Sex After Feminism

But I Love Sex

Sex is awesome, or at least it should be. Sex should be a healthy meaningful interaction between human beings. It is only when sex is violent that it hurts people. So long as it is safe and nonviolent, it is harmless. No one makes a more convincing argument for this fact than Dan Savage and his "media empire" (insubstantial though it may be).

However, the problem with sex is the very thing that makes it so satisfying. Sex is a product of the limbic system, not the prefrontal lobes. Sex is reptilian. When you get rid of all the toys, human sex and crocodile sex is pretty much the same. This is a problem because feminism is a product of modern society. Modernity has enabled us  to make humanity better. Because of the U.N., we no longer live in a constant state of war. Because of the welfare state and an effective legal system, our resources are divided more equitably so that we no longer have to fear starving to death, or dying of a curable disease. Because of near-universal education, we are no longer ignorant of the state of things. We no longer have to live at yellow alert, because our society has created a semi-stability. We can move out of our animal state, stand up on two legs, look around and think about the world.

An aware educated person cannot help but notice prejudice. Facts that we had assumed for centuries, such as the myth that blacks and women were inferior, have been considered and found to be false. But some of that residue remains. Some of the fear remains. And when we go into "sex mode," and our higher brain shuts down, we stop using our smart filter.

But I cannot imagine a society without sex, even if our reptilian brain is particularly susceptible to our gender training. Even if our sexism is nature rather than nurture, that just means that it is something that we have to work harder to overcome. We have to find a way to approach sex in a healthier way.

So, here are some ways that people who want to see gender progress can approach sex without reinforcing gender roles.

1) Powerful Women and Men- When Hollywood and their clueless media moguls say a powerful woman, they almost always mean a woman who has power over a man. They don't mean a good and kind woman who just really likes to have sex with good and kind men. They don't mean a loving couple who wish to explore their sexuality. They don't mean two powerful politicians falling in love with one another. They generally mean a woman who, at some time or another, uses sex to get what she wants. That must end.

2) Redefine the Aesthetic- Every straight woman does not have to appeal to every straight man. Criticizing the body of our potential partners is a shameful product of masculinization. When someone admits a sexual attraction to a woman, the first response is to find fault, as men commonly do by focusing on body parts, and Kerry and Samantha now do over drinks when they "dish" on "Sex in the City." It needs to be stopped. Rather than speaking disparagingly about the bodies of women, we who are attracted to women need to do two things.

Picture by roseoftimothywoods

a)Admire their body without dehumanizing them- It is okay to admire the bodies of others, and should be encouraged, so long as it is done respectfully. An acquaintance once told me a story of coming home with a smile on her face.

In her neighborhood, it was common for men to catcall her from the windows of their cars and say things like, "Get in." When that happened, she was obviously disconcerted. Constructions workers' filthy language and dangerous sexual aggression is a reflection of the worst of masculinity. In these examples you can see the connection between the reptilian brain and sex. You can also recognize the structures of carrot and stick masculinizing. By antagonizing and threatening women, masculinizers are able to make the threat of feminization more terrifying. If being woman-like means getting harassed on the street, men will not want to be like women. It is simultaneously a way of keeping women "in their place." But, on this particular day a man had joyfully stopped my friend and said, "Excuse me."
She said that she replied with the customary suspicion, "Yes?"
"You have a nice ass."
With waiffish, girlish women being admired in most fashion magazines, this woman had thought of her backside as a liability. This simple and friendly acknowledgement of sexual attraction was not hostile or aggressive. It sought nothing in return. It was just a casual acknowledgement of sexual attraction, the same way that one would say, "You are very pretty."

Frank acknowledgement of sexual attraction, instead of sexual aggression, combined with emphasizing the positive, rather than the negative, could allow men to open up to more diverse sexual attractions, creating healthier partnership bonds, not driven by advertising or peer pressure, but by acceptance of all body types.

b)Be Discreet- The key to respectful acknowledgement of sexual attraction is to make sure that the person is not threatened by it. Too many women (1 in 4) have been the victims of sexual violence, as have too many men (1 in 5. This number indicates the dual purpose of sexual violence to feminize women and bring the threat of feminization to men). It is improper to casually remark on sexual attraction to strangers, even if done respectfully, because in a society where sexual violence is epidemic at 22.5% the man in the example above could not have been sure if my friend had previously been raped. In a better society, perhaps frank admission of sexual attraction to strangers could be normal, but not in this product of tens of thousands of years of sexism. While I believe it is important that we start to acknowledge sexual attraction, it is important that we do so respectfully and discreetly.

