Tag Archives: Sexual harassment

Bonding through revulsion and desire: a note on homosociality and strip clubs

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A reader named Sarah recently wrote in about a conversation she had with her husband about strip clubs:

My husband today mentioned the time he took his younger brother to a strip club when the brother turned 21. I laughed a bit, and said, “wow! i never heard that story before!” A few more teasing words were said between the 3 of us, and Imentioned that if he ever took our (still non-existent) son to a strip club i’d be furious. I assumed no more needed to be said, as the whole idea of it was so ludicrous and that my husband wouldn’t do something so creepy and so anti-women with a son of ours.

My husband shocked me by saying that yes, he would take our kid to a strip club and he doesn’t see why it would matter to me if “our son is getting married, and we all go to a titty bar for the bachelor party. it’s not like i’d encourage him to cheat!” I was left sputtering and a little disturbed, and totally unsure on how to proceed with this conversation as my husband is a man who’s always respected women and agreed on these matters. (or I obviously wouldn’t have married him!)

I’m no fan of strip clubs for a host of reasons. But Sarah’s email isn’t really about strip clubs — it’s about the problem of homosociality, a topic I’ve written about many times before. (Homosociality is the notion that for American men in particular, the approval of other males is of paramount concern, even more sought after than validation from women.) One of the most odious features of homosociality is the way in which it employs women’s bodies as devices for bonding men together. For example, many women are perplexed (as well as infuriated) by the habit young (and not-so-young) men have of cat-calling female pedestrians from passing cars. “Why do they slow down and whistle at me, making those comments?” a young woman asks; “Do they really think I’m going to get in the car with them?” The answer, of course, is that the fellas in the car are far less interested in the woman they’re harassing than in bonding with each other. They demonstrate their heterosexual bona fides to each other, and in the process of humiliating women on the street, forge a closer homosocial relationship. (It’s more than anecdotal to point out that groups of men, having just harassed a woman sexually, will high-five each other; one of the most devastating depictions of this comes in the rape scene from “Boys Don’t Cry”.)

Going to a strip club, of course, isn’t necessarily analogous to participating in a gang rape. But fathers and older brothers have been taking their sons and younger brothers to “titty bars” and brothels for a long time; in parts of Latin America, the practice is particularly common. The stated purpose may be an “initation into manhood” for a teen boy, or a bacchanalian farewell to bachelorhood for a man about to be wed. But there’s invariably more to it than that. Wives and girlfriends, not unreasonably, suspect that the motive is sexual: fathers and brothers may claim to be doing it as a favor for a son or a sibling, but in reality they’re just looking for an opportunity for “justified infidelity” of one kind or another. That may be true, but there’s a deeper and more common reason: a longing for homosocial intimacy.

Going to a baseball game is the paradigmatic “father-son” bonding activity. But for many men, sporting events are less effective than strip clubs as homosocial strategies. Women haven’t been excluded as spectator from ball parks for generations; very few wives and mothers actively disapprove of sports. (They may find watching sports dull, but that’s hardly the same.) Men in our society, as countless scholars of gender have pointed out, are socialized to find particular delight and meaning in activities from which women are excluded, or which most women find repugnant and objectionable. American boys prove their manhood, after all, through their rejection of their mothers’ values; to care too deeply about what mom thinks is to be a sissy, a mama’s boy. And need I point out how many American men have relationships with wives and girlfriends that closely resemble the mother-son dynamic? Mama might not object to taking little brother to the Yankees game — but she’s likely to be less pleased with a sojourn to the titty bar down the block.

The effectiveness of strip clubs as a homosocial bonding strategy is thus linked to two things: the shared sense the male patrons have that their wives and mothers disapprove of their being there, and the opportunity to establish their credentials as “red-blooded, straight American guys” by sharing the experience of objectifying women’s bodies. A single man in a strip club, nursing a beer, is seen as a vaguely pathetic — or perhaps threatening — figure; a group of men on a “stag night” in that same club are anything but. What is unacceptable in solitude is admirable and manly when done in solidarity with other males.

