Men Are the New Women

Around this time last year, I had sex on the balcony of a friend’s apartment.  I had sex on the balcony of my friend’s apartment because, a few hours earlier, I’d flown in to Atlanta, where my friend goes to school, and she’d taken me to a coffee-shop in town, where an attractive male friend of hers, a long-haired scruffy rail-thin aspiring poet who talked immediately and incessantly about Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salome, had shown up.  We started talking, and as we were talking he unpacked books from his backpack.  I complimented him on having Camille Paglia’s Vamps and Tramps amongst his reading, and when I did, he said, “Oh, this is for you.  She [my friend, that is] told me about you, and I was really excited to meet you.  And I saw this at the used bookstore, so I decided I had to get it for you.  I mean, if you don’t already have it.”

    Obviously, I had to have sex with him after that.

    I thought that was that, which would have been fine, but then he came to New York soon after I got back.  We met up at a museum, and went back to my apartment and shared a bottle of white wine, passing it between us without cups. Then, slightly buzzed, we walked almost a hundred blocks downtown, and were amazed when we realized how far we’d walked and how many hours had gone by.  The conversation was very good, and the night was sort of tingly like the line between simple reality and cinematic self-consciousness was getting thin.  In the East Village I told him about how this was my old neighborhood, and he bought us greasy hipster-pizza and said he wanted to find a stoop “so we can sit down and just stare at each other for a while.”  “Ok,” I said. 

    Eventually, very late that night, we ended up, as I’d figured we would, in my bed.  We were in my bed, naked, making out when he stopped and said that he couldn’t have sex with me anymore.  And while we were lying there with his very apparent erection making itself known between us, he explained, see, that he really liked me, he didn’t expect this to happen, but he really felt something special for me, and it was rare that he felt this way about anyone, in fact it’s so rare and special and special and rare and special that he wanted to start this over, and take it slow, and get to know me before anything really happened, because he really respected me and cared about me now, so it couldn’t just be a casual thing anymore, so we couldn’t have sex until we’d really gotten to know each other better, and started a real relationship.

    The really ridiculous thing is that he wasn’t the first guy to do exactly that.  He wasn’t the first guy even within those few months to tell me that he cared too much about me to keep having sex with me.  And what’s more ridiculous is that most of the female friends I told about these occurrences would invariably respond with “Oh, wow, that’s so romantic.”

    No.  No it is not.  It is not romantic when someone stops having sex with you; it’s humiliating.  And baffling.  And totally illogical.  The only logical assumption, in fact, is that these men are lying, and telling you what you want to hear, and in fact you just must be horrendous in bed.  I mean, you think, okay, maybe I actually break people’s dicks when I sleep with them.  Because men always want sex, right?  I don’t know about you, but all my life, up until the last few years, I’ve been told that men want only one thing.  I figured it was pretty obvious what that thing was.  I liked this about men, in theory.  It might not always be a nice thing, but at least, I thought, it was clear and honest, as opposed to trying to figure out what most girls want, which is pretty much impossible.

    But apparently I was told wrong.  The truth, your girlfriends tell you when this happens, is that these are the good men.  “You’ve really found a good guy,” they say.  One friend even said to me “well, this is what sex is like with emotion involved.”  Almost all the women and the men say basically the same thing when I tell this story.  They say it was romantic.  They say it proves how much he really cares about me.  They say why do men always fall in love with you constantly? (“I don’t know!” I yelled back.  “I don’t care! Why won’t they fuck me?!”)  Well, you’re just the kind of girl men marry, not the kind of girl they fuck, one of my best friends said.

    Here, dear readers, is the crux of the whole outrage.  Men, and women too, separate the women to whom they’re attracted—friends, girlfriends, teachers, mothers, co-workers—into wives and hookers.  There are no other options, and there are no grey areas.  It’s possible this system made some sort of horrid but undeniable logic in the America of the 1950s, when pre-marital sex was for the most part not an option that people considered, and marriage was still an inevitability for men and women.

    But how, you might ask yourself, is it possible that this division of women into women I can fuck and women about whom I can feel something is still just as strong and influential in this age when pre-marital sex is expected if not obligated, when marriage is mocked and reviled in most liberal circles, when eleven-year olds are having oral sex like it’s no bigger a deal than getting together to play video games, when every other bar in the country has a weekly or monthly or nightly burlesque show, when our billboards and commercials and magazines and clothing ads and internet networking sites all scream about fucking in graphic, unabashed language, when soccer moms take pole-dancing classes at their local gym and, it seems, as one reader commented on Grammaticus’s essay regarding “Jake” and his article in Glamour, that if the Virgin/Whore complex still exists, it’s been flipped on its head and now privileges the Whores, rather than the Virgins?  Everything’s permitted, isn’t it?  Isn’t that what all this liberation, all the waves of feminism rolling in to crash on the beaches of theory and splash the sunbathers of aesthetics and the beach police of post-structuralism (this metaphor no longer has anything to do with my point, in I’m just having fun)—but seriously, isn’t that what all this feminism, and all these movements toward liberation, all these mandatory college sex and gender classes and Gossip Girl books and self-esteem striptease classes and mainstream sex writers (I love you, Dan Savage!) have done for us?  Isn’t sex finally just out there, not taboo at all anymore?

    Well, frankly, no.  The Virgin/Whore or, as I’m going to call it here, Stripper/Wife complex is still prevalent precisely because of all the societal truths and trends I listed just now.

    America is a country defined primarily by self-loathing.  We’re a country obsessed with thinness where the majority of the population is fat.  We’re a country disgusted by eating and obsessed with food.  We’re the richest country in the world and yet rich people disgust us.  We’re obsessed with sex, and populated with prudes.  And this defining national quality, this self-loathing, filters down into individual identity.  We end up a nation of self-loathing individuals.

