Tag Archives: Desire and objectification

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 →

Of the validation of desire and the graceful acceptance of rejection: on male wanting

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A young man whom I’ve mentored was in my office this week, and asked me a question based on what had come up in one of my old Men and Masculinity lectures. I’m paraphrasing, but here’s more or less what he said:

I appreciate what you often say about the importance of being a “safe older man.” You are, and that’s great. But one reason you’re safe is that you’re married. You aren’t single and looking. It seems like that makes it easier for you to be a full-fledged feminist male, because you can afford to have all of your relationships with women other than your wife be completely asexual. So don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not always that helpful as a feminist male role model because you can’t demonstrate how someone can be single, straight, looking for a girlfriend and be feminist. I don’t want to be seen as a creep, but I certainly don’t want to be seen as asexual either.

This goes back to some of the recent discussion around Clarisse Thorn’s piece at Alternet about demonizing men who are honest about their sexual desires.

It’s something I touched on in my write-up of my meeting with young men at Brown University last year. As I wrote then: “for men who long to be feminist allies, finding a way to affirm their own wanting (without an assumption that they are entitled to have those wants satisfied by women) is vital.”

So my student (who had read Clarisse’s controversial article as well as my post about the lads at Brown) was essentially asking me to explain the how of affirming male heterosexual desire while reconciling it with a commitment to gender justice and feminism. He wanted to move past the rhetoric that intimates that from a feminist standpoint, “the only good penis is a soft one.” But how can a man show sexual and romantic interest in a woman without being potentially creepy? That’s where my student — and many other well-intentioned young men – need help.

First off, being a straight male feminist ally is not code for “walking on eggshells” all the time. It does not demand that young men run about taking the emotional temperature of their female peers. There’s no better example of a false dichotomy than the suggestion that all men must be either painfully earnest nice guys or predatory, swaggering bad-boy assholes. The alternative to those unhappy models is one of compassionate confidence (or, if you prefer, confident compassion.)

What does compassionate confidence look like in interpersonal relationships? It starts with the recognition of the difference between one’s own right to want and one’s right to expect others to respond to those wants. In a culture where we raise women to be people-pleasers, generations of men have grown up assuming that their desires are women’s responsibility to solve. Whether it’s a husband who expects dinner to appear magically as soon as he’s hungry, or a boy who insists that his girlfriend owes him a blowjob because “she got him horny”, far too many of us are conditioned to believe that men’s desires are women’s problems to solve. So many men confuse wanting with the entitlement to have their wants met that it’s little wonder that a great many women are mistrustful of expressions of male desire.

A good guy knows that he has the right to want. His horniness and his fantasies are not sinful or wicked. But he’s very clear that his attraction to a woman (say a classmate with whom he strikes up a conversation) isn’t a compliment to her for which she is required to be grateful. He has the right to have a crush, he has the right to lust. He doesn’t have the right to have his wants reciprocated. He needs to do two things at once: affirm the essential goodness of his own desire, and affirm that the woman he’s attracted to has every right not to share his interest.

As I’ve written before, one of the greatest benefits of feminism to men is a greater authenticity and honesty in heterosexual relationships. Women who don’t feel pressured or coerced or “guilted” into a “yes” are going to be much more comfortable saying “no.” And a woman who feels safe to say “no” to the men to whom she is closest will also be someone who will be better equipped to speak an enthusiastic, honest “yes!” when she’s presented with someone she actually wants.

We live in a culture where women have good reason to fear the consequences of rejecting men. Making it clear that one doesn’t expect one’s wants to be met by others is a key part of putting other folks at ease. Dealing with rejection without sulking or shaming the one who has rejected you sends a signal about your safety and your essential decency. (For a marvelous example of why women have good reason to fear the consequences of rejecting men, see the opening scene of the hit movie “The Social Network”, in which it seems as if the very inspiration for the creation of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg’s toxic rage at being rejected by a woman he’s already treated very shabbily.)

