Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Rocking the Boat. By which I mean I also enjoy a good facial

Category labels: Bisexuality, Community, D/s dynamics, Gender fluidity, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex, Sexism

Eileen is always berating me for being an ass. It’s true: I’m kind of an ass. I’m probably mostly an ass when I’m wiggling my bum at her trying to get attention so she’ll spank me or fuck me or something like that, but she claims I’m also often an ass when I’m writing in mailing lists or leaving comments on people’s blogs. This is fair, I like to rock the boat—I’ll admit I enjoy the confrontational style of debates.

I very recently did exactly this (although I was much nicer than I could have been) on a local young-persons-in-Sydney group’s mailing list. I remarked that I had done so, and due to popular demand and interest with regards to my remarks, am going to share a single edited excerpt of that thread here. In case anyone is local and cares to join the group, here is my original post.

The year is 2008. The place is Sydney, Australia. The topic is male bisexuality in the BDSM community. The population of the scene here…well, the population of the country is barely the size of the state I came from. These people are not “simple, country folk” by any stretch of the imagination, yet I can’t help but feel as though I’ve been transported to a kink scene from ten years ago:

Congratulations in advance to those of you who actually follow and read the linked references. Those of you who don’t will assume I am just rocking the boat. I am, of course (rocking the boat that is)—though I’m trying to do so while adding significant substance to the conversation.

On Aug 4, 2008, at 5:07 PM, Person A wrote:

In my brief time in the sydney bdsm scene, i’ve noticed girls are a lot more willing to play with other girls than guys are to play with other guys. why do yo think this is? Do you think bisexuality is more comon in girls in the vanila world too. Do girls who engage in bdsm play with other girls even consider themselves bisexual. looking forward to your comments

for the record I am 100% straight male.

So is my male dom top friend who is dating a boy. Though labels like “staight” or “bi” can be useful, they are ultimately meaningless. It’s actions, not words, that define people and who they are.

Person A then wrote:

I’d feel uncomfy playing with a guy, even if just tieing me up etc. how do other guys feel.

Lots of “straight” guys feel this way while encouraging girls to get it on with one another, and if you haven’t noticed most guys in the BDSM community you’re a part of are straight. Perhaps that’s why you’ve noticed that girls are a lot more willing to play with other girls than guys are to play with other guys. Huh. Imagine that.

See also this satire: http://bloodylaughter.com/2007/07/26/eureka/

On Aug 4, 2008, at 5:34 PM, Person B wrote:

that’s because girls are just the more attractive sex, is my guess.

Person B, we’re both lucky we don’t really know each other because it makes it a lot easier for me to tell you that you’re being an ass right now.

On Aug 4, 2008, at 7:54 PM, Person B tried to redeem his statements by qualifying them like this:

I meant that in the most objective way possible, which is not to say that I don’t find certain guys attractive and would even consider certain BDSM scenarios involving that person, but it happens very
very rarely for me and he’d have to be pretty fit. And I think most girls would agree with me that girls tend to be more attractive than guys in general. Is that true or have just been speaking to the the wrong girls?

You’re oozing the kind of heteronormativity that makes me dislike heteronormative spaces—like this list right now. Personal preferences are one thing, but trying to pass these off as “statements intended in the most objective way possible” belies your ignorance. Again, I say that heteronormative culture encourages exactly this kind of thinking.

See also:

http://maybemaimed.com/2007/08/21/i-want-to-be-a-pretty-boy/
http://maybemaimed.com/2007/12/12/the-rules-of-flirting-are-sexist-and-wrong/
http://bitchyjones.wordpress.com/2007/07/17/the-unfairest-of-them-all/

On Aug 4, 2008, at 6:02 PM, Person C wrote:

hi all, long time lurker first time poster. I consider myself a straight male as i can’t really see myself being with a male sexually without bondage being a huge part. It was something that i was very nervous about until my Mistress at the time introduced me to the concept of playing firstly with couples and then eventually she was happy (as was i) for me to play solely with makes. Fem Dom’s are still my preference however my desire to please outways if there are dangly bits or not. Now i’m “out” i hope to catch up with some of you soon

And then, right on cue, on Aug 4, 2008, at 6:33 PM, Person D wrote:

Here’s my theories.

Girl on girl is a bit more socially acceptable than guy on guy due to the fact with guys there is the implied image of things up the arse.

Yes, exactly. God forbid something goes the “wrong way” up a man’s butt. Of course, every straight guy knows women’s asses are a two way street.

This is precisely why the feared “image of things up the [guy's] arse” has become the femdom cumshot in porn, and it’s where this (insulting) notion of “forced bi”—which is pretty much exclusively a femdom/malesub dynamic—comes from. Now, I love getting fucked in my ass, but I love getting fucked on my penis, too. In other words, being the person who does the penetrating does not equate to having power, or masculinity. Perverting (and I use that word deliberately) anatomy to create falsehoods of power imbalance is nothing more complicated than plain stupid.

See also:
http://bloodylaughter.com/2007/07/11/fuck-him/
http://maybemaimed.com/2007/08/12/pegging-gets-mainstream-attention-and-kinky-porn-gets-rightfully-slapped-upside-its-head/

Portions removed at the author’s request.

You’ve hit the nail on the head, though you’re not tying it all together quite yet. This is the same masculine heteronormative sexuality that defines male sexuality based on dominance and power, only it’s now happening in reverse. Where the former circumstance is one in which a man is dominant and thus validates hegemonic masculinity, this circumstance is one in which a man is submissive to another even more masculine/dominant/powerful man and thus validates hegemonic masculinity. As far as genders studies students are concerned, this is just a situation where you have six of one thing and half dozen of the other.

In other words, men’s fantasies that are geared around being submissive to a “real man” merely enforce the hegemonic masculine stereotype. Now, that’s not bad (it’s quite sexy—I personally love the idea of submitting to a strong, dominant, het guy I find physically attractive) it’s just very, well, we’ve all been there and done that.

See also:
http://bitchyjones.wordpress.com/2008/07/18/submissive-men-and-the-humanity-gap/
http://maybemaimed.com/2007/12/18/how-an-outdated-view-of-masculinity-ignores-the-needs-of-all-men/

Anyway, for more insights on gender and male sexuality, see this 10 minute video:

http://maybemaimed.com/2007/12/06/transgender-basics/

Regards,
–
-maymay
Blog: http://maybemaimed.com
Volunteering: http://ConversioVirium.org/author/maymay

Comments (6)

Monday, June 9, 2008

Sexism at Large in American Politics: Armed and Dangerous

Category labels: BDSM in the media, BDSM safety, Masculinity, Politics of sex, Sexism, Vanilla life

I’ve never been extremely thorough about pursuing political current events, but I’m finding myself ever more personally withdrawn from American politics now that I’m living in Sydney and no longer living in America. However, I actually feel more knowledgeable about American politics now than I did when I lived in New York City, mostly because local people here won’t stop asking my opinions on things.

It’s funny to me, how much Australians are interested in the happenings in America. I suppose that makes sense, but as an American who (like the stereotype) never really realized how much of an influence America was to the rest of the world, it’s taking me a little by surprise.

Anyway, needless to say, I’ve been keeping up (a bit) with the Democratic national primary. It’s hard not to. The whole world was practically sitting on the edge of its seat wondering who will win. A black man or a white woman as candidates give rise to only two topics in the right’s conservative hypocrisy: racism and sexism.

This was such a heated race that I’ve even received regular emails from some people in my extended family about it. Their emails are extremely strongly-worded short essays with arguments as to why I should or shouldn’t vote for Obama or Clinton (though mostly only because of the candidates’ opinions on Israel, which I couldn’t really care much about anyway). I’m thinking of telling them to start a blog.

I really have no opinion one way or the other about the merits of either candidate—I’m simply not very well informed. That said, Debra Haffner linked this 5-minute video produced by the Women’s Media Center showcasing myriad clips of all the sexist remarks made about Hillary during her campaign. I rarely link videos in this blog, but this one is worth your time.

There’s a lot of sexist language harassing women in this video, since its goal is to showcase how the media is sexist against women. However, that’s just half the story. There’s at least an equal if not greater amount of sexist language in today’s media against men since, obviously, most public political discussion happens about and between men. Where’s the highlight reel of political pundits proclaiming that some candidate “doesn’t have the balls” to do something brave?

One reason I’m more than a little withdrawn from politics is because I know I’ll never be elected to public office. Even if I had the aspirations, I would simply never survive a smear campaign. I mean, look at this blog!

Indeed, back in the “good old days” when I used to stay at Paddles, the local NYC public BDSM club until 4 AM, that was even a joke. The lot of us, my friends and I, would stumble up the stairs in the dark and then burst out onto the street like mole-people, bleary eyed from a long night. We used to joke with another, “Well, I’m certainly not running for public office after tonight!” the implication being that we’ve done yet another thing that would get us booted immediately if the word got out.

While this threat is meaningless to me, since I don’t want to be in public office anyway, I have met more than a few people over the years for whom this is a real concern. They remain anonymous to this day precisely because they do, at some point, want to be in public office in order to make our government better, and most of them don’t even want to get into the areas of sexual rights. They’ll never have a blog like this, though, because having a blog like this—doing what I’m doing right now—means I’ll never win a race for public office.

But hey. I still get to vote. And of course, I will.

Comments (3)

Thursday, February 7, 2008

Firsts are always changes

Category labels: Community, D/s dynamics, Emotions, Femdom, Kink events, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Masturbation, Personal experience, Relationship, Sex, Uncategorized, Writing and blogging

One of the reasons I’m so interested in kink and sexuality is because it’s implicitly a big part of my life. It’s everywhere and nowhere at the very same time, not unlike how many people understand god. For me, my sexuality is akin to my religion: self-expression (and particularly sexual self-expression) is my prayer, I am my own god, and the pleasure-positive, queer-friendly, self-empowering communities of which I am a part are my Church.

I like the references to religious imagery apparent in much of my play even though the thought of religion in my sex life makes me feel viscerally repulsed. I won’t do religious-themed play (naughty priests, nuns, and even Rabbis spring to mind—all potentially sexy for some people if not for me), but I understand the impetus of those who do. I like getting wings, being referred to as an obedient angel, or the idea of being nailed to a cross. I am no martyr, for martyrdom and ultimate self-sacrifice is in many ways the epitome of what I find repugnant; I ask to be hurt, to be beat, to be etched and marked, because it’s what I want, not something I dislike that’s merely a path to something “more.”

Parts of my life, like kink, present themselves in interesting ways sometimes. They’re like habits, much in the way going to the gym is something that is at first difficult but over time becomes habitual and—not necessarily in a negative context—addictive. If I don’t get my kink fix for a while, I start getting antsy. The physical catharsis of a good beating goes hand-in-hand with emotional catharsis of some kind. It’s one way that I experience the connection between the body and the mind.

What I’ve found over the past few weeks is that, at least for now, writing about these experiences and continuing my own introspective explorations about myself, my sexuality, and how I relate to the world around me (as well as why the world around me is so fucked up), is similarly emotional cathartic. Yes, I’ll admit it: I blog as a form of self-treatment. And I’ve been itching to start writing again.

However, I’m a horribly change-averse person at my core, in spite of the fact that I am also occasionally an eager risk-taker. When I stopped writing often, it became difficult to start up again. So many pieces of my life are scattered about the floor around me, in piles waiting to be sorted, packed, and shipped off to the other side of the planet (I’m moving to Sydney, Australia, from New York City), that I desperately wanted to maintain some semblance of continuity and order among the change and chaos.

You’d think, naturally, that with all the preparations to be made, the telephone, Internet, gas and electric, and other utility accounts to close down, the bank accounts to open and close, the taxes to complete for the previous year, the stuff to move, the apartments (and jobs?) to find on the other side of the world, and everything else I have to do to move my whole life from one of Earth’s hemispheres to the other, that I wouldn’t be able to squeeze in time for more play. In fact, I expected to be so busy that kink would have to take a back-seat to the rest of my life until I was settled again. Boy, was I wrong.

In the past few weeks, I’ve played more often than I have in the past half-year. Furthermore, I’ve played with more people in less time than I ever have before—the exact figure would have been even higher had there been the time. I lament the fact that it’s only now, with my imminent retreat from the in many ways stifling New York City scene that I’ve suddenly experienced an explosion of play partner possibilities who are not only fun and intriguing but who also seem to actively desire playing with men who bottom or, (gasp!) are actually submissive and self-respecting. C’est la vie….

The experiences are not all incredibly intense in and of themselves, but the experience of my own broadening “promiscuity” and apparent desirability is incredibly disorienting, and surprisingly uncomfortable at the same time that it is very welcome. After repeated conversations about the topic, in which I often express confusion, doubt, and glee at the situation, the best I can come up with is that “I’m not used to being liked at so intensely,” to borrow one of Rona’s lovely grammatical idioms. Of course, I’m not oblivious to the reasons: I’m relatively good-looking even if I still don’t consider myself “hot”, I have a pretty wide and (to some) intense range of things I enjoy doing, and I’m an all-around decent person.

What’s so astonishing to me, then, is that other people have taken note of these things, too. Actually being in demand by people who’ve never even heard of me before, as opposed to being merely available, is a lovely, self-affirming experience. It’s the ego-boost I’ve heard so many women talk about. And I’m not too proud to admit that it was really, really nice to have.

The weekend after the Flea in Rhode Island, I went to a weekend-long private party near Boston, having been invited by a friend along with Eileen, and the experience (much of which is the foundation for the feelings expressed in this post) was the exact opposite of what I expected. Instead of feeling shunned, I felt wanted. I played each night, each night feeling a bit more comfortable than the one before, until on Sunday night I not only got beat in ways that made me moan when I moved for days, I also had my first semi-public orgasm and outright sexual experience with someone I’d just met.

Oh, it was tame, and relatively short-lived, but the fact remains that it was the first of its kind: invited to join Eileen and the top both she and I had met (and played with) earlier in the party on the floor in a corner of one of the party rooms, I lay back and the two of them proceeded to rub and caress my bruised body while he (the top) pressed a Hitachi Magic Wand against my penis. A few minutes later, while I was just beginning to start writhing in pleasure on the floor, my friend from Kink in Exile, who had just gotten through beating my thighs and ass with one of her metal pipes, joined our corner and took a spot rubbing my chest, nipples, and sides.

I was uncomfortable being the center of so much explicitly sexual attention. Three people, one of whom I didn’t even know before the weekend started and another whom I’d seen in person for only the second time, were now sitting around me while I lay on the floor and braced myself against the vibrator’s insistent buzzing. And at first, I really was bracing against it.

“This is not very like me,” I was thinking. It was weird and uncomfortable, and I wondered if they were actually enjoying this anyway, letting me just lie back and enjoy myself with almost no words exchanged about it. “Maybe there are expectations I’m not aware of. That’d be bad!” I closed my eyes early on to try to fend off any triggers for more doubt, and not being able to see is something that helps me turn inwards, to focus on the sensations in my body rather than the thoughts in my mind.

It took me a long time to shove the nuisance of my own self-doubt out of my head in order to relax enough to enjoy what they were doing. At the start I was giggly and clearly nervous, but they all reassuringly told me to hush. The orgasm built slowly, but as a result it was fierce and explosive and wonderful and it left me a little dizzy.

After it was over and I came back down from the high of the beatings and the orgasm, the newness of the experience struck me most clearly: I’m changing, too. For years, even though I’ve had due cause, I’d been walled off and detached from the social and sexual possibilities and opportunities laid out before me. No, they aren’t always there in such massive quantity as they were at this party for the first time, but I know they were there.

Maybe I’m starting to be ready to really say “yes” to a lot of the things I wanted but wasn’t ready for before. It took the right people, in the right place, at the right time, to make it happen. Just as it did when Eileen and I first met.

Comments (2)

Friday, January 4, 2008

America’s Sexual Sampler Platter: Everything but Me is on the Menu

Category labels: BDSM in the media, Bitter and jealous, D/s dynamics, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex, Rant, Sexism

I get that New Years is a time of resolution, a time when people feel compelled by the time of year to make themselves better. The holidays are over, all that weight is back around your midsection, and there’s never been a better time to get back in shape, to stop that bad habit, to become better with women, to…on and on and on.

On the second of January I received an astonishingly fitting pair of postal letters. The first letter was the new catalogue of The Stockroom, one of the largest online sex toy retailers, and the second letter was from a local church that promised me blessings for using their special prayer rug. Dear readers, I kid you not! Of course, I promptly tossed the Jesus-decorated prayer rug in the trash, flipped through the Stockroom’s catalogue until I got bored seeing women tied up, and then gave it to Eileen, since she’s far more excited by that idea than I will ever be.

I suppose it should strike me as not at all odd that I’m seeing a disturbing influx of sexist, incendiary material fill every possible orifice of my news feeds. Most infuriating of all is that it’s not even that much more than usual, which is to say that the litany of aggravating material I’ll briefly discuss below is far more often the rule rather than the exception and that, itself, is the most depressing thing about them.

First, via The Sex Carnival, this Boinkology post links to SellYourSexTape.com with more cheerful humor than I could ever muster. It showcases with quite explicit flair exactly how marginalized a sexuality like mine is, as if there wasn’t enough of that already.

[…]if you want to make the big money ($2000, for the curious), you’ll have to document your sex life for an hour a day for an entire week, making sure to keep it interesting. Bonus points for shots of “daily life” and minimal shots of the boyfriend — this is straight porn, after all.

Oh, and kinksters need not apply: “Sex scenes should be natural and loving and happy, no violence, but don’t forget the money shots! Do not include anything illegal or “obscene”. ie. no interspecies, no golden showers, no forced sex, etc.”

Once again we have these time-honored, incredibly insulting assumptions about porn and sexuality. Men consume, women are the product. Anything that isn’t straight, hetero-normative sex is “unnatural,” or “obscene.” Rougher, more “violent” sex is okay so long as it’s the woman on the bottom, for “the money shot,” but if you can call it kinky then it’s immediately cut. No concern is ever paid to the woman’s sexual satisfaction, as long as we get to see the man ejaculating. Also, we don’t want to look at men because men aren’t sexy, they’re just facilitators; a man’s value is in his finances.

In an even more mainstream outlet, Tom found the kicker when he came across AskMen.com’s recent article called, of all things, How to Dominate and Dominant Woman. Augh! As Tom put it rather succinctly:

Because, you know, [women] all secretly want to be submissive. Not to mention that they will respect men who do this.

I could barely get through the introduction to this article without gritting my teeth:

We often associate dominant women with whips, chains and a pitiful man groveling at their feet while licking a pair of vinyl boots. This certainly occurs with some regularity, but you may be surprised to learn that dominance doesn’t always translate into sadism. On the contrary, many dominant women play the superior role in relationships simply because their man hasn’t learned how to dominate them. She may be strong-willed, feisty and independent, but this doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to be ravished like any other female might. If you’re ready to take charge in the bedroom, the following tips will show you precisely how to sexually dominate a dominant woman.

It’s precisely this kind of narrow-mindedness that keeps both men and women enslaved to gender ideals that make only a very small percentage of real men and women happy. In one fell swoop, this introduction alone manages to insult just about every possible orientation I can think of, including submissive men (by calling us “pitiful”), dominant women (by implying they should be playing an “inferior” role in a relationship), and dominant men (by stating rather explicitly that not dominating a dominant woman means they haven’t been ready to “take charge” yet). I think the only insult I’m not seeing is one aimed at submissive women—but that’s probably because they’re so inconsequential anyway that their influence doesn’t really matter in the first place.

(Elizabeth, please do an 87-part series on this. Please. PLEASE!)

From yet another corner of the blogosphere I was shown this “orgasmic experience simulator” that, while obviously someone’s idea of a joke, basically denigrates the male sexual experience as devoid of diverse value even though it seems to be making fun of the female orgasm at first glance. The simulator is a simple two buttons, one for experiencing orgasm as a male and another as a female. Click the male button and your browser window shakes just a smidgen and you’re presented with the following JavaScript alert box:

Total Time (including undressing, dressing and somking a cigarette): 58 seconds

Press the female button and you’re guided through numerous jump-through-the-hoops alert dialogues that ends in a climactic window-shaking experience. This is an example of the prevalence of the misguided belief that men are all the same, the same belief that has that disgusting AskMen.com article thinking the only submissive men are pitiful examples of masculinity.

But wait, there’s more!

Lolita found a video about which she asks “is it bondage porn, or an Agent Provocateur video?” Once again, all I see is blatantly misogynistic understandings of sex, with (once again) submissive women centerfolds. What’s striking about this instance is that it is so obviously an advertisement directed towards both men and women, yet it is still women on which the camera unapologetically focuses throughout the entire video. The message is, once again, crystal clear: it’s the female form and only the female form worth embracing for the singular purpose of abating the carnal desire of men.

Poor, hapless, helpless men, one might think! In both the vanilla world and the kink world men are treated very much the same: as victims of their own biology, always thinking with the wrong head. Control sex, it’s thought, and you control a man, because sex is worth more to men than anything else. How much more? Good question!

Thankfully, Eileen showed me this post of Bad Man’s that links to CostOfSex.com, which has a handy calculator to show us exactly how much time, effort, and money men spend each day on their high-priced hookers called girlfriends and wives. Oh, and hookers. Can’t forget the hookers. The takeaway from this link is that the message of men-as-monetary-value and women-as-sexual-value is so ingrained in men themselves, that they are taking a perverted sense of pride in their efforts to get the most sex for the least amount of money. That is, after all, exactly how men are taught to prove their manliness!

Lest you think that it’s only people like you and me who can see the sexism here, note that the CostOfSex.com calculator is courtesy of a site that calls itself Mr. Sexist. They sell T-Shirts. Want to know my favorite?

I’ve got an 8-inch thick wallet.

I do realize cultural and sexual progress doesn’t happen at the blindingly fast pace that we’re all used to technological advancements happening, but, seriously…if this is what 2008 has in store for me, I’m going to keep wishing I could hibernate until 3008 rolls around. Again, I do realize some of these are jokes—and yes, they’re kind of funny in that “I’m only half-joking” sort of way. What hurts me right now about all of these things is the insurmountable disparity of privilege in regards to sexual power—in what ways power is or is not okay to be shared or expressed—that results in the stigmatization or, worse, the invisibility of submissive men like me (and, for that matter, dominant women, too).

Will it really take ’til 3008 to stop hurting?

Comments (4)

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

If this is 2008, then I don’t have any resolutions

Category labels: Masculinity, Technology, Vanilla life

On a little bit too much bubbly and more beers than I’d like to admit, I feel almost obligated to wish everyone a happy oncoming 2008. It’s here, of course, whether we like it or not. Time is such an uncontrollable thing, at least for now.

In any event, Eileen points out to me that New Years celebrations seem almost too arbitrary to matter, to which my only conceivable response has thus far been to ask her why other holidays don’t seem quite as arbitrary to her. Solstice celebrations, which are nothing more than a naturally occurring event despite the significance of Christmas and Channukah or what-have-you that people tend to associate with them, are no more meaningful in my eyes than the New Years holiday. The same is true of other givens, such as the decimal number system we are accustomed to using, which evolved thanks to the fact that we have ten fingers on two hands, nothing more, nothing less; after all, computers use binary, since that’s easier to count with electrical circuitry.

So instead of resolutions this year, I thought I’d share with everyone a poem that Eileen shared with me a few days ago. It’s moving, pertinent, and hopeful. Happy New Years, everyone.

If by Rudyard Kipling

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
Comments (8)

Saturday, December 29, 2007

The Sexism of Politeness

Category labels: Masculinity, Personal experience, Politics of sex, Sexism, Vanilla life

There’s been some interesting talk of the so-called “Politics of Politeness” by Rona, inspired by Dev’s comment on a recent post of mine. In the spirit of story telling, I want to share two relevant brief anecdotes that have been burned into my memory for all time.

When I was just getting into the job market after dropping out of school, one of my early jobs was that of a lowly office technician. I was handy with the computers, but I was also handy at running errands. On several occasions, I would fetch lunches or coffee from Starbucks for my office-mates and bosses.

One time, the office had a particularly large order for Starbuck’s Coffee. I was sent out to retrieve it. The order overflowed two trays (that’s 8 drinks plus snacks) and was a challenge to carry, but I managed. I managed, that is, until I got to the doorway of our office building.

The doorway was manned by a security guard. Not a doorman, mind you, a security guard. When I reached the door and tried to open it, I couldn’t. I was juggling too many things in my hands to get the door open without dropping or spilling this thing or that. I glanced over at the security guard on the other side of the glass but despite making eye contact he made no motion toward me, so I tried the door again.

Then, out of nowhere, this tall blonde woman was beside me holding only a small purse, standing in front of the doors. Suddenly the security guard had the door wide open, the woman walked through it without ever acknowledging either of us, and the security guard let go of the door before I even stepped inside. Thankfully, I was small and quick enough to literally slide through the open doorway as it was closing.

Now, all of this happened in the span of about thirty seconds or so, so there is more story here than there is necessarily fact. Nevertheless, I will remember those few seconds for the rest of my life because of the incredible rush of frustration I felt in that moment. What assholes, I was thinking to myself, the security guard for being utterly sexist and the woman for her pretentious attitude of entitlement.

In my generous moments, I think that perhaps the security guard thought I would be insulted if he offered unsolicited help in opening the door and perhaps the woman, for her part, was simply very busy. But I doubt both of these things.

Another similar moment happened not long ago when Eileen, Sinclair, and I were leaving one of Viviane’s recent tea parties. We were putting on our coats and since I had exited the party last, I was the last one to finish getting bundled up in preparation for the cold outside. Then I noticed that Sinclair was holding my coat up.

For a moment, I froze and wasn’t sure what to do. After the surprise had passed, however, I continued putting on my coat with Sinclair’s help and thanked her for the gesture. Never before had anyone who I wasn’t already very close to held my coat up for me this way, and I remarked on the fact.

What’s funny is that I can remember many times when I have done exactly that for other people and then upon further reflection, I remember, mostly for women (though at times close male friends, too). It is as though, lacking any kind of other information about one’s chosen gender role, I defaulted to this behavior while interacting with feminine-identified people I didn’t know well and not with masculine-identified people I didn’t know well because social mores have taught me to do exactly that. Only once I became friendly with a man, and our relationship changed to a more intimate one (even if not a romantic or sexual one), did I begin to behave in a more gender-agnostic way.