    So we privilege the whore, the hooker, the stripper, the femme fatale if you’re classy, not because she has actual societal power, and certainly not because she’s garnered mainstream respect.  Our culture privileges slutty women precisely because it reviles them.  America’s obsessed with whores in the same way that we like to watch zombie movies and slow down when we drive by a car crash to try to see what happens.  The whore may have a privileged place in iconic images, but in terms of actual social interaction, sexually free and autonomous women are absolutely still the marked category.  We’re still the women treated differently, excluded from generalizations about normal women, assumed to have no interest in things such as marriage, family, emotion, love and anything else thoughtlessly granted as the domain of “normal” women. “Sexy 9.0” may show up on television and in clothing ads, but if you think that means a woman who doesn’t want to be immediately monogamous, or who has sex on the first date, or who openly pursues sex independent of or alongside with love, doesn’t get treated worse, taken less seriously, and dismissed by the majority of men and women with whom she interacts, then you’re just not looking very closely.

    I’ll argue that the pervasive images of glossy mainstream promiscuity strewn across popular culture in all forms in fact only further reinforce the Stripper/Wife Complex.  In fact, the movement and the backlash are one and the same, on the same side.  Any actual sex-positivism in this country is still an underground minority movement, and should still be afforded the respect and support that such struggling and noble ventures need.  If you want actual sexual freedom, you need to understand the popularity of “sexiness” for what it is: Bullshit.  Bullshit and a successful reinforcement of the Stripper/Wife complex.  You need to look for, and engender amongst yourself, real sex-positivism, and first you need to figure out what the hell that is and how to do it.  I’m going to help with that, as much as I can.  And I’m also going to argue that men are the new women.  Because they are.

    As was argued in opposition to the last essay, yes, seemingly it’s the Stripper who’s in the cultural spotlight, rather than the Wife.  But this is another action of a self-loathing society.  Our adulation of whores, strippers, hookers, or what-have-you doesn’t prove us to be sexually open; it rather further proves our prudishness.  For every positive image of the whore, there are still ten in which the woman is punished for her sexuality.  It’s possible we want to see movies or TV shows about sexually promiscuous women, but at the end of the narrative, they almost invariably end up either married or dead.  Many of the so-called positive images of the Whore may be seemingly positive, in that the promiscuous woman ends up happy or successful, but she always does so in a story whose moral is something like “Isn’t it awesome how she’s totally emotionless and doesn’t believe in love?  Yeah!  Love is useless!  Woo!  Feminism!”

    I once slept with another guy who spent the entire time arguing with me about how I could possibly have casual sex.  This guy and I had great sex.  It’s really unusual that first time sex is that good.  It was that good.  It was the kind of sex that you feel suddenly horrified during because you think, “Oh fuck, what if this is the best sex I ever have?  And that means no other sex I ever have is ever as good as this!  Crap, that means it’s going to end and then my life is just going to be downhill from here!”  Of course, that didn’t happen.  But what did happen is that directly afterwards, he looked at me like I was some kind of (attractive) pod person and said “How can you possibly have sex like that and not want a relationship with me?”

    He’d obviously been successful up until that point in shuffling women into tender, caring wife and emotionless hooker.  I felt a lot about him that night.  I thought he was gorgeous, and more gorgeous for how fucked up he obviously was with inexplicable scars all over his body and quoting the really disturbing parts of A Season in Hell from memory to me while we were in bed.  He had that violent, sublime Wagnerian thing going on that really gets me off about people and experiences, and I was perfectly happy to feel a whole lot of emotion about him and about sex with him, whether or not I ever saw him again.  But he didn’t seem capable of listening when I told him as much.  Because I’d taken him home a few hours after meeting him, I obviously didn’t have deep emotions, and there was no way he was going to believe otherwise.  Finally, when I kept trying to explain it to him, he looked at me and said, “Wow, someone really must have hurt you.”  He had also learned that if women have feelings and still choose to have casual sex, it can only be because they have low self-esteem, and that low self-esteem derives from a man having hurt them.  Yeah, he was pretty damn sensitive.

    People get scared of an eradication of the Stripper/Wife binary, because they think such eradication means just a reversal: Stripper good, Wife bad.  But that’s not sex-positivism, nor is it any kind of reality, nor does it assist in teaching people how to have the best possible sex lives while treating one another as well as possible, which should be the ultimate goal.  Whether you privilege the Stripper or the Wife is in fact immaterial.  The complex isn’t harmful because of which one is considered sacred and which one a pariah.  It’s harmful because it sets up binaries in an arena where none actually exist.  Sex and emotion are equally, incredibly complex.  The minute we shuffle “tender feelings” over to one camp and “hot sex” over to another, or “casual relationships” or to one camp and “passionate emotion” to the other, we get a little farther from understanding sex in a way that would allow any of us to enjoy it.

    To understand how the Stripper/Wife complex is today more prevalent than ever, and to begin to attempt to eradicate it and replace it with a more complex understanding of sexual specificity, we have to start by asking whose fault it is that this polarization of sexual identity keeps gaining popularity.

    And I have an answer to that question:  Ugly Women.

    I’ll explain.  Fashion magazines are almost too easy a target for this website, and it seems unfair to make fun of them here.  In fact, with our type and level of criticism, it might be much more interesting for us to laud fashion magazines and explain why they’re a fantastic and useful thing for the Awesome Feminist (which they are, if understood correctly).  But we have to talk about fashion magazines to make the point that, when it comes to men and trying to teach men and women how to deal with one another in the context of sex and romance, Bad Feminism and Fashion Magazine Rhetoric have become utterly indistinguishable.

    This is some pretty harsh irony, considering that Bad Feminism, in all its juvenile shrillness, is supposed to be pitted in a war against fashion magazines (“…with their unrealistic skinny models instead of real women, how dare they, I am going to eat some ice cream now! I eat it righteously! I eat it for justice! Justice for all women!”).  Bad Feminism and Fashion Magazines are supposed to be natural enemies, but when it comes to men and sex, they fall into exactly the same rhetoric—and if there is a difference, it’s that fashion magazines are more liberal and sex-positive than the Bad Feminists.

    The problem is that bad feminism grew out of good feminism.  People like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, for all their hysterical prudishness and the extent to which I strongly disagree with most of their ideas, were incredibly effective writers and speakers, and they had enough good to say that they did make a difference and did help many women to gain power and security.  Gloria Steinem wrote some idiotic and reductive things (Gloria, a fish can’t have sex with a bicycle and you know it), and caused a lot of women to hate men and not get laid, but she also did an enormous amount of good.  I’d be remiss if I didn’t credit all three of these theorists and many more of their allies for the fact that I’ve written this article and you’re reading it.  I don’t object to Take Back the Night rallies; in fact I’ve marched in more than one of them.  I don’t want to re-institute prescriptive gender identities in which all women have to wear high heels and slutty lingerie and be highly sexually prolific if they want to be “real women.”  I just want to stomp all over anyone who tells me that I’m not a real woman if I do wear six inch heels and visible stocking-tops and make out with, like, everybody.