Because many women have little experience with men who take rejection easily and with equanimity, it’s little wonder that some women’s fear of male rage turns into a fear of male desire itself. “If he wants me, then I have to face the problem of rejecting him — and if I reject him, he may do something really dangerous or humiliating. Therefore, it would be better if he didn’t want me at all.” But the problem isn’t the wanting: it’s both the vulgar and crude ways in which some men make that wanting known, and more importantly, the outraged indignation so many men express when they are in fact rejected.

Learning to articulate one’s wants needs to go hand in hand with the graceful acceptance of the rejection that occasionally follows; that is the stuff of which “confident compassion” is made. And in the end, women’s acceptance of the reality (and goodness) of men’s desires is contingent on men’s acceptance of women’s (absolute and never forfeited) right to reject them.

The “frigid”/”slut” dichotomy, the myth of male weakness, and the drive to shape women’s desires

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In response to yesterday’s reprint, I got an email from Joni.

…every time I run across this idea that (most) boys/men just want sex I’m reminded of just how destructive that myth has been to MY self esteem as a woman. When I was growing up (I’m 36) I was told over and over and over again about how “boys only want one thing”. I gave the boys I knew more credit, but not much more, if I’m honest about it. I knew that there was more to them and to their emotional lives, but on a certain level I still deeply believed that boys really just wanted sex, when it comes right down to it. I also believed that they pretty much wanted it all the time.

Imagine my surprise when I made it out of the supercharged teen years and the boys I was dating didn’t want sex as much as I did. To this day I’m not sure if my sex drive is unusually high, but it’s certainly higher than that of any man I’ve ever dated. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself now. But really, on some level, I take it personally. I believe, deep down, that the reason the men I date don’t want to have sex with me as often as I want to have sex with them is that I am unattractive in some way. I’m not a waif, so I already have society telling me I’m too fat, even though I know that’s not really true. (I could lose a few pounds, but really, not a lot.) I’m not exceptionally beautiful, but I think I’m pretty. But regardless, when my boyfriend doesn’t want sex when I do, it’s hard for me to give him the credit he deserves and give myself the credit I deserve, and recognize that he may just not be in the mood, or want to do something else, and it’s not a negative reflection on me.

Joni’s poignant message raised one of the sad corollaries to our myths about male hyper-sexuality. If a woman, like Joni, finds herself in a heterosexual relationship in which she is consistently the higher desire partner, the myth suggests that she must be fundamentally undesirable. A man whose female partner has a lower sexual drive can comfort himself with the reassurance that this is natural; his girlfriend’s lesser libido is not an affront to his masculinity. She wants sex less not because he’s not handsome or sufficiently masculine, but because she’s a woman. Women like Joni don’t have that source of reassurance; the myth of uncontrollable male desire suggests that a woman’s naked (or even partly disrobed) body ought to drive a boyfriend or a husband wild — every damn time. If it doesn’t, then the fault is with her. And if she lusts for her guy more than he lusts for her, then she’s an unfeminine slut.

We live in a culture, as feminists point out over and over again, that expects women to be sexy but not sexual. Women’s sexiness has a function; we are taught that in a world in which men have barely controllable libidos, desirability is female currency. “Men will do anything to have it”, we are all told, and a great many women believe it. In a world where women are systematically disempowered in countless respects, they are reassured that their status as objects of desire grants them leverage in their relations with men. Of course, that leverage is contingent on an assumption about the male inability to exercise self-control. In a world where men are expected to have sexual self-control, women’s desirability loses its allure as a bargaining chip. If sexiness had less potential value, then women would be encouraged to develop other skills — and might well begin to make more insistent demands for equal treatment.