For men who, perhaps like Sarah’s husband, who have not yet done the vital work of learning how to establish intimate relationships with other men which do not require the objectification of women as “bonding glue”, the homosocial appeal of the strip club experience is tremendous. But women aren’t cement to hold together that which can’t otherwise be joined. Emotionally competent adult males don’t use either women’s revulsion or women’s bodies in order to establish closeness and cameraderie with each other. And men’s universal capacity to become emotionally competent — at a relatively young age — is very real. The fact that so many choose not to exercise that capacity is not evidence that they lack it.

Of Schrödinger’s rapist, Zeno’s paradox, and the problem of trying to prove a negative

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Lorie H., a longtime blog-and-Facebook friend, sent me a link earlier this week to the Phaedra Starling post that is heating up comment threads across the sphere: Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced. It’s the indispensable post for the first half of October, and I recommend it highly. (For those of you wondering who this Schrödinger is, here’s a link to the Wikipedia entry on the famous epistemological problem about his unfortunate cat.)

Some excerpts:

So when you, a stranger, approach me, I have to ask myself: Will this man rape me?

Do you think I’m overreacting? One in every six American women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. I bet you don’t think you know any rapists, but consider the sheer number of rapes that must occur. These rapes are not all committed by Phillip Garrido, Brian David Mitchell, or other members of the Brotherhood of Scary Hair and Homemade Religion. While you may assume that none of the men you know are rapists, I can assure you that at least one is. Consider: if every rapist commits an average of ten rapes (a horrifying number, isn’t it?) then the concentration of rapists in the population is still a little over one in sixty. That means four in my graduating class in high school. One among my coworkers. One in the subway car at rush hour. Eleven who work out at my gym. How do I know that you, the nice guy who wants nothing more than companionship and True Love, are not this rapist?

I don’t.

When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can’t see inside your head, and I don’t know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you—to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy—you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.

Fortunately, you’re a good guy. We’ve already established that. Now that you’re aware that there’s a problem, you are going to go out of your way to fix it, and to make the women with whom you interact feel as safe as possible.

Bold emphasis mine. I’ve written about the “absence of a right to be presumed harmless” before. Starling’s spot on, and her point about the perniciousness of “rape culture” is something that most young men need desperately to understand, and don’t. Well-intentioned but clueless fellows cry in indignation “But you should trust me until I prove myself to be unworthy of the trust”, focusing only on the hurt they feel at not being immediately accepted — and refusing, sometimes willfully, to acknowledge that when women view them as threatening, they do so because it is rational and life-preserving to do so.

Starling offers a short but excellent list of things men who don’t like being viewed as Schrödinger’s Rapist can do; please read the whole post, and the 1216 comments currently below it.

But I’d like to pick up on the theme of trust, and in particularly, the “guilty until proven innocent” notion. One thing that I’ve learned in all my years doing men’s work and feminism: I can never prove myself “safe” to everyone. Indeed, a substantial number of women with whom I interact on a regular basis as students or colleagues or mentees or friends will retain, despite my best efforts, some small element of caution when dealing with me. Some of that caution may be based upon specific knowledge about my past, but far more of it is based on the inescapable reality of my maleness. Folks with my physiology tend to inflict far more physical harm on the world than those with female plumbing; men in positions of authority are notorious for abusing that power sexually. No mater how earnest I am about my feminism and my boundaries and my transformation, the reality is that regardless of who I might be on the inside, I still come across as “a man”. And in the inescapable math of rape culture, man=threat.

Mind you, I don’t spend much energy wondering to what degree I am trusted. It’s very important for male allies to not fall into a dynamic where they find themselves trying to pull out all the stops to convince the women in their lives that they are safe. That’s just another form of seduction after all; it places one’s own ego ahead of the very real, complex needs and concerns of the women with whom one is engaging. This isn’t a competition in which other men are rivals. I’ve seen some ostensibly feminist men make this mistake. Masculine culture sets up males as competitors, with women used to measure a man’s prowess. For many, that means sleeping with as many women as possible as a means of proving one’s masculinity — and, in some sense, bettering other men. The faux pro-feminist corollary is trying to prove to as many women as possible that you, their male feminist friend, are somehow different from all the other guys. The reward isn’t sex or homosocial validation — the reward is being told that you’ve done what other men couldn’t do, and that’s earn trust. While hardly predatory, there’s still something problematic about this kind of “safe seduction” behavior — because it places the man’s ego, rather than women’s safety, front and center.

