conference at Claremont Graduate University tomorrow morning. The panel I’m chairing is on Feminist Masculinities, and I’ll be sharing the dais with some terrific activist men. Here’s a link to the program; come on out today (or tomorrow)!

“But he’s supposed to want it more”: the damaging expectation of higher male desire

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After so many years of blogging, teaching, mentoring, and writing, you find yourself getting the same questions over and over again. (Questions about the wisdom of age-disparate and long-distance relationships, for example, are evergreen.) But there are other topics that come up often as well, like incompatible sexual desire. (See here, for example.) And as is often the case, I get multiple queries on the same topic at the same time from different sources; call it kismet or synchronicity, the topic of what happens when a woman has a stronger libido than her male partner has come up four times this week.

Our myths about sex drive tell us that men are supposed to peak in horniness in their late teens, while women only reach their full libidinousness on the high side of thirty. A lot of us suspect that to the extent there’s any truth to this at all, it has a good deal less to do with biology, and more to do with the long and difficult road so many women have to travel to discover and accept their own sexuality. Slut-shaming and sexualization work together to make girls acutely conscious of others’ wants and expectations while shutting them off from their own desires. It’s hard to hear one’s own “still, small voice” of longing if you’ve been raised to be a people pleaser!

But of course, so many young women don’t fit this model, just as the guys they date often don’t fit the male stereotype of constant randiness. And for many young women, finding themselves in a sexual relationship where they are the higher desire partner can be deeply confusing. One FB email this week from a former student of mine:

Before I had sex, my fantasy was always that a beautiful man would want me so much that he would lose all control, overpowering me. Not a rape fantasy exactly, just the idea of driving some hot guy crazy with lust. I guess you’d say my arousal was tied into how aroused the guy was by me. That was my number one fantasy for years and years. But Tom (name changed, of course) doesn’t seem to want sex nearly as often as I do. I’d like it almost every day, and he’d like it a few times a week. We don’t get much time together as it is, and this is driving me nuts.

I hear variations on that quite often (though rarely several times in one week.) And of course, my former student is hurt and confused. She knows enough to know how much of her own sexuality was shaped by cultural messages about uncontrollable male desire. She’s done a great job of leaving behind the message that “good girls don’t really want sex”. But while she’s given herself permission to want and to have, she’s still got the old tape playing that says that in heterosexual relationships, particularly among young people, the man should always be hornier than the woman. Continue reading →

Heat doesn’t require beauty: on “bowflex boy”, monogamy, and desire

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A reader named Ryan wrote me last month in response to my reprint of this post on “bowflex boy”. I was writing to suggest that it’s possible to be drawn to an “ideal” without losing the capacity to be intensely aroused by one’s less-than-perfect partner. Ryan writes:

Your post on the Bowflex Boy touched on something that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. For me, attraction to other women and years of using porn have made me wonder whether I really find my girlfriend to be beautiful. I keep seeing her flaws. Often, I find other women to be prettier. That scares me, and I end up feeling ashamed and guilty. Then I question whether my girlfriend and I should be together at all.

I’m convinced that we can have a ‘Bowflex Boy’ on our walls and have it not be a big deal. That doesn’t mean we don’t love our partners. I know I don’t need my partner to measure up to some unattainable ideal. But I’m still so troubled by the negative thoughts I have about her appearance. It’s gotten to the point of being toxic. I don’t — can’t feel okay — and when it inevitably comes out in conversations with my partner, it naturally hurts her very much.

So, you talk about how we can see an ideal like the Bowflex Boy and still desire our partners. I agree that can be the case, but I don’t know how to stop being afraid. I love and do my best to respect my girlfriend, and I absolutely believe she’s beautiful. I’m working on letting go of the fantasies I used to have about the ideal relationship. . But when those unbidden thoughts come, I still doubt and I still fear. Your thoughts?

