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Feminist* author Courtney Martin, widely respected-by-feminists* blogger at premier feminist* website Feministing* quotes Australian feminist* porn-for-women blogger Ms. Naughty by way of decrying…

...censorship prompted by decidedly non-feminist Australian Senators Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett. The censorship in question? Small breasts, which at least in Joyce and Barnett’s understanding of anatomy, are found only on underage girls.

Quoth Martin…

So many jokes come to mind here, but I’m going to leave the analysis to Ms. Naughty on Australia’s weird ban:

Why ban small boobs? I can only assume it stems from paranoia that flat chests somehow stir up the pedophiles. And you only need to mention that “p” word to start a full-scale moral panic in Parliament.

Shall we put such hysteria aside and look at what this ruling is saying to Australian women? Basically, it’s classing a certain normal female body type as obscene. It’s declaring all flat chests to be automatically juvenile, something that should not be viewed by anyone because of a fear that it will stir up “base instincts” in certain people.

“Can the Classification Board be any more insulting or sexist?”

Read the quote in context here.

For what it’s worth Barnett and Guy have also pressed the board to outright ban all depictions of female ejaculations and, even weirder, they’re evidently working to restrict photos where inner (but not outer!) labia are visible.

So far anyway the comments at Feministing have been pretty positive in the sense that even those who aren’t totally thrilled by porn still think impositions like this are going too far.

In fact, pretty much around the world people of all stripes are taking a… pretty dim view of the board’s actions.

So I’m going to be contrary and try to give the stupid morons the benefit of the doubt.

Opposition to the small-breasts ruling have been pretty hyperbolic and the analysis has sounded a bit slippery-slope-y so I thought I’d look around and see if I could find the real scoop.

Turns out there’s not a lot. In fact the only credible source of a pro-small-breasts-ban line of reasoning comes from the the Australian anti-censorship site that seems to have broken the original story, SomebodyThingOfTheChildren.com.

According to them the Australian Classification Board says their intention is to ban only images of underage models. Well, and images of small-breasted of-age adults if they might be mistaken for underage models.

In other words even though there’s surprising unanimity in choosing to illustrate articles with photos of actress Keira Knightley, it’s at least somewhat likely magazines and videos depicting her wouldn’t be covered by the ban because she’s known to be an adult.

On the other hand, publications the board evidently has completely banned include 18 U.S. C. 2257-compliant U.S. magazines with titles like Barely Legal, Finally Legal and Purely 18. In other words publications that expressly intend their models to be perceived as of-age adults… and who, since the publications are under perpetual threat of F.B.I. investigation, are verified to be actually of-age adults.

Which means that, yup, even if accusatory articles are hyperbolic the underlying story appears to be accurate: in Australia pornographers are now officially required to discriminate against women with small breasts.

Senators Barnaby Joyce and Guy Barnett, and no-doubt Russ Meyer approve.

\* I’ve been debating a bunch of anti-feminists who claim all feminists are man-hating, hairy-legged, lesbian-separatist, female-supremacist sex haters lately and, at least according to them this post, nor Courtney’s, nor Ms. Naughties can exist, let alone say anything that isn’t straight-up conservative about erotic images of adult men and women. So I thought I’d emphasis the point. Not that it would matter — they’re inclined to see feminism as an evil monolith than Mary Daly was inclined to see men, period, at all. So I thought I’d rub it in.

Jezebel of Evil Slutopia quotes right-wing troll Glenn Beck who, after deciding it’s not enough to slander his own partner, three daughters, plus the remaining 51% of the population decides to slander men as well. (Their source is from Beck and a colleague discussing Scott Brown’s victory speech.)

GLENN: Guys you can figure out: Food, sex. That’s it.

STU: Two step process.

GLENN: It really is. Feed me, make love to me, let me sleep.

STU: Sleep, yeah. That would be the third, sleep.

GLENN: Come on.

STU: That’s pretty much the bottom line.

Read the quotes in context at here.

Actually, technically, what Beck and his broadcast partner are doing is setting an expectation for men: anything besides sex and food should be irrelevant to us or, being a little more specific, everything else a man might want should be secondary. Dispensable. Defer-able.

Note also the expectations he sets: the main things men need “Feed me, make love to me” must be given to him. He can’t do them himself!

Given by or… maybe with a diamond, maybe with a couple of roofies… gotten from someone.

And given Beck’s presumption that all men are heterosexual who, exactly, is he expecting to “feed me, make love to me, let me sleep?” Women, or as he puts it, “psychos.” Who just don’t understand that all they should bother men with are feeding him, fucking him, and letting him sleep.

Yeah, that would make me psycho too. I fear for his little girls. Not because he’ll expect them to feed him and fuck him. But because he’s saying he’ll give them absolutely no support… and just tell them they’re psychos… if when they’re older they want more from a partner than someone to feed or fuck to sleep.