Social conservatives — the sort who believe in traditional gender roles — need the myth of male weakness as the foundation of their worldview. Over and over again, they remind women that “feminine power” is the power to direct and manipulate fathers, husbands, and sons. The myth of male weakness suggests that men lack the verbal skills, the sexual self-control, or the wily intuition that women naturally possess. Women, the traditionalists insist, are fools to compete with men directly. Rather, a clever woman gets what she wants through her beauty, her charm, her nurturing instincts. Of course, the moment we start to believe that men are no more pliable than women, the whole house of cards collapses. Continue reading →

“She’s so pretty”: on partners, compliments, and thank-yous

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Those of you who know me well know that I tend to be zealous about guarding my family’s privacy, rarely blogging about my wife and keeping family pictures password-protected. But I wanted to repost this 2007 piece, largely because my lovely Eira has been getting more than her usual share of attention on the street lately, thanks to her resemblance to the Brazilian actress Morena Baccarin, who plays an alien on the TV series “V”. We haven’t watched V, but we’ve seen the promos — and with her short hair, Baccarin does look very much like Eira. My wife has been stopped on the street a couple of times recently by curious folks.

And so this seemed worthy of reposting.

Not unexpectedly, most of the photographs on my desk are of my wife and me, including a formal wedding portrait. Time and again, students and colleagues come in, look at the pictures, and say “Your wife is beautiful” (or something similar). And after a long time, I’ve grown very comfortable saying “thank you.”

Years ago, I was at a wedding (remarkably, it was one of the few in which I wasn’t involved as either groom or minister) with an ex-girlfriend of mine. I introduced my date to some friends, and one of them, an older woman, blurted out, “Hugo, she’s very pretty.” She said this right in front of my date as if she wasn’t there, and I said “thank you.” When my date got me alone, she punched me firmly in the arm and asked “Why did you say ‘thank you’? Are my looks your accomplishment to be praised? Some feminist you are!”

Ouch. There’s no question that within a great many different social circles, it is considered customary to offer praise of a woman’s looks to her husband, boyfriend, or father. It often doesn’t seem to matter whether the praise is entirely justified, either. Ever since I started dating, I noticed that it seemed standard protocol to make a remark about the perceived prettiness of the woman in my life. I note that with my fourth wife, I get the remarks more frequently because she is truly striking, but by now I know enough to know that this particular compliment is almost a cultural universal.

I understand why a visitor to my office might remark that my wife “looks lovely.” They can’t tell from looking at her picture that she’s brilliant, that she’s got an absolutely brutal left hook that can floor most men, that she has hundreds of phone, account and credit card numbers memorized in her head (it’s part of her job). They can’t tell that she’s a great salsa dancer or that she is a marvelous cook or passionate about Gabriel Garcia Marquez. They can tell that she’s lovely, and so that’s what they remark upon.

But saying “thank you” to a compliment paid to your wife or girlfriend about her looks is at least somewhat problematic. The friend at the wedding who praised my date’s prettiness directed that praise at me, and there seemed to be an implication then — as there often is now when folks comment on my wife’s pictures — that I am to be credited with having succeeded at something by “landing” a “hot” woman. One of the things that feminists work very hard to reject is the notion that women’s looks are currency for men to measure their own status. The phrase “trophy wife” or “arm charm” resonates painfully. Ask women whose husbands or boyfriends have dumped them because they couldn’t provide sufficient “hotness” to boost the ego of their male partners. Using women’s attractiveness to measure a man’s status is as disastrous as it is (still, sadly) ubiquitious.

On the other hand, I can’t give everyone who compliments my wife’s looks a lecture. Most of the time these days, especially since she and I have been married, I do say “thank you”. I say it not because I believe that my ego has just been boosted, but because I take very seriously the idea that my wife and I are joined together. We have become a team, a union of flesh and spirit. Her triumphs are my triumphs, my triumphs are hers. A compliment to either of us is a compliment to both, an insult to either is an insult to both. That doesn’t mean I need to fight all of her battles for her. That doesn’t mean that we don’t retain a considerable degree of autonomy even within marriage. It means that in terms of how the outside world perceives us, we are a unified front, standing shoulder to shoulder. (This unity, however, does not impose an obligation on my wife to look a certain way; if she gains a huge amount of weight, for example, I am not entitled to use the “but we’re a team” card to badger her into looking “good” for my benefit.)

On the other hand, I’m very reluctant to praise the looks of a male friend’s wife or girlfriend, at least until after I’ve gotten to know her much better. When shown a photograph that requires a compliment, I usually say something (fashionista that I am) about clothing or accessories. “What a great suit”, somehow, seems far less sexist than “She’s a knock-out.” Perhaps that’s not a distinction everyone sees as meaningful, but it works for me.

Please share your thoughts.

UPDATE: I’m bumping this up from the comments, because when I wrote this post, I gave the impression that I only say “thank you” when someone compliments my wife’s looks. What I almost always add afterwards is “I think so, too.”

And of course, perhaps the most feminist response would be the “I think so, too” without the “thank you.” But sometimes etiquette and ideology conflict and etiquette wins; I was raised to thank everything that moved.

“I worry for both of them that they aren’t tempted”: some thoughts on dorms, gender, and the myth that proximity creates desire

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One of the things about blogging for a few years is that one regularly has the opportunity to reflect upon — and revise — old posts. Mind you, I don’t dip into my archives and surreptitiously rewrite old pieces. Rather, I sometimes find that the passage of time has given me a different perspective. It is so with an issue freshly in the news once more: mixed-sex dorm rooms.

I wrote about the subject of colleges assigning different-sex students to the same dorm room in 2006 in this post. What troubled me then was not that folks would seek out roommates of the opposite sex. What I wanted was to encourage bonding with one’s own gender. Boys who find it difficult to relate to other males; girls who’ve found relationships with other females to be characterized by competition and judgment — these were, I argued, the sort of young people who could benefit from confronting their own discomfort with living with the same sex. Rereading that post three and a half years after I wrote it, I wince at my willingness to be so prescriptive of what young people need. And while I stand by my conviction that we do need to do more to encourage some young folks to fight through their fears of bonding with those who share their biology, I’m much less willing to insist upon it.

I’m thinking about this because the Los Angeles Times, a few years late to the party, ran a front-page article yesterday on what is no longer as much of a novelty as some might imagine: Mixed-gender dorm rooms are gaining acceptance.

The number of colleges offering the option increases each year, though the total number of schools at which it is possible to room with someone of the other sex is still only about fifty. The Times profiles the situation at nearby Pitzer College (an institution to which I have seen a number of my best and brightest transfer over the years), and interviews students there and at my alma mater, Cal. (In the 1980s, the innovation at Berkeley was bathrooms shared by both sexes. After the first week, having women walk past men standing at urinals became old hat.)

What heartened me was the willingness of so many young people to separate the idea of close physical proximity from sexual intimacy. The assumption of an older generation, of course, is that the power of desire is so overwhelming that it makes uncomplicated friendship (or, simply, roommate-ship) impossible between two heterosexual young people of different genders. Read the comments after the Times story; lots of predictions of rape and distraction. The myth of male weakness raises its head in the thread over and over again.

The comment that caught my attention was this one from someone called “cmfreedom”: I guess “gender-neutral housing” means asexual. I worry for both of them that they aren’t tempted! Bold is mine.

What impressed me about the young people in the article is the same thing that depressed me about cmfreedom’s remark. Our dominant cultural narrative is the discourse of uncontrollable male sexual desire. We believe that men — particularly those of college-age — are so in thrall to raging hormones that they are constitutionally incapable of seeing women as anything other than sex objects. The peddlers of the discourse sneer contemptuously at those who insist that men are, in fact, are both quite capable of self-regulation and frequently not as sex-crazed as their elders believe. To claim for men the capacity to exercise control, to insist that young men do not all think about sex every seven (or sixteen, or thirty-five) seconds is to invite derision. Continue reading →

Discourses of desire and the problem of rejection

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Last week, Rachel Hills guest-posted an explosive piece at Feministe: But Women Don’t Rape. Rachel began by reflecting on this post at the Feministing Community which dealt with a woman’s sudden awareness that one of her female friends had coerced her boyfriend into having sex. The comment threads at both Feministing and Feministe are substantial and well worth a read.

Rachel and her commenters note the constellation of factors that make us believe that women cannot force men into unwanted sex: our misconceptions about male physiology (the “guys can’t have erections or ejaculate against their will” myth); our belief that men are more resistant to psychological pressure and invariably less eager to people-please: our notion that, as the Feministing post put it, “nice girls” (especially feminists) simply are incapable of forcing their boyfriends to do anything against their will.

Please join the great discussion at either site. I have posted a bit on the issue of men-as-victims, as well as on the notion that pleasure is not evidence of consent. In a 2005 post about Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau I wrote:

For too many of us, pleasure and orgasm are inconsistent with (being a victim of) sexual violation. But to assume that pleasure and orgasm are always acts of volition is to defy practically everything we know about adolescent development, sexuality, and power.

I’d amend that to say that the statement holds fairly well even if we remove the “adolescent” from it.

But there’s another issue that Rachel raised at Feministe that I’d like to tackle: the way in which we socialize women to believe that they ought never be the higher-desire partner in a heterosexual relationship. She writes:

…one of the interesting threads that has come through in my interviews is how very poorly many women take it when their male partners don’t want to have sex with them. They don’t like it at all. For these women, being turned down for sex – even if only occasionally, even if only once – is read as communicating a whole lot of nasty things about them and their relationship. That their partner doesn’t find them attractive anymore, that he’s cheating, that their relationship lacks passion, that they’re bad in bed, that he’s not into women at all.

(For more on Rachel’s research and to take her survey, visit here.

I think that Rachel’s right. The male sexual desire discourse tells us that men are always in the mood, invariably hornier than women. Indeed, our whole notion about the myth of male weakness is linked to assumptions about the overwhelming power of men’s libidos. But as countless women have discovered in relationships with heterosexual men, this discourse founders on the rocks of reality. As Rachel says, many women are confused when boyfriends or husbands evince less interest in sex than they themselves do. Rather than question the discourse, many choose to blame themselves, assuming that they are insufficiently attractive. Sometimes, they externalize that self-doubt, accusing their male partners of being gay or of having an affair.

As several of the commenters have pointed out, there’s an old axiom in marital therapy: the lower-desire partner has more power than the higher-desire partner. The one who has the power to please or disappoint by saying “yes” or “no” gains the upper hand. (I’ve posted about that a couple of times. Sorry to always link to myself, but here’s a post on that subject too.). And of course, one of our most traditional (and loathsome) discourses with which we raise young women is the one that teaches that a woman’s power comes from her ability to control men sexually. Sex is a bargaining chip, and its value is created by men’s impetuous libidos.

Though most younger women today, particularly young feminists, intellectually reject the “sex as leverage” trope, the idea continues to exert an uncomfortable hold on many. Many women don’t realize the degree to which they had “bought in” to the discourse until they find themselves in relationships with men whose desire for sex is less than their own. And while it’s never easy to be rejected, and never easy to deal with sexual frustration and self-doubt, men are more insulated than women from the effects of that rejection. That doesn’t mean men are less sensitive, or less vulnerable to hurt. But a man whose sex drive is higher than his female partner’s can comfort himself that theirs is “a normal relationship.” His frustration is par for the proverbial course; his masculinity is not called into question when his girlfriend is not in the mood.

We have many inanities that pass for common wisdom about men and women and their different attitudes towards sex. We say things like “Women need a reason; men just need a place” or, when describing the speed of arousal, that “Men are lightbulbs, women are ovens”. My readers can probably think of more. And while like all cliches, they prove true in some instances, the exceptions are sufficiently numerous as to disprove the rule altogether. The problem is, of course, the effect on the many for whom the opposite of these “truisms” is true. A woman who does “feel like a lightbulb” when it comes to arousal is made to feel abnormal, as is a man who is more “like an oven.” And while these bits of common nonsense comfort “higher desire men”, reassuring them that they are normal, they suggest that all sorts of things are wrong with a woman if she finds herself more easily and frequently turned on than her boyfriend.

It is axiomatic that the fewer freedoms women have, the more their beauty is valued. Some of the most repressive societies on earth value that beauty by concealing it from all but her husband, who is entitled to possess it as he pleases: others encourage young women to display their bodies (whether they want to or not) for men’s consumption. This isn’t about burqas and bikinis again. It’s about the idea that we raise our daughters to see their beauty as a particular source of power. And while most of us would like to be found attractive, our craving to be wanted sexually is often in inverse proportion to the amount of leverage we can achieve using our other talents.

A decade into the 21st century, and many of us still believe that a woman’s desirability is among her most valuable assets. And many women who don’t think that they believe that nasty old sexist notion discover that it still has a strange hold upon them –and they discover it at the moment that they find themselves in relationships with men whose desire for sex is less than their own.

“I can make anything work”: more on desire and its absence

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I recently got a Facebook message from a former student of mine named May, a message which opened:

Is it possible to have feelings for someone and not be physically attracted to them? Aren’t they supposed to go hand in hand?

May gave me her permission to write a response here, though I did give her a more personal one as well.

I’ve gotten this question from others before — and not just from young people. I dealt with that issue in this February 2008 post on the indispensability of passion. Writing contra the infamous Lori Gottlieb, I said

Yes, passion may fade over time. But trust me on this one: there is a world of difference between being in a marriage in which the passion has cooled and one in which there was never any “heat” to begin with. Expecting sexual heat to endure (without any increase in effort) for years is unrealistic; settling for a marriage where there isn’t even any memory of fire and passion is, I think, too great a compromise.

That was true for marriage. But what of May, still in high school, contemplating what it is that she should do about a budding relationship with a classmate?

Depending on our stance, we tend to either oversell or dismiss young women’s sexuality. It is certainly far from true that adolescent girls aren’t interested in sex, just as it is far from true that adolescent boys are interested in nothing but. But even as we resist the traditional straitjacket narratives about teenagers and desire, we do need to acknowledge that we raise our sons and daughters to experience desire differently. And we need to acknowledge something else, something that forms part of a gentle warning to May: young women often overestimate their capacity to make things work.

Anyone who works with teenagers knows that grandiosity and low self-esteem often go hand in hand. I wrote about that in a post called I have so much love to give: young women and self-flattery.

Teenage girls are renowned for their vicious self-criticism. Time and again, I’ve heard young women criticize their own appearance, their academic shortcomings, their bad habits. But those same young women will often hasten to say, if they are or have been in a relationship, “You know, I’m a pretty awesome girlfriend.” Or if they haven’t yet been in one: “I am an incredibly loving person, and I would give so much to the right guy.”

There’s a corollary to that. Some young women overestimate their capacity not only to love with great intensity, they overestimate the malleability of their own emotions. I’ve often written that to some extent, sexual identity is fluid — for both sexes. But that fluidity has its limits, and that’s something that on occasion, the young fail to understand. May hasn’t said this, but I’ve heard things like this from many of her peers: “I really like Leroy. I think I could fall in love with Leroy. I’m not physically attracted to Leroy, but he’s perfect in every other way. And you know, I think if I work at finding things about him that are desirable, I can make myself want him. And if I can’t, I think I can learn to live without that passion. I can make anything work.” Continue reading →

Tiger Woods and the “misogynistic homosocial economy” of desire

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(The title of this post differs slightly from when it was first put up this morning.)

Lots of discussion in the blogosphere these past few days about this Eugene Robinson column in the Washington Post: Tiger’s validation complex. Robinson, who is African-American, is troubled by more than the famous golfer’s equally famous multiple infidelities. He’s troubled by the type of woman that Tiger seems to have pursued:

Here’s my real question, though: What’s with the whole Barbie thing?

No offense to anyone who actually looks like Barbie, but it really is striking how much the women who’ve been linked to Woods resemble one another. I’m talking about the long hair, the specific body type, even the facial features. Mattel could sue for trademark infringement.

This may be the most interesting aspect of the whole Tiger Woods story — and one of the most disappointing. He seems to have been bent on proving to himself that he could have any woman he wanted. But from the evidence, his aim wasn’t variety but some kind of validation…

…the world is full of beautiful women of all colors, shapes and sizes — some with short hair or almond eyes, some with broad noses, some with yellow or brown skin. Woods appears to have bought into an “official” standard of beauty that is so conventional as to be almost oppressive.

