The magical world of Texas fungi provides this charmingly innappropriate illustration: a stinkhorn mushroom. The spore mass contained in the black goo smells like, well, ass. Note that the stinkhorn’s order is Phallales. Mutinus elegans, Blanco County, TX, July 2007. Don’t eat this one, Alice!
Whenever I write about how much men hate you, somebody — usually a dude, but sometimes a Mrs Nigel — always chirps up, “That’s no way to win men over to your nutty Twistolution!”
And they are right. Dudes won’t support feminism unless there’s something in it for them. In my case, they seem anxious that I behave solicitously toward them, to reassure them that radical feminists don’t really want to substantively diminish their social status.
My advocacy for women’s entitlement to domination-free lives may sometimes look good on paper to liberal ‘feminist’ dudes, but they loudly demur when it comes time for them to acknowledge that they oppress women whether they like it or not, by virtue of their participation — whether it is a voluntary participation matters not a whit — in male dominant culture. When I explain why their position is untenable, that oppression is experienced by the oppressed as hate, it is interpreted as my crossing the boundaries of feminine propriety. This makes’em mad. And they get mean, e.g. “I don’t hate women, you stupid bitch!”
These glittering examples of Western manhood appear not to grasp the irony of responding with hate to a men-hate-you argument. The justification for their subsequent personal attacks (one fellow human recently expressed his happy anticipation of my rapidly impending obituary) seems to be that I am just not obsequious enough. Insufficient obsequiosity apparently invalidates any argument made by a feminist, however shimmeringly astute it may otherwise be. As a cause, the fight against the oppression of half the human population is only supportable if it is presented with a solicitous head-tilt, a pert giggle, and an invitation to fuck you in the ass.
But hate you men do, however often certain of them wish you dead from cancer for saying so without first offering to bend over.
Sometimes I am enjoined to use a less emotionally-charged word than hate, or to recompose the statement to read “some men hate you”. Evidently the truth is too painful for these delicate sensitivos. They should, in that case, avoid at all costs this article. This riveting piece — on, coincidentally, bending over — written from the default human point of view, summarizes the metrosexual mania for anal het sex, wink-wink. As evidence in support of the men-hate-you argument, this article couldn’t be any more repellently potent; it is not the isolated ramblings of some midnight teen tubesock blogger, but in fact appears in the mainstream men’s magazine Details. You know, if I’d sat up all night with a tub of Cool Whip, a six-pack of Tab, and an 8-ball, I couldn’t have contrived a more definitive expression of our culture’s merry glorification of misogyny.
In this article you will find, replete with hilarious euphemisms*, men freely admitting that ‘demanding’ anal sex is not only considered perfectly OK, but is in fact a contumely devoutly to be wish’d. And ‘contumely’ is the operative word: it is agreed that conquest and subsequent humiliation is actually the object of the exercise. To wit:
“Once a guy has anal sex, he’s put on a pedestal by his peers,” [Philip] says. He claims he hasn’t had much trouble getting women to agree to it. “I only had to persuade two girls. [I asked] ‘Can I put it in your butt?’ At first they were like, ‘No, it will hurt.’ Then time after time of having sex with them they finally said okay. It hurt them the first time, but after that they always said they enjoyed it—if not a little, then a lot.”
And this:
“For most of my friends, it’s sort of a domination thing,” says John (not his real name), 30, a writer in New York. “[It’s] basically getting someone in a position where they’re most vulnerable. My friends enjoy that and they tell their friends they did it. But it’s not like girls are ready for it—it’s something they do when they’re really drunk.”
It’s an escalation of porn culture. Since the excessively vaunted sexual revolution decreed that all women henceforth would be empowerfulized by their service to male sexuality — getting jizz in your wig is a big compliment! — too many women have been giving up the vagina too easily, and even blow jobs are hackneyed now that housewives are writing mundane marriage manuals on the subject. “Regular” het sex just isn’t brutal or insulting enough anymore. There’s no sport in it, no swaggering triumph, nothing to give men “a good story to tell over beers.” Anal sex may be “the new deal-breaker,” but it’s only a matter of time until blush is off that rose, too. If a ’sex’ act fails to egregiously humiliate or even harm a woman, men will keep pushing the limits until they find one that does. How long until we’re reading this in mainstream magazines?
“I only had to persuade two girls. [I asked] ‘Can I shit in your mouth and mutilate you with razor blades?’ At first they were like, ‘No, it will hurt.’ It hurt them the first time, but after that they always said they enjoyed it—if not a little, then a lot.”
Now, before you anal apologists flood my inbox with your porntastic personal anecdotes, hear this: in a patriarchy, wherein one class oppresses another for its own profit, there can be no ‘consent’ between oppressor and oppressed.
___________________
*Rearguard action, take the service elevator, and grant a backstage pass are just a few of edgy-winky author Peter Rubin’s jollifications of women’s sexual slavery.
[Thanks to Stacy, who read about this at Feministing]
Seems reasonable to me that every man who wants “anal” should get it.
NB I didn’t say “‘give’ it.”
The picture alone made me nauseous…
I spent the past several days with a houseguest who… well, let’s just say that he’d probagbly find this article perfectly reasonable, and female demurral as unreasonable. At the end of the visit, I felt horrible about myself, just from the proximity. And I’m feeling even more blessed that I live alone.
Ah. Here it is:
“The physicality of it, being painful or whatever, shows how comfortable the girl is with you. […] Ideally, every girl is a disgusting pig who wants it,” he says. “But only with you.”
So, the best things about it are a woman’s willingness to suffer physical pain, and humiliation, exclusive to one person. Got it. Can’t believe I haven’t tried this yet.
The constant reassurance that women really ‘like it’ is the usual male bullshit. Questioning that ‘liking’ is never done, because the revelation of what defines ‘liking it’ would probably be some dick-wilting shit.
The whole article was porn propaganda. And as Twisty noted, it has gone mainstream. It’s not enough that porn is an epidemic. Men will not stop at that. They now want to change it from being a dirty little secret that they are ashamed of to outright humiliation of women being perfectly acceptable. The last vestiges of pretending not to hate women are starting to give way, sugar coated by glancing assertions that on line polls show that huge percentages of women like being treated like ‘disgusting pigs.’
This fine young example of american manhood couldn’t even be bothered to disguise his hatred of women when interviewed by a mainstream magazine. And yet men will claim they don’t hate women.
Knowing that I have been raised and trained to react like any other man makes me sick to my stomach. You can turn off the impulse to be a misogynist when you get to be a certain age, but you can’t ever claim that you are innocent of ever being aroused by what you know is wrong.
Personal experience - including trying it with women - has kept me from considering this stuff something I like. But the porn culture has still made it part of my trained response, despite my own indifference to the reality. This is one way how I began to understand that misogyny is cultural, rather than natural, at least in me.
A man just isn’t happy unless he’s hurting a women. I’m surprised to find even that much truth in “Details” magazine. Somebody let me know when there’s a comparable article in there about pegging. Thanks.
I always thought the women liking it thing was about men liking it but as usual projecting their feelings onto the women they abuse. It’s the same with rape, rapists always talk about their victims wanting it, they never tell the truth which is that they wanted it.
I want to say something about the picture but I just can’t.
Somebody let me know when there’s a comparable article in there about pegging.
What’s pegging?
The constant reassurance that women really ‘like it’ is the usual male bullshit.
Well, the mere fact that she allowed something to be done to her means she likes it. The fact that it took five hours of cajoling, wheedling, and badgering to get her to agree to it doesn’t seem to figure into the equation.
It’s all about conquest, and degradation, and hatred.
It sounds to me like these guys would rather be having sex with their male friends, since they’re obviously more concerned with impressing them than their girlfriends.
Read the article and then scroll all the way down to read the comments. Surprisingly (for a men’s magazine), blamers are in full force.
Also, take a look at the website’s icon; until now, I have never realized how phallic the necktie is.
The huge irony (maybe it’s not irony… it’s something), of course, is that Details used to be a fairly decent gay men’s mag.
Torture- and murder-porn are going mainstream on TV, now this. It just gets better and better.
Ahhh, The blamers are there grace a the excellent thread on the subject in the blame-forum over at:
http://easypersiflage.com/blameforum/index.php
Check it out. The invasion was orchestrated. Don’t you just love *us* ?
Thanks so much, Twisty, for presenting this to us.
There’s nothing I can say that you haven’t said already. It’s pure mysoginistic crap, and I pitty the women who can’t see it and give in to be dehumanized, abused and hurt. I, like you, will keep screaming this truth at the top of my voice until I die.
My immediate reaction–to both the picture and the post–was YECCCHH!! The order of the plant is very appropriate (the first thing I thought was, “That plant looks like a giant penis!”), and the post, well… let’s just say that if I was participating in that most patriarchal of activities (i.e., hetero sex of any sort), you can be DAMN sure I would never consent to a guy putting it up my ass! Sorry, that’s just too disgusting. I know more than enough about human anatomy & physiology to know that the anus was designed as an exit, NOT an entrance; therefore, anal sex violates that rule completely. You are far more likely to contract all sorts of nasty diseases (some of which are lethal) from this practice than any other sexual practice, just because of the difference between the anal mucosa and that of the mouth or vagina– the former is delicate and far more prone to small, often invisible tears that can serve as an easy portal for infection; the others are tougher and more resilient, so you’re less likely to cause tissue damage in the course of usual activity. Posts like this one make me glad to be far more interested in other aspects of life. Sex and all its trappings are overrated, IMHO…just another expression of the use and abuse of women. IBTP.
Yeah, I sense the next frontier for these assholes will be “existing orifices are not enough, real men must create their own new hole for penetration.”
If “Anal is the new ‘third base,’” then what the hell is a home run?
This is all way too similar to an inverse of Freudian childhood sexual development.
On a different blog, I read that this article was an example of how Details magazine hates men, not an example of how men hate women.
And that mushroom picture is breath-takingly, mind-bogglingly AWESOME. HOW do you find these things? Twisty, you’re a genius.
Brilliant essay. Day-um.
I think you can say that by portraying men as unmitigated jerks Details is also expressing hatred of men. In real life, men have many patriarchy-bred faults but (at least in my life, thank goddess) they are not likely to say out loud, for publication in a mainstream magazine, “Ideally, every girl is a disgusting pig who wants it,â€â€
If you think that’s what mainstream guys think, you’ve got a very low opinion of them.
Details, Rugosa, is hardly a niche-fetish publication, from which fact I infer that its content is designed to titillate mainstream men. You will note that the men quoted in the article are all anonymous, so clearly there is still a degree of shame involved in calling a woman a disgusting pig, but these dudes are portrayed to the magazine’s audience of regular, everyday fellas as regular, everyday fellas.
In other words, I do have a low opinion of mainstream guys. It takes an unusual, gifted, and dedicated (i.e non-mainstream) guy to stand up in a roomful of dudes and say “porn is the graphic representation of rape, and therefore it sucks.” Which is why you will rarely, if ever, witness this in real life.
The original title of the article was “Is it OK to demand anal sex?” Apparently someone with editorial power thought adjusting the title would, I don’t know: clean things up a bit? Make the article less horific? Some of the blamers’ comments refer to the orginal title.
It’s nice to think positively of men, even though they feel this way about women. I think it’s culturally ingrained in men to feel this way, and depending on the individual capacity for empathy and understanding, every man, no matter how disgustingly misogynist, knows he doesn’t have to feel this way, but that it is what is expected of him, though many men have little or no idea of how bestial and hateful it makes them.
That’s why you see gradations of honesty in men about women. Sure, lots of men struggle with the sickness of being a man because they know somewhere down deep in their little baby souls that there is something terribly wrong about feeling this way about women. And they can easily learn to hide these feelings from women, who have absolutely no inclination to try to understand how men can sink so low, even though they see traces of all the cultural forces that cram it down our throats every day.
Just as men find it almost impossible to grasp the idea of regarding women as human beings, so do women find it hard to grasp the idea that men have the seeds of humanity in them, but it is smothered by the terrible weight of how our culture teaches them to be a man.
In the privileged confines of my own social circles I would be hard pressed to find a man who would admit to such savagery outright to any woman. Yet I also know, because I am a man, that many of them would laugh at it and think it was funny once among other men. I and some of my other friends wouldn’t, but we are far from the mainstream.
The important thing I’m trying to say is that even the nicest liberal guy in the world knows that the way he sees this is from a position of smug superiority rather than as a victim of oppression, and our slight gasps of outrage are relatively lightweight because of our position of privilege. You can get it, perfectly, yeah, but if you’re a guy, you never really get it bad.
I hate that men hate me. It terrifies and infuriates me. I hate that they can say these things and immediately render me frozen with shock, anger, and fear. I hate that they use these attitudes to control me and others like me. I hate that they laugh about it. And most of all I hate that they pursue orgasm by degrading and harming fellow human beings.
Articles like these just turn me more and more off sex to the point I don’t even feel the urge anymore, because this article glaringly represents the prevailing attitudes of men in the world toward their female sexual partners. If I can’t have sex with men who actually respect me as a whole human being attached to my pussy and treat me with genuine affection, fondness, and respect then I am quite happy to forego it altogether. Better that than being consumed,spat out, and laughed at over beers with his boys just so some dood can get his rocks off and place himself higher in the pecking(pecker?) order of his pack. Besides, it isn’t hard to find an orgasm if I really want one, and men aren’t needed for that. I just really marvel at how much these guys take and push and take and push, without really giving anything back to their partners, especially respect. Entitlement, much?
“porn is the graphic representation of rape, and therefore it sucks.â€
Could you please explain this a little more? How is it representing rape and not sex? Doesn’t it depend on what kind of porn it is? I’m guessing this claim is based on the argument that in a patriarchy, all sex is rape because consent can never be freely given on the part of the oppressed, as you mentioned above. Is this correct?
This post reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from the Queer Nation Manifesto:
“I hate straights:
I hate straight people who can’t listen to queer anger without saying, ‘Hey, all straight people aren’t like that. I’m straight, too, you know.’ As if their egos don’t get enough stroking or protection in this arrogant, heterosexist world. Why must we take care of them, in the midst of our just anger brought on by their fucked up society? Why add the reassurance of ‘Of course I don’t mean you. You don’t act that way.’ Let them figure out for themselves whether they deserve to be included in out anger.”
Banshee, porn is the graphic representation of women’s oppression, which oppression is achieved via the persistent and chronic daily threat of rape or other violence. Furthermore, the women ‘acting’ in porn films are prostituted women, ‘prostitution’ being the patriarchy’s eupehmism for pay-for-rape. So yes, it has something to do with the inability of a woman, who lacks full human agency, to consent to sex in the same sense that a man does.
Thanks for asking. And thanks for quoting from the QNM. By decree of the dominant culture, all oppressed groups are required to spend 90% of their time reassuring individual members of the dominant culture.
When you hate men back they always act like you did it first, because they never accept that their insults and hatred and disgusting behavior is hateful. Their hatred is nothing, to them; they think you’re supposed to be delighted they’re paying attention to you, even if it’s hateful.
Banshee said, “I’m guessing this claim is based on the argument that in a patriarchy, all sex is rape because consent can never be freely given on the part of the oppressed, as you mentioned above. Is this correct?”
Nope. More like: Porn presents multiple parties, with one party wanting specifically to do something TO the other party(-ies), which is why “consent” is only achieved through monetary exchange, ie. without the cash, the party wouldn’t consent. Since doing something TO a party, rather than the cooperative WITH each other (which mindset sidesteps consent, by the way), is essentially rape (and at least represents a rape mentality). Ergo, porn is “the graphic representation of rape.”
Let us remember Dworkin, and how she never said “all sex is rape.” Instead, she said something like “just most of it, but it’s not really all that difficult for anyone to remove themselves from this rape mindset; it’s just that most people (especially men) don’t even try.” And now, as then, this still rings true.
Twisty got there before me. (Hu)Man is she quick!
he pointedly stops short of romanticizing screwing a woman rectally. “Ideally, every girl is a disgusting pig who wants it,†he says. “But only with you.â€
Actually, I think men think this about ALL sex acts with women, not just anal.
They do. Which is why they just don’t give a shit about most women. They know they can’t have sex with all women, so they don’t have to be nice to most of us.
What really bugs me about this article is the underlying implication that in order for a man to REALLY enjoy sex, the woman has to be compromised in some manner. She’s got to be giving something up reluctantly, through pain and humiliation.
This can be true of all sex acts, not just anal [as Daisy says, above], because it’s not about sex, it’s about power and conquest.
TMI WARNING!As a young woman, I had lots of experience being on the wrong end of male conquest, having sex that was shitty for reasons that had nothing to do with actual shit. I only started enjoying a wider range of sex practices after I was old enough to not feel compromised by them, once I had a clear sense of my autonomy in the bedroom. Anal sex is fantastic if your partner knows what s/he’s doing. Sometimes that takes some patient instruction on my part, but it first requires an inherent sensitivity on the part of one’s partner if it’s going to be a worthwhile endeavor. You can’t teach that kind of sensitivity, or if you can, I don’t have that much patience, so I just don’t have sex with people like that anymore.TMI OVER
What really pisses me off about this article is that it denies women pleasure in sex. I find that profoundly offensive, in the same way I find FGM offensive.
If the mainstream is bad, the military is worse. I’m glad I’m leaving it soon. There was some statistic passed around at a recent briefing that domestic violence in the military is twice as high as the rest of the country. I can’t really say it’s surprising at all, but it still sucks. It’s sucked being in a position where I feel like I can’t change anything and I’d probably get mauled for trying.
Eh. I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here. “Sorry for perpetuating the problem, but I agree with you and good luck with the fight”? It still feels weak.
Thanks for the writing, I’m glad someone else sees the problem and can articulate it intelligently. I never figured that last bit out.
That picture is hilarious!
“What’s pegging?”
Generally, it’s anal sex in which a woman penetrates a man with a strap-on.
What’s pegging?
Since no one else answered Marcy, pegging is when a woman wears a strap-on and has anal with her partner.
—
This quote from the Details article is really telling, emphasis added:
What the fuck!?
To men who demand anal:
If she’s not enjoying it, fucking stop. Er, stop fucking.
If you’re doing it for peer pressure, stop.
If it grosses you out, don’t do it.
But most importantly, you don’t get to demand sex. Ever. Demanding any kind of sex is rape. Guys who demand anal are rapists.
If this article were really about sex, they wouldn’t have used violent language like “demand.”
So wrong on so many levels.
1. Degrades all women generally
2. Degrades women who don’t like or want anal sex and who have the temerity to refuse demands
2a. Degrades women who don’t like or want anal sex but are “persuaded”
3. Degrades women who do like anal sex by implying women must have no active role in choosing their sexual activities
3. Works against men who are trying to escape the misogynist mindset
4. Encourages men who think it’s their right to demand sex
5. Altogether shiteful and hateful
Hoo-fuckin’-ray.
“it’s only a matter of time until blush is off that rose, too”
Preciselyism.
The “TABOO” concept needs to be obliterated all together. This naughty bite-my-lower-lip-construct is made entirely by the P for the P, and exists only to puppet-master all matters of sexuality.
Nothing about sex should be taboo. Feeling “naughty” is the critical objective of Rape Culture: you’re not *supposed* to be doing this, but you reeeaaallllyy want to. Well there goes consent.
Painful anal? Rape and torture porn? Well we had it coming to us!
Poor guys, it’s taken them thousands of years of unwrapping to get this far–not even 100 years ago men were only getting to lift tafetta smocks and gaze upon our ankles to get their SuperSoaker-HeMANBoner and now they’re unwrapping our *skin*.
At this rate, I give us maybe another 100 years of existence. I wonder if we will be missed in the Age of Extinction.
Nice blaming, pisaquari.
What pisaquari said.
This topic has inspired a new sexual fantasy for me:
Some wicked-smart lady scientist develops a roofie antidote—some kind of alkaloid that the partay girl can injest pre-party which is harmless to her, but which renders unconscious any male engaging in sex with her. When she regains her judgment enough to determine whether or not the sex was consensual, she can decide to either wake him up with a bit of fellatio, or gently extract his testes from his nutsack and insert them in the orifice of her choice.
I think all sex is forced upon women in a gross way. Compulsory anal sex is just slightly more obviously so.
“in a patriarchy, wherein one class oppresses another for its own profit, there can be no ‘consent’ between oppressor and oppressed.”
That applies to making babies, too, right?
What must a woman do in reaction other than tearing out her hair in insane fury? I couldn’t even read the article word for word. I looked at the photo for it and my jaw just dropped….are these fuckers for real? I read articles like these, I hear and read men saying this shit, and then when I am out in public and I see men and older boys…I have to wonder….how many of them are rapists?
Sean: “Porn presents multiple parties, with one party wanting specifically to do something TO the other party(-ies), which is why “consent†is only achieved through monetary exchange, ie. without the cash, the party wouldn’t consent. Since doing something TO a party, rather than the cooperative WITH each other (which mindset sidesteps consent, by the way), is essentially rape (and at least represents a rape mentality). Ergo, porn is “the graphic representation of rape.â€
I don’t know too much about the financial aspect of porn, but I thought both parties got paid? I wonder how many men go into porn for the sex, and how many women go into for the money. I know that in the case of prostitution, a lot of the time women get involved out of financial need, but porn is somewhat more regulated, so I’d imagine that ideology (and not financial desperation) plays a bigger part in porn than prostitution. Not that it makes it more legitimate if the women are doing it because they want to than for money; a lot of that ‘want” is culturally created. In fact, if you look at the wikipedia page on rape victims, a significant portion of these women went on to do porn, which really says something.
“Sometimes I am enjoined to use a less emotionally-charged word than hate, or to recompose the statement to read “some men hate youâ€. Evidently the truth is too painful for these delicate sensitivos. They should, in that case, avoid at all costs this article.”
The article is odious, as so many in Details or GQ are. The idea of sex acts as ways to dominate is absolutely somewhere on the rape spectrum.
I’m still not sure how the article proves that “some men hate you” is not the correct formulation. The article is in a mainstream men’s mag, but there are men who find the topic and presentation repellent. And not because “the truth is too painful” for them, but because they actually do find it repellent.
I’m not sure that having all men acknowledge that they are oppressing women, even if by some definition it’s true, is as helpful as making the ones who are actively doing so in avoidable ways to stop.
Choice comment over at the original article:
“By the way, ITS NOT ALWAYS PAINFUL. After the first few times it doesn’t hurt anymore. In addition to that SOME women LIKE the pain. You SERIOUSLY need to get over your crusade against “coercive” sex as if thats the only type of sex that exists.”
No comment needed.
Wow, CafeSiren. I don’t think I could have read that in its original context without going blind with rage. If that’s the asshat’s attitude, then I would invite him to bend over while I get the vaseline and my 10 inch thick black rubber dildo. After all, it isn’t always painful! He said so himself!
Nice to have you back Twisty, and glad you brought your A game to this one. Nothing to add that hasn’t already been well said. Blame on.
Banshee: I can see how I could’ve been more clear about what I meant by “parties.” I meant not only the folks on camera but also those off, as in, the production companies. They technically pay the “actors” to 1)act, although if we take Stephen Dedalus’s definition of pornography (leading to a kinesis–jacking-off–rather than a stasis), this acting doesn’t really count for much art-wise, and 2)to be filmed. The second is probably the stronger defense of porn, since the participants are, according to the studios, being paid to be filmed rather than to have sex that eventually induces sexual gratification, or a variant of prostitution. Thus, the actors are doing something the wouldn’t normally do aside from the money. From a feminist perspective, this is akin to coercion and eventually leads to rape, whence the term “rape culture.”
Of course, the main response to this is “Aren’t all jobs like this?” And this is where Marx is helpful in his analysis that all labour (and as Engels would put, specifically labour as opposed to work)is forced. Marx makes the point that in pre-capitalism, forced labour was called “slavery.” In capitalism, then, the working class is, for all practical purposes, enslaved. I think we need the same kind of dual terms that Engels proposes for feminism: coerced sex is “fucking” (as forced labour is slavery) and “free” sex is simply “sex” (as work is when the worker is not seen as a commodity; slavery has the slave as literally a proto-commodity, whereas capitalism has the labourer’s labour as commodity). Hence, while the oppressed class is forced into labour, they are also coerced into fucking. However, work and sex are still possible–and that possibility, along with availability, is necessary to “the pursuit of happiness”–but will only be available untainted and widespread following the revolution. And let us remember that Marx did not advocate for a necessarily violent revolution. He saw Western political systems–including democracy–as tools to be used for said revolution.
So true, pisaquari - also explains the increasing obscenity/violence in rap and music videos, movies, etc.
Long ago, some comedienne joked about a woman wanting to know what she should say to increase her partner’s sexual pleasure, and of course the answer was, “Ouch.”
Glad you’re back, Twisty. Folks were getting worried. Hope you are well, in spite of the never-ending supply of misogyny.
Pisaquari: I MUST SAY that “Super-Soaker HeMANBoner” is a very WELL TURNED PHRASE!
Feministing has a link up under “Friday Gross Out” to an article at the Washington City Paper about up and comers in the Washington DC area. Probably not main stream but not without main stream influence. Here’s a couple of *charming* quotes from “LNS” chats.
“RE: Figuring out if girls are sluts
Posted By: farmer john on 04-02-2007 9:57 pm
all women are whores at heart…they will always slut themselves out at some point in their lives to get something…especially something shiny and expensive”
“RE: optimal number for a woman
Posted By: higher the better on 10-23-2006 1:39 pm
I prefer high #’s. It usually means they really like to have sex, and that they are very good at it. And the idea that you might be exposing yourself to a serious disease is thrilling and really gets my blood flowing.”
The reporter notes one of the men she attempted to interview demanded a hand job.
I hate that they pursue orgasm by degrading and harming fellow human beings.
A good phrase to translate “pro-porn”:
“pro - pursuit of orgasm by degrading and harming fellow human beings “
Sean, I think I could understand the difference between fucking and sex better if you explained the nuances Marx & Engels’ theories of labor within the context of the patriarchy while getting pronged in pre and post revolution porn video scenarios. Viva la Twistolution.
Ruth,
The Washington City Paper is definitely bordering on “mainstream” for the DC area. It’s got a really wide circulation, because it’s free and available in all kinds of different places. (If you’re from DC & I’m stating the obvious to you, I apologize.)
I HATE and DESPISE the Washington City Paper because every single issue, without fail, is By Dude Nation For Dude Nation on how to hook up, get laid, discard women, etc. I HATE it. It is consistently the most misogynist soft-core porn disguised as oh-so-hip-and-liberal “journalism.” Of course it carries Dan Savage’s columnn. Naturally.
What worries me most about this increase in anal among het couples is the increased risk for HIV. I would betcha, especially with younger couples and certainly when alcohol is involved, couples who would normally use condoms to prevent pregnancy if nothing else, might throw this precaution out the window, the risk of pregnancy now being completely removed.
I do wonder if any of this Anal is the New Vaginal! is sensationalized, much in the way the media had us believing all teenagers trotted off to “Rainbow Parties” a few years back. Not saying it is, but you always have to wonder.
Taking Details at its word, however, I wonder if the increase in anal among het couples is responsible in any way for the recent increase in HIV/AIDS in married het women.
Wouldn’t if have been nice, if along with this Everyone’s Doing It! article, Details would have published some stats on how HIV is 5 times easier to transmit during anal sex than vaginal, and a reminder on how long (potentially HIV carrying) sperm can live in the body. That, while no, you won’t get pregnant, KEEP USING THOSE CONDOMS, because your increase for contracting the HIV virus is increased.
Also, I agree with Dawn Coyote: “in order for a man to REALLY enjoy sex, the woman has to be compromised in some manner. She’s got to be giving something up reluctantly, through pain and humiliation.”
Or: the message in the Details article appears to be, if a woman REALLY digs you, she’ll let you fuck her in the ass! = STUD.
Or: You got yourself a “pornstar!” girlfriend! = STUD.
And: but she only performs this “pornstar” behavior for your studly ass. So, she’s not, thank goodness, a SLUT.
And: Sure it might hurt her — but that’s how much she digs you!
That’s what I get from the Details’ article.
I’ve had a hate/hate relationship with them for over 19 years.
Beginning on the day I sent them a letter in protest to a boot ad which depicted a woman licking the floor.
That said, I refrain from passing judgement upon consenting adults who enjoy the act.
It’s no coincidence that “being fucked over” and “taking it up the ass” are synonymous with the most egregious examples of deceit and betrayal. Somehow I don’t picture the average dude reader of ‘Details’ magazine coming home and announcing “Hey honey, I got fucked up the ass today” as a slangy derivative of “I just got a raise” or “Guess who just won the lottery?”.
Notice, too, how “bitch” has replaced the homophobic slur “cocksucker” as the most derogatory term a man can call another man. In heterodude terms, women are lower than “faggots” and as such, deserve to be brutalized and violated for the mere “thrill”. Or to put it more simply: why go out and bash “fags” when you can commit your own little hate crimes in the comfort of your own home?
If you don’t believe that anal sex is the pinnacle of the woman-hating experience, try asking your bitch (oops, I mean “man”) if he would submit to an on-camera fisting - or at least a little pole dance in the Vinnie’s Secret “mangerie” you bought him for Christmas. Unless he’s a Republican, chances are, he will run from you faster than you can wave your He-tachi Magic Wand.
“Now, before you anal apologists flood my inbox with your porntastic personal anecdotes, hear this: in a patriarchy, wherein one class oppresses another for its own profit, there can be no ‘consent’ between oppressor and oppressed.”
Simply not true.
The oppressed can always refuse, can always fight back. the fact that it is a lost cause is by the by.
Consent is not about what you actually want, it’s not about fairness. It’s a technicality, it’s about permission and your position in the world and whether or not something is worth the repercussions. On either side.
