Women who work aren’t feminine

Being feminine is an occupation. Women know that feminity is exactly what attracts men and maintains attraction. The reason women are feminine is so that they can be supported by a man, or in order to fuck a man.

A women who spends all her time earning income has no reason to be feminine. Her job of support is already accomplished.

So women working has a downside.

And this is again why I consider the best arrangement is for your woman not to have any job. Forget about whatever income she can bring in. That is insignificant in comparison for the value of her doting on you, and relying on you.

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Women don’t reason, they rationalize. And it’s usually about sexual competition.

Diomondeyes

It all boils down to the fact that females loathe sexual competition and the anxiety it produces, and will use any nefarious means at their disposal to squash competition and monopolize a man’s sexuality.

Pretty much any commentary any woman has about relationship and most of everything else boils down to this.

That lump in your armpit seems to be growing. Better think about something else….

Fred reminds us that in polite academia, it’s OK for Jews to be smarter than average, but bad science for blacks to be dumber than average. 

Cognitive differences among groups are deemed impossible due to emotional needs.  Some people don’t believe in any cognitive gender differences.  Some don’t believe in IQ being in any way measurable.  Differences piss people off.

Feministe porn discussion, continued.

Additionally, I don’t think you can make any kind of art or media without, to some degree at least, objectifying the artistic subjects and creating your own narrative and interpretation of those subjects. To to say pornography is “objectifying” is, in itself, as much of a non-statement as saying its “visual” or “written”. Yes? And?BUT, that does not mean I cease to realize that the model I’m being turned on by is a full human being, with their own life and thoughts outside of what they do in porn. That seems self-evident to me.

You groked what I was trying to say and re-wrote the underlying idea far more eloquently than I could.

I think a person must be of an uncommonly low denominator not to innately realize that all people with bodies have an internal self that is worth empathizing with.  I’d think if one didn’t automatically assume this, one would have serious cognitive deficits that could be labeled as a personality disorder. 

What is so evil about objectification?

This is quote from a discussion about porn at feministe.

The root of the problem is, IMHO, that the vast majority of porn in our culture is the graphic depiction of sexual assault against women in which girls are depicted as instruments of men for men’s pleasure.

I’ve never been able to comprehend the argument against objectifying and commodifying sexual imagery. Nor can I comprehend the negative taint associated with women being instruments for pleasure.

It seems that people want to be seen and valued for some mysterious internal subjective essense, and to look at and value the objective shape and form and function is somehow not only shallow, but insensitive and oppressive.

But that’s insane. No one is a mere subject. We are both subjects and objects. You can’t have sex without a body.

The whole quibble about whether little black boxes steal bits of women’s souls and transfer them to paper and hard-drives is a primitive superstition. Souls are not being stolen and objectified, flattened and commodified. The commodity is the endorphin, testosterone, oxitocyn and adrenaline rush. The medium is data storage and display, and the source is graphic art, CGI, or video recording. No soul got objectified in the process.

Update: On the issue of porn, can bloggers convene to do more than try to agree on what to wring hands over?

Assuming there came aggreement on what should change, what avenue for change can you persue?
1) Legal? If this were practical, the very powerful religious right would have curbed porn already.
2) Social pressures? As I used to steal Penthouses at age 9, i can’t imagine social pressures will overide libidinous pressures.
3) Affect supply or demand? Anyone on the globe with a cam-phone and a net connection can produce and distribute porn. Demand is insatiable.

I suggest the only way to positively affect sex culture is to have unusually great sex, and advocate your practice to others. Choose the porn (or lack of it) that fits your lifestyle of great sex, and condone others to do likewise.

1) The blogosphere has virtually no impact on the porn industry.
2) There is nothing in porn that has not been going on for thousands of years, and that won’t continue to go on long past our deaths
3) If you want to make a cultural impact, lead by example; be happier than most.

Update 2: There is a Kadampa Buddhist slogan that goes something like: 3 objects, three poisons, three virtuous seeds.  The objects are the objects for which we have passion, aggression, or indifference; the poisons are those 3 emotions; the virtuous seeds are the habits that are sown by letting go of attachment to the objects and owning ones own emotions without causing trouble. 

Regarding seeing a hot chick on the street, the slogan implies that you not bother her with unwanted sexual attention.  In a way, the slogan says not to objectify, not to project your desire onto someone else, but to own it, and so not bother people and begin to free yourself from habits that feed disturbing emotions and obscure relaxing into awareness in the moment.

How we come at the question of objectifying depends on our angle of view.  Are we the recipient of unwanted sexual advances?  Then we explain that we don’t want to receive somones projections and desires and fantasies – don’t objectify me into your projection.  Are we a respectable and respectful admirer?  Then we want to be able to both own our lust, and use it to play flirtatiously, if appropriate.  There is nothing in admiring the physical form and wanting to interact with it, in itself, that is harmful.  It can be inspiring and cheerful.

Socially constructed society is a dream of Utopia

It’s the nature of meme processing to suppress what causes death to the prime memes.  Humans are denial machines.  We can’t think outside our own boxes, we can’t process information that does not fit in.

Aside: In this mornings dream, I decided to have fun and fly again.  This time I succeeded in remembering that flying is 100% impossible in dreams; I can’t learn how to fly in real life from practicing in dreams. So there I was, trapped in a dream context, unaware of what country my real body lived in, or what my recent history was.  In the dream world I was living in Canada.  Where was my real body?  How could I wake from the dream? 

You can fit the immersive dream reality together with how we think.  Our reality encompasses us, and we can’t quite see the edges of it, let alone the surrounding landscape.

And now, to feminism.  Attack.

Here are quotes from a discussion between some smart folks.  The full article could be worth your read.

RU: If you acknowledge that every other living animal group has certain inherent forms of social organization, it’s fundamentally absurd to say, “Well no, human beings don’t.” And certain people on the left remind me of fundamentalist Christians. It’s kind of a denial of evolution. They’re not denying Darwin, but they’re denying something that is a logical extension of Darwin.

JQ: Right. And the sort-of social science academics on the left are the only ones who have a problem with this stuff. When I speak in front of most women, they’re trying to understand their husband and they’re all over it. They want to understand why does he do the things he does; why does he communicate the way he does? People on the street assume that there’s something fundamentally different about men and women.

RU: What happens with people in the process of a sex change — like a guy who’s taking a lot of estrogen and that sort of thing? Have you looked into that?

JQ: Sure, I’m fascinated with that stuff. If a woman gets a sex change operation, and she starts taking injections of testosterone, different genes that are suppressed are turned on in her, and she finds herself feeling more aggressive; she finds it harder to cry; she finds it easier to get angry; and she can’t get sex out of her mind. I talked to one woman who was in the midst of this process, and she said, “God, I suddenly understand how guys feel.”

Women explain to men about women

This is all lifted from the tuckermax message board from this thread. All questions are by men, all answers are by women:

Originally Posted by SkiGuy Why is it that women have seemingly so much more trouble separating a professional/business mentality and a personal/friendly mentality? There are women I work with, and who I have played sports with, who cannot take criticism of their work (TPS report, back-hand shot, etc.) because they personalize the comments. If something is wrong with the end product and it is pointed out, it isn’t taken as a professional critique, it becomes internalized as a transgression against their character to the female. The transgression is even worse when it comes from someone who is supposed to be a “friend,” or is someone they highly respect.

I think it’s because from a very early age, our only identity comes from our success. We are pushed so hard to be pretty, smart, and perfect. When we fall short in one area, it’s difficult to separate that blemish from the rest of our existence.

I think it’s good that we are such integrated people with high standards for ourselves. At the same time, it is an exhausting life to lead. Taking every criticism as a mortal wound isn’t easy. I don’t think this is likely to change until society’s expectations for us, and then our expectations for ourselves, change completely. Right now, women are expected to fill so many roles from tough guy sales exec to gentle housewife that there is no way to survive other than to intermingle all of those different personalities. As a result, the weaknesses of one will be present in another.

— and —

That’s an excellent question, and something I suffer from in spades. I think there are a lot of women (if you’re not one of them, kudos to you) who have a hard time taking criticism for what it is: criticism. Just because you point out an error in judgement does not mean I look fat that day.

I think emotions and self-doubt are part of the problem, as is the desire to be viewed as good – or better – than our male counterparts. And while I understand that acting batshit crazy is achieving the opposite effect, I get upset when we think I’ve failed or performed sub-par. It’s hard to rationalize, but everytime I’m told that “you could have done this differently”, I hear “You fucked up”. I’ve gotten better at it, but there have been some Oscar-worthy breakdowns as a result, and I’m not proud of that at all.

As a general rule, we also want to be liked, and when it’s your job to play boss, sometimes it’s hard to play friend as well. So we tend to perceive critisisms as negative against US, versus negative (or even non-impacting) against our effort put forth on the job.

Originally Posted by MasterOfNone Why can’t you accept what I tell you at face value? Why must you assume that everything I say has hidden meaning to it and layers of subtlety? Why can’t you understand that it is possible for me to sit there and not be thinking about anything?

Personally, I have a hard time with this. In my mind, if you’re just sitting there, something has to be going on.
Maybe it’s because my mind is always going a hundred miles a minute, envisioning every possible senario, replaying what we’ve talked about. It’s hard for me to understand that you’re really thinking about nothing.
Plus, we’re always told that guys don’t like to talk about their feelings, so maybe it’s just that you need to be encouraged to tell me what’s really on your mind.

— and —

Simply, because that’s how we are. We drop hints. We imply things rather than being straightforward. When we sit in silence, even our silence has meaning, so we, by nature, project that onto you and assume (wrongly) that you operate the same way. Obviously I can’t speak for ALL women, but I’d say this is the case more often than not.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frisco Kid Why would you rather ignore a problem and pretend it doesn’t exist, ala “what’s wrong” “nothing”, rather than doing the healthy thing and discussing it right away in a healthy dialog? It’s like pulling teeth to get at these things with you girls. You say how much conversation is important in a good relationship, but that’s only when YOU want to converse. Most of you are smart enough to realize that doing this only makes the problem grow out of hand. Please explain.

Probably waiting for a better time. If you’re in front of people, you don’t want to get into a potential screaming match or cry-fest. Or, if you’re about to go somewhere and need composure, right then is not the time to talk something through that may be emotional. It’s all dependant on timing and circumstances.

Also, it could be something inconsequential that just bothers us for a few days that isn’t worth the possible arguement. Something like natural female crazy, such as, you flirted with a mutual friend and though we know it meant nothing, it’s crawling on the skin for a day or two. Why go nuts on you about being a cheater and an asshole when in 48 hours we could get over it? Girls are a big old can of crazy and need to regulate it.

 

Originally Posted by MasterOfNone Why can’t you accept what I tell you at face value? Why must you assume that everything I say has hidden meaning to it and layers of subtlety? Why can’t you understand that it is possible for me to sit there and not be thinking about anything?

Because it’s better for our self-esteem. Ex. A guy says, “You look good in white.” A girl might automatically think, “Wow, he said I look good in white… maybe he’s imagining what I look like in a wedding dress… I could so marry this guy, oh my God, we’d have like, the perfect life, et cetera…” See what I mean? Not all girls do this, but we do all try to read into facial expressions and between the lines because we’re so used to trying to pick up on this stuff from our girlfriends.

Originally Posted by DietCokehead Why do you insist on asking us what we think of ________ and then get upset no matter what the answer is? If you don’t want us to answer a question, why do you insist on asking it?

Because we want to hear you say what we want you to say, not what you really think. (That was a confusing sentence…)

Why can’t you accept what I tell you at face value? Why must you assume that everything I say has hidden meaning to it and layers of subtlety? Why can’t you understand that it is possible for me to sit there and not be thinking about anything?

 

Quote:

Why are you so uncomfortable with long periods of silence?

These two go together. We have to look for hidden meaning because that is the way that WE communicate. Everything must be delved into so that we don’t miss an innuendo or shading that we would have to look back on later and say….”So, that’s when the son-of-a-bitch was probably doing this or that.”
And please…we know that when you are sitting there not saying anything that you are probably thinking of sex. We just want to make sure that we are the ones that are featured in your fantasies, not the girl that just walked by or the actress on TV.

—

we like your company and want to know what you think as long as it agrees. That one lady was right. women are a bit crazy, but mainly because we desire to understand you. Once we accept that there is nothing going on in that head but food and beer, sex, and sports, with an occasional song or movie, then we will stop doing that.

We over think. Guys arent plotting… they are thinking “what a shame there is no football on..” While u are thinking this, women are thinking “I wonder if he still finds me metally stimulating?” the truth is, he probably never did.

How can you not slit your own throat when you have the following conversation with your female friends about your boyfriend?

This is another time that we are looking for positive reinforcement from someone. We want to hear about how we are too good for the guy and how dare he treat us so awful.

Originally Posted by CaptCapital Why do you read Cosmo? Women’s magazines, all of them, are fucking stupid. They are writen for stupid people. They make you dumber for reading them. Why do you do it?

Fashion, hair and makeup ideas.

We don’t read those magazines. We look at the pictures.

—- and —

As someone said, fashion. Plus, sometimes there are fun sex tips.
Plus, it’s just mindless entertainment. It’s light, and fun, like watching cartoons or something.

[3.] And since we’re talking about your friends getting guys, you girls do realize how easy it is to get a guy, right? So what’s the big deal?

There is no big deal. We make it one. We’re women.

Dear Idiot Women,

I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that the reason this thread exists is to get real, thoughtful answers to legitimate and semi-legitimate questions about the fairer sex. Responses like “we’re women” or “that’s just what we do” are the reason men call you vapid whores, I’m calling you idiots, and the world thinks you are unfit to lead. Now snap the fuck out of it and use your heads for something other than a placeholder for my penis.

 

Originally Posted by Nanashi Do you ACTUALLY feel fat or is it a general sense of insecurity, or is it something else altogether?

I think it’s mostly just validation. We may be feeling fat that particular day (favorite jeans don’t fit right or something), pms-ing, just desperate for attention, whatever.

Most of the time, the girl doesn’t really even care what you think. She just wants to feel loved and accepted by you.

Fun with misogyny

I’m reading a funny and sometimes penetrating rant about women as gold-diggers here. There are too many quotable paragraphs in it to choose just one.

It is always necessary to judge a woman by her actions, never by her words. All women lie, especially to themselves. She will swear she has no interest in money, yet she callously rejects anyone with an unimpressive salary,unless she thinks she can goad him into a more lucrative career.

.

It is one thing to live off a man, but quite another to deny it. The intricacy of a woman’s self-deceit is astounding and complex, and while she may secretly be aware of her calculating motivations, she will rigorously defend herself against any invasion of the truth. She believes in her personal innocence and virtue, camouflaging her prostitution with such euphemisms as “I’m looking for a professional man” or “I don’t care how much money a man makes, but he has to have a status job” or “I don’t need a man’s money-I have my own money” (while she’s toiling away at an unskilled job, lives in a dilapidated apartment, and is insanely jealous of any woman she knows who’s married to a doctor or a lawyer).

.

Even though in some long-ago shuttered recess of her soul she might realize that she’s prostituting herself, she will never admit this, and so she feels absolutely no obligation to fulfill her side of the implied sexual bargain. She believes that a man should pay for her just because she was born female, and should ask for nothing in return. When she scams drinks and meals from men, she calls it dating; if she did the same to a stranger, she’d be arrested for fraud.

The average woman, emotion-driven though she is, cannot even begin to comprehend the frenzy of a man’s sexual desire. The ability to become aroused-and urgently ready for sex by a glimpse of bare skin or the lilt of a feminine voice makes no sense to her at all. She just sneers that men “think with their dicks”.

I find much truth in what he says, and his writing provokes just the right amount of emotional pain to cause laughter. His views lack the depth and breadth needed to give them balance, but that’s what makes for such a fun read.

I used to be very near his attitude back when I was living in the US. I wanted women to act like the feminists that they claimed to be. Nowadays I’m trying harder to learn about who we are and learn how to enjoy that, even if that means accepting some differences in gender agendas.

Update: It turns out that the article was actually lifted from the book Sex-Ploytation: How Women Use Their Bodies to Extort Money from Men by Mathew Fitzgerald. The reviews for the book on Amazon.com are worth a read. They highlight that there is a growing groundswell of we-ain’t-going-to-take it masculism and anti-radical-feminist sentiment. Men. are. seriously. pissed.

I’ve included all 7 chapters of the book in the comments section of this post. The book is out of print, and selling for $125 per copy on Amazon.com.

Why were men against women voting?

I’m researching material about the emotion of jealousy pushing away the one you want to keep close, and stumbled upon this article about suffrage. In our post-modern post-feminist society where most people agree to equal opportunity for all while at the same time admitting to wide ranging general differences between the sexes, it’s interesting to look back on what insights might have been contained in the old ignorant ways.

Were some of the predictions of the anti-suffrage movement born out? Are men more effeminate now, and women more masculine? I’d love to see a study that would say something useful about the old fear that women are more easily swayed by emotional political campaign ads than are men.

—

OTHER FEARS THE ANTIS’ HAD IF WOMEN WERE CONSIDERED EQUALS

---

• More strongly the anti’s conception of women’s emotional composition aggravated their fears about women’s suffrage. Whereas men were described as rational and emotionally stable, women were portrayed as “high strung,” tense, irritable, and potentially irrational. “Their delicate emotional equilibrium could easily upset by a strain-like voting.” “When women generally vote and hold office, ” warned one anti-group, “nervous prostration, desire for publicity, and ‘love of the limelight’ will combine to produce a form of hysteria already increasing in the United States.” Those women already involved in the suffrage movement were pointed to as case studies of hysteria. “One male doctor who opposed woman suffrage declared that he could not shut his eyes ” to the fact that there is mixed up with the women’s movement much mental disorder.” “Another anti spoke of the insane craving of the suffragists to imitate men and of her pathological contempt” for women’s work.” (Mayor, 67)
  

  THE THREE CONCLUSIONS THE ANTIS’ AROSE AT DUE TO WOMEN’S “EMOTIONAL BEHAVIOR.

  1. Since all women suffragists bordered on hysteria there was no need to take their arguments seriously.
  2. There was a real danger if other women cane under the influence the suffragists. “As one Anti warned, “all woman are potentially hysterics.” Men had an obligation to protects other women from contamination of the suffragists.
  3. A women’s emotional instability would make her a dangerous voter. She would let her feelings rather than her intellectual concerns be her primary reason for voting. “Since women obviously could not be trusted to behave rationally, they would be extremely dangerous in a political setting.” (Mayor, 67)

  OTHER ARGUMENTS THE ANTI’S STRESSED AGAINST WOMEN AND VOTING

  1. In addition to this, the antis stressed that women were intellectually inferior and could not make educated decisions. “Women did not have the intellectual capacity of men because their brains were smaller and more delicate. One anti observed that “the fiber of a woman’s brain is likely to be as much finer as the phobia of her sin…”
  2. The other explanation to women’s intellectual inferiority was related to the same basis for diagnosing hysteria. They argued that the women’s thought process was less equipped to handle logical progressions than were men’s. For example, an anti said that “women’s mind arrives at conclusions on incomplete evidence; has a very imperfect sense of proportion; accepts the congenial as true and rejects the uncongenial as false; takes the imaginary which is desired for reality, and treats the undesired reality which is out of sight as non-existent-building up for itself in this way… a very unreal picture of the external world.” Another anti said that “while women’s minds seemed to move rather in curves and circles, following lines more beautiful, perhaps, but irregular and disconcerting, men’s minds seemed to move along in a straight line.” (Mayor, 68)
  3. “Women in politics would mean corruption and irrationality.” But this argument did not cease here; the antis took this even farther for their own benefits. They warned that if women got the vote they would compete with men in the male sphere and lose the qualities which made them feminine. An anti said, “‘The question to be decided…is simply this: Is it desirable to have women become masculine, instead of retaining the characteristics of her own sex?” Another anti said that over time those changes would alter the very temperament of women. (Mayor, 68)

  OTHER MISOGYNIST IDEOLOGIES BEHIND THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST SUFFRAGE AND THREATS IT POSED

  1. While women would become more masculine, antis argued that men would become more effeminate. Male antis saw women in politics as a threat to their masculinity. “Giving women the vote was views as a shirking rather than a sharing of responsibility, and therefore a resignation of manhood.”
  2. They predicted the shifting of gender roles as expressed their views quite bluntly. “Woman suffrage would produce a nation of transvestites.” (Mayor, 69)
  3. Once traditional sex roles were tampered with the family structure would annihilate, argued antis. The antis argued that women had a separate but equal form of power. They could shape their children’s growth. The antis argued that giving women political power was not the solution to women’s dissatisfaction. ‘They advocated that women use the power they had within the home to produce sons and husbands who were effective extensions of themselves.” (Mayor, 71)

  Link

Sexism, or gender differences?

Some quotes from posts on thetaobums.com about gender relations:

Nature is sexist. It created us different with different class strengths and weaknesses. We are not androgynous by birth and gender is not merely a social construct.

Humans need to get over it and embrace our TRUE natures. Men need to be strong enough for women to withstand all their shyt-tests. ‘What you can’t say no to has power over you.’ So if a man never says no to a woman – he’s showing that she has power over him – which is a turn-off to both.

This seems common sense but in our feminist counter-culture, the obvious truth has been made taboo and replaced by groupthink falsehood. Truth is, “feminism” has become a sugar-coated pseudonym for misandry, female supremacy, anti-femininity, closet masculinism, penis envy, lesbianism & androgyny. And very often, the projection of personal issues and the scapegoating for one’s personal problems onto men.

and

If many western men are more comfortable acting in a somewhat feminine manner while remaining hetero – as a sexual proclivity; it may be that they’ve been taught to repress their own masculinity so as not to upset mom or some other whom they needed to please while growing up. It is noticeable… the phenomenon is evident and obvious -particularly in urban areas…And with intellectuals too- for some reason when the cognitive aspects are developed to a high degree in both sexes many see them as neutralized (neutered) in their sexual aspect.

and

Having let a lot of silence into my soul over the years, I can say my gender has indeed blossomed.

And what I find is that it is an animal.

An animal that drives me with wild passion to strongly slam my girlfriend up against the wall, and push deeply against her body. She may struggle, she may giggle, or moan. But that’s all surface, for when I reach behind her and grab hold of her hair, pulling her head back and exposing her neck, she surrenders to me completely. I love this.

And so does she.

We eventually strip ourselves of our masks, our conventions, and our clothes, and become completely naked, both physically and psychologically, so that we may both express our truest selves to one another.

I am yang, and she is yin. It all makes sense in the bedroom, this dance of light and dark, hot and cold, power and yielding. When these two polarities combine, everything is created. (Including babies if we aren’t careful.)

The question then becomes, how far do we take this primordial dance of polarities that works so well between the sexes and apply it to our everyday behavior?

Any post about gender differences on the fredoneverything.net will say bold things about what is ridiculous about a feminism that denies gender differences. Such as his post Why Men Prefer Asian Women

More to think about regarding porn and feminism.

Apostate pointed out this article, written in 1983, about the dialogue between feminists in two camps on the issue of porn.

The article gave me new information, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around all the implications of it.

I read it just once, two nights ago, and want to write down some initial thoughts.

The most interesting part of the essay, for me, was pointing out that some women feel sexual attentions and pressures forced onto them, sometimes in predatory ways. This combined with a culture of double standard where men get to fuck around and be macho while women are sluts if they do, makes them feel sexuality is tied together with a shameful imposition – even as they get horny and enjoy sex. A rage against men gets tied together with an anger at displays of women been seen as sexual objects. That is the part of the essay that I need to work a lot harder to wrap my head around.

The article also mentions, with great sympathy and clarity, that people very often have “shadow issues”, and project outwards aspects of their personality that they are not comfortable with. I want to spend some time in future posts to examine this and give some examples.

I can understand how when a person is angry, and feels that no one is listening to their anger and taking it seriously, that this leads to more anger. Rage, even. What many women don’t seem interested to hear, is that many men are angry. We have reasons to be angry, and we don’t feel that our anger is being taken seriously. Especially by feminists, who don’t seem to think men even have the right to be angry – it isn’t our turn, and our grievances are too minor to count.

The conversation about pornography, in a feminist context, makes me angry also. Too angry to keep my discussions about it civil – even though I would prefer to be able to. I get really charged up about it.

I am 41, and have not witnessed the sexually repressive culture that Joanna Russ discussed in her essay. I have not witnessed the sexual double standards, or women being seen as sex objects to be dominated and discarded. My childhood was formed during the sexual revolution, during the time when children were taught that there are no innate gender differences other than sexual organs. Regrettably, the sexual revolution was toning down, and then finally hit up against the aids scare as I entered my late high school years. The aids scare died down. In the nineties I travelled around the U.S., visiting colleges as a travelling salesman, visiting music festivals. I did some sales on beaches during spring break. I did not witness a culture of double standard or sexual prudery. I saw a lot of sexual openness and experimentation. Tittie flashing on the beach isn’t even the beginning. Dirty dancing on the dance floor shows better how open people are with sexuality nowadays. Serial monogamy, marriage no longer being the only respectable lifestyle, and even teen orgies gets closer to how far we are from the fifties. Even open lesbian experimentation is not only allowable, but fashionable. I don’t know what culture Joanna Russ is describing, but I suspect that it is a culture that exists in the past.

As for the dirty Uncle Harries she mentions, as a man I can say that men pride themselves on treating women with respect and making them happy. We don’t brag about sexual conquests and using people. If you doubt this, just check out website discussion boards. Even the PUA crowd – the pick up artists that work diligently to hone skills of fast seduction, do not talk of women as a thing to be used for personal enjoyment. I understand that there are dirty Uncle Harries out there, probably a lot of them, but I don’t see that we live in a culture described by them. Men value maturity as much as women do, and we know what is immature, hostile, anti-social behaviour as well as women do.

A point made in the essay that is worth emphasising, a point I under-emphasised when discussing porn, is the difference between good sex and bad sex. I’m not sure how to write about this. Personally I prefer porn that depicts real, passionate, enjoyable sex. I don’t like scripted stuff, and if the woman isn’t obviously and truly showing intense pleasure, it is not good porn. The man too should be depicted as having real, enjoyable, passionate sex – not just being a tool. I prefer home made type porn, for this reason. Passion and intimacy are essential to good sex, and this is reflected in porn. I haven’t been exposed to a lot of porn that seems to use the woman at her expense and the man’s pleasure, but I would not find that type of porn useful or stimulating, and can understand distaste and worse at porn that depicts women as being other than totally consenting, in the deepest possible sense. The difficult nuance about that is that a woman can deeply and passionately consent to and enjoy sex that includes dominance and submission.

Getting back to shadow issues; here is where I disagree that the pro porn and anti porn camps are merely talking past each other. I see the pro porn crowd as having worked through, or at least not having, the same projections about the negative aspects of sex, especially power issues of dominance and submission, as do the the anti porn crowd. In this sense, they have access to more of themselves, to more of reality, to a bigger picture. They can see and understand and internalize the power dynamics that can happen in sex, without externalizing them onto an other.

And this points to part of my anger, real anger, as real as feminists are capable of, about cultural assumptions that I have lived embedded in. Feminism has been about freedom from sexual bias, but became a tool of sexual domination. Men are pissed off. Men and women are different creatures, and men want to be men. We don’t want to be feminized in order to be social. We want to respect our biologies and natural inclinations – respect them, use them, own them. Men are pissed – and feminists have not been working hard to understand why. Men have been working to grok feminism, and more than that, to grok women.  We do that work.

There are right now, still, too many shadow issues regarding sexuality in order for masculists to talk to feminists. Feminists, I believe, especially need to do a lot of work owning their shadow sides. Sex sometimes can include domination, and that is OK. There isn’t any shame or problem in that. Sexuality can include a lot of stuff that isn’t politically correct. It can – and there really isn’t any problem with that. As Wilber says, we can transcend and include our biological heritage. We are not only descended from primates, we are primates. And that is perfectly natural.

That lovin feeling.

A few nights ago, I came home later than my lover expected. I’d been delayed on the return route; friends and not-yet-friends pressed on me to join them in a drink, or two. I had a vodka bottle to share, and left them with it.

She left planet earth when she found out I’d been drinking on the street. She went totally cow eyed on me – all glimmer and glint and shine from a rational mind gone – her eyes milky and glazed with cataracts of the unreachably insane.

Then out came the brinkmanship. She was leaving me, on the spot.

We had been three months into our mutual deception of romantic love, the perfume of it even in our dreams. In five minutes she would turn it all upside down, as if it were nothing.

When she loses it, she doesn’t lose just a bit of it, she loses all of it.

The next day of course, she was all about trying to get that lovin feeling back. “Do you still love me, Daddy? Am I still your wife? Your little bitch?”

But I’d lost that lovin feeling.

Her sanity had returned. My lover’s temper and mood are usually stable, and she is very loving.

I wonder, do all people sink into a hypnotic trance of feeling loved all over when they get a massage? Does touch automatically release those endorphins and oxytocin and feelings of warming slippery-sleepy touchy-feely intimacy? I like it when the afterglow of massage and kisses and sex lasts until the next fix.

It took three days of regular fixes for me to open to her again. She said “next time I go psycho, just ignore whatever I say. Only listen to me when I’m normal. Hit me if you want, do anything, just never let me go”. I don’t want to hit her in that context – I don’t want to go there.

Violence between lovers, for most of us, that subject is not even a topic that any words ever need to be spoken of. But is anything ever forever fixed and certain? I’ve heard stories and lived experiences that contradict and change what I used to know. Sometimes people want to feel forcefully owned. It makes them feel loved; safely contained; bounded by primal ties of family. But I don’t want to use violence, don’t want to need to, outside of a few very minor just for fun spankings and slaps in a sexual context of intimate love.

I have no heart remaining to keep my woman in line, when she knows she wants to remain in relationship and knows that I’ve done nothing outside of boundaries and knows that she is just going psycho out of control nuts. I just don’t have the heart for it, anymore. Been there. Tired of it. Tired to tears, limp wristed tired. So tired that if you ask me if I still love you, nothing I say will have any force behind it, and you will want to ask again and again.

But we’ve got that lovin feeling back. It has been 4 weeks since the last time she went totally out of it psycho. And our regular days are constant kisses and massage and laughter and sex and just hanging out empowering and loving and being good to each other.

I wonder how other people live. Isn’t it so good to have that lovin feeling? Don’t others try to live a life that contains that?

I do.

When I walk around any town, the lovers hand in hand are rare.

I know that I think that I’m all that, and I know it is a mis-perception. I accomplish much less than I think I’m capable of. Sometimes I’m full of it, and sometimes what I’m full of is myself. But I can’t help the perception that most people are the walking dead, and that I’m not, and that I’m better than that. Didn’t you feel that way as a teen in love? That the adults had all forgotten what love really is? People seem strangely dispassionate to me. I’m not always picky of who I take as a lover, but most have been ignitable, and most of us were at least once ignited. I suspect people get numb and deadened, don’t want to be wounded, and so become less vulnerable. But why not live as that teenager, live within that loving feeling?