    So because we don’t want to condemn the good, we don’t separate out the bad.  The theorists who initiate big ideas may be smart and discerning, but their causes are most of the time taken up by people looking for a cookie-cutter identity and too lazy to separate the useful from the hysterical.  Bad Feminism isn’t a bunch of brilliant women perpetrating a campaign to screw everyone.  Brilliant women have better things to do.  Rather, it’s mindless acolytes turning theory to their own purposes.  It’s girls too afraid to deal with their own sexuality reverting to calling sexually confident women “whores” and then using feminist theory to justify it.  It’s girls who think they aren’t attractive and are too lazy or scared (those two things, by the way, eventually come out to the same thing) to do anything about it, and so want an excuse to say that girls making an effort to be attractive aren’t “real women.”  It’s women who hate men because men won’t do exactly what they want them to do (which is, let’s face it, something we’re all going to encounter with people, not just people of the opposite sex), it’s women who don’t get laid because they won’t try to, it’s women crippled by jealousy—in short, it’s the same women who read fashion magazines and take the love-life advice columns therein as gospel, the exact women feminism was supposedly going to teach us all not to be, who embrace feminism as a way to always blame someone else for everything.  That’s what we mean when we say Bad Feminism, and that’s whom we mean when we say that ugly women are ruining it for the rest of us, men and women alike.  By ugly women I don’t mean simply “women who are not aesthetically pleasing.”  I mean women who think they’re ugly, who’ve bought into our national self-loathing, and instead of doing something about it, are looking to blame everyone but themselves.  Ugly bitches.

    I understand that the problem of the Wife/Stripper complex is not new.  I understand that dividing women into wives and whores is a practice that’s been going on since the dawn of civilization, and that its traditional form lives on with frat guys, who are happy to gang-rape hookers but, with the right girls, will just put you to shame with the decorous beauty of how they know to treat a lady.  But I don’t hang out with frat guys.  At this point, I’m almost relieved by old-fashioned misogyny.  It’s the fact that the supposedly “sensitive” guy, the liberal guy, the guy who is supposed to be, and thinks of himself as, the antithesis to the frat guy, is actually doing the exact same thing the frat guy’s doing.  The difference may be that a frat guy would fuck me once and then be done with me, and the sensitive guy would want to fuck me but wouldn’t because he respects me too much, but look, having sex with someone only once is just a sleazier version of not having it at all, so it comes out to exactly the same thing.  Sensitive Guys, in trying to be the opposite of Frat Guys, in fact end up behaving in the exact same manner, and by the exact same rules and assumptions, as frat guys.

    And they get this behavior, this code, this permission, from Bad Feminism.  Let me show you how this works:

    I’m writing this essay in my favorite place in the world, a cramped and ill-lit coffee shop up near Columbia University where they serve endless coffee strong enough to stun a small horse and strange, sticky pastries of Slavic origin.  Being a university coffee shop, it of course has a bathroom with the requisite erudite and self-righteous graffiti decorating its walls.  The last time I was in there, I had opportunity to read the following:

        One Person’s Handwriting: “Ain’t Pussy Great?”

        Directly Underneath, a Different Person’s Handwriting: “What a charming objectifier you are, you asshole.”

    I’m pretty sure that you assumed the first author, the pussy enthusiast, to be a man, and the second author, the offended party, to be a woman.  I did too.   We’ll skip over the fact that we have no real evidence of either party’s gender identity, and the fact that if the first author were a woman and the second author a man, we would immediately all read this as an instance of stunningly homophobic vitriol.  But it already says something useful that we all assumed the first author to be male and the second author to be female, because these two sharpie-wielders are playing out what passes for the essential battle of feminism, and what is in fact is the crux of the stupid problem of stupid Bad Feminism.

    The offended respondent calls the first author an “objectifier.”  Let’s examine the text of his statement to see from where exactly she gets that opinion: He says that pussy is great.  A pussy is only an object insofar as the female body is an object.  He didn’t say isn’t pussy great to the exclusion of everything else about women.  He didn’t say isn’t pussy great and aren’t women emotionally and intellectually useless.  He didn’t say aren’t women just brainless hose-bags.  He didn’t say Gee, I sure hate women but sure do love fucking the shit out of them!  Certainly, any of these statements would have justified the second writer’s offended response, and more.  But all this man said was that he loves pussy.  He expressed his enthusiasm for, and appreciation of, the female sexual organ, the part of the body from which women derive primary sexual pleasure, the part of the body, in fact, that the feminists who probably comprise most of the female respondent’s friends, say is the sacred, symbolic temple of femininity and female power.

    But this woman demonstrates the main fallacious complaint leveled constantly at men by Bad Feminists: Any expression of sexual desire for a woman is inextricable from and synonymous with degradation of that woman.  By painting all male sexuality as degrading to women, Bad Feminism sends the message that a virtuous man, a “Good” Man, is a neutered man.  It sets up a binary as crippling as the pretty/smart binary imposed on women: Men can be either sexual or sensitive, either masculine or “Good.”

    But here’s perhaps the worst part.  At the same time that Bad Feminism, as represented by our irate graffiti artist, tells men that something so inarguably positive as expressing appreciation for a female body part is “objectification” and makes him an “asshole,” its other biggest complaint can be summed up in a Missy Elliot lyric: Motherfucker never ate my pussy.

    It’s as though it’s purposefully trying to confuse men until they just give up, like blindfolding someone and then spinning them around until they vomit.  Bad Feminism tells men that any sexual attention they give women is evil and demeaning, but then expects and demands extreme, worshipful, selfless sexual attention from these same men.  I still naively believe that feminism was supposed to be an equality movement, but I’ve been told more than once that by seeking out sexual experiences wherein my partner and I give and receive equal amounts of sexual attention and satisfaction, I’m in fact demeaning myself.  Women complain about the double standard all the time, but there is lately also a double standard in which men are the victims.  By the standards of feminism popularized in pretty much any liberal, educated community, women are allowed, even obligated, to be unbelievably selfish in bed, to perform, in fact, exactly the type of behavior for which they vilify men as aggressors and rapists.  If a woman receives oral sex from a man without reciprocating, he’s a “really great, sensitive guy,” and she’s a powerful feminist.  If a man receives oral sex from a woman without reciprocating, he’s an asshole, and she’s been degraded and objectified.

    A brilliant theatre director I used to know once gave a lecture on how audiences react to portrayals of violence onstage.  She had a male actor mime hitting a female actor. “When a man hits a woman, he’s an asshole,” she said.  Then she had the woman hit the man.  “And when a woman hits a man,” and the whole audience said the punch line along with her, “he’s an asshole.”

    It might seem like Jake (of Glamour infamy) is just an old-school misogynist who’s never had a conversation with a woman in his life, but I would guess that in fact most of Jake’s close friends are women.  Remember that Jake was chosen as a Glamour columnist through a reader vote; he was voted into the position, therefore, by a majority of women.  I think Jake may not in fact just be a predisposed douchebag (though I don’t rule out the possibility).  Rather, I think Jake is representative of the kind of men into which Bad Feminism turns Good Men.

    Men who want to be good, who want to be sensitive often decide, logically, to let their ideas of sexuality and masculinity be dictated by what women say.  But the problem here is that most women are assholes.  Most people are assholes.  And it’s always the assholes who yell loudest and most frequently (which is why it’s important that we, as smart people, yell loudly and constantly).  The woman who writes on a bathroom wall that a man who likes pussy is an objectifier will be the easiest person for a man to listen to when trying to figure out how to be a Good, Sensitive Guy.  And these women will tell men that having sex with women, that wanting to have sex with women at all is insulting to women.

    So men are told that women hate sex.  Men are told that their sexual desire is an insult to the women towards whom it’s directed.  They’re told that they are responsible for the disempowerment of women.  They’re told that if they really love their girlfriend, they won’t want to fuck her.  They’re told that appreciating women’s bodies is objectification, and expressing that appreciation is degradation.  They’re told that if they get any pleasure from the sexual act or, worse, ask for what they want from their sex partner, they’re selfish and borderline rapists.  They’re taught that women never like sex with them, and that any enjoyment women appear to get from intercourse is likely faked for their benefit.  They’re taught that the bad things that happen to women are their fault.  They’re taught that they want to force all women to be wives and mothers.  They’re taught that they’re entitled jerks, and that they can never understand the pain women suffer.  They’re also taught that it’s entitled and insulting if they try to understand said pain.  They’re taught that they are the reason women suffer economically, spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually.  They’re taught that their physical body, their anatomy, which they made no choice in constructing, is in and of itself a tool of oppression and violence.

    And so men become insecure, self-loathing, frigid, victimized, confused, weak, sex-hating, fearful, skittish, pandering, constantly apologizing, passive-aggressive, neurotic and sexually insecure prudes.  In short, they become women.

    You hear the idea that women are the new men thrown around a lot.  It wouldn’t be totally out of line to throw that generality even over my theories of Female Arrogance as the next wave of feminist salvation and justice.  I do believe that there are a lot of qualities that men naturally embody and to which women are taught they’re not permitted.  I believe that it would help to empower women if they took on many of these traditionally masculine qualities.  Some of these qualities are things that many people call negative in men—male entitlement, for instance.  I’ve already explained why I think female entitlement would be a fantastic thing, and why we do ourselves an enormous disservice when we shy away from the arrogance to which men are supposedly entitled.  I think the world would be a much better place if we were all—especially those of us superlatively and rigorously intelligent—supremely and equally arrogant.  I think then we might respect both one another and ourselves, and shit could really get done.

    But Bad Feminism believes that equality is the equal weakening of both genders.  Rather than seeking to eradicate the weakness that has been for centuries instilled in women, and empower women by giving them permission to men’s equal and opposite traditional strength, Bad Feminism seeks to force men to take on the traditional weaknesses of women, while at the same time preserving those weaknesses in our gender.

    So let us open our hymnals to the SAME DAMN CHAPTER AS ALWAYS:  Equality is not about everyone being equally disempowered!  A movement that disempowers those people it claims to serve in fact serves no-one!  We will be better people—kinder, more considerate, and more likely to treat one another well—the stronger we become.  Everything we write here is essentially a chapter in the same epic rant against the heroicization of weakness in our society.

    One way, arguably the central way, that women have been traditionally kept weaker than men, is through the fear of sex.  Sex was something that empowered men.  It was a metaphor for conquest, for taking ownership of the world through physical knowledge of it.  Sex went hand-in-hand with entitlement:  As a man, you were supposed to fuck things just because you could.

    Women remained in the passive, victim’s role because they weren’t supposed to derive the same pleasure or power from sex that men did.  Even Sex-Ed classes are a great example of this: When I was growing up, they divided the girls and the boys and took us into separate rooms to learn about puberty.  The men were told about how their body, with its growing penis, its body hair, and its wet dreams, was a source of pride and pleasure.  The girls, with their oncoming menstrual cycle and the accompanying blood and pain, and their terrifying ability to get pregnant, were taught that their body was a source of pain, shame, and anxiety.  Women have traditionally grown up with a fear of sex assumed to be normal, while men have grown up with excitement about and empowerment through sex assumed to be normal.

    And you’d think feminism would mean that everyone gets to be equally empowered by and excited about sex.  You’d think feminism’s solution to this inequality would be to teach both men and women that their developing bodies are a source of pride and pleasure: women would learn about multiple orgasms, and men would learn about their powerful phalluses or whatever.  (Nobody, for the record, ever told me about multiple orgasms.  In fact, so many people told me about how difficult it’s supposed to be for women to come, that for a long time I just figured I must be doing it wrong and that the 46 or so orgasms I have in a normal sexual experience didn’t count, or something.)  Bad Feminism, hating all forms of power, decrees that the only way to be good is to be weak; so all men have to be afraid of sex, too.