In creating a safer world for all of us, men do well to follow the sensible sort of advice that Starling offers. They also do well to direct more of their efforts towards calling out predatory and sexist behavior in other men, rather than expending tremendous energy trying to earn women’s trust. (It’s probably obvious that the two activities aren’t mutually exclusive: a man who is actively feminist when he’s around other males is more likely to be viewed as sincere in his commitments, rather than merely pretending to be egalitarian for a female audience.) But in the end, it’s important for men who do this work to understand that no matter how hard they work, no matter how committed and sincere their efforts, a great many women will continue to view them as potential predators. They may succeed in lowering the intensity of the threat they pose until it is very near zero, but, like Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, they can likely never get to that elusive goal of total and complete trust. The sooner men understand that, accept that, and redirect any attendant frustration away from women and towards a culture that encourages rape and abuse, the better off we’re all gonna be.

Tired of being coddled and feared: standing up to the myth of male weakness

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A reader writes in from the East with a query. “Micah” is an undergraduate, taking a class on Gender Issues in the Workplace. He writes of a problem he has with his female professor and her reactionary views:

… in our discussion on sexual harassment, we got into a (I’m
shy to call it a discussion), on how woman’s clothing is partly to blame.
She took the position that women should dress more conservatively, and that
it’s their responsibility in this way to prevent sexual harassment. Her answer to my question “If we make this opinion the norm, doesn’t it negatively affect a woman’s ability to seek redress after being harassed, in that she as the victim is blamed?” was simply, “No”.

I don’t want to create an adversarial relationship with my professor, but at the same
time I’m frustrated at the message she’s sending to both men and women in the class. It’s awkward to be a male student trying to take a feminist stance with an anti-feminist female professor! I’m having trouble explaining my concerns, and am wondering if you could offer some insight into approaching the situation.

Certainly, Micah is in a difficult situation. Indeed, it’s frequently problematic for a male feminist to engage in an argument about gender justice with an avowedly anti-feminist woman. Most men who embrace feminism in a public way run into this particular pickle sooner or later, and it is made exponentially more challenging when the anti-feminist woman is an academic authority figure.

Despite the awkwardness, there are a couple of tacks that Micah can take if he’s willing. The best one, of course, is to challenge his professor’s low expectations of men. The notion that women are responsible for “inviting” harassment by the way they dress is rooted in the belief that male sexual desire is a problem that is women’s to manage. It’s the old myth of male weakness, a myth that suggests that those of us who are incarnate as males simply lack the capacity to control our urges. Therefore, it is women’s job to set boundaries and to “help us” overcome temptations that we are incapable of overcoming on our own. It’s a myth that’s damaging to women, but Micah can point out that it’s incredibly insulting to men.

To borrow a phrase of which conservatives are over-fond, it’s a variation on the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It’s a complex bigotry to be sure, as the real victims of the myth of male weakness are not those presumed to be weak but those who are, because they are presumed to be morally strong, forced to assume the role of sexual gatekeepers. In the sexual harassment dynamic, the myth insults men by suggesting that all of the be-penised are knuckle-dragging, simple-minded thugs who would never get anything done at all if it weren’t for women’s careful encouragement and cajoling. The myth insults women by suggesting that while men’s sexual appetites are extraordinarily voracious and uncontrollable, women’s sexual desire either doesn’t exist at all or is so weak that it can be easily managed. (If a woman does experience intense desire, the myth suggests that there may be something wrong with her.) And above all, the myth holds women accountable for bad male behavior, forcing women to second-guess themselves endlessly while depriving men of something they desperately need, which is the chance to grow into kind, rational, self-soothing and self-controlled human beings.

Micah is right to be indignant in the face of the myth of male weakness. As a young male feminist, he is right to be furious at what sexual harassment does to women, and he is right to be exasperated at the pervasiveness of the belief that women somehow bring mistreatment on themselves through their behavior or their dress. He is certainly right, too, to be frustrated at what the dominant discourse about men, women, and harassment says about him and his fellow males. If he’s old enough to be in college, he probably already knows what it’s like to live as a relatively privileged American man: alternately coddled and feared, loathed and loved. If he pushes back — in a polite but robust way — against the damaging message his professor is sending, Micah will send a message to his classmates that not all of their male peers are willing to be complicit in the Great Lie. Whether he gains any traction with his prof is another question.