I do. And I will. And if love leaves, then I leave and find love. I dis-respect the choices that others make – choices towards security. I do – I disrespect those choices. Am I arrogant to do that? Or are people closing down from a life fully lived? Music, wine, intimacy, art, all the things we can love, when we shut down from them, isn’t it possible to say, that is worse than not shutting down from them? I think we can say that embracing life is better than being deadened to it, and so I look down my nose at people who don’t fuck a lot, and passionately.

I take it personally to see people disregard what to me is an incredibly important human birthright. Some people throw away and dis-respect their right to be rational. I have no respect for that either. But throwing away all that sexuality can give – and it can give an immeasurable lot – that is like trashing planet earth with pollution – grave disrespect. Beethoven talked of God coming through to him in Music. Could he turn his back on that connection? What would he think of those that chose not to listen to the sublime possibilities in music. He’d likely be pretty snobby, I’d think. And what if he saw a friend, a virtuoso talent, give up music altogether? Wouldn’t it be an outrage against the voice of Spirit that communed to him?

I get really snobby, which is merely arrogant. I get outraged too. Which probably does no good to anyone – but there it is.

Update: Since I posted this, I’ve been wondering how my outrage can be projected shadow material.  Why the outrage?  Why not sadness at opportunities missed by others, or empathy at our common human predicament of settling for less?  Perhaps my proseltizing zeal means I also question my values, but project that uncomfortable doubt outwards and then try to convert the disbelievers.  I don’t like feeling outrage and feeling snobby.  I hope the fault is an interior flaw I can fix. 

Women are psycho.

Mean green meme folks dislike comparisons. Don’t compare men against women. Don’t compare whites against blacks. Don’t compare Mexicans to anyone.

Reality based reality requires reality. Women are different, from each other.

But have I known one that doesnt’ go totally psycho, sometimes? Grisly bear claws, cow eyes, dog voice. Out of it beyond redemption of Christ. Wild.

Women are more moody, fine. But they delight in total anarchy.

It’s not a good control strategy, females. It makes us dis-interested.

5 emotional reasons against porn:

1) It is competition: it can make my man horny and raise his gaze away from me and raise his expectations past what I can or want to provide.

2) It is shameful. Shameful and therefore even immoral – someone is getting shamed, and that is wrong.

3) It harms the actual female models.

4) It harms women by changing men into people more likely to be harmful to women.

5) The women are working too hard for self esteem points, and worse than that, the points are being handed out by asshole men. I don’t want to be dependent and inter-dependent upon other peoples validation, and porn shoves in my face self esteem being tied to looking a certain way and doing certain things I don’t want to associate with. The whole self-esteem system it portrays sucks.

Have you ever had a rational discussion with someone who had an emotional base to their argument? They show you the forest of their ideas, tree after tree. If you cut down a tree here, or point out that another is but a shrubbery, they feel that you miss their big picture. You can ask them point blank: “Is this what you mean? Because if so, here is how I disagree – do you agree or disagree with my disagreement” and the most likely response will be a diversion to point to a new “tree”.

I think regarding porn, it comes down to these five deeply seated emotional feelings. The rational arguments are smokescreens.

Each of these 5 emotional negative responses to porn have obvious answers.

1) Women often mention that women are extremely competitive. There will always be competition, and you always will not like it. Porn works very hard to be effective at getting your man horny. Your man isn’t going to sex the models, and probably will sex you more after seeing porn. If you can’t even compete against porn, you aren’t trying hard enough to deserve to complain. The world is not and will never be fair, competition is built right in. Whining about advantages that others have as being unfair or wrong is adolescent. Literal Equality should never be achieved.

2) If you feel sex is shameful or that any sexual act is inherently shameful, you are sexually ignorant. There are ways to embody sex that appear on the outside as harmful to one, but are enjoyed by both. S&M for instance can only be fully understood if it is also fully embodied subjectively.

3) Most porn is made between consensual adults. If you have a beef against sex slavery, that is a separate issue. If your mind is not capable of keeping those issues distinct, you are not literate enough to discuss the issue. Does a percentage of porn using sex slaves taint the porn between consensual adults? If so, use that same analogy for all your other “logical” thinking. Friendship is bad because some friends cause harm. Homosexuality is bad because some gays practice pederasty or pedaphilia. Marriage is bad because…

4) As for porn changing men for the worse, if you don’t have the power to change him back for the better, you either aren’t trying, or aren’t skillful or are limited in your approach to what is better or worse, or he needs something you can’t give. Don’t blame porn for mis-educating your man. If you are not bigger cultural and sexual influence than porn, what is amiss is more serious than images.

5) If you don’t want those being-seen-as-sexy self esteem chits, don’t want them. If you do, who do you want to be sexy to? Yourself? Women working hard to be attractive by wearing sexy clothes and make up or performing sex acts get positive attention. They work for that attention, they get it, they earn it. Do you honestly expect to rescue women from male power to hand out wanted attention? What an incredibly naive and blind concept – that acting sexy is giving up power to the wrong people. People who work for approval do it on purpose, for selfish reasons. No one would do so otherwise. So give up trying to change the capitalist based self-esteem system. We labor in it with our free will. Stuff your utopia – it is disfunctional. You say that nobody really needs those self esteem points? Men can’t really give them, and the wrong people are getting them, for the wrong reasons? The wrong people are getting the self-esteem chits that you are not working for?

I can understand a loathing of tying self esteem to uncontrollable outside forces; men should not have power to hand out self-esteem chits. Hey, wake up and use the system. Love it. It feels good. Rise above it, if you like, but use it when you want. Being sexy must mean being vulnerable to being judged through other people’s view of what is sexy.

Other=other. You can not explain to other people what you would prefer they find sexy. What other people find sexy is going to very often be something you don’t want to be or do. So let them enjoy their porn.

I’ll need to re-write the 2nd half of this post – it is too bitter to be effective. Or the interested reader can read my more balanced comments. I’m reacting with frustration to decades of feminism that prioritises certain of women’s needs, while dimishing the value of both masculinity and femininity. To the ugly facts of life being twisted into misandry and visions of oppression.

I suppose I should mention that I’m not particularly interested in porn, for the same reason that I don’t have sex with prostitutes. Sex for me, and for most men, is largely about intimacy and shared pleasures. I’ve many times enjoyed watching porn while having sex with a partners who requested it though. Most of my collection was downloaded at the requests of girlfriends.

UPDATE: I was wrong. These comments over at the tuckermax board show that people really do get desensitized and have different expectations after watching a lot of porn. Go figure. Your mileage will vary.

People also get different expectations after having different partners, but porn seems to be having a similar effect to dating super hot babes – it’s hard to eat a steady diet of beans when you’re used to lobster.

I know that after living here in SE Asia for 5 years, my physical/sexual girlfriend expectations are way higher than I would even try for in the west. It makes a really big difference to have strong hots for who you are dating. So ya, I guess women have to work a lot harder to keep the experienced or porn watching guy sexually interested. My girlfriends mostly have entranced me, so I never noticed porn as any sort of competition.

Bad science? Feminism can’t social engineer away differences.

This quote from David Brooks, on edge.org :

“Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don’t even notice until it has almost disappeared. Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness….

…Over the past 30 years or so, however, this belief in natural goodness has been discarded. It began to lose favor because of the failure of just about every social program that was inspired by it, from the communes to progressive education on up. But the big blow came at the hands of science.

From the content of our genes, the nature of our neurons and the lessons of evolutionary biology, it has become clear that nature is filled with competition and conflicts of interest. Humanity did not come before status contests. Status contests came before humanity, and are embedded deep in human relations. People in hunter-gatherer societies were deadly warriors, not sexually liberated pacifists. As Steven Pinker has put it, Hobbes was more right than Rousseau.

Moreover, human beings are not as pliable as the social engineers imagined. Human beings operate according to preset epigenetic rules, which dispose people to act in certain ways. We strive for dominance and undermine radical egalitarian dreams. We’re tribal and divide the world into in-groups and out-groups.

This darker if more realistic view of human nature has led to a rediscovery of different moral codes and different political assumptions. Most people today share what Thomas Sowell calls the Constrained Vision, what Pinker calls the Tragic Vision and what E. O. Wilson calls Existential Conservatism. This is based on the idea that there is a universal human nature; that it has nasty, competitive elements; that we don’t understand much about it; and that the conventions and institutions that have evolved to keep us from slitting each other’s throats are valuable and are altered at great peril. … “

Two implications here to feminism. The most obvious is that feminism must contend with some gender differences and sexual attitudes being innate. Women are going to continue to want attractive shoes, and men are going to continue to be turned on in all the ways we’ve always been turned on. The more interesting implication is that feminism itself has a tendency to become a tribe that divides humans into the in group and the out group.

Picking sides is inherently dangerous, even if difficult to avoid. The way to avoid the exclusions of the tribal mentality is to identify with a larger tribe – first family, then community, then nation, then globe, then non-humans, etc. I think we can understand men and women and embrace both in understanding, and think of ourselves as humans expressing one portion of our larger human condition. We can identify with both genders.

And here is Marvin Minsky quoting Richard Feinman:

“We are equally apt to deceive ourselves, not only in our personal lives but also when dealing with abstract ideas. There, too, we often close our eyes to conflicts and clashes between our beliefs. Listen to richard Feynman’s words:

“That was the beginning and the idea seemed so obvious to me that i fell deeply in love with it. And, like falling in love with a woman, it is only possible if you don’t know too much about her, so you cannot see her faults. The faults will become apparent later, but after the love is strong enough to hold you to her. So, i was held to this theory, in spite of all the difficulties, by my youthful enthusiasm.”
— 1966 Nobel Prize lecture”

Feminism is a colored lens that allows you to see the world in a new way. But as with any ideology it can be very partial. We need a humanism, a synthesis of feminism and masculism and sociology and biology and everything related: an appreciation for the gestalt of the full sweaty human condition.

note: if you don’t catch my sense of humor by now, the image for this piece is meant to heighten debate, not to polarize positions. I can see the juxtaposition and how it will inflame emotion.  History is debatable, gender is controversial, and whoever can include the most facts into her theory wins. Theory that is most inclusive is most respectable.