Were you to say that there cannot be any reconciliation between oppressor and oppressed you would get your point across but the oppressed can always be sycophantic for the sake of lessening the force of the oppression.
Being scared shitless into submission =/= being beaten into it.
Also a desire for dominance =/= hate.
The two are distinct emotions. One is about ego pure and simple (one oppresses so one can revel in one’s own superiority) the other is about the target’s suffering (one harms because one has a need to see another suffer. The focus of the emotion shifts).
Dominance is bout one’s self. Hatred is about the target.
“I’m not sure that having all men acknowledge that they are oppressing women, even if by some definition it’s true, is as helpful as making the ones who are actively doing so in avoidable ways to stop.” Octopussygalore
ZZZZZZZZZZZ
Well shit, this made me cry. It was weird, I read and cried and then I cried harder and now I just feel in complete despair. I mean I know that this is happening, but, oh, it’s just revolting and so disappointing. I’m such an optimist and I really struggle with this stuff, and yet this is part of why I’m here, and so I have to wade my way through it and I have to fight and I have to stop crying now.
(Twisty, are you an author? You should be.)
Hey Mar, I get that you always violently disagree with Octogalore, but how about a little less of the name-calling? Refute her argument or put a sock in it.
Last night, in my eagerness to champion the benefits of anal sex, I forgot to say that I find it both loathesome and pitiful that someone would wish for your demise, Twisty.
I don’t know how thick your skin is, but mine is not so thick that I don’t get my feelings hurt when someone says something nasty to me, even when it’s some inbred fuckwit on the internet.
I’m sorry you’re on the receiving end of such vitriol, but I’m not sorry that you do what you do. You can take comfort in the fact that you made that person decidedly uncomfortable. It’s encouragement, really. Blame on.
Ruth,
Here in Cleveland we have The Scene, which is the same as your Washington City Paper. It’s free and widely available. I quit reading it after they published an article about boning fat chicks and cleverly dumping them. (There was a too-too clever pejorative name for the technique, but my mind has mercifully blocked it out.)
And if anal is the new third base, what constitutes a home run? Fisting?
The fungus photo is genius, even if the color scheme is a little alarming.
You know, I really am starting to wonder how long it will be “But baby, if you really loved me you would let me chop off your hand!”
Out of curiosity, have you been holding onto that photo in anticipation of an entry re: anal sex?
Should read “how long until it will be”. I’m smart.
Rachel, I must say I am proud of that mushroom. I was out stomping around at El Rancho Deluxe the other day when lo, there it was. I’d never seen this species in real life before, and it freaked me the fuck out. I mean, it absolutely did not register in my brain as any kind of categorizable earthly object. Miniature pool float? Discarded sex aid? But what would these things be doing in a remote cranny of my personal rancho? It was 8 inches long, the most ridiculous shade of bright pink, and, well, the appallingly smelly goo was freakish. My temporary inability to even broadly classify the thing as animal, vegetable, or mineral was super-disconcerting to my giant ego. Fortunately, I am the world’s most brilliant woodsperson, and the scales eventually fell from my eyes. I did a triumphal mycological victory dance when I realized it was a very fresh stinkhorn. Usually, by the time you come across a stinkhorn, flies have already made off with the stinky goo and they look far less hilarious, so I was quite lucky that this one had only just very recently ‘blossomed’.
Yeah, I’m a geek.
Did I plan the anal post as an excuse to publish the picture? No, it was just an unhappy coincidence.
It seems considerably grander than an ‘unhappy coincidence.’ If I were given to yogi zen talk, I’d wonder if it was an unhappy sign from the unhappy universe about the unhappy state of thins. At any rate, the narrative of initial befuddlement and eventual recognition of something in a pure state, unclouded by the inevitable dressings of surroundings (flies in this case) works nicely in a meta way with the narrative of the post itself. Minus the glee of a victory dance, of course.
“the unhappy state of thins” = teehee.
I had one more comment, a cynical one. I’m actually glad that men are starting to spew this kind of misogyny out loud.
I can guess at how hard it is for a young and innocent blamer who might love a few men and think they are incapable of this kind of talk. I’m unwilling to believe it myself, even though I know better. Men will loudly claim to be astonished and appalled by this kind of talk in front of women they love.
But men think it’s OK to compartmentalize these thoughts. They think that as long as they keep it in the realm of ‘jokes’ (take that, you humorless feminists!) or ‘fantasies’ that it’s OK to think of women this way. They think they have it under control, so it’s harmless and nothing for women to complain about.
Anyone here will be screaming with rage as they read this, because it’s a perfect example of how deeply entrenched misogyny is in our culture. And how many blamers have heard that crap before, over and over?
So the next time some nice guy tells you that you are overreacting to feminist cant, you now have a concrete example of blatant woman-hating to show him. So men don’t hate women, eh? I suppose they love them because they are disgusting pigs, just for them?
The hypersexuality of modern man is highly dependent on humiliation to stimulate the artificial level of arousal men think they need to be manly.
More important than anything else (why am I so logorrheic?) I just like the idea that smart women are going to wake up, the more they see this kind of blatant, unquestionable misogyny around them every day. The more women who become open to feminism by seeing these mainstream revelations of just how bestial men have learned to become, the better.
I sometimes try look at examples of women-hatred in terms of trends (after I get over the outrage and horror, which, sadly, takes less and less time as I get more used to is ubiquitousness.) Someone pointed out that this article reflects male sexual domination as something that men are trying to posit as mainstream, acceptable, and something they can stop being ashamed of. They want to a) reduce women to compliant sexual objects and b) brag about their subjugation to their friends without feeling like pigs. I agree, but I also wonder what effect this will have on feminist discourse on a broader scale. Is it possible that by being honest (and crude as all hell) these men are unwittingly advancing the public dialogue? We can point to this example (and seemingly to an ever growing body of examples) of men championing their hatred of women as a sign that women-hating is still strongly rooted in the modern patriarchy. If, by contrast, this disgusting article did not appear, and the interviewees maintained that they did not hate women while shamefully keeping their violent sexual fantasies a secret, it would be harder to discuss this persistent misogyny in public discourse. So while the writers and speakers of this article still deserve our contempt, does their brazen ownership of their women-hating sexuality actually serve as a tool with which to better facilitate public feminist dialogue?