See more in the Modesty and Myth of Male Weakness categories.

Towards the “pleasure-affirming vision”: a review of the magisterial “Yes Means Yes”

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In mid-December, I ordered a copy of “Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape, edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti. YMY is an anthology filled with essays by writers well-known in the feminist blogosphere, and others who aren’t; by cis- and trans-gendered men and women; by people across the sexual (and chronological) identity spectrum. But each piece in the collection offers a new and different insight into the questions of rape, consent, power and pleasure. Taken as a whole, these 27 essays constitute a visionary and immensely important contribution to the work of creating a new sexual dynamic between men and women, between men, between women, and within ourselves.

The foreword to the anthology comes from feminist comedian Margaret Cho, who in her familiar funny and painfully insightful style, sets the tone for the collection. She writes about the complexity of that simple word, “yes”, and the insidious variety of ways in which our sexist cultural rules work to extract that monosyllable from women. Though the title of the collection is “Yes Means Yes!”, Cho and the editors understand that an authentic “yes!” can only come in a dynamic where “no!” can be said safely. Just as it is infuriating and exasperating to have one’s genuine “yes!” overanalyzed, shamed, or denied, there are also huge psychic consequences to saying “yes” just to placate, to soothe, to avoid a fight. Cho writes:

I am surprised by how much sex I have had in my life that I didn’t want to have. Not exactly what’s considered “real” rape, or “date” rape, like my first time, although it is a kind of rape of the spirit — a dishonest portrayal or distortion of my own desire in order to appease another person — so it wasn’t rape at gunpoint, but rape as the alternative to having to explain my reasons for not wanting to have sex…

Often I would initiate the encounter just to get it over with, so it would be behind me, so it would be done. It is the worst feeling; it is like emotional prostitution, emotional whoring. You don’t get paid in dollars, you get paid in averted arguments…

I said yes to partners I never wanted in the first place, because to say no at any point after saying yes would make the whole relationship a lie, so I had to keep saying yes in order to keep the “no” I felt a secret. This is such a messed-up way to live, such an awful way to love.

It’s dangerous for any feminist man to claim knowledge of “how women think”, but in countless journals and in group or private discussions, I’ve heard women say almost exactly what Cho says here. And I’ve heard it from one or two of my exes from years ago, women who were honest enough (and often, angry enough) to call me on my own privilege, my own presumption, and the thousand ways in which I (who ought to have known better) helped to create a dynamic where I needed soothing. One of the most humbling experiences I’ve been through is listening to a lover recount to me, in excruciatingly candid detail, the way in which I worked (with her complicity) to silence her “No”, to “get” her “yes”. This is not to suggest that my male pro-feminism is rooted in a desire to make amends, or even worse, to reclaim some lost pride. But a great many men are oblivious to the ways in which their sense of entitlement — and women’s culturally ingrained people-pleasing behavior — work to make sex legally consensual but emotionally unwanted. For men who care about their partners, the realization that a woman has had sex to soothe, to placate, or “just get it over with”, is and ought to be devastating. And it ought to be an impetus to action, to candor, to hard work, and to conversation. Cho’s foreword sets a tone for all of that, while serving to remind us in scathingly honest fashion of the consequences of remaining silent. Continue reading →

“The opposite of rape is not consent; the opposite of rape is enthusiasm”: a revised and expanded post

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I’m very much looking forward to Jessica Valenti and Jaclyn Friedman’s forthcoming anthology: Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape. I submitted a piece for inclusion, but a week or two ago received a very kind rejection note from the editors. I don’t think the short essay I wrote is viable for publication elsewhere, as Yes Means Yes will likely be the definitive work on the subject of consent for some time to come. So I’m posting the submission here.

This essay is a revised version of an earlier blogpost, of course. And though I am naturally disappointed that this essay won’t be included, I’m still very much looking forward to the appearance of the book, scheduled for later this year. in any case here goes:

“Yes means yes.” It’s a powerful, simple phrase, and important enough to be the guiding theme for this anthology. But the problem, of course, is that there is more than one kind of “yes.” There’s a world of difference between the “yes” said to appease or please, and the “yes” that comes from our core, brimming with enthusiasm. From the time we were children, most of us have been raised to say “yes” to things we would rather say “no” to: doing household chores, covering a co-worker’s shift, agreeing to pick a friend up at the airport. “Yes” often means “I am willing” rather than “Gosh, I’d really like to do that.” And while part of living in community with other human beings involves saying “yes” to things we’d rather not do, this issue of consent and enthusiasm is very different when the subject is sex.