His taste in mistresses leaves the impression of a man who is, deep down, both insecure and image-conscious — a control freak even when he’s committing “transgressions.”

There is a long and painful history in the African-American community revolving around the penchant that a great many successful black men have had for pursuing white women. Indeed, the problem (if we can name it that) is a staple of magazine articles and fiction aimed at African-American women. I’m not a commenter on race, so it’s best that I merely note that the reaction Robinson is having is connected to a bitter and complicated history that is a good deal older than the now-disgraced superstar golfer.

But there’s a part of Robinson’s piece that isn’t just about race; it’s about the way in which men of all ethnicities use certain types of women as “trophies.” It is almost axiomatic that female beauty is a commodity which men employ to boost their status with other men. I wrote about this in April 2006, in a post about men, women, homosociality and weight. An excerpt:

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.

“Whiteness” can function similarly to “thin-ness”, particularly for men of color. America has a long and bloody history of violence towards dark-skinned men who were even suspected of a sexual interest in white women. For some men of color, to be with a white woman — particularly one who embodies the all-American “Barbie” ideal — is to say to the world “See, I’ve made it. You can’t touch me; I’ve achieved sufficient power and wealth so that I can have ‘access’ to what was once forbidden and could have gotten my grandfather lynched.” I’m not saying that was Tiger’s motive (Robinson is, and he’s in a better position than I to do so). I am saying that bedding whiteness, in the misogynistic homosocial economy, gives status points.

One of the important challenges we all need to take up is that of separating out what aspects of our desires are organic to us, and what aspects are socially constructed and reinforced. Men who are afraid to date heavier women “because of what my buddies will say” or women who are reluctant to date shorter men “because of how we’ll look together in public” do have, I think, an obligation to distinguish their fear of losing status from their actual desires. As we all know, the human libido is flexible but not infinitely so; it can be influenced but not entirely molded by culture and experience. Most of us have preferences and types, as I wrote in 2005, that are to some degree essential to us:

…feminism is not hostile to the body, nor to human sexual responses to the body. Feminism does ask the hard questions about why our culture suggests only some kinds of bodies are worthy of being deemed attractive! Feminism is critical of the extraordinarily narrow range of women’s bodies depicted as beautiful and desirable in the culture. But there’s a difference between speaking out against the ways in which popular culture limits the definition of beauty and desire, and rejecting the idea of lust and physical attraction altogether.

Most of us — not all — have certain physical “types” to which we are often drawn…A “type” does become a problem when certain physical attributes are presumptively linked to certain anti-feminist qualities (submissiveness, docility, and so forth). Most feminists are rightly troubled, for example, by white men who have an “Asian fetish” that is clearly linked to fantasies about submission and sexuality. But a man who simply prefers brunettes, without attaching any cultural baggage to his attraction, is not violating any vital feminist principle. We are allowed our individual quirks and our individual preferences, as long as those quirks and preferences are not linked to racist and sexist assumptions that certain types of women “know how to treat a man better.”

I’d add the Tiger corollary to that, which is that individual preferences are fine insofar as they are not thinly (sorry) disguised excuses for pursuing a particular type of woman in order to gain validation and status in the real or imagined eyes of other men. Untangling what we want sexually from what we ourselves want in order to meet cultural or familial expectations is a universal challenge. Unlike my postmodernist friends, I do believe we have an identity and desires that are deeper than our culture; our sexuality, although more malleable than many imagine, isn’t entirely a tabula rasa. (If that were so, there’d be far fewer GLBT kids growing up in conservative Christian households than there in fact are.)

Part of becoming a responsible, sexually mature adult is doing the often difficult work of discerning what one craves inherently from what one has been taught one ought to crave, and what one has learned will win approval from parents or peers. It ain’t rocket science, but it isn’t easy either. And while Tiger may “organically” crave youthful white women with Barbie-esque proportions, one suspects that for all his achievements, he has not yet come close to gaining insight and understanding of the role sexuality plays in his life. And the consequences of lacking that understanding are, as we have seen in his case, devastating.