Click the pic to hear my segment
of 1585's appearance on the RRS Show!

    Men are given two options: They can either be afraid of, and neurotic about sex, or they can be thuggish asshole rapists who love sex because they love oppressing women.  A good guy obviously will choose the option that doesn’t make him a rapist.  He hears over and over about how traditional masculinity, with its celebration of sex and pleasure and power, has oppressed and violated women, and his understandable reaction is to shun traditional or stereotypical masculine sexuality.

    So you get guys who won’t have sex unless it’s in a serious relationship.  You get guys who have one-night stands and then are racked with useless guilt over the “empty” sex.  Guys who break up with women if the women won’t immediately be monogamous and committed to them, guys who feel obligated to get really emotional over any sexual encounter they have, guys who throw childish tantrums when women won’t do exactly what they want because they’ve been told that they need to be more emotional—i.e., you get men who imitate the worst behaviors of women in an attempt to be more “sensitive.”   These are the men who care so much about women that they don’t even want to have sex because they’d never want to do something that demeaning, men who don’t want to do anything in bed except go down on you endlessly, because anything else would be too selfish, and therefore degrading.

    Does this sound like misogyny to anyone else?  If you’re having trouble hearing it, it’s in fact identical to misogyny because it’s a male mindset that assumes the man knows better than the woman what the woman wants.  Yes, these men may have gotten their ideas of what women want from women, but that doesn’t change the insulting nature of what they’re doing.  The issue, in fact, is beyond misogyny, beyond “gender issues,” and comes back to the larger point I’m making in all of this: It’s selfish.  Assuming your partner’s desires based on an idea of the person rather than the actuality of them is selfish.  It would be just as selfish and objectionable were I to have sex with a man and assume I knew what he wanted in bed and felt about sex without asking him or listening to him.  There isn’t such a thing as “sensitive” sex—eating pussy isn’t inherently “sensitive,” nor is dirty sex involving props and pain and name-calling inherently “emotionless.”  Some women find one or both of these things insulting.  Some women find them boring.  And some women find them fantastically sexy and satisfying.  None of these reactions is correct, nor is any of them a guaranteed answer for all women.  What’s important is what the specific person wants in that specific sexual encounter.  Dividing women into wives and strippers assumes that sex itself divides into “Mean Sex” and “Sensitive Sex.”  Nobody’s going to have good sex if we operate on the belief that pre-existing binaries are true and can provide you with all the answers.

    And this is exactly how Fashion Magazine Women fit into the picture.  Both Bad Feminism and Fashion Magazine Rhetoric tell women and men what to think about sex, and how to judge members of the opposite sex.  Fashion magazines, just like Bad Feminism, tell men that they’re insensitive jerks unless they have a specific kind of (selfless, gentle, “loving,” “respectful”) sex with their wives and girlfriends.  They say that a good man will only respect a woman who waits to have sex with him.  They don’t, of course, say that in so many words.  Rather, they do it backwards by saying that women wish men would respect them by waiting for them to be “ready” to have sex, rather than pressuring them to have sex on the first date, as only a whorish woman would do.  They don’t explicitly tell men only to respect women who wait to have sex, but they do tell men that only women who wait to have sex want respect and serious connection.

    In its hysterical frigidity, Bad Feminism has become startlingly similar to Fashion Magazine Feminism.  Men are the enemy for both.  Sex is an insult to women unless it’s in the context of a loving, committed relationship.  The things that most men want in bed are insulting to women.  Women who like sex, like dirty sex, or don’t wait a long time to have sex, only do so because they have self-esteem problems.  You know better than women do; in fact, you’re obligated to know better than women do, or else you’re a bad man who doesn’t respect women.

    Yeah.  Figure that one out.

    The December issue of Glamour (this is a good moment for me to point out, parenthetically, that I do in fact read fashion magazines regularly.  In case you haven’t noticed, my whole personal philosophy and enactment of feminism is about being really, really hot.  If you want to be hot, and look feminine, you’re going to have to learn something about hair, makeup, and clothing, and guess who knows a lot about those things?  Fashion magazines.  Fashion and beauty magazines are useful in terms of fashion and beauty.  But trusting a fashion magazine to give you sex and relationship advice is like asking a biologist to tell you how to raise your kids.  The biologist can tell you how kids are made, but that doesn’t mean she or he can tell you what to do when the other kids tease them and they come home crying) ran a feature detailing the results of their “sex poll.”  They printed reader responses to questions about whether they liked or disliked certain sexual practices, and included quotes from readers that they found relevant.  In the section of the poll concerning anal sex, one guy said “It’s cool if she likes to do it occasionally, but if she likes it too much, she’s probably not the kind of girl you want to bring home to meet your mom.”

    It’s easy to see why that’s offensive, but if you think that’s offensive then you have to think that the “a woman who wants to have sex on the first date has low self-esteem” crap is offensive, too, because they’re in fact doing the exact same thing: Assuming that someone’s specific sexual preference logically indicates a larger conclusion about that person.  I know plenty of women who are only interested in monogamy, who want to get married and have kids and be sweetly faithful to their boyfriends, the kind of women a guy’s parents would be overjoyed to meet, who also happen to really, really like anal sex with their monogamous, committed partner.  I like anal sex a whole lot, and I’ve also never met a boyfriend’s mother who didn’t adore me.  If your girlfriend is going to talk to your mother about how much she likes anal sex, then maybe you have a problem—but it’s a problem about etiquette, not sexual proclivity.

    Women, however, aren’t by any means the only victims here.  Part of the point of this essay is to demonstrate that Bad Feminism and Fashion Magazine Rhetoric equally victimize both men and women.  There aren’t two separate problems, a “women’s problem” and a “man’s problem”—it’s the same problem for everyone when we’re taught to approach each other as stereotypes and fixed, binary ideas, rather than as sexually specific and emotionally complex individuals.