Listen, flipping male flatworms want more out of life than food and sex and all they’ve got is primitive notochords, but Beck is adamant that’s all men want?

Round-y side of the spoon down when you try to eat soup, dude.

Boy, where would Evolutionary Psychology and its more deterministic uncle Sociobiology be without the sexual revolution?

All that seed-spreading. All that “natural promiscuity” among men. All that “natural reticence” (coughRule Number Onecough) in women.

What do you suppose it would have looked like if it had been proposed not in 1975 but in, say, 1875. That was at the height… but also near the end… of the 3,000-year-old male-chastity and semen-conservation movement when Kellogg’s corn flakes and Graham’s flour and crackers were sold over the counter as it were to promote what was then the very, very popular idea of sexual and seminal “continence” in men. What if it had been proposed in India today, where Ayurvedic medical theory still holds that semen is a vital essence, even single drops of which are expended only at a man’s peril?

What if it had been proposed by the ancient Greek athletes, warriors, philosopher, and physicians?

What if it had been proposed in the U.S. or England as recently as 1957?!?!?

I’m… pretty sure you’d hear all manner of research “proving” that instead of profligately screwing anything that moved and then moving on you’d hear earnest, intent, and scrupulously collated research papers “proving” that men value marriage as a way to insure the products of their “investments” of precious-bodily fluids were kept safe and healthy until they reached their own reproductive years. I’m sure you’d hear “just so” stories about how harem-owning Sultans and polygamist Mormons did their level best to sequester and impregnate their myriad wives as conservatively as possible in order to protect their own health. I’m also pretty sure Satoshi Kanazawa would still be implying that Russian women are whores, but based instead on suppositions about their “evolutionary” desire to ruthlessly and promiscuously extract as much semen as possible from as many men as possible.

In other words there still might be such a thing as evolutionary psychology but I’m pretty sure that when it came to research human sexual behavior it would look almost completely different than it does today.

For one thing I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be so single-mindedly obsessed with proving that sexual attitudes that are scarcely more than a century old… and possibly less than 35 years old!... have been the sexual status quo since time out of mind.

Which, I might add, the highly-contingent timing of evolutionary psychology and sociology don’t undermine the concept that components of behavior are shaped by selective pressure. Such behavior is clearly demonstrable in animals and even plants. And it’s very hard to imagine human behaviors, even sexual ones, weren’t similarly shaped.

It does however tend to undermine many of their most often-repeated, and lurid, popular, and bias-confirming hypotheses about gender.

Ok, so I feel really uncomfortable going here because it takes me back to when I was, like, a horny 17-year-old boy… and because it’s about fashion, which is always sort of a loaded issue but…

In a very cool post on body/mass indexes, working out vs. dieting, and standards of attraction Amanda Marcotte over at Pandagon said

“...a lot of women polled still found women like Alba attractive, but 41% said that muscles are never attractive on women. 72% said they don’t think men find muscles on women attractive, and 77% said that they don’t think women find them attractive.”

Read the rest of her excellent post here.

S’cuse me but… this is going to sound like male privilege out the wazoo or something (I promise it’s not) but… but… who gives a crap what women think other women should look like?!?

I ask because it’s certainly the case that women appear to care hugely more about how other women look than men do. And also appear to care hugely more about how other women think they look than how men think they look.

If I was an MRA or something I’d snuffle about how it’s so unfair that Teh Feminists blame men for forcing women into unhealthy diets, uncomfortable shoes, entire toxic waste dumps full of cosmetics and hair products and (worst of all in my opinion anyway) clothes without pockets that… cost two to five times as much to purchase as men’s and two to ten times as much to (dry!) clean. When, as this survey shows, women are full of the harsh towards other women.

Of course I’m not an MRA so I’ll go with stuff Hegel, or Naomi Wolfe, or Susie Orbach and say something about the feminine beauty trap which, like the corresponding masculine worthiness trap is a product of our self-criticism and self-policing in the face of our gendered expectations. And that is sure seems like there’s sort of the opposite of that stupid joke about bears and running shoes where we tell ourselves if we’re going to get the man/woman/whatever of our dreams we can’t just meet the typical non-gendered threshhold of attractiveness to the opposite gender and instead perceive that we have to beat everyone else who might also be interested in them. With the result that we’re more acutely attuned to the nuances of… whatever gender trap is assigned to us than members of the opposite sex are ever likely to be…

...with the result that, ironically, we’re likely to be more judgmental of, and have higher standards for, ourselves and our peers than the prospective partners we’re allegedly competing for. Which is why I think it’s an escalating trap. To the point that, say, women can wind up saying things like “don’t kiss me I just did my hair” and men say things like “I can’t come home now, I’m not earning enough to keep you happy” that are objectively dumb but subjectively make perfect sense to them.