3)We also need to start talking about sex so that we can take it out of the exclusive realm of the reptilian brain. When we talk about sex, in the words of Dr. Phil, we "program our environments for success." The sex act is always going to be reptilian and wild. That is the joy of it. But if we acknowledged it in our daily lives, talked about it openly, and made deliberate choices about sex, then we could begin to understand an intercourse of equality. Would that be a beautiful thing? I believe so.

Why I Was Jealous of my Wife

For two years, I have spent most of my time as a stay-at-home dad. The experience has opened my eyes to ideas about gender that I have come to realize are quite rare. These intellectual notions are important, but I have been ignoring the personal challenges of changing places with my wife. Here is one issue that I'm only just coming to terms with.

Parenting (Well) is Hard Work

I was changing 80% of the diapers, feeding the baby all day long, cleaning up, and paying a lot of attention to the kid. This last is harder than it sounds. In the first couple of months, while there's still that new-baby smell, it's easy to just sit and stare at the baby, or read a book while the baby is sleeping, or simply poke at the baby and make silly noises hoping for a smile. But as the baby gets older, and becomes a toddler, xi needs you to be in a state of constant yellow alert.

Yellow alert is a concept that gun owners talk about often. When you're conceal and carrying, you are supposed to be at yellow alert every moment of your day. Some of the NRA-types talk about how there wouldn't be any crime if everyone were always at yellow alert. The only problem is... yellow alert is really boring.

When driving down a highway across Nebraska or Wyoming, I am supposed to be paying attention at all times, I should be watching my blind spot and looking as far ahead as I can see for trouble. But at some point, it is inevitable that I realize I've completely forgotten the last 15 miles. People are just too social to be at yellow alert all the time. But being a mothering dad of a toddler is like driving down that highway, only your a long haul trucker. You're putting in sixty to seventy hours a week watching your kid try to stack one block on top of another. "Look at that, sweety. You stacked the blocks," again. "What would you like to do now? Oh? Stack some more blocks?" Yay! "If you stack another block, that would be great and I am going to throw myself out the window." Oh, did I say that aloud. "Don't worry baby, it's a first floor window, so I'll probably be okay."

The thing about watching a toddler for seventy hours a week is that toddlers don't know how to do all of the neat things that we humans know how to do (like hold conversations). So, the job of a mothering dad is essentially to watch the toddler learn how to do things that I've known how to do since I was a toddler. Oh, I could help, but I also know the research, and if I help the toddler too much, xi will never learn how to do it xirself, and xi will never become a fully functioning and actualized adult. So, I put myself on yellow alert and sit down to watch the kid stack blocks... again.

On ne Nait pas Femme, On le Devait.

When my wife got home, inevitably my kid would glow and shout, "Mommio!" The kid would run to the door shouting in joy and proclaiming her arrival like a trumpeter at court. At first, the mothering dad is relieved. Finally, yellow alert can be turned off. I can read the newspaper (online of course), and catch up on my email. I can finish making dinner, and clean up all the stacks of blocks that have been created around the house and somehow remind me of Manhattan, only shorter, wooden, and proclaiming "Z" or "B" where the billboards should be. I can do the dishes, start the laundry, or vacuum the floors.

Two problems with this relief. The first is that it fades quickly when I realize that all the things that I want to do are just the things that will make me feel like an adult again. This kind of self-care is the most challenging part of being a professional mother. Without it, you are not as good a parent because you are taking out your neurotic needs on your children, yet being an adult is a full time job and being a parent is more than a full time job, and there are limited hours in the day.

The other problem is that I can't entirely turn off yellow alert. You see, my wife is a very good parent. She is probably better with young kids than I am. While I was out trying to mow lawns as a kid, because I was a boy, she was out finding gigs as a babysitter, because she was a girl. That's an oversimplification, and I did some babysitting as a child, but before my baby was born, I had never cared for a child younger than 18--months-old (see child's play blog from 2010). Nevertheless, my wife didn't know the kid as well as I did. And of course, that made me feel guilty.

While my wife was out working, I was bonding with our child, getting to know the little places that he liked to stack blocks, the things that he liked to pretend were blocks and stack, and the blocks that he liked to pretend were missiles. I got to know the cord that he almost strangled himself on several times during the day, and the kinds of bowel movements that he was having requiring rapid-fire diaper changing. I could tell you if his spit up was going to be white, blue, or green.

But these were the kinds of things that my wife always wanted to know about her kid. She was the one who wanted to be a stay-at-home. She is the one who played with baby dolls her entire childhood, babysat when she was ten-years-old, and envisioned what her future husband would look like coming in the door, giving her a kiss on the cheek, and then awaiting his scotch on the rocks aperitif. Even if her imagining has been shifted by gender studies' classes, she still had the urges, partially programed in by genetics (though the research shows that this is a lesser influence than social programing), and partially programed in by a life of being told, "this is what good women do."