This essay argues that when it comes to teaching young people about sexuality, we need to do more than make the case that “no means no, and yes means yes.” We need to make the case that consent is not enough. Great sex – ethical sex – is rooted less in mutual agreement than in mutual enthusiasm. It’s about moving from a “yes” to a “Hell, yes!”

I’m the elder of two sons raised in the ‘70s and early ‘80s by an avowedly feminist single mother. Mom hosted meetings of the League of Women Voters in our living room; Ms. Magazine rested on the coffee table. My brother and I didn’t get much of a sex talk from our mother, but she was gently insistent that we “respect” the girls we dated. When I was fifteen, I had my first girlfriend, Carmen. One afternoon, as my Mom drove me over to Carmen’s house, she warned me: “Don’t push her further than she wants to go. No means no, always.” I was acutely embarrassed (Carmen and I hadn’t moved beyond the kissing stage), and changed the subject. But I remembered the message.

The problem with the “no means no” slogan, as vital as it is, is that it implies the opposite is always true: “yes means yes.” “Yes means yes!” can be a triumphant statement about women’s sexual autonomy. But in a world where so many young women feel pressured to please others (particularly men), too many of the “yeses” uttered in dorm rooms and in the back seats of cars don’t reflect authentic desire. Too many “yeses” are coerced; too many quiet “okays” and “I guess so’s” are interpreted as blanket permission. When we confine our advice about sexual decision-making to a simple “no” means “no”, we risk sending the message that anything that isn’t a clear and strong “no” constitutes a “yes.” And as countless anecdotes told by young women reveal, that’s a recipe for disaster. Continue reading →

Yet another post on men, suspicion, youth ministry, and cheerfully proving one’s innocence

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A reader, responding to the thread below this reprint, writes:

…talking about false allegations keeping men out of these fields (working with kids) and referencing things like To Catch a Predator and the McMartin / Buckey case to make out like the fear of abuse is totally overblown really hurts, you know? I try not to let things bother me. I’ve had to stop reading certain blogs because of the prominence of thinking that downplays the reality of child sex abuse… For someone to portray what concern that exists now as hysteria makes me feel invisible. For almost every woman I’ve known well enough to have a personal conversation with and almost every female family member, this is a big part of their reality, part of their life story.

I wasn’t able to do much moderating while I was in New York, and perhaps I ought to have weighed in a bit. Whenever I’ve posted about working with youth, and particularly about working with underage teens (see this category archive), men’s rights activists tend to show up in the comment threads. They often show up to give me a “friendly” warning that I risk being hit with a false accusation, or to lament what they see as a broader cultural climate that is deeply distrustful of men who work with young folks. As I said in this post and many others, the collective bad behavior of a great many men (not just a few “bad apples”) has led to a justifiable degree of suspicion on the part not only of the survivors of abuse but on the part of parents, communities, and the broader culture. My two-fold point has always been the same:

a. I welcome the opportunity to “prove myself safe” through a repeated willingness to submit to scrutiny, a scrupulous willingness not to be entirely alone with a minor, and a cheerful and undefensive willingness to answer questions about my actions and my pedagogy from any stakeholder in the community.

b. At the same time, I’m going to be fearless about being warm, loving, and where appropriate (and sometimes, it is very appropriate) physically affectionate with young people of both sexes. Good youth ministry with any group of teens is impossible without an environment in which non-sexual, affirming, touch is available. Continue reading →

“Find out what it means to me”: some thoughts on respect, chivalry, and campaigns against sexual violence

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Vanessa posted last week about the Coaching Boys into Men program, a product of the New York Family Violence Prevention Fund. Vanessa posts one of the flyers produced by the program; it features a boy in an orange hoodie with the words “Awaiting Instructions” emblazoned across the front. And the instructions the boy receives:

1. Eat your vegetables
2. Don’t play with matches
3. Finish your homework
4. Respect women

And in the comments section at Feministing, there’s a mix of praise and criticism for the campaign, mostly revolving around the “problematic” meaning of “respect” for women. ProFeministMale writes:

…often times, when I hear the general, non-feminist public teach young boys to “respect” women, I get the impression that a lot of what they’re teaching also involves “chivalry,” to to see women as somehow being “different,” that they’re nimble and weak and need to young boys and men to serve as the “protectors.”