    You know how you always see beautiful women with ugly men?  I was on the subway the other day, and at the Jay St.-Borough Hall stop, this incredibly beautiful woman got up and stood in front of the subway doors.  Every woman in New York is beautiful, and this woman still made me turn my head.  She was tall and slender and snow-white pale with black curly hair, wore elegant little stilettos peeking out from under a full-length pinstripe wool coat that must have been at least close to as expensive as it looked, and when the train doors opened she broke into a white and even smile so luminous that it was as though confetti rained down on everyone within a five-seat radius of her.  And then the doors opened and the guy because of whom she’d smiled like that got on the train.  He looked like a supporting character in a Sunday-morning cartoon about hapless accountants.  He wore an ill-fitting suit, had weird overlarge features and unwashed hair in a bald-on-top Shakespeare bowl-cut, sallow, uneven skin and must have been at least ten years older than her.   She flew into his arms radiantly.  The whole train ride she couldn’t stop kissing him; I couldn’t stop looking at them.

    Now it’s not fair for me to use this couple as an example, because I don’t know them, I’ve never spoken to them, and I didn’t even succeed at eavesdropping on their conversation.  But their physical archetype is exemplary of a trend that goes back to the main problem of Bad Feminism’s effect on masculinity.  It’s true that men are simply less likely to be aesthetically beautiful than women, and that the woman being the beautiful one is a tradition that goes back further than history.  But I know women who don’t like to date attractive men.  I know women who judge me harshly for dating attractive men, and assume because of it both that my relationships must be superficial and that these men will quickly break my heart and leave me.  The men I know who get the most beautiful women, the men I know who have women throwing themselves at them, these men could at best compete in a sexiness contest with Woody Allen.  And it wouldn’t be guaranteed that they’d win.  (note: Woody Allen is on my fuck list, but only because I’ve never properly thanked him for Manhattan.)

    In my Female Arrogance piece, I proposed that one of the most worrisome issues for women is the false binary between “smart” and “pretty;” the idea that women can either be intelligent and serious or pretty and sexy, but that the two things are mutually exclusive.  The distaff of this for men is the Asshole/Loser binary.  Men are told by Bad Feminism that they if they’re not a Loser, then they’re an Asshole.  Any man who makes an effort to be attractive, who is physically strong in a masculine way, who likes sex and has it successfully, who is good with women rather than awkward, any man who presents an image of successful masculinity must by definition be an asshole.  This definition doesn’t actually take into account whether he treats people well, whether he is good to friends, family and lovers, whether he is generous or selfish, kind or cruel, or any of the things that are actually supposed to determine whether you can call a man an “asshole.”  He’s an asshole because he’s not a loser.

    It’s not just that beautiful women generally want to date unattractive men.  I’ve known plenty of fantastic men who weren’t particularly physically attractive, but were intelligent, kind, discerning and good in bed (please note that I have also known plenty of superlatively physically attractive men who shared these qualities).  It’s that women seem, almost exclusively, to want to date losers.  I’ve asked a number of beautiful, interesting, smart women whose boyfriends and/or lovers appeared to be big losers what it was that attracted them.  “Oh, he’s such a nice guy,” they’d say.  “He’s just a really great guy.  He’s so sweet.  He’s so nice.  He’s such a good guy.”

    Well, okay, I’d think.  And then I’d hang out with the guy and, almost invariably, he was an asshole!  Because most guys who are losers are assholes!  The idea that men who are losers are the nice guys is as ass-backward fallacious as the idea that fat women are the really nice women.  Fat women are usually bitches for the same reason that loser men are usually assholes: Because people don’t like them!  Because people aren’t attracted to them!  Because they don’t get laid!  If anyone could get past their own insecurities long enough to really examine these assumptions, a fourth-grade mastery of logic would lead within seconds to the conclusion that the nicest people are probably going also to be the most attractive people.  Attractive people have less to be angry about.  We have less reason to be mean to anyone.  Everyone’s generally (aside from, well, all the issues in this essay) nice to attractive people, and we develop no vendetta against the world because we don’t need to defend ourselves with one.

    This is exactly why the readers of Glamour picked Jake as their “Advice from a Guy” columnist.  Because Jake is obviously a loser.  And women have learned that it’s only losers whom you should trust.

    Bad Feminism is pretty smart.  It plays, like all oppressive movements, on the worst aspects of humanity.  I understand why women want to trust, and date, losers.  I often feel shaky and uncertain dating attractive people.  Being secure in a relationship (be it serious or casual) with someone attractive and cool requires you to have confidence that you yourself are attractive and cool.  And we’re all basically insecure and scared that someone else in the room is prettier, sexier, more charming or a better option.  It’s much easier to feel that a loser won’t leave you.  It’s much easier to date someone who isn’t as attractive as you and thereby feel secure that they’re not going to find someone better than you.  It’s a lot easier to surrender to these insecurities than to work to conquer them, and we’re all prone to laziness and fear.  But only dating losers, buying into the idea that the loser, the unattractive guy, the non-threatening guy, is a good man, is weak, and makes you weaker and weaker each day.  In fact, it makes everyone weak.  It keeps women insecure and powerless because men who make little or no effort to make themselves attractive or interesting can still get exceptionally attractive women.  It encourages men to be losers and discourages them from self-improvement because they believe that trying not to be a loser will instantly make them into an asshole.  I know it may sound ridiculous to say this, but dating attractive, sexy, awesome people is a way to do your part for the Cause of Right.  Women have to stop sanctifying losers, or else they can’t complain about how there are no attractive men, and men have to stop buying into the idea that they’ll turn into a jerk if they try to be attractive or sexy, or else they have to stop complaining that women only date losers.

    I don’t believe in some ideal, future androgyny the way that many feminists, bad and good, do.  I believe, strongly, in femininity and masculinity.  I don’t believe real gender always corresponds with biological gender, but I do believe in essential qualities of masculinity and femininity.  I think the fact that there are definitely women who are born in men’s bodies and vice versa just goes farther to prove that femininity and masculinity are more than social constructs and, just like sex, are natural, complex, and still somewhat inexplicable drives in each of us.  If masculinity manifests as cruel and damaging, that’s in part because Bad Feminism has painted it that way.  The men who don’t submit to the big leather boot of gender theory, who refuse to drown their masculinity in apologies and the sissy passive-aggressive misogyny that passes for “sensitivity,” react in understandable violence against this rhetoric.  Bad Feminism reinforces misogyny on both sides of the fence: It gives traditional misogynists strength through something to react against, making old-school misogynist masculinity suddenly popular because people are so damn sick of the victim-loving arguments against it, and it permits or forces men who want to be “sensitive” to become a new, thinly veiled kind of misogynist.