Breastfeeding Makes me Jealous

But Not for the Reason You're Thinking (sicko)

I felt guilty that I was depriving my wife of her chance to be "mom," and at the same time, I felt shamed that I wasn't helping to earn money. When I had broken my gendered activities to play house with the girls (which I did more than most boys), I was the dad who came home to the kiss and the aperitif. Most of this blog has focused on what it meant that I was ashamed to do something that I and my wife both wanted to do (it is the same barely cloaked shame in the fantastically complex Mr. Mom song by the country singer Lonestar).

But I was so focused on the shame of not being the earner, I didn't realize until recently that I was being denied one of the rewards of being the mothering parent. Because my kid was getting most of his calories from breast milk, xi had become primarily attached to my wife. Despite everything that I was doing to be Mr. Mom, I was as much second parent as if I was the aloof business traveling megabucks earning working dad. From the moment my wife got home, I was practically ignored, though still watching the kid out of the corner of my eye for some pitfall that I was better acquainted with than my working wife. I focused on how guilty I felt that she didn't get more time with the kid, so I never dealt with my own feelings of jealousy that I was only getting half the rewards of being the stay-at-home parent.

It has only been in the last couple of months that my child has become less reliant on breast milk (yes, we are still breastfeeding at two, I am proud to say, as is recommended by the World Health Organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and any other none-industry scientist that has ever studied it). When I got home from teaching a class on Monday, he was staying up and refusing to sleep until he got a kiss and cuddle from his "daddio." It is just a phase, but it is the phase that I expected and wanted long ago. My jealousy has been replaced by relief. I was convinced that my child's attachment to his mom, despite the fact that I was the stay-at-home, was a sign that I was an incompetent mother, and my greatest fear (the one expressed in this song my Justin Roberts) was that men were naturally incompetent mothers.

photo courtesy of SaglchMaSo.
SaglchMaSo is not associated with RightBeDone.

No matter how much I understood, mentally, that men, like women, are created, not born, this small proof that I was failing as a parent haunted me. Now that my child has shown attachment to me as well as my wife, I feel vindicated. I am a great mother. My child is the best behaved, most sensitive, and all-around greatest two-year-old I have ever met, and xi loves me. I may not have birthed our son, but I was made a mother none-the-less. Never in my life have I felt more free.

Primal, Masculine, Child Rearing

Dads throughout the nation feel a threat to their masculinity. According to a recent study, testosterone rates lower as men spend more time with kids.

The finding itself was not surprising. It has long been known that women have hormonal reactions to becoming caregivers. The only reason to think that men did not have similar reactions would be if our species were reptilian, and males did not participate in child rearing. Yet, reactions in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Fox News were histrionic fear that dads were losing their manliness. Are men still real men after they’ve had children and their testosterones levels have dropped by (*gasp*) more than 30%?

Being a man is not about having a high testosterone level. The only reason that species have men and women is to have children. It’s about sexual reproduction. It is not threatening your masculinity to have children because it is the ENTIRE POINT OF maleness in the first place.

The American vision of masculinity leaves no room for children. As a very funny Washington Post blog joked, “You don’t want to hold a baby unless you’re holding it like a football.” Yet somehow, our culture of masculinizers has got it in their heads that being a father is less manly than being a football player.

The reason that football is considered masculine, and fathering is not, is simple. For hundreds of years, western society has convinced men to be cannon fodder. This is especially true in America. Young boys don’t play with dolls, a tool that might teach them how to be better fathers. They play with GI Joes, a tool that teaches them how to be guerrilla warriors. While girls are learning how to prepare food, something that comes in handy for any person who likes to eat, boys are outside learning how to throw a basketball into a basketball hoop, a task that comes in handy for almost nobody.

But we grow up, and when we do, we are supposed to realize that GI Joes and basketball were just play things and that family and work are our lives. I feel true sorrow for any man who doesn’t.

Men don’t realize what being a man actually means for numerous reasons, but the biggest one is fear. Some of them are cowards, but most simply don’t understand what they are afraid of, so let me explain it for them. The entire threat behind traditional masculinity, the threat that is literally beaten into us as children by other boys who are afraid that they are not masculine enough, is the threat of feminization.

