oooh, this is a really good post. the comments are confusing me; i'm not sure if some of them are referring to things that are no longer there. but if you're someone like kiki (the writer of this post)'s friend, or if you know someone like that, go read this.
i just want to quote the whole post. but here's a bit.
S A U C E B O X - where nice is optional:
[...]for many men (like my friend) who believe in the humanity and autonomy of women; who believe in a woman's right to be regarded as a whole person who is more than just the sum of her tits, ass and pussy; who believe that a woman's cultural and societal worth encompasses more than her value as a sexual object; who do not believe that women innately "owe" men sex by virtue of our existence; but yet who also find much of their thoughts, desires and behaviour at least partially driven by their innate sexual attraction to women - attempting to uphold feminist ideals of not objectifying women may often seem like an impossible task.
1 Comments:
While I have a lot of sympathy with her position that aggressive rudeness is right out, I think she's making two mistakes in that analysis.
One has to do with treating, even rhetorically, sexual attraction as a state, rather than a process.
Rather like language ability isn't a state; we're born with a machine for building an ability to understand the languages we hear around us, not with an ability to learn a particular language.
Similarly, it's pretty likely that no one is born with a sexuality, but rather a machine for building one. For that machine to be status-conscious -- to tend to use social cues about what is most desireable -- is just as likely (primate band status has been very important for a very long time), which is where the shift in what's attractive comes from -- the sexuality-building machine keeps right on getting the appropriately status-conscious attractiveness markers as the markers move around with economic change.
Trying to understand typically-male (though I'd like to hop up and down and point out that this is a continuum, not a dichotomy) sexual responses as a state, rather than a thing that evolves from the social environment and life experience and genetic background gives, I think, less helpful answers; certainly "I don't care if you feel these things but I never, ever want to deal with them" isn't a helpful answer. (It's pretty much directly analogous to the Catholic Church's stance on homesexuality, frex.)
I'm left wanting to ask "when is what you've identified as male desire valuable?" and "why do you think that the raw physical attraction precludes the person attraction?"
It's my experience that the two kinds of attraction don't necessarily even send each other letters (which seems to be kiki's point about her own physical lustful feelings), that it would be a very good idea to tell teens this, frequently, and that sex with just the physical attraction is ok and that just the person attraction doesn't work as a basis for sex and that both kinds of attraction being present means sex works a lot better than the pure physical attraction kind.
(and, tangentially, I'd like to note that nothing that involves as much vulnerability as sex does is ever going to not involve power relationship questions. Much less stereotyped ones, maybe, but the issues will be there.)
The second thing is that, well, you aren't ever going to get rid of the objectifying sexual responses to other people; the monkey brain doesn't care if it's not polite.
A sexuality expression social model that insists on the absence of those things -- as opposed to a respectful context of expression of those things -- is going to fail just as badly as the "this is what you have to put up with for the privilege of having children" sexuality model.
-- Graydon
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