    This is going to go on as long as masculinity is trumpeted as empirically negative.  I think Bad Feminism’s attempts to tell women that extreme femininity is disempowering is just as bad as its attempts to tell men that traditional masculinity is harmful to women.  But once again, all this rhetoric comes from lazy women encouraging everyone else to be lazy.  A man who works out, plays sports, and is proud of his physical strength and prowess isn’t necessarily an insensitive meathead.  The way to find out if he’s an insensitive meathead is to see if he behaves stupidly or insensitively.  Unwanted physical aggression is a horrific thing and I don’t think anyone’s going to argue with me there—but what Bad Feminism, and all political-correctness movements, do with this issue, as with so many others, is divorce the value judgment or qualifier from the thing itself.  Physical strength is not inherently bad.  Physical strength can be used for a lot of fantastic, positive, good, kind, generous purposes.  And physical strength and prowess is sexy.  Bad Feminism tries to teach us that sexy is no longer something that should be simply defined by the admiration of traditionally beautiful bodies, that women shouldn’t be thin and men shouldn’t be muscular.  These characteristics are boring, it claims, and we don’t actually find them sexually attractive, but rather have only been convinced we do by a brainwashing, conservative media that wants to keep us all oppressed in traditional roles.

    Don’t get played by this rhetoric.  Seriously.  Don’t do it.  Physical beauty isn’t a sociopolitical construct; if it was, we wouldn’t find images of beauty in art from societies drastically different from our own to be beautiful, but we do.  Aesthetics are a fact. Preference differs from person to person, but in general, physical strength is attractive on men, as much now as it was when Michelangelo sculpted the David (actually, I’d rather fuck Michelangelo’s Dying Slave—but that’s just because I’m kinky).

    Bad Feminism and Fashion Magazine Rhetoric are on the side of stupid people, and stupid people always have the same objective: They want to make everything easy.  They want everything to be nice.  Neither of these goals is possible, and only a stupid person would think they were.  These are the same goals as those of the religious fundamentalists.  Sex can’t ever be nice or easy.  Sex is always going to be complicated, and it’s only going to be good if you surrender to that truth and try to work with it.

    Partly we hate each other the way you always hate someone who has something you want desperately.  There is no complete solution to this problem because as long as men want to have sex with women, and women want to have sex with men, men will hate women, and women will hate men.  We’ll all always hate the people we want to have sex with, even if only just a little bit, because they have so much power.  Anyone whom you desire is someone who owns a little part of you.  Wanting someone means handing a part of yourself over to her or him.  It means allowing him or her to be responsible for your happiness.  And it seems unfair that anyone could do this because the minute we want someone (to say nothing of loving them) the beautiful illusion of total free will dries up a bit.  You’re still free to act entirely as you choose, but whether or not you hurt, whether or not you’re happy, satisfied, horny or not horny, is not within your own choosing.   And we’re always going to hate people when they have this much power over us.  I don’t actually think it’s possible to have sex with someone without feeling something for him or her, because desire is a big damn deal.  I just think it’s very much possible to decide that those feelings are just there, and don’t really matter so much, in the action and narrative of things.  It’s possible, in other words, to deal with it, which is exactly what Bad Feminism doesn’t want you to figure out.

    If you deal with it, if you get comfortable and close with these perhaps disturbing truths about sex, then you can let go of the resentment that naturally arises out of wanting someone.  Sex is confusing and often painful.  It fucks us up, it gets us drunk and giddy, it teaches us about despair, or sometimes it doesn’t make us feel anything at all and that in an of itself can be unsettling.  It falls short of expectations (because how could it not) or exceeds them so far as to put a (only sometimes metaphorical) leash on us and yank us crawling back again and again to certain individuals.  It defies systematizing, which is, of course, why we look to put a system on it.  The Wife/Stripper division keeps cropping up and gaining strength and popularity in much the same way, in fact, that religion does.  I remember at some point when I was a kid, I started asking all the big questions, the why do people have to die questions, and my parents sat me down and explained that there aren’t, actually, any answers to those, but that the universal human desire for such answers is the reason people choose to be religious.  From that moment on, religion made perfect sense to me and I knew I couldn’t ever believe in it myself.  We all want easy answers.  I have brief moments of intense envy for religious people; they think they know why and how and what next, and even though it’s false, it must be comforting.  I understand why many of them are so damn smug, though I don’t condone their smugness: they feel like they’re in on the game, they have the secrets, they already have it all sewn up.

    The Wife/Stripper complex seeks to do the same thing with sex that religion does with existence and mortality.  It makes the answers easy.  It makes people stop yelling at you.  It provides a simple solution to a complex problem that seemed to have no answer.  It allows men to easily resolve Bad Feminism with heterosexual desire.  It makes people stop yelling at you.  It makes you feel like you’re one of the good guys, and all the other good guys know that, and will welcome you into the clubhouse with open arms and it makes people stop yelling at you.

    Of course, it’s a load of crap, and it’s a fast and easy way to ensure yourself a life of bad sex and banal emotion, but at least it banishes uncertainty.

    You don’t want that.  If you’re reading this, I know you don’t want that.  People are complex, and specific, and—if they’re at all worth knowing—defy whatever sort of easy label gets applied to them.  Asking us to fit into neat identities and, perhaps worse, to understand one another by such reductions, teaches us to be cruel and dismissive in our interactions with our lovers, our friends, our families and ourselves.  There’s no such thing as love in a world, or a worldview, where women are strippers or wives, and wives can’t be fucked and strippers can’t be married, where women are blaringly sexual or not at all.  There’s no such thing as real desire—real, gritty, dirty-nailed, mouth-watering desire—in a world where men are either sexless romantics or thoughtless rapists, where sex and love are at ugly war and every expression of physical wanting demeans us, where to be looked at is to be taken advantage of, to be beautiful is to be behind doll-displaying glass, where to be masculine is to be incapable of love, marriage, family, subtlety and complexity, and to be capable of these things is to be neutered and perpetually inoffensive.