This question came to me after I read the wonderful blaming on this comments page. I thought: Damn. These asshats in the article have helped these blamers make some really solid arguments against the patriarchy. Not even the don’t-blame-me-i-don’t-hate-women crowd could deny this article as a sign of what we’ve been trying to convince everyone for so long.
heh, TP, I promise that I didn’t plagiarize you. It actually took me 20 minutes to write my comment (I balance my blaming with doing tasks at my job, so it can take me a while sometimes.)
It’s no coincidence that “being fucked over†and “taking it up the ass†are synonymous with the most egregious examples of deceit and betrayal. Somehow I don’t picture the average dude reader of ‘Details’ magazine coming home and announcing “Hey honey, I got fucked up the ass today†as a slangy derivative of “I just got a raise†or “Guess who just won the lottery?â€.
When that day comes, Violet, I am going to run like hell.
Twisty, thank you for explaning why I was so pissed all the time when I was in college, dating guys who read and believed crap like Details. Besides offering retroactive validation for old broads like me, you’re providing an important voice in the porn wilderness for the young ‘uns.
Hear! Hear!
Somehow I don’t picture the average dude reader of ‘Details’ magazine coming home and announcing “Hey honey, I got fucked up the ass today†as a slangy derivative of “I just got a raise†or “Guess who just won the lottery?â€.
After seeing the way the sexist, racist word pimp has come to popularly mean “very positive and cool” in the past 10 years I am willing to believe anything is possible. 1997 was not that long ago and Eminem’s career had yet to take flight with the release of 1999’s The Slim Shady LP.
It’s easy to forget progress in women’s rights can be undone quickly. In 1776 American women were allowed to vote if they met certain criteria, but eleven years later in 1787 all states except New Jersey revoked women’s voting rights. New Jersey stopped letting women vote twenty years after that in 1807, and it would take a century and millions of women’s efforts great and small to wrest the vote back again.
Ganza and TP: go to your bookshelves and pull out your copy of Sexual Politics by Kate Millet. Read and weep. There is nothing new under the sun.
“You know, if I’d sat up all night with a tub of Cool Whip, a six-pack of Tab, and an 8-ball, I couldn’t have contrived a more definitive expression of our culture’s merry glorification of misogyny.”
Twisty, you turn my crank the way you turn a phrase.
Glad you’re back (even with scary fungi).
Men, by and large, don’t get fucked; they do the fucking. As Andrea Dworkin observed: “Man fucks woman; subject verb object.”
And yes, its been a very good summer for fungi here.
An odd effect of the way my browser combines the title of the post with the name of the blog when you click on the comments link is the fact that I can now read
Anal is the new ‘third base’ at I Blame the Patriarchy.
I have nothing to add beyond my (redundant and)shameless love of this blog and its author
“I’m not sure that having all men acknowledge that they are oppressing women, even if by some definition it’s true, is as helpful as making the ones who are actively doing so in avoidable ways to stop.â€
It is the silent approbation of the passive majority who benefit from patriarchy that enables patriarchy to persist. Focusing on elimination of only the most obvious, physically explicit, acts of oppression is insufficient if one’s goal is to eliminate patriarchy.
I just wish people would stop using the word “anal” to mean fastidious. They are trying to be clever and all I’m left with is a very disturbing visual image.
Twisty, never, never, never back down from your “men hate women” arguments.
This semi-concealed loathing is the core fact of women’s existence in “their” world and in fact the only way most of our lives, professional and personal, make any sense.
And I say this as someone who bakes, sews, types, and has been married for over 30 years (that’s cumulative; two different patriarchs). Every time something puzzling happens in a patriarchal interaction, any woman past puberty who thinks, “Well, they DO hate us” as the first explanation will not be far off the mark.
I don’t why young women are so resistant to knowing this, as I once was, but unfortunately they are. Too bad. They would start making better life choices almost the instant they start keeping this basic fact in mind.
Twisty Rocks.
Here’s the Librul Solution to the problem of horrible men:
Women Need to Learn to Separate Love and Sex — so that we can get off on sleeping with men who hate us, apparently…
deathless prose from one male commenter: After 14 months in Nam and a lot of five-dollar girls, in 1969 I created my own game. I learned that I really like the naked female body. I did not care what head game the females were into as long as they played by my rule. One hour off and a half an hour on and I do not kiss any hairy things. I was amazed in the early seventies how many girls would call me up just so I could talk them into shaving. So I guess they liked my rule.
Notice the recurring male assumptions: women are required to play by male rules; women’s bodies are disgusting and require modification in order to be acceptable; and women secretly love being told what to do by men.
Scroll down searching for DeAnander to find my mini-rant on this appalling (perhaps even more appalling than the Details drek, because more insidious) article. Excerpt: pleeeze. why are a-net’s articles on sex and love so often so stupid? could it be because the reality of the minefield of sex and marriage under patriarchy (”date rape,” prostitution, incest, workplace harassment, female poverty, abusive husbands, abandoned 1st wives, unavailable abortion services, STDs, unfaithful men, double standards, insane beauty standards, etc) is just too painful to confront head-on?
Thank goodness for IBTP. If the MSM are the “lapdog press” kowtowing to the merchants of death, then the Librul Media are the “lapdance press” kowtowing to the pimps, panders, and johns/rapists.
This disgusting article may well be a blessing in disguise. For time out of mind men have insisted that women love huge, hard dicks interminably pounding our vaginas, that we being brutalized in the way they like to brutalize us.. If we object, then we must be frigid, man-haters who don’t enjoy sex, their definition of sex being radically different from ours. The mainstreaming of anal may actually strike a blow for universal rectal parity. While men will continue to argue that women enjoy having our alien vaginas abused, rectums (recti ?) provide equal opportunity access and the chance for a little one to one comparison data testing.