From the start, children are told that boys wear blue and girls wear pink, and they believe it because they can’t tell (through clothing) what else could possibly be the difference between a boy and a girl at an age when physiological differences are practically inexistent. Under the coaching of terrified and cowardly men, boys make other assumptions about what it means to be a boy, and when a boy does not conform, he is punished. Boys are mocked, ostracized and sometimes physically beaten. A boy who goes to a ballet class may be teased because “only girls do ballet.” A boy who wears nail polish may not be allowed to play with his friends because, “this is a boys-only club.” A boy who kisses another boy in his teenage years may be beaten to death in the Wyoming plains.

Even if we are not the subject of these punishments, we learn from them. We see what happens to boys who wear nail polish. We see what happens to Matthew Shepard. We equate that in our minds with being a girl because that is exactly what our punishers intend. What other message could we get out of the statement, “this is a boys-only club,” but that we will be ostracized for not being “boy” enough, and in a society that recognizes only the two classic genders, who else could we be if not a boy, but a girl? Girls, therefore, are teased, ostracized, and beaten. For some strange reason, boys don't like being beaten.

But the threats are hallow. The people who defend traditional masculinity are cowards. Do not be afraid. You are not less of a man for caring for your children. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you are not an actualized man until you are caring for children, so go out right now and adopt some. If you don’t want to adopt, offer to baby sit. If you don’t know anyone who needs a baby sitter, then email me and I will recommend a terrific mentoring organization in your city or town. We have many jobs as adults in a democratic society, but as a man we only have one; raise the next generation.

Living the Thug Life as a White Stay-At-Home Dad

Americans have an ignominious relationship with thugs. In the 2008 election, Tom Tancredo’s campaign was focused on the threat posed by MS-13 (he even started rumors that the gang was joining the military to shoot our boys in the back in Iraq in a desperate attempt to make the threat relevant). Going back to the 1970’s, Nixon’s war on drugs was really a war on thugs in the form of people of color who used the wrong kind of drugs. As evidence of that, the drug war has never targeted “civilized” drugs the same way that it targeted crack, meth, and other “thug” drugs. Powder cocaine was sentenced far lower than crack cocaine until recently, and misuse of prescription drugs is still hardly even a blip on the DOJ radar. Yet, this image was cultivated from a website that is admiring of Pres. Nixon, confusing the issue even further. We throw the word at police, security guards, Obama is called the thug-in-chief by tea party members who are called thugs by Moveon.org, and black youth and Muslims are our go-to thugs. Anyone we find prepared to apply violence indiscriminately is a thug.

And just who is willing and able to apply violence without thinking. Sometimes black men, sometimes, white men, sometimes Arab men, sometimes Latino men, but always men. So what is the female equivalent of the word thug? What do we call a woman who is willing to commit violence indiscriminately? Do we even have a word for it?

The word you're looking for is not bitch. A bitch is a woman acting outside of her appropriate feminine role. Rather, thug is equivalent to slut, which is a woman acting within the appropriate feminine role but taking it too far in a dangerous and indiscriminate way.

A thug is someone who has learned his social lesson too well. From an early age, boys are trained that the ability to commit violence is a primary source of our power. We spend a lifetime training boys to kill, hurt, and maim. We indoctrinate them into violent sports, video games, and even glorifying the word “thug” in proper contexts. We show them thousands of scenes of violence on television, almost all of them perpetrated by men. As boys are coming to terms with what it means to be a boy and later a man in America, they are bombarded by images of men killing other people (often women). Occasionally, a woman joins in the violent blood romp, but only if she is sexy enough to make the man feel secure in his masculinity while she’s doing it. We are trained to be warriors, to protect our family, society, and country from thugs.

To twist the Apostle Paul's words in Romans 8:30, if warriors be for us, who be against us? When the cops are warriors, the criminals are thugs, and when the marchers in Selma are warriors, the cops are thugs. When the Marines are warriors, the terrorists are thugs, and when the men from the village are freedom fighters, the imperialists are thugs. The image on the right are not Taliban thugs as you may have assumed, but Afghan freedom fighters with the Northern Alliance fighting the Soviets in a different era. Somewhere in the middle are we who want free from this Madonna/Whore complex.

But while the the whore side of the complex may be able to be reclaimed (as the Slut Walks attempt), there is no reason to reclaim thug. Sluts have fun. Sluts enjoy creating life. Sure they take risks and break hearts, but they do not kill. Thugs, however, are irredeemable. Thugs murder, rape, steal, and beat. Talking about the risks involved in acting like a thug is ridiculous because being a thug is pure risk. If a thug doesn’t kill, he dies at the hands of a true thug in mixed martial arts, in the streets, or in Afghanistan.

So we must stop rewarding warriors, and stop reclaiming thug. We must push back against violence and try to learn from women's work how satisfying it can be to nurture and care for those we love. We must break out of the warrior/thug complex.

Video Game Violence, Censorship, and Sexism

Arguing against banning video game violence but arguing for a ban on animated child pornography is sexism.

The reasons that we censor pornography have always been motivated at least partially by sexism. There is no other way to explain it. How is it that consensual sex is so horrific that some consider breastfeeding in public as obscene, but partaking in a simulation of the quartering of a woman dressed in highly sexualized clothing is not? How could it possibly be that the act of creating life is obscene, while the act of ending life is not?

The obvious answer is that our narratives have convinced us that women hold the power in consensual sex, but clearly it is men who hold the power over violence.

J. Scalia points out in his recent opinion on age-limits for the purchase of violent video games that literature is full of violence from Homer on down to today's copy of the New York Times. Isn't it also full of sex? Wasn't Lott fucked by his daughters (Genesis 19:30-36), and didn't the men of Greece rape the Trojan Women at the end of the Illiad? And yet, interactive depictions of these acts are sold in XXX shops to people 18 and over.

J. Scalia also argues that pointing out how much video game violence is racist and antisemetic (as J. Alito does) makes a case that it is art and therefore free speech. But an inordinate amount of child pornography is sexist. Does that mean that child pornography is art?

In an earlier case that banned animated child pornography, despite the fact that they cited no studies indicating that animated child pornography harms children, they were willing to believe that it would feed pedophile's urges and make them more likely to victimize children. However, they are unwilling to look at the ample studies that prove categorically that violent video games increase violent behavior, decrease helpful behavior, and have led to countless assaults.

I'm not saying that I think we should regulate video games, but if we do not, we must not regulate animated child pornography either. But of course that will never happen because sex is so insurmountably abhorrent that even consensual loving sex is often an exception to the first amendment. On the other hand, violence is necessary to keeping women in their place.

Violence is necessary because we need to train little boys, and I mean tiny little boys who have no reason to hate anything, to grow up into killing machines. We need to convince men that killing one another is a feat that not only is acceptable, but is rewarded on Memorial Day, Veterans Day, the Fourth of July and by saying, "Thank you for your service" when we encounter a professional killer on the street. I do not mean to trivialize the service of our men and women in uniform. They are professional killers, but if we are to live in an imperfect world we have to be able to protect our nation. However, we must keep their service in context.

These violent video games are aimed at boys because we need to train them to believe that it is exciting to kill and be killed. In video games, it is easy to say I "shot him" and he is "dead," and even I am "dead" or I am out of "lives." It is all so trivial, fun, rewarding, and exciting that the military itself uses these video games for training and recruiting purposes, and sponsors the creation of these video games. We are training boys to live lives of violence. Violence requires victims. Many of these boys are not able to find legitimate victims so they turn to one another, or their wives, or their children, or people in the street, or themselves.

And the reward is even better than it seems at first. The reward for all this violence is the continuation of the gender hierarchy that puts men on top, keeps women on their backs (and I do mean it that way), and aligns the world all right (and I do mean it that way). If the little girls flinch when the little boys cheer, it just proves to us all that little girls and the women they grow into are not cut out to do what needs to be done to run our country, our world, or our society. Girls need to be protected, so they should play Dora the Explorer, or at worst Super Mario Bros., but leave the violence to the little boys who are "just naturally drawn" to beating prostitutes to death before decapitating another victim.

The worst problem with this holding is that it completely misidentifies and aids the true threat to our freedom of speech. We are no longer living in a world where governments (Egypt, China, and Iran) are able to control what we say. We now live in a world where the most active censors are corporations, the same corporations that are making these video games. Sometimes corporate censorship is the kind that we know traditionally, as is the case with Apple and Amazon.com when they ban objects from their platforms because they claim they are obscene (who gets to say what's obscene and how come it's always gay smut?).

More often, corporate censorship is the marketing of certain (usually sexist) products, while making other products mostly unavailable. They say that they market what the public wants, but if that were the case nobody would ever pay for marketing (I'll let you puzzle that one out). In fact, they spend millions attempting to get us to want certain products. Corporations use advanced psychological techniques that are as effective as brain washing, and they target children whose brains do not fully mature until as late as 25-years-old.