That observation, when applied elsewhere, held true for many other things as well. When saying goodbye to friends, I’m more likely to ask, “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?” if I’m speaking to a woman and more likely to ask, “Are you sure you know your way?” when speaking to a man. I generally wish everyone “safe travels” regardless of their gender, and obviously there are other factors at play here (that men are also susceptible to), but the observation is an interesting one nevertheless.

The conclusion, I think, is that politeness is perceived to be a facet of social interaction that is inexorably linked to gender. In other words, politeness is sexist (or more precisely, genderist) since to do or not do something polite is dependent upon one’s social presentation. That’s an incredibly variable thing.

Assuming that the security guard who didn’t hold the door for me did see me (because, damn, did I ever feel invisible after that!), either he didn’t open the door for me because he was an asshole or he didn’t open the door because he thought that I would feel it impolite if he did, because I was a man. Similarly, he opened the door for the woman because that is what’s “supposed to be” polite in that context.

No one is surprised to hear that gender affects social dynamics, but many people have trouble seeing how other people could possibly have a different understanding than they do. If you open the door for a woman, she may be flattered, or she may be insulted. In such situations where a positive or a negative outcome could result from one’s actions, what is one to do? That’s a tough question!

I think the best generalized solution has been around for a very long time, and Rona got it exactly right when she cited the solution as the golden rule:

Really, though, I think it should come down to the golden rule - treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself… or possibly even better. Don’t adjust your behavior to suit the gender, adjust it to respect the individual.

What this means in the situation with the security guard is that, if I assume his understanding of gender dynamics to be the ones he displayed, he did exactly the right thing. Similarly, if I were in his shoes, I would want someone for whom I did not open the door to first assume I did so out of positive intent. In other words, to make mismatches like this one go over smoothly, we really have to assume everyone’s innocent until proven guilty.

And hey, isn’t that one of those universal human rights? This is, of course, admittedly much more work than just blanketing every social interaction we have with binaries of “polite” or “not polite,” but that’s the price we have to pay for the invaluable benefits of being a social species.

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Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Harlem, 2 AM, and Group Dynamics

Category labels: Masculinity, Myths and misconceptions, Personal experience, Politics of sex, Sexism, Vanilla life

It’s Harlem, New York City, and it’s nearly 2 AM. I’m at a friend’s house, having just enjoyed a very fun Christmas day dinner that she and her boyfriend cooked for a few other guests and I. We were served chicken, vegetable cous-cous, mashed potatoes, wine, ice cream, cake, amaretto, and tea. It was delicious, and I’m tipsy, tired, and ready to head home.

I’m only 40 blocks from my apartment, I’m thinking, the subway will take forever, and I’d rather not spend the cash on a cab. I can walk it. So, even though this isn’t something I usually do, I decide to travel on foot.

I call Eileen on my cell phone because she called me moments before I left my friend’s apartment and because I want to talk to her before we each go to bed. After walking a short while, I’ve passed two large groups of hispanic and black men congregated on the sidewalks, never breaking stride and never breaking somewhat idle conversation about something or other with Eileen. I notice one man who is talking to another man eyeing me and then I note that his compatriot turns to look at me, but I continue by and nothing happens.

This is what’s expected. I’m a slender white Jewish boy, five-foot-eight-inches tall with long, curly red hair, glasses, and a long wool coat. I don’t look like I should be out in the middle of Harlem at 2 AM. What was I thinking?

Yet nothing happens. Nothing happens until I’m almost half-way through my journey and, having passed yet another group of almost a dozen rowdy men or so, am feeling somewhat more secure in my march towards home. I mean, I’m not so far away, and it’s not that bad a neighborhood (I’m even about to pass another friend’s house right now), and no one is really out to get me, and certainly not me specifically. What could happen?

I notice a group of six or so girls up ahead. I think almost nothing of it, as I typically don’t. Any real threat comes from men, I’ve been taught to think, since they are the ones who are violent, they are the ones who commit crimes, they are the ones the media has told me to fear.

I walk closer to the group of girls on my way towards home, making sure to stay on the side of the sidewalk closest to the street, furthest away from them. I’m just going home and I want nothing to do with these people. There’s nothing they have that I want and nothing I have that I could imagine them wanting. So what’s the worry?

I notice a taller girl, clearly hispanic, with long curly black hair and wearing a North Face down coat looking at me as I approach. What’s the worry, I remind myself, I’m just a curiosity in these parts at this hour. So I walk on.

As I pass them, my focus is fixed firmly within my peripheral vision, yet I’m still talking to Eileen on my cell phone. This girl’s fixed attention draws the attention of the others and now they’re all looking at me. In an instant, one girl from the small crowd crosses my path not half a foot in front of me and makes a loud noise in my direction, her face nearly pressed right against mine for a moment. I give her a somewhat quizzical but annoyed glance and keep walking.

In the next instant, somewhere between all the yelling that has suddenly and conspicuously begun too abruptly to be coincidence, I hear another girl yell, “Your nose needs surgery!” I look to my left to see one of the girls standing next to me with her arm raised in a fist. I put up my hand in a defensive posture, feel my breath catch, and my heart race. I hear the tall girl with the long black curls say with a grin in her tone, “Don’t you know you shouldn’t ever raise your hands up like that to a woman?!”

Then I feel a light pat on my butt and a cacophony of laughter. I whirl around to face all of these girls, unsure of what to do. “Jesus fucking christ,” I mutter to myself—on Christmas night no less—but keep walking onwards at an even more quickened pace. There are more shouts after me. I turn back around and hurry off.

Eileen is asking if I’m okay. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m fine…. Will you stay on the phone with me ’til I get home?”

I talk as much as I can on the way home even though, now, I am having two distinct conversations. One conversation is the one I have out loud with Eileen, the one my cell phone carries over the wire to her ear. The other is my internal monologue asking questions about what just happened.

Why was it all so appearance-centric? Men, as they have done once in the past, would have demanded money, confrontation, or physical altercation, but these girls were entirely gender-focused, even going so far as bringing up our different sexes vocally. How much of this has to do with race and how much with sexism, for that matter? Furthermore, how much of my reaction, and my fear, has to do with over sensitivity, my lack of a thick-skin, versus a real, perceptible threat? How much is real?

Is it my fault? I bet I just look like an easy target; what do people who aren’t easy targets look like? How can I be more like them? Do I want to? Should I have to? Why did they do this? Was it just for laughs, some harmless immature prodding at my expense? That wasn’t typical feminine behavior; one of them touched my ass! Where did these girls learn that? I have to wonder about how many times each and every one of the girls in that group has had the same experience I just had. How many men have touched them inappropriately?