In my post, I wrote of being a college boy with an average and not particularly impressive physique who found himself having sex one night with a friend, Debbie, who had a poster of a stunningly perfect man hanging right over her bed. In post-coital conversation, I had asked why she (we had never hooked up before) would want to be with me when she had this flawless vision to look at. From the original post, Debbie’s words:

“Hugo, I like looking at beautiful bodies. He’s a gorgeous guy. But the fact that I think it’s beautiful, even the fact that I am attracted to the image, doesn’t mean that that is the only kind of man I can be attracted to…I can appreciate perfection without expecting it, and I can really be just as attracted to a normal body as to a perfect one.”

I wasn’t insulted. I was relieved. And it occurred to me, of course, that that was how I thought about my partners as well. I liked looking at sculpted, idealized bodies — but that was hardly the limit of what I was attracted to. As in so many areas of life, it’s helpful to think in terms of a spectrum of people to whom we could be attracted. The media offers us images we may or may not find beautiful, but they tend to offer us only a narrow slice of that spectrum. What we can want and what we do want is broader than we’re told.

As anyone who has been in a monogamous relationship for any length of time will assure Ryan, there will always be other people who appear more attractive than one’s partner, no matter how beautiful one’s partner is. The longer we’re with someone, the more of their ordinariness we become privileged to see. We discover the stretch marks, we smell the sleep farts and morning breath, we see the adult acne. That gritty reality can’t compete with either the airbrushed images of pornography or the well-coiffed and smartly attired people with whom we interact publicly. Add in the quarrels and struggles and mundanities that are part and parcel of any enduring committed sexual relationship, and it’s little wonder that the sex appeal of one’s partner appears to diminish over time. Continue reading →

Hef gets engaged again: on Everlasting Novelty and Sexual Invisibility

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My friend Bill asked me to post about 84 year-old Hugh Hefner’s announcement this week that he’s engaged to be married again, this time to a former Playmate exactly sixty years his junior. Knowing my many problems with age-disparate relationships, he wondered if I had a comment about the perpetually be-robed octogenarian’s latest assay into wedlock.

Still on vacation in Placer County, I’ll keep this short. It’s easy to see Hef as a caricature, and a rather sad one to boot. But more than one young man has looked at this aging cultural icon and said to himself, “Damn, I’d like to be like him when I’m old.” Some find instruction in what others of us find ridiculous. It’s important to remember that.

The tragedy of Playboy is, as I’ve said before, that it focuses on “everlasting novelty.” (The phrase is my father’s, but the point was originally made by Barbara Ehrenreich in a book I highly recommend, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment .) Men wanting to look at beautiful women isn’t the problem — it’s the need to always see new beautiful women that is so troubling. Playboy wouldn’t have made money with one issue a year, after all. A new issue every four weeks guaranteed variety — or more accurately, encouraged a mindset that was only aroused by variety. It is Hefner who is widely credited (though it may be apocryphal) with the devastating line “Show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you the man who’s tired of fucking her.” It is trendy to accept that fascination with everlasting novelty as rooted in our biology, but the weight of the evidence suggests that pornographers like Hef are more creators than reinforcers.

And of course, Playboy Playmates — like the most successful and celebrated of porn actresses — are overwhelmingly young, 18-24 at the time they break into the industry. With a tiny handful of exceptions, few work successfully in the business after 30. This focus on youth suggests that women over 25 have passed their “sell-by” date; Hef has done more than his share to contribute to the sexual invisibility of older women. (The occasional issue focusing on an over-40 hottie is the classic example of the exception proving the rule.) It’s little wonder, then, that Hef has spent six decades chasing women in their early twenties. He’s sold himself on his own narrow vision of what is and isn’t desirable, and as a consequence has become incapable of experiencing sexual interest in any woman past the age of his Playmates. It’s one thing for nineteen year-olds to be drawn sexually to their peers, another thing for their grandfathers to lust after the same barely post-pubescent women.

This isn’t about the porn wars; I recognize the potential for liberation in visual depictions of the erotic. This is about the Playboy ethos. (As Ehrenreich suggested and as I always tell my students, it’s better to write it as “Play, boy!”, driving home the point that the opposite of a “playboy” is a “working man” who accepts responsibility and is capable of constancy.) The Playboy ethos is almost puritanical in its distaste for bodies that deviate from a narrow standard, and contemptuous(as well as fearful) of the sexual potential of women over 25. Above all, the Playboy ethos insists on the necessity of endless variety. Familiarity breeds contempt and aging breeds disgust, or so Hef’s world view holds.

It would be pathetic if it didn’t resonate so loudly with so many. We can do better.

No refuge: how webcams and cell phones ratchet up the pressure to be perfect

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In my women’s studies class yesterday, one young woman asked me about the changes I’d seen in my students over my years of teaching. I thought for a moment about how much the world has – and hasn’t — changed since I first came to lecture at Pasadena City College in 1993, and thought of all the possible answers I could quickly give. And then it occurred to me that one of the most troubling of recent developments about which I hadn’t yet spoken or written was the loss of safe space created by the advent of webcams and cell-phones.

Count me among those adults who think that the frenzied anxiety about “sexting” is both prurient and overblown. Frankly, I’m more worried about the motives of school principals who go through students’ cell phone photos than I am about the photos themselves. And as someone who rejects the “one mistake will ruin your life” warning that is foisted onto kids (girls in particular), I suspect that most teens whose naked photos make their way into the public domain will survive the embarrassment just fine. We’re only three decades away, at most, from a presidential candidate being confronted with images and video from her impulsive adolescence — and I strongly suspect the reaction will be a collective yawn. So my problem with webcams and cell phone pictures has very little to do with sex.

My problem is that for countless young people — again, particularly for girls — their “private spaces” are no longer as private as they once were. Just a decade ago, a girl’s bedroom or bathroom were hers alone (even if shared, say, with a sibling.) In the looks-obsessed culture of American teenagers, the bedroom was a refuge. A young woman who had been scrupulous about her appearance all day could return to her bedroom at night, change into what was comfortable, and have at least a little waking time where her looks didn’t matter. Since the 1950s (if not before) a high percentage of teen girls have had telephones in their bedroom, but until the past decade, those phones didn’t transmit visual images. You didn’t have to get dressed up to talk. That’s all changed.

A 2009 survey suggested that an astonishing 71% of teens used webcams in their bedrooms. In commenting on the study, the primary media concern was with the potential for sexually explicit video chat, as boys cajoled girls into stripping for the camera. No doubt the pressure to sexualize webcam conversation is real, and no doubt some young people end up doing what they regret — only to find that the images or video have gone viral. (By the same token, “webcam sex” — like phone sex before it — has a lot of potential good to it as well, allowing for the safe expression of fantasy and for connection in long distance relationships. I dealt with that topic here.) But the real problem has nothing to do with sex. The real problem is that the webcam has stripped the bedroom and the bathroom from their role as safe refuge from the beauty-obsessed culture. The real problem is that now, even with the door shut, a young woman’s looks still matter.

The self-portrait in the bathroom mirror is one of the iconic images of the 2000s. First on Myspace, and then on Facebook, these photos were — and to a great extent still are — de rigueur for young millenials. Some of the photos are sexy, some are silly, but because these photos are taken by desperately image-conscious teenagers, all are posed. In 2007, I asked the kids in my high school youth group about these self-portraits, asking how many snaps they took on average until they found the right one to upload as a profile pic. Most reported taken dozens if not more, carefully striving for that right balance of attractiveness and teenage insouciance. It’s not new that kids want to be seen as cool. It’s not new that kids study themselves in the bathroom mirror. It is new that they are expected to share those poses with everyone else. It is new that so many of us expect to see and share the contents of these bedrooms and bathrooms. It is new that these most private of spaces are now at least partly public.

I write a lot about the crushing pressure to be perfect which afflicts so many teen girls. (And I always recommend Courtney Martin’s superb Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters.) There’s no question that technology has exacerbated that pressure. The ubiquity of cell phones has meant, for example, that young women are expected to be constantly available to their boyfriends — and to each other. Friendship maintenance, so crucial to so many young women, may require dozens of texts a day, each of which “needs” to be replied to promptly. For those who are raised to be people pleasers, technology simply means that the people one needs to please can now make demands more incessantly than ever before. Being at school, being in the car, being in one’s room is not an excuse any longer for being unavailable.

And being in that bedroom or bathroom is no longer a respite from the pressure to be pretty, to be sexy, to perform.