    There’s another piece of graffiti on display in this coffee shop’s bathroom with which I’m currently enamored.  One person has written:

        “‘I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor’s language’—Adrienne Rich”

    In response, directly underneath it, a second person has written:

        “Sometimes I touch myself, and this is the masturbator’s language.”

    It’s obvious why I like this, but aside from laughing at it, I got to thinking about the Rich quote.  Adrienne Rich said that in the context specifically of a lesbian relationship, in protest against homophobia.  Rich is a hero of academic feminists and man-hating lesbians, but I think that fact just makes the deliberate misreading I’m about to perform for my own purposes yet stronger.

    The reductionism and neutering performed by Bad Feminism’s demands on gender roles are the oppressor’s language.  They perform oppression upon heterosexual desire and relationships in the exact same way homophobia does upon homosexual relationships.  They deny to both women and men one of our greatest and most complex capabilities.  Proponents of the Wife/Stripper complex, the three-date rule, and the equation of neutering with virtue figure sex as merely animalistic.  But such a judgment degrades humanity on a grand scale.  Sexuality is divorced neither from the intellect nor from the emotions, and is by the same token intrinsically tied to neither.  Sex is defined by each and all of its participants, in the experience and in the act, defined again and again and each time differently.  Reducing sex to feudal virgin/whore valuations and pre-civilized animal brutality denies all the gloriously specific ways we can define sex and thereby define identity through sex and sexuality.

    More often than not, sex is what I do about the things I cannot do anything else about.  I think the ability to have sex the way we do, to feel desire and act on it in the ways of which humans are capable is a tremendous biological mercy.  There is a point, in conversation, in admiration, in contemplation, of or with another person, when it’s not enough.  These well-mannered and public things we are allowed to do to express interest are also the most passive actions of which we are capable.  Just talking to someone you love or lust after can be as frustrating as just looking at a great work of art.  Looking, admiring, doing things at a respectful distance isn’t action at all, and as reactions to something you feel strongly—in any way—about, they are woefully inadequate.  Sex, on the other hand, is the most active thing we can do.  Sex feels like doing something about it.  That desire that wells up in interaction with a person, or even just with physical beauty, of wanting desperately to do something about it, sex is mercy for that.

    I am a whore just like Bad Feminists and “Good” Men would call me.  I’m a big whore for everything, for the way the air feels when you walk outside in the morning and the smell of bagels from Zabar's comes down clear ten blocks to where the avenue and the street arrive in a frame of red brick and coastal washed-out skies at the corner by my building and all at once every movie I’ve ever seen is about me.  I’m a whore for the way the streets in New York demonstrate the principals of Renaissance classical painting with the grid making vanishing points like Raphael ordained all of them to disappear into a blinking horizon somewhere way off up beyond Harlem.  I’ve had sex because of the way the hills in San Francisco cut the view out at impossible ninety degree angles, because of that delicious and tragic feeling when summer’s ending and there is absolutely nothing to do about it.  I’ve had sex with a Princeton graduate because I could have gone to Princeton and didn’t and sometimes am terrified I made the wrong choice.  I’ve had sex because of the uncanny cold beach at night just beyond the Golden Gate Bridge and the impossible possibility and enormity of America looming the offer of its continental body out to the ocean in the summer dark, all that standing, geographical metaphor right there without a way for me to put my hands on it, and felt briefly satisfied because finally I was doing something about it.

    We have sex with people because of their neighborhoods and apartments, because of their stories about their families or where they went to school, because of the shirt they’re wearing or how they mispronounce our name just slightly when they say it for the first time or because they kiss just like the first girl or boy we ever kissed, or because they look like someone who wouldn’t fuck us in high school.  I knew I had to devote my life to being a writer after one freezing winter night when I fucked a guy because of his bookcases (or, rather, the books in them).  I’ve had sex with people because I hated them or envied them or was fascinated by them or scared of them or felt they were keeping some secret from me or, yes, because I was in love with them.  After an hour, or a day, or a week, or a year, something about that person, be it entirely aesthetic or sublimely intellectual, compels us to do something about them, and the most we can have of someone, the closest we can get to someone, the next best thing to eating their brain, the only way to feel briefly like you can possess someone, take ownership of whatever it is that you want to do something about, is by fucking them.  Oh, and also, it’s fun.

    Denying sex, refusing desire, degrading the impulses and abilities described above into some issue of respect/disrespect objectification/valuation, saying it has to be tied to a committed, monogamous relationship or otherwise it’s cheap and meaningless, is not respectful, is not caring, and is deliberately unintelligent.  Like everything Bad Feminism propagates, it is one more thing that seeks to make us less intelligent and more boring.  Not fucking someone even though both of you want to fuck each other isn’t respectful.  It isn’t caring.  It doesn’t demonstrate an interest in their complexity and interiority.  It doesn’t show that they mean something to you.  Fucking someone and spending a lot of time with her or him and telling them they mean a lot to you and treating them well demonstrates all of that.  We don’t need to interact with one another in some nonsensical code.  Not fucking someone merely demonstrates that you want less of her or him.  It demonstrates that you want to distance yourself from him or her.  It’s only the false villainizing of sexual desire that causes people to think it means anything else.  Bad Feminism and all its reductions and binaries dispossess us of the fact that sex is a tribute, a desire for (at least in that moment) more and more and ever-yet-more of the object of desire, and what the hell could be more valuable, more human, more sensitive than that?

    Devaluation of sexual desire is oppression.  I cannot touch you, and this is the oppressor’s language.

    The very phrase “men are the new women” is offensive, but it’s offensive in precisely the way that this essay seeks to demonstrate any prescriptive sexual judgments to be offensive.  Until we stop defining men as “Sensitive” or “Asshole,” and women as “Wife” or “Stripper,” good sex, really good sex, is going to be something for which we have to fight by being rigorously intelligent.  Don’t accept anyone making any assumption about who you are or what you want because you had sex on the first date.  Don’t date unattractive people because they’re less threatening.  Don’t assume that just because a guy wants to go down on you for hours, he’s not a total misogynist.

    And if a guy says “I care too much about you to want to have sex with you,” kick him out of your house in the middle of the night, because you’ve got to fight for your right to party.

THE END
of
Men Are the New Women

...but Sexa Rubelucia will return
in
A Defence of Trendy Bisexuality

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