I’m home now, and I’m fine, yet my mind is still having these thoughts and more. I’m tired and somewhat frazzled from the sudden rush of flight-or-fight impulses coursing through my veins. These girls were just hooligans, probably no real danger.

At some point, analyzing this exchange under a less drunken and more cognitive mindset might prove fascinating. The sexism, the racism, the group dynamics. It’s all fascinating.

But for right now, I’m just thankful to be home safely.

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Sunday, December 23, 2007

The boy next door is also bisexual

Category labels: Bisexuality, Communication, Community, Gender fluidity, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex, Polyamory, Sex

Today I was wandering around the blogosphere and found a link via The Sex Carnival to this report on a poll about the prevalence of bisexuality that made me stop and think. The brief article touches on quite a few topics that I am finding immediately relevant. These topics are:

  • Hostility towards bisexual-identified people, most confusingly from gay- and lesbian-identified people.
  • A lack of cohesion and inertia in the bisexual community, who often identify with some other community instead (gay, lesbian, kinky, poly, etc.).
  • The harm that is caused by a simplistic understanding of communication, particularly when using language.

These topics are of obvious interest to me because they each affect my social spaces. One of the more startling findings of the poll is that there are apparently more than twice as many bisexual women as there are bisexual men. Or at least, of course, more than twice as many that feel comfortable identifying themselves as such in this poll.

The poll of 768 people, conducted last month, shows in its adjusted final tally that 15.4 percent of respondents are bisexual men and 33.5 percent are bisexual women.

In my personal experience this ratio is even more skewed, but I’m willing to give this finding some credence. To be brain-dead simplistic about the issue, one can say that women who identify as bisexual have an easier time of coming out about it because they just don’t face criticisms from as many fronts as men who identify as bisexual do. Specifically, bisexual women are stereotypically stigmatized only by lesbians, whereas bisexual men are stigmatized by both gay men and by straight men.

One of my strongest dissatisfactions with many of the gay men I’ve interacted with is their blindness towards gender fluidity and how that affects eroticism. This is perhaps one reason why I find myself having trouble finding these men sexy after they open their mouths. They seem so singularly focused on their own version of the masculine ideal that they ignore what I find to be important pieces of my femininity that are necessary to my own erotic fulfillment. The exceptions are the gay men who seem to enjoy femme-y boys, but even in these instances coming out as bisexual seemed to disqualify me to them.

“It’s sad to me that gays and lesbians have such a hard time standing by their bi brothers and sisters,” she said, “because we are really in this fight together, about having our love lives and families validated and respected, no matter what gender we love.”

On the flip side, I have intense trouble socializing with straight men. Consistently, the only straight men who I seem to be able to get along with are the ones who are either sensitive to issues of gender or sexuality (such as those already involved in a sexuality community) or those with whom I can talk technology. When my coworkers invited me out to bars, I declined because the conversation would not have been technology as it was (by necessity) in the office, and that would have quickly become uncomfortable.

In other words, sex is social. That’s a concept I want to explore in further depth later on, but for now suffice it to say that for people with a sex drive, an element of social interactions is sexuality, whether they realize it or not.

Another major issue this article touches upon is the fact that there are very few organized bisexual communities in comparison to other sexuality communities, and that the ones that do exist are fairly small. The most striking example of this was that at the last New York City LGBT Pride March, the bisexual contingent had a grand total of four (4!) people marching in it.

Even the BDSM contingent, who typically have one of the smallest groups in the parade (not including the “leather” sections, though I’m still confused as to why BDSM is contained within leather instead of the other way around), always have at least a dozen people or more marching with them. To be fair, I marched with the BDSM group instead of the bisexual group, and therein lies an example of the lack of visibility of the bisexual community.

I think that, by our nature, almost every one of us holds some other label equally important to us as the bisexual label. I am not just bisexual, I’m kinky, too. Most bisexual men I know are not just bisexual, they’re also polyamorous.

As a result of this multi-focal sexuality (”I like this and this…oh, and this too!”), it’s sometimes difficult for bisexual people to be taken seriously. The common argument is that we just haven’t “chosen” yet, but sooner or later, after enough experience and time, we’ll “settle down” into one of the all-or-nothing choices. (This is the same problem switches have in the BDSM scene: “you’re not really a switch, you’re either a top or a bottom and you just don’t know yet.”)

This point of view is no different from hetero-normative thinking, because it is founded on the principles of mutual exclusion. “You can’t be this and that.” Looking at sexuality this way treats such concepts as attraction as though they are finite resources, as if by being attracted to men you can not possibly have enough “spare attraction” to also be attracted to women, or that if you do then the attraction is lessened in direct proportion to how much attraction you have “spent” elsewhere.

I believe people think this way because they are confusing the things that do, in fact, have limited availability, such as time and physical energy, with things that do not, in fact, have any arbitrary limit. Am I the only person to whom confusing these sorts of things sounds absolutely insane?

Moreover, the idea that this insanity also holds true of language is equally absurd:

“There are plenty of lesbians in the gay community who occasionally sleep with men and still call themselves lesbians and vice versa. People need to start being honest in their daily lives about their actual behaviors rather than hiding behind convenient black-and-white labels that breed acceptance from their gay and lesbian peers who often condemn bisexuality.”

In other words, according to Nicole Kristal, who is quoted from the article above and who is a co-author of The Bisexual’s Guide to the Universe, you’re not a lesbian if you’re a woman who also sleeps with men. This is the equivalent of saying “you’re not a woman if you have a penis,” and we already know how ignorant confusing sex with gender identity is.

Ultimately, what this quote spotlights is the importance of understanding language as a tool for communication. The other day, a friend shared an awesome quote from Confucius with me that she read:

When words lose their meaning, people will lose their liberty.

She told me,

I read something today and thought of you immediately. Apparently, Confucius believed that correct usage of words was a prerequisite to working society. When words stopped being connected to specific meanings, he believed that it was a sign of the impending corruption and collapse of civilization. I like that way of looking at it, [but] I had never heard it put that way before.

It is for that reason why academics like Robert Heasley work so hard at providing a vocabulary with which to discuss things like masculinity, and why people like me work so hard at using such vocabularies to define distinctions between things. Doing so hones our understanding of the meanings of words, which fights rhetoric and propaganda in the process. In the war on sex currently being waged, language is the ultimate weapon.