I shall now buy a larger handbag, all the better to pack an enormous, rock-hard dildo. As a feminist and veteran patriarchy blamer, I long since rejected the “Ladies First†convention, and, in the interest of coed asshole pain threshold testing, will suggest to any man that this constitutes foreplay and some real world sex education. Any other type of sexual activity might be negotiable after my arm gives out, if he’s still in the mood.
Finnsmotel, for THAT you get to blame Sigmund Freud.
For Sigmund Freud in general, one blames the patriarchy.
I thought “anal” as “fastidious and kind of uptight” had to do with “analytical”. Of course I have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, so.
Naw it has to do with Freudian phases.
If you’ve got problems at the anal fixation phase it will produce certain neuroses versus if you have interruptions at the oral or genital phases—
so says the big F. Ask Anna Freud about how fucked up any and all of this may be.
Also, about Sid:
I used to date a Dude who made arguments similar to Sid’s [and Mandos, if anyone remembers those shenanigans] when we had discussions about institutionalized racism, dudely hatred, etc. They would become hopelessly, infuriatingly focused on tiny linguistic disagreements, supposedly because they had massive logical and theoretical implications. But it never progressed beyond that; the discussions became prolonged shouting matches over women’s actual experiences versus his dudely, individualistic logic.
The the dissection of privilege and oppression became derailed because , gasp: he didn’t get it! He didn’t experience it! He was a white, capitalist, middle class, educated dude! Since he had no emotional investment in my oppression, it was all about theory, logic, language, and my ‘flawed approach’ to the subject.
Ugh.
Twisty, I thought someone here said the name I used was one this person uses on other boards. If I’m mistaken, I do apologize.
Whoops, this post goes before my last one:
Hear, hear! Physio Prof! Why make the outwardly less egregious offenders admit thier collusion in rape culture/racism/capitalism/classism etc.? That would hurt their feelings! And actually rid us of the P.
Twisty, nice pic! Michigan has been a mycological wasteland this season. Drought!
“but the oppressed can always be sycophantic for the sake of lessening the force of the oppression.
Being scared shitless into submission =/= being beaten into it. -SID”
Yeah! Women should have to relinquish their identity (who needs personhood? become a wife/mother/whore) and becoming fawning parasites (pornstars)to survive in our society! Twisty must be off her nut! We DO have choices!
Sid, how does this inane statement (Mandos, anyone?) in anyway effect or nullify Twisty’s point that women live in a system of coercion and sexual violence (are you leaving out all the women who actually are ‘beaten into it’, or are you completely disconnected with reality? Particularly those women who ‘choose’ to be in the ‘business’ of humiliating themselves for the pleasure of men.
Oh my, I left one end out of parens, there. And it is “any way”. Gah.
Criminy you guys, I exercised incredible self restraint in ignoring the mandos clone and left you to have all the funn without me. bugfluff.
Sorry, I’ll stop. Couldn’t resist!
Speaking of Freud, anyone who ever doubts that pornulators hate women only needs to listen to them discuss their “craft”, much as listening to the men of Details conclusively demonstrates their hate for us. I read an interview once with Gregory Dark, the porntastic director often credited with popularizing anal scenes (in the movies and real life). In that interview he mentioned despising both his parents, and that he had made it his pornlicious goal to completely degrade women (thanks to his slutty mom) and to turn all American men into defacto gays by making everyone crave anal (thanks to his reviled absent dad).
GROSSNESS WARNING! This interview doesn’t go quite as far as the one I remember, but the hatred for all humans (except the French), and women in particular, still shines through. Blamers who are sensitive souls should not read this, and it’s not work-safe:
http://www.lukeford.com/stars/male/gregory_dark.html
If you’re looking for the next third base, look no further.
It will be ass to mouth.
A2M
I am almost certain of it.
“Here in Cleveland we have The Scene, which is the same as your Washington City Paper. It’s free and widely available. I quit reading it after they published an article about boning fat chicks and cleverly dumping them. (There was a too-too clever pejorative name for the technique, but my mind has mercifully blocked it out.)”
‘Chubby Chasing’. I’m guessing that’s what they called it. I’d let the terminology die an ignoble death in the dark recesses of regrettable cultural trends except that it’s still a term being used at the moment and we fat women should know it to be on the lookout for one. Also view with suspicion anyone who declares himself to be into ‘BBW’ and ‘feederism’.
Feederism isn’t the same as BBW. Many people who like fat women are deeply anti-feederism. While there is an inherent problem with using a phrase like BBW, and I personally hate it, it’s the only word I can currently use when looking for dates. I always describe myself as fat rather than BBW, but understandably some people would think they were being mroe offensive by saying they wanted to meet a “fat” chick rather than a BBW. Apologies, totally off thread, just thought the conflation of bbw and feederism was dangerous.
SusanM. Um. This is where I stopped reading that:
Let Me Tell Ya Bout Black Chicks was 1984’s sequel to White Chicks. “I had these Klu Klux Klan guys riding on top of black girls as if they’re horses. That scene made me happy.”
Well, my personal opinion is that if someone is going to date you based on whether you are or are not fat, they’re probably not worth spending time with. It’s all part of the same problem as far as I’m concerned, which is why I mention them together. I’ll come right out and say I’m fat because I’d rather avoid both types of person, but I run like hell from the people who are looking specifically for fat women.
Yes, I see your point. I think I didn’t get that in your original post; probably my coming at it from the wrong angle.
The New Times in St. Louis (owned by the same people who own the Scene in Cleveland and also catering to fratboy date-rapists) did that same vile story a few years back. They called it ‘pigging.’ The fact that stuff like that actually gets published means there are many people who think it’s okay, and that’s mind-boggling to me.
I think way too much about this stuff. I thought of it last night — the Scene magazine’s term for chubby-chasing was called “going hogging”.
EWWWWWW!!!!!
You know, I wonder if these people could understand if I were to explain that by saying they’re willing to date someone fat, they’re only saying “Hey, it’s cool if you’re fat, I’m not going to be all fattist about it or anything,” but if they’re saying they want a BBW which stands for “big beautiful woman” IIRC, they’re actually saying, “It’s cool if you’re fat, as long as you’re also what