Which is what these corporations do with violent video games in California. They rate the game M for Mature, and recommend it for users over 16, but then market to 12-year-olds who buy the games by walking to their local Game Stop and then hiding it until late at night during a sleepover (where your child visits and plays it even though he doesn't own those kind of video games because he is a good kid). The question in this case was not whether the video game manufacturers should be able to sell to kids, or even market their mature products to kids who everyone admits are too young for the game. The question in this case is should those kids have to ask their parents for permission to buy those video games as they have to do already for pornography. The question is whether our puritanical society thinks consensual sex is worse than murder. The answer is clear. They are both terrible evils... [Excuse this interruption, I'm being handed a message from our sponsors. "Violence is awesome!!! Rip off some fucking heads!!! Rip them off!!! Yeah!!! Rip that hot bitch in half!!! Yeah!!! This rocks!!!"]

Slut Walks: Marching Against Shame

“Slut Walk” started in Toronto when, as reported in the Washington Post, a stupid cop told a women’s forum at a college that, "women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized." Some of those women decided that they wanted to dress like “sluts” and not be victimized anyway, so they took to the streets. Many of the women marched in little more than their underwear, some in their pajamas, and some

in sweatpants. So how do these marches impact men’s liberation? Here are my thoughts.

Male Helplessness

Part of what Slut Walk is saying is that men should control themselves. The implication is that men CAN control themselves. Too often people say that men are pigs, dogs, animals, beasts, some-other-automaton. When they say that men are pigs, people imply that men are unable to control their base urges to hurt people. Men sometimes think they sound feminist by saying it. They think that deriding themselves puts them in league with the anti-man feminists, but they are mistaken. The premise at the heart of most feminism is that men are better than they historically were. They can be great fathers, great homemakers, and great people.

That is what Slut Walk implies, and that is a powerful statement. Men are able to control themselves, and they should.

Hyper-Gender

At the same time that the marchers are telling men to control themselves, they are also saying that they should be able to wear, in the words of one blogger, clothes that make them “look and feel good”. But who says that they look good? A society that has been dominated by men for tens-of-thousands of years tells them that they feel attractive when they look sexually available. Pushing the feminist movement

further into femininity is no better than pushing the men’s liberation movement into the church and onto the football field.

Before we fight for our rights to feel good about ourselves, we should ask why those things make us feel good. All too often, what feels good is the exact same thing that makes us feel bad other times. Shame and sexual attractiveness are tied together by the fact that they are both different sides of the same coin of gender oppression. Each time we say that we feel good looking and acting feminine, we are making it easier to feel bad when we do not look

and act appropriately gendered.

For almost all women, it is painfully impossible to be appropriately feminine. The Slut Walkers should be thoughtful about dress or risk being thoughtless about sexism.

Shame

Rupert Murdoch’s, "The New York Post" could be trusted to respond to any such movement by using their own buxom blonde to cast shame on the marchers. Kirsten Powers’ editorial says that reclaiming the word “slut” is immature and misguided. But is that what the Slut Walks are really attempting to do? Some women may be attempting to reclaim the word, but the much more powerful claim is that the marchers are attempting to undermine shame. The word slut is only valuable as a tool of oppression so long as it is tied to shame. To paraphrase Bob Marley’s, “no woman, no cry;” no shame, no oppression.

And men are learning from these movements. They are starting to recognize the shame men feel for being too un-masculine is not something that is natural or fixed. It is trained into us since the moment that someone says, “it’s a boy,” and the training continues until the day we die. If women are successful at reclaiming the word “slut,” they prove that this kind of shame is only a society-wide gender-induced mass hallucination.

There is a good deal to be said for shaming rapists and wife beaters. They deserve to be shamed, and society should continue to do so. However, this movement will be less powerful if it focuses on that shame. If this movement can stay focused on liberation from shame, it can be an inclusive movement. There will always be people like me who will march alongside women attempting to shame men for aggressive sexual behavior, but the majority of men (and women) is not interested in finger pointing even when it is legitimate. I’m not saying to stop shaming wife-beaters, pedophiles, and rapists. They are the worst kind of hyper-genderized men, and should not feel anything but regret for what they have done. What I am saying is that the movement can continue to focus on finding the bad guys, or it can take this moment and focus on doing better, and thereby deny shame as a tool to the forces of sexism.

The Future of Gender (as I see it)

Based on the last hundred or so postings, I have spotted two opposing trends. There is clearly some progress. I am always heartened at how substantial the movement is that I merely attempt to identify in this blog. But there is also some clear backfire. Ostriches don't really hide their heads in the sand when they are frightened, but they do run, and the radical regresivists are high tailing it right now.

There is so much progress on the way towards equal and plastic gender that it is difficult to document it all, but three examples provide an outline.