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Thursday, December 20, 2007

The Sexism of Sex and Smarts

Category labels: Male sexuality, Masculinity, Myths and misconceptions, Personal history, Politics of sex, Sexism

Sex and smarts have always been at odds with each other culturally for some reason I haven’t been able to identify yet. Everyone is aware of this fact and yet, despite my many inquiries into the subject, no one I’ve talked to seems to fully understand this odd relationship. That makes me feel at once smart and stupid, which makes me feel at once sexy and unattractive. And that is, in fact, quite a strange relationship, wouldn’t you say?

There is a double standard in this. Smart people are considered sexy, desirable, and clearly wanted for their smarts. At the same time, smart people are the ones most often considered to be the least sexy for all other reasons. When we are younger, the smart people are the nerds and dorks who are bookworms, loners, and considered “losers,” and are most certainly part of the populous that is most unfuckable.

After all, schooling and education has never been thought to be about intelligence but rather preparation for the great, holy, more-important goal of becoming a productive member of society. Well, it certainly does a good job of trying to make you conform to fit its molds, and it makes most people miserable in the process. It’s not about you, it’s about what you can do for your country: school is patriotism at its worst.

Yet, when we are no longer in school and no longer find ourselves in environments where a sense of belonging (wanting to be “one of the popular kids”) is more important to us than a sense of safety (”how am I going to pay these bills?”), suddenly being smart is a huge sexual asset. This is obviously because “smart” people are generally far more capable at providing safety than dumb ones.

Or are they?

Let’s take a look at that assumption for a moment. I was taught, even threatened, throughout much of my life that intelligence is what I needed to make my way through the world. “If you don’t get straight A’s,” I was once told as a boy, “you’ll never get into a good college and you’ll have a harder time of finding a good job and then you’ll never be able to make it as an adult.”

Parenting tip from me to you: if you ever want to really scare a child, tell them they’ll never make it as an adult. It’s not going to make them do what you tell them to, but it’s certainly going to give them second thoughts about wanting to wake up the next morning. Or maybe they’ll just become obsessed with Peter Pan.

As we become sexualized, we are indoctrinated with another gem of a truism: “Women’s value comes from their sex appeal: To succeed as a woman, just be sexy.” According to conventional gender wisdom, all women in positions like CEOs, businesspeople, politicians, or other leadership roles probably got there by fucking the real decision-maker’s brains out (who was obviously a man). Likewise, women who are actresses, models, or any other field based largely on looks have to be a very specific kind of beautiful, and, naturally, sexy in some way.

Even though we know intellectually that this just isn’t always accurate, it’s still considered to be implacable. Today, after long, hard battles fought primarily by feminists, women are allowed to be smart—they just also have to be sexy. If they’re not, their smarts stop being a good thing and turn into a bad thing. As a woman, if you’re too smart, suddenly your brain has become a huge liability.

And what’s “too smart”? A recent New York Times article, Should Hillary Pretend to Be a Flight Attendant? makes the case that “too smart” means “smarter than men.” As part of his conclusions on a two-year speed-dating study, Mr. Fisman, who is a Columbia economics professor, is quoted as saying the following about men’s perceptions of a woman’s intelligence:

…even in the 21st century, many men are still straitjacketed in stereotypes.

[…]

“We found that men did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner’s beauty, when choosing, than women did. We also found that women got more dates when they won high marks for looks.”

He continued: “By contrast, intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women’s choices as men’s. It isn’t exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter — but only up to a point … It turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition — a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date.

This is hardly surprising, though it is rather depressing and the short New York Times article makes this point with such starkness that it is also very remarkable. I can imagine most feminists are seeing this as a battle cry to “protect the rights of smart women,” a noble and important goal to be sure:

Catalyst, an organization that studies women in the workplace, found that women who behave in ways that cleave to gender stereotypes — focusing on collegiality and relationships — are seen as less competent. But if they act too macho, they are seen as “too tough” and “unfeminine.”

Ms. Belkin said that another study shows that men — and female secretaries — are not considered less competent if they dress sexy at work, but female executives are.

Women still tend to be timid about negotiating salaries and raises. Men ask for more money at eight times the rate of women.

Victoria Brescoll, a Yale researcher, found that men who get angry at the office gain stature and clout, even as women who get angry lose stature because they are seen as out of control.

However, for all this research focused on women, I am wondering where the analysis of the men is happening, if it’s happening at all! Specifically, the question we need to ask is not (only) “why are women judged so harshly on looks,” but rather “why are men so afraid of their own shortcomings?” And indeed, men have stereotypically always been afraid of their own (ahem) shortcomings, haven’t they?

Whatever dating studies reveal, part of the key to empowering women lies with understanding men. Not just masculinity, but men. Not just their gender role, but their gender identity. Not just who they are and how they behave, but why they behave the way they do.

We always need to ask why. Always. And, we need to have solid reasons for our answers.

So why is a smart and sexy woman threatening to a man? I posit that it might have something to do with a perceived disparity of privilege and, more specifically, with the fact that our culture sees value in a woman’s appearance that it does not see in a man’s. A woman’s sexiness is based on (surprise!) sex, whereas a man’s sexiness is based on smarts, power, influence, or money, which is, let’s see here…not sex (though these things certainly can be made sexual and when they are I find them rather sexy).

The point is that a man can’t be considered sexy unless he’s also got something else going for him, and a woman can’t have something else going for her unless she’s also considered sexy. This is why my painfully-obviously brilliant friend Calico and I end up talking for hours about why I don’t feel sexy and why she doesn’t feel valued in non-sexual ways even though I’ve been told countless times that I’m sexy and wanted and even though she’s been told countless times that she’s supremely intelligent (and not just by me).

In the end, to the world at large, it doesn’t matter. I get judged on my smarts, and she gets judged on her looks. And that’s not fair to either one of us.

All of this begs the question: so what’s the value of intelligence? And what’s the value of sexiness? I don’t really know how to answer those questions (beyond elementary concerns) yet, but I’m starting to wonder if the answers we once thought had to be so different from one another actually may be more alike than we could possibly have imagined.

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Tuesday, December 18, 2007

How an outdated view of masculinity ignores the needs of all men

Category labels: BDSM psychology, Communication, D/s dynamics, Emotions, Femdom, Gender fluidity, Male sexuality, Masculinity, Masochism, Myths and misconceptions, Politics of sex, Polyamory, Relationship, Sex, Sexism, Vanilla life

As his posts usually do these days, this post of Figleaf’s got me thinking about personal needs, how we provide for those needs, and how those needs become needs in the first place. In it, he says:

Just as we indoctrinate men to strive so mightily to provide that they/we never come home, so we also indoctrinate women so thoroughly to believe men won’t even see them unless they’re starved, then scraped bare, then repainted that some of them/you are afraid to be seen by your partners after a night of roaringly good sex. The real thresholds for being sexy, being a good provider, being a man or a woman, are surprisingly easy to meet. However to embody sexiness, or worthiness, or manliness, or femininity is a fools errand[…]

(His thought-provoking post was inspired by none other than this eloquent post of Calico’s, which is also worth a read. So are the rest of both their blogs, by the way, which each have posts that are almost always equally eloquent.)