The Paris Paradox: how sexualization replaces opportunity with obligation

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I’ve often quoted Courtney Martin’s now-famous line from her Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters:

We are the daughters of feminists who said, “You can be anything” and we heard “You have to be everything.”

I call it the Martha Complex, others call it the Supergirl syndrome; whatever name you give it, most of us who work with young people agree that it’s absolutely rampant among contemporary girls and young women (even those whose mothers weren’t feminists!) The complex has many sources, but one factor that particularly exacerbates the problem is sexualization.

Ariel Levy, in her powerful and controversial Female Chauvinist Pigs, quoted Paris Hilton’s remarkably perceptive remark about herself that she was “sexy, but not sexual.” Hilton isn’t alone. My students today, who are mostly in their late teens (though I have many older ones as well) were deeply influenced by Hilton, who was at the peak of her notoriety four or five years ago, when these now-college freshman were just entering high school. And sadly, not unlike many of their older sisters, they find themselves stuck in what we might call the “Paris Paradox”.

Young women with the Paris Paradox were raised in a culture that promised sexual freedom, but what they ended up with looked a lot more like obligation than opportunity. It’s not hard to understand why the pressure to be sexy so often trumps the freedom to discover one’s authentic sexuality. As Levy and Martin and others have been pointing out for the past decade, we’ve begun to sexualize girls at ever earlier ages, as anyone who noticed the Halloween costumes marketed to tween girls will be aware. The explicitness — the raunchiness, to use Levy’s word — of this sexualization is relatively new. But when that sexualization (or pornification, to use another popular term) meets the far-older pressure on young women to be people-pleasers, we have a recipe for misery. Continue reading →

The pro-feminist pick-up artist: rethinking a blind spot

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Clarisse Thorn, the noted sex-positive writer and blogger, came to speak to my women’s history class today. Clarisse was in Los Angeles on another engagement, and was kind enough to come and talk to my students about sex-positive feminist masculinity. We had a short and very amiable debate, as I challenged some of her positions. (More on that in a future post.) I look forward to getting some good feedback from more of my students, but have already had a few enthusiastic emails and Facebook messages.

UPDATE: Clarisse notes her visit here. Her post lists some links from each of our archives that cover some of the areas where we disagree.

Clarisse’s article on the pathologizing of male desire got a great deal of attention in the blogosphere last month, and there were over 100 comments in the debate about it here on this blog. A follow-up post has a still-active comment thread. Those two posts received more comments than any others I wrote in October. Clarisse is clearly an instigator of good discussion.

I took Clarisse to lunch to thank her, and in our discussion over various vegetarian goodnesses, we returned to this challenging theme of constructive sex-positive feminist masculinity. I talked about how frustrated I’ve been in my exchanges on the topic with many men, who — as my comment threads indicate — find my writing on the topic to be shaming, or unhelpful, or privileged. I’ve been asked before for “pick-up tips for feminist men”, a request I’ve resisted for both ideological and experiential reasons. I haven’t spent much time around the “pick-up artist” (PUA) and “seduction” communities, largely because I find their views to be deeply demeaning to women (as well as men). Clarisse has a more nuanced view, as one of her many interests is focused on “bridging the gap” between the PUA and feminist worlds. I’m leery that that gap can be bridged at all, but I’m open to discussion.

But in talking with Clarisse, I realized how often I’ve been unnecessarily contemptuous of those men who have sought out techniques and strategies for approaching women. I’m married, of course, and devotedly so. I’m obviously not looking for sexual or romantic partners. But even when I was single, I never had trouble “meeting” women, finding sexual partners, or getting into relationships. (I had tremendous problems making relationships work, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.) Writing those words makes me uncomfortable; they seem filled with macho swagger. I’m not boasting of my sexual prowess, or at least, I’m trying not to. But though I have had myriad challenges in my life (particularly around drug and alcohol addiction), one problem I haven’t had since I hit college was finding sexual partners. Learning to be celibate was hard; learning how to be monogamous in thought and word as well as in body was hard. Unlearning flirting was hard. Getting laid — and every few years, getting married — was easy. Continue reading →