• Tolerance of Non-Traditional Genders: Main stream society now embraces, or merely rolls its eyes, at the idea of btqq and more than 40 other nontraditional genders, including hors gender categories like 3rd gender and intergendered. While I do not want to overstate how accepting society actually is, it is practically a revelation that some of these "good-ole-boys" don't form mobs and riot when we consider how threatening this must be.
  On an old episode of Ally McBeal, a transgendered kid appeared with nary a comment. Instead, the entire office just referred to her as "him" except when she was not around, and then of course, she succumbed to the popular notion that all non-traditionally gendered people are inviting violence when she was beaten to death at the end of the episode. While the mainstream loves to believe that they are accepting, their legitimate concerns for the safety of the non-traditionally gendered is sometimes genuine, and sometimes (as may have been the case on Ally McBeal) it is a cautionary tale. When those concerns fall into the latter camp, they resonate of the wisdom of a father who tells his daughter after she is raped that she shouldn't have been wearing that "trampy" outfit.
  Though this movement has a long way to climb, just the very fact that there is a rung on the ladder where gender is not tied to biological sex is titillating. Can you feel it? I'm practically shaking with titillation.
• Ambivalence Towards Gays and Lesbians: As a society, we now appear to love our gay stylists and lesbian comedians as much as we love to hate them. I don't think it's possible to overestimate the impact of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" on my life. Though the show perpetuated gay stereotypes, it also began to value typically feminine concepts in straight men. The notion that it was hip and fun for straight men to care about their dress was a revelation brought to us by our love of gay men, so long as they stay in their proper spheres. The main stream acceptance of a t.v. show featuring five gay men as experts (a practical Stonewall Riot of fashion advice) allowed America to pat itself on the back and say, "Look how far we've come."
  Still, we have grown to love certain kinds of gays, and that is surely progress. Hell, there's even the Log Cabin Republicans (a.k.a. the Banana Republicans) and when both parties are at least talking to gays and lesbians, there can be no doubt that progress is being made.
• The Feminist Successes: And of course, in many ways feminism is becoming a victim of it's own incredible successes. Hillary Clinton not only made a viable run for president but sits as another in a line of women serving as Secretary of State. Women are in more and more professional positions, including occupying almost 60% of our nation's colleges and universities. And despite the cries of the Reganites, children are still being raised without devolution into utter chaos. Yes, without a doubt, the feminist movement of the sixties and seventies has been an overwhelming success.

But the direct result of the progress of these movements was a series of sometimes unconscious and sometimes blatant backfires of regressivist thinking. Though it makes society seem incoherent, these trends are just as mainstream as the three trends above and many people embody each and every contradiction without any sign that their heads are about to lose cabin pressure. Our society loves contradiction like a geometry teacher loves plaid and stripes.

• New Manliness: I don't think that I am imagining it when I notice that many people expect men to revert back to 50's stereotypes. Men are expected to be warlike sports-adoring knights even as they are expected to be good dads (not fathers) and caring husbands. We are fine with women succeeding, just so long as it doesn't mean that men have to make any changes whatsoever. Cultural icons from all sides of the spectrum, from Sarah Palin and Judith Schafley, to Barack Obama and Sarah Jessica Parker, all continue to idealize men who practice traditional masculinity like it is a hobby. This movement is disturbing as much for its unrealistic expectations as its very real repercussions.
  Men cannot look to Ward Cleaver as an example of what it takes to be a good dad because there would be no Ward without June who now has a satisfying and meaningful out-of-the-home job. So men came back to an empty house. People expect men to be comforted by that. "No kids at home?" we're supposed to say. "Great! I can pop in that first person shooter I've been dying to try while I drink beer and watch porn on my 64" 3-D television."
  But it is sadder than that really. We just didn't think at all about what we expected men to be like in a society where women had been liberated because there was an inherently sexist tone at the base of the 1960's and 70's women's movement. Only a very few academics stopped to ask what men were missing out on. Men never asked themselves, "what are we missing when we leave girlie things to the women?" And the reason, of course, is that girlie things are inherently valueless except in so far as they can attain some socially recognized success. And by socially recognized, we mean recognized by men. So you see, in the end, there is no such thing as reverse sexism, it's just the same sexism, differently perceived. Kind of like the same M&M, but a different color shell.
• Girl Power: We have certainly recognized that Girls (big G) have power. Isn't that what the Spice Girls were all about? Lipstick, makeup, and toenail polish are all now being reclaimed as powerful objects of ornamentation that can promote a woman's career just like a good power tie can make or break a president. Right?
  If they were really acknowledged as powerful, then wouldn't the people in power be wearing them? Why isn't the president, or even the Secretary of State borrowing from this supposed "Girl Power?" How many women ceo's are wearing power FM Pumps while they walk into a boardroom?
  The answer to all these questions lies in the name of the movement itself. It is "Girl Power," not "Woman Power." We make it infantile because our image of a powerful woman is not an older woman at the helm of a fleet of merchant ships. She is supposed to be a child taking her power in a way that men can recognize (sexually), rather than a threat to the established hierarchy. Unforunately, "Girl Power" is not in contradiction to "Boy Power" as it at first sounds, but actually opposes "Woman Power."
  Another, more insidious version of "Girl Power" is the new long line of "Power Princesses." On top of targeting VERY young girls with an image that benefits the bottom line for traditional mega corporations, it exemplifies a vision of the powerful female as young and it shows their "power" as trivial and meaningless without men.
  I am baffled by the fact that nobody has thought to make it a movement about queens instead of princesses, and I am not talking about the elbow candy queens of the last century of French autocratic rule. I am talking about Queen Elizabeth I, perhaps the most powerful and successful monarch in European history. She managed to take England from an inconsequential island nation looking up at the dutch with eyes the size of saucers, to being the famed empire on which the sun never set. But if English monarchs aren't your taste, we've got Cleopatra (the real one, not the sexy one from the pornographic imagination of the "Greatest Generation"), Hatshepsut (yes, that Pharaoh does have breasts), and Isabella I (the discovery of the American trade route? Just something she thought up during her knitting circle).
  But of course, we know why we'd prefer to focus on Princesses. Because women with actual power scare us, even if they are VERY young. Worse than that, the reaction from the folks over at Disney to the criticisms of traditional princesses, has been to make the princes who were rescuing them powerless themselves. Make the man look powerless even while you make the woman actually powerless. The impact of this on children, boys in particular, but also girls who will eventually realize that the new Princess of Whales is just elbow candy to anti-democratic figureheads, is going to be interesting to watch as the current generation of kiddo's comes of age.
• The New Gender Code: All of this has accompanied a feeling among Americans that putting children into their particular gender roles is completely okay. It is practically impossible nowadays to buy boys clothing with any pink on it at all. Even Teddy Roosevelt, the great Rough Rider himself and defender of early 20th Century masculinity, photographed his infant sons in dresses (that infant in Teddy's eldest daughters lap, is his son Quentin). This desperate scramble to make sure that every child, no matter how young, is easily identifiable as boy or girl is a brand new movement. Considering that we are supposed to be in an era when gender doesn't matter, this seems at first like a flat out contradiction. However, it is the belief that gender is an inconsequential game which we all play, that enables this hyper-genderization of our young children. After all, children are supposed to play, and one of the things that children need to play at is gender. That is how they learn what it means to be a boy, girl, man, woman, and other (see the section on non-traditional genders above).
  But children are not playing at gender. Their parents are using their children as genderization test subjects. Infants don't buy their own camo fatigues and princess dresses. We do it for them, and when we do, we are sharing with them our priorities. We are explaining to them better than if we gave them a lecture on the immovability of gender traits that women are elbow candy, and men are warlike and aloof.
  There are others still who feel free to hyper-gender children because they don't think that gender is influenced by environment. This theory is based on books like "As Nature Made Him." Not even taking into account the horrible scientific methodology on which these books rely, none of us actually believe that gender is immovable, otherwise, like Teddy Roosevelt, we wouldn't point at parents who dress their infant boys in dresses and say, "You're messing that kid up." It wouldn't matter how we dressed our infant boys because they would grow up to be manly men (or less manly men) regardless of what we taught them to be. All girls would like pink and all boys would hate being kissed, regardless of how recently pink was actually a color associated with masculinity and how often full grown men in other cultures kiss each other as a sign of comradery.

So here's my prediction. I predict that the generation we are now raising will rebel. We are at a stage right now that is more gendered than at any time since the 1950's and in some ways advertising has made us more gendered than at any time in America's history. But the genie is out of the bottle. As the young people in the preschools, and elementary schools today grow into adulthood and go to college, too many of them will read Gloria Steinem, Catherine MacKinnon, and Susan Faludi to keep this whole gender liberation thing a secret. That knowledge will spread and we will have a gender rebellion on our hands that is as significant as the hippies and bra burners (note; very few bras were actually burnt).

That is the extent of my rather whimpy prediction. This generation will rebel against its parents (now that's controversial), and it will be so incredibly creative and exciting that none of us are able to say for sure exactly how it will be done. Most of us will be terrified of it (because if we are not, it won't be rebellion), and all of us will think to ourselves in our grumpy ways, "kids today." Even those of us who want a rebellion against today's hyper-genderization will utter complaints like, "These kids don't know what a rebellion looks like. I remember back in the day..." The cycle will continue. The only thing you have to ask yourself is, will you be on the right side of history?