Acquiring an accurate understanding of my personal needs has always been the central focus of my life and, sadly, I fear that I still have a long way to go. Having needs that are (or, equally bad, feel as though they are) unfulfilled is the obvious source of a lot of sadness, anger, resentment and jealousy in my life.

When it comes to social and sexual relationships, in fact, jealousy is the word most often associated by most people to indicate a lack of fulfillment of some need in some way. This explains why the polyamorous community and their resources, writings, and issues seem to deal squarely with discovering personal needs and understanding the needs of one’s partners in order to overcome that jealousy.

When reading Figleaf’s observation that men are indoctrinated “to strive so mightily to provide” I saw myself in his words. In most typical instances, what men are indoctrinated to provide is “a living” for their family, which in more concrete terms is often defined by mainstream gender roles as “a dependable source of financial income for the nuclear family unit.” Everyone knows that it’s the man’s job to bring home the bacon, and he’s expected to sacrifice everything—his time, his happiness, his independence, his freedoms, and ultimately himself—in the pursuit of this noble, self-sacrificing, almost holy endeavor.

This is masochism perverted into martyrdom—”no pain, no gain.”

Indeed, there can easily be satisfaction and emotional fulfillment to be found from this goal. I have always absolutely loved to buy Eileen dinner, or treats at Starbucks, or spontaneous gifts—big gifts like several-hundred-dollar jewelry—or to treat the two of us to a night at the movies. All of this all on my dime. I enjoy that because my dime signifies my hard work and spending money on the things that make me happy is something I’ve earned.

Something that makes me happy is providing good experiences to Eileen, which is also the cornerstone of many components of submission. Feeling as though I am capable to provide good experiences for my partner is one thing that is necessary for me to feel submissive. This relationship between being submissive and being a provider and each of their connection to masculinity is most obvious in service-related kinks (sissy-maids and men-turned-”homemakers” are two prime examples that come to mind), and equally obvious in stamina-related kinks (in which men are tortured but, because they are MEN! GRR! they do not whimper or scream and only display a stoic pride), both of which is the (frustratingly) universal representation of male submission everywhere.

Could this be the root of men’s “chivalrous nature”? We are certainly taught that chivalry is a good thing. These activities and the feelings that come from them is both the hegemonic masculine view of how a man should behave towards a woman and an accurate description, at least in parts, of how I want to feel about the way I treat my partners, men and women alike (though the expression of this is, interestingly, different in my relations with men than they are with women).

And that, now that I think about it, may be the first time on this blog in which I have actually described myself as fitting nicely into the masculine gender role stereotype.

Moreover, there’s nothing wrong with this that I can see. Providing for another person makes me happy, and it simultaneously makes me feel strong. Is this not, in fact, the epitome of the knight submissive concept? The knight submissive is a representation of a man who is at once powerful, who uses this power in a way that is courageous, honorable, and makes the lives of those he chooses to effect better, and yet—contrary to the accepted display of hegemonic masculinity—is also submissive to his partner. One might even say he is dominated by his partner, or perhaps in other words that may provide for more insight, is guided, steered, or advised by his partner.

In other words, “behind every good man, there is a good woman.” To me, this sounds as though the knight submissive is the hegemonic masculine man that women read about in romance novels.

Only, because gender stereotypes are idealized versions of atomic characteristics of gender and the masculine gender role has been elected as “the one who provides” whereas the feminine gender role has been elected as “the one who needs,” men are disallowed from needing and women are disallowed from providing—period. End of story.

The classic examples provide evidence of this dichotomy in abundance. What happens if the wife of a heterosexual married couple makes more money than the husband? Suddenly, the husband feels bad because his perceived “manliness” is threatened since she provides more financial income to their family unit than he does. What happens if the wife has a love affair? Again, negative feelings and a perceived threat to his manliness because he is not the one providing her with sexual satisfaction and some other (presumably) man is. This is even true in the way many conservative men respond to vibrators, or, god forbid, pornography intended to be consumed by women.

Any remotely emotionally functional individual will recognize that this system in which women only need and men only provide is harmful to both men and women. Women are expected to need only what men can provide and men are expected not to need anything except, of course, the needs of women. Thanks to the prevailing viewpoint that monogamy is the One True Way to Love® this set of needs is further restricted to include only, for women, the things your one man can provide and, for men, the needs of your one woman.

I see it as self-evident that both men and women have component needs that are irrelevant to their specific partner(s). In other words, a need is intrinsically born of oneself, not of one’s partner. Otherwise, whose need is it, really? Academically, this concept seems as though it can, broadly speaking, be contained within the greater need for self-actualization.

It seems nothing if not utterly ridiculous to function day by day under the rigid and false pretense that only a traditional understanding of the gender model allows. There’s simply no way that I can see being able to squeeze fulfillment and happiness out of being a man whose sole need is to fulfill all his other partner’s needs because, obviously, need-fulfillment is by my earlier definition not actually possible to obtain from a single source. It may, perhaps, be possible and even healthy to seek to fulfill the specific needs of a partner that can be fulfilled by other people, but ultimately there is going to be something, no matter how small that your partner is going to have to do on their own to feel fully fulfilled. (And, if you’ll take a word from the wise, it’s never something that small.)

That piece, no matter how much you or I strive to provide it, being the good, otherwise capable, and self-sacrificing men that we are, is not ever something we can succeed in. Not recognizing that fact leads invariably to codependency of one form or another and then, inevitably, to unhappiness in at least something, be it our work, our social partnerships (of which sexuality and pair-bonding is a form), or—worst of all in my opinion—one’s ability to think effectively and to make good personal choices in one’s private life.

In other words, by focusing so strongly on the experience of our partners, men end up being unable—forbidden, even!—to live our own lives. We need, as a friend said wisely to me the other day, to find a way to disconnect from the experience of our partners, but not disconnect from our partners themselves.

Finding submission with Eileen, for me, has been a major component in being able to connect with another person on a sexual (and thus at least one piece of a social) level that, finally, feels good, and right, and fulfilling. Being submissive meets one of my needs—specifically the need to have fulfilling social interactions. However, in becoming submissive, I must also allow myself the freedom to disconnect from her experience, to allow her the capability to provide for her own needs.

Submission, or masculinity or being a “man”, is not in reality the rigid, narrow thing society tells us being a man is. Being a man is not about providing everything for our partners. It can be about providing for them, but it’s also about providing for ourselves. And guess what? That’s what being a woman is about, too.

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