This is a good idea – but I can’t help but think these boys are also being indoctrinated into gender roles that so much of the world is buying into.

In the various workshops I’ve put on for young men (and not so-young-men) in church and school settings, I’ve talked a lot about the real meaning of one of my favorite words, “respect.” (And if you’re thinking of the Aretha Franklin song now, hold on, I’ll get to it.)

I often start by writing the word “respect” on a flip chart or chalkboard, and then ask the folks I’m working with to play the word association game with me. Everyone gets to throw out the first thing that comes into their head when they hear or see the word. As you might expect, I get a lot of different definitions. Some people do think of chivalry; almost always, someone will say that “opening the door for a woman” is the first thing that he thinks of when he hear the word. Others will offer a negative definition, suggesting that “respect” is more about what you don’t do than what you do: “It’s like watching your language around a girl”; “It’s about not grabbing her just ’cause you want to”; (I remember that definition vividly from one high school group), “It’s treating her as a girl and not like a guy.” I write as many of the definitions and word associations on the board as I can. Continue reading →

I’m “viral”, and it makes me happy

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Actually, it’s the “enthusiasm not consent” post from July that’s getting the attention. Nothing I’ve ever written gets quoted as often as these lines:

“The opposite of rape is not consent. The opposite of rape is enthusiasm”. It’s dangerous because it’s shocking, and of course, it’s dangerous because it twists the purely legal meaning of the term “rape.” But from the standpoint of one who cares desperately about the well-being of young people, my goal in offering workshops like these is not merely to prevent sexual assault that meets the legal standard of a criminal act. My goal is to prevent that, of course, but to also offer shy and uncertain young people tools to prevent them from having bad sex characterized by obligation, confusion, and detached resignation. I always argue that anything short of an authentic, honest, uncoerced, aroused and sober “Hell, yes!” is, in the end, just a “no” in another form.

Looking through my pings, trackbacks, and hits, it’s my most-linked-to post ever, and I’m genuinely glad, because the subject matters so much.

Thanks, Curmudgette!

Men, women, ageing, and the “slide into invisibility” after 35

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Mythago links to this post by “jolt” about women, ageing, and objectification. Read the post, and the one to which she also links.

Jolt writes:

I have definitely experienced all sorts of verbal harrasment, but not as frequently as I used to. It may be that years of suffering these unwarranted intrusions have made me oblivious a lot of the time, worn down from the constant onslaught. But I think it’s also that now I am in my late 30s I have moved from “potentially fuckable and thus subject to any and all pestering that any idiot male chooses to provide” to “eh, not old, but why bother.”

Part of me is really enjoying this slide into the invisibility of females over 35. Part of me is just pissed off. Look, I don’t need the hassle, but when even the lack of hassle pulls you into the swirl of the patriarchy and assigns you your rank therein, it’s annoying as hell.

Obviously, one of the most insidious aspects of patriarchal culture is the way in which it teaches women to assess their own value through the desire that they arouse in men. Even more toxic is that your average 17 year-old girl will receive more catcalls and sexualized comments on the street than her 45 year-old mother. No less an authority than the infamous John Derbyshire insists that women hit their “sell by” date somewhere around twenty.

Of course, rude, crass, and decidedly unwanted sexual attention can be annoying and disillusioning at best — and soul-scarring at worst. Yet we teach young women that that attention — no matter how vulgar — is a measure of their value. It’s easy to dismiss that connection intellectually, but I’ve known plenty of women who have found, much to their own frustration, that on some level they’ve “bought in” to this notion that strange men on the street do have the power to assign their value.

As a forty year-old man on the cusp of what was, traditionally, middle-age, I am ever more keenly aware of my male privilege. I’ve been teaching full-time since I was 27 (and I was a very young-looking 27 when I started). In my first few years, I felt as if my youthfulness was an obstacle to being taken seriously. I felt as if a great many of my students were asking themselves, “How much can he possibly know? He looks too young to be a professor.”

In the last thirteen years, I’ve gained a tremendous amount of experience. That experience has made me a better teacher, of course. But I also am keenly aware that ageing has brought me a degree of respect from my students and colleagues that I simply did not enjoy when I was younger. In 1994, my students looked at me as a slightly older peer, and I know that for some, that proved an obstacle to their learning. While in those early years I received far more validation for being “cute” or “hot” than I do these days, the concomitant perceived lack of gravitas compromised my legitimacy as a teacher.

I’ve heard from a number of female friends in my age group (late thirties, early-to-mid forties) who are coping with what jolt so accurately calls the “slide into invisibility of females over 35.” These are accomplished, creative, brilliant, interesting, beautiful women. None defines herself solely by her sex appeal, but several have quietly pointed out their own considerable ambivalence about ageing and this increasing “invisibility.”

Earlier this year, right before my 40th birthday, I was telling a group of colleagues in the faculty “party room” about how excited I was to be hitting this chronological milestone. One of my female peers reminded me, gently, that my enthusiasm was at least in part tied to male privilege. There is little that men lose by ageing, she noted. Not only do we traditionally tend to see older men as more desirable, even when older men lose their looks, we don’t hold their slide into middle-age against them. I can’t remember exactly what her words were, but my colleague — who has known me since I first came on board at the college — said something like “What you, Hugo, lose in ‘youthful hotness’ you gain in ‘weight’; men who get older don’t get noticed less, they just get noticed differently. Women sometimes don’t get noticed at all.” (She had a cleverer way of saying it than that, and when I remember it, I’ll revise this post!)

I’ve written many times about the “older men, younger women” problem. Make no mistake, our cultural obsession with sexualizing very young women is inextricably linked to a dismissiveness of “older” women’s desirability. While the catcalls and the wolfwhistles and the cheesy pick-up lines may become less common (to a not inconsiderable amount of relief on the part of their targets), as jolt writes, “even the lack of hassle pulls you into the swirl of the patriarchy and assigns you your rank therein.”

I’m really, really, really happy being forty. I like my wrinkles. I like watching my body change. Age is not my enemy today. To put it simply, when I was a boyish 27 I felt my youth was a decided liability in my work; at 40, I have no such concerns. But even when I enjoyed the flattery, I never connected my worth to my (brief) status as the “young hottie” on the faculty. Male privilege meant that my perceived attractiveness was essentially irrelevant to my work as a professor, and its disappearance has not impacted my credibility. The same has not, I’m sorry to say, always been true in the experience of my colleagues. And in that sense, the freedom to celebrate ageing without a trace of anxiety is, at least in part, considerably easier for men.

Street harassment and recruiting alpha males

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I got an e-mail last week from a man named X, asking about pro-feminist men and responses to sexual harassment — particularly on the street.

There’s been a lot of blogosphere discussion about street harassment lately, and I was interested in your thoughts about how, and whether, men can help (aside from Not Doing It, and acknowledging the pain it causes).

I’m embarrassed to admit that I only started to become aware of how big a problem this is fairly recently, and so it’s been on my mind. This morning, for example, I was walking to the subway and right about when I passed by a woman, a guy sitting in a parked van made some remark to her. I felt ashamed to just walk by, as if I didn’t notice or I approved, but also couldn’t bring myself to say anything.

On the one hand, I think there are good reasons why confronting other men in situations like this might not help at all–as a post at Feministe (where I originally posted this, before realizing maybe asking you would be a better venue) and some comments have noted, most harassers simply won’t acknowledge their behavior as wrong, and there’s a non-trivial chance of violence. (This inability to productively engage may be even more true insofar as class and race issues enter into things.) It seems that especially in cities, people almost never sanction strangers for their public improprieties; attempting to do it on a regular basis, especially as a third party, is hard to imagine. On the other hand, is that just cowardice speaking?

I agree with the suggestion that verbally accosting harassers in the street can be dangerous and (almost worse) unhelpful. While we might be called on to jeopardize our own safety to assist someone who is being physically assaulted, I’m not sure that that moral mandate applies to all instances of sexual harassment. Male feminists are not asked to be “knights in shining armor”, rescuing helpless damsels. And while it is certainly true that male feminists have a special and vital role to play in challenging other men to rethink what is acceptable, that doesn’t mean that we ought to ask men who embrace feminism to put themselves into regular physical danger.

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