—-

But what I really wanted to say was I think it’s weird that the report would gather statistics on whether other women think buff women are unattractive. Which goes back, I think, to me being gender, and probably cis- and all kinds of other privileged after all. Because when I hear “women are” attractive/unattractive/whatever I automatically append “to men.” As if that was the only criteria that matters. And I’m not sure it’s a good excuse that that really is supposed to be what the whole attractiveness industry is predicated on.

And now after saying that I’m going to add that I think 77% of women are out of their minds if they don’t think men think muscles on women are attractive. It’s as dumb as saying 77% of men think women aren’t interested in men who don’t have… I dunno… high-paying jobs or something. Because I’m pretty sure a heck of a lot fewer than 77% of men think buff women are unattractive. I mean, seriously, I don’t get it.

—-

One more thing: in comment #29 to Amanda’s post La Lubu said: “Women’s clothing—-outside of workout clothes—-doesn’t come in an ‘athletic’ cut the way men’s clothing does.” That part certainly is true. In the past I spent a lot of time doing pool aerobics with athletes recovering from knee, foot, and leg injuries and it’s certainly true that contemporary women’s clothes, ironically, don’t seem to “flatter” fit women’s bodies as well as they do women who aren’t as fit. Except, I guess, in the pool or at the beach.

—-

Things like this make you wonder who invented heterosexuality anyway? I mean, I like being heterosexual and all but wow, for something that’s supposed to be “how nature made us” we end up doing a lot of embarrassing things to ourselves and each other.

The following comic wouldn’t be funny (I think it’s hilarious!) if it didn’t play into common stereotypes about, especially, young roughneck men. I happen to be one of those people who thinks that in mass culture stereotypes don’t just unfairly describe the targets they also, unfortunately, may also set expectations in the targets themselves. (If I may meta-stereotype for a moment, I’ve noticed that young men tend to be very influenced by pop-culture characterizations of… young men.)

Comic by Robert T. Balder at PartiallyClips.com

Source: Robert T. Balder’s Partially Clips

Epiphora of Hey Epiphora on Tumblr found a pretty good example of the deep, deep incomprehension asexuals have to deal with.

Whimsical-looking dildos

clientsfromhell:

I’m a freelance illustrator and I was hired to do a couple of illustrations for a story about people who are asexual (they do relationships, but not IT). I sent off my sketches to the art director and received an email back that wrote, “These look great, but could you possibly add some whimsical looking dildos?”

Read the quote in context here.

Sort of like asking for whimsical-looking Virginia hams in sketches of a hardware store, dildos just aren’t elements in the visual grammar of asexuality. Some people have a very, very hard time grasping asexuality as a concept.

Hugo Schwyzer says

The blogosphere and the mainstream media have … had much to say about the Pew study released Tuesday that shows that more than ever before, men are likely to marry women with more education and earning potential than they themselves have. From the Times story:

“Men now are increasingly likely to marry wives with more education and income than they have, and the reverse is true for women,” said Paul Fucito, spokesman for the Pew Center. “In recent decades, with the rise of well-paid working wives, the economic gains of marriage have been a greater benefit for men.”

The analysis examines Americans 30 to 44 years old, the first generation in which more women than men have college degrees. Women’s earnings have been increasing faster than men’s since the 1970s.

He said it here.

Seems to me that part of the effect would just naturally follow from an equalization in earning rates and earnings potential. Past a certain point it just doesn’t make sense that on the one hand earnings would be approaching parity but on the other people would still be scrambling to find men who earned more than women.

I mean, yeah, I strongly suspect that urge is still there. (You can actually sort of see that effect where, for whatever reason, men in relationshps tend to be, say, taller or older than their women partners even though in aggregate there’s obviously substantially more overlap in men’s and women’s heights and ages. And I’m certainly aware of individuals who won’t consider a woman partner who earns more or, in a couple of cases even more emphatically, women who won’t consider a partner who earns less. Preference has a strong pull. And I’m guessing that’s partly why why the marriage numbers aren’t already closer to aggregate earnings ratios.

Still, past a certain point a lot of marriage-inclined heterosexuals are going to have to, well, “settle” for relationships where close to 50% of the time the woman earns as much as or more than the man. Not that that’s the end of the world — 50% of men would by-definition also be earning the same as or more than the woman.

Or am I missing something here?

The best thing from my perspective would be that since women who have children still spend some time out of the workforce (in my experience three months for the rarely mentioned “fourth trimester” isn’t unreasonable) and therefore put some fraction of their earnings potential on hold (at least till we get solid progressive family leave policies) then it makes sense that women ought to at least start out with higher incomes. (It makes sense that their partners would also support that.)

The advantages are considerable: there’s be no particular intra-family earnings imbalance due to children, there’s be no strong incentive for the partner who stayed at home with the first child to stay at home with the next, etc. And if the family did decide to go the “traditional” avenue where the woman stays home with succeeding children she’d still have an easