I was married (shortly and many years ago) to one of those “liberal” male types who recognized even the subtlest forms of racism, but was willfully blind to sexism.

Anyway, I’m enjoying your blog immensely and have been sending the link to my like-minded friends.

I thought exactly the same thing on reading Daily Kos’s take on this–another guy who is all for feminism, but then when push comes to shove what he really cares about is his right to a cold beer and two naked blond girls mud-wrestling on TV.

It makes me sick.

You can buy into this brain-dead sexism without hatred, I must insist. Obliviousness is just as deadly as hatred, and twice as patronizing. The oblivious driver who refuses to see you crossing the street is far more likely to kill you than the one who hates you but fears punishment. The contemptible assumption that men are fully capable of understanding exactly how women should feel about casual depictions of sexual degradations is the primary problem with things like TV shows of pie-smearing pinups. Men think that they would like to be a beautiful woman being smeared with pie because it arouses them, and then are not only amazed that any woman could beg to differ, but are actually offended that any woman could challenge their assumptions that something they think they would like is actually, on the face of it, under any possible examination except for arousal, demeaning.

So you constantly get between me and my arousal, casual and unconscious though it may be. My only redemption is that I can acknowledge it when it’s pointed out to me, since I have started to understand the basic humanity of what you say and separate it ever so slightly from my constant desire to be aroused. But most men, liberal or whatever, when they are first faced with the full horror of their own desires deflated to their very face, react with shock and snarls of defensive fury. To be a man and to be forced from your constant state of seeking arousal is a castrating and undignified feeling. Like admitting you were wrong or something.

It’s not an unimportant thing to me, to try to understand why and how my own sexism works on everything I see. I’m not going to give up on my desire for arousal - it feels too good. I wouldn’t want to give it up any more than I would want to give up food or air or love. It must have a place, perhaps a private place, where it can work its strange magic. I need it, and I want it to be my crutch and aid. But what I don’t want is for my adolescent fantasies to be smeared all over the front page of everyone’s reality, showing the world just how easily I can be fooled into arousal by the simplest of monkey-see-monkey-do type tricks. Because that’s really as pathetic and stupid as it really is. It’s not really about the women. It’s really about the men refusing to understand the women because they can mentally pull on a cheap pair of ripped up fishnets and a push-up bra and think, “If I was a woman I’d like being demeaned, too! Hubba hubba!”

Amen.

Great Post!

The overall theme is agreement with the great insight you present about how the Daily Kos fellows are unable to distinguish between adolescent male fantasy and women’s sexuality. I tie this into my belief that men don’t hate women as much as they are oblivious to their degradation.

I then move on to guess that it might be because men don’t understand women’s sexuality, because they are, as you said, unable to distinguish between their own fantasies and the reality of being a women. I wonder if the desires that men project onto women that they use to explain away their assumptions isn’t like putting themselves into a costume like a drag queen, and the results that I thought this plainly implied are the results anyone can see for themselves if they go to a drag show; sad and laughable and cliched, but nowhere near feminist.

I go on to say that it’s brain dead, but it’s possible to buy into because men are oblivious. I discount hatred as a motive, a motive that you refer to with a Germaine Greer quote in the blog entry. I think it’s more of a patronizing obliviousness than hatred. I point out that just because men are aroused by pie-smearing women, they think that women should be also, because of what I said above about men’s perceptions of women’s sexuality being projections of their own desires, not of women’s. Because men think make-up is pretty, they have to smear on too much of it to walk in a women’s shoes and see with her eyes. They never see how demeaning it is because they think that’s all part of being in drag, which is the limited view they have of being a women. Is this any clearer paraphrased like this?

Men are amazed, then, from this drag queen perspective that they think is a women’s perspective, that women are not as aroused by pie-smearing pin ups as they are, since they are still thinking with a man’s brain. Smearing a bunch of make up on a man is not sufficient to make him think like a woman.

He is still aroused by cheesecake either because he digs humiliation or because, like many men, he is always aroused by women who are posturing in ways that signal sexual availability.

So even though he thinks he’s looking at this ad with the eyes of a woman, he can’t because he’s still aroused by it, and it’s likely that a woman has an entirely different set of reactions to it, especially if she’s at all sensitive to humiliation and finds sexual posturing calculated to stimulate male arousal demeaning for all the reasons you are so good at providing and explaining.

But the man who thinks he knows what women think is angered by any other reaction except arousal, because he think’s that how a woman should see it, too.

I realize what makes my post complicated is that once I used the drag queen metaphor to signal how men think women will react and what responses they will have that everything else would follow. When I introduced the aspect of male arousal, I was showing that even though you can put a left-wing pundit in drag, he’s still aroused by sexual material that might not arouse a woman. I should have made it more clear that the left wing pundit is in metaphorical drag only because he thinks he’s thinking like a woman, not because he’s aroused by being in drag, like the drag queens one sees lurking around the convention center In Bologna looking for tricks to turn.

Then I stuck a paragraph in about how I’m often fooled, confused and confounded by arousal myself. I further note that when a woman doesn’t react to something that arouses a man with arousal it can be intimidating for a man to have his assumptions challenged, because his idea of being a woman is as superficial as the paint on a drag queen’s face.

I end it all up with an attempt to justify my need to be aroused and to enjoy it. I say that it’s kind of embarassing how simple it is to trick me - or any man, really - into arousal, and make it clearer that this attitude is not about the women’s place, but in what a man thinks he would like if he were in a women’s place.

I hope this helps. If not, well, I guess I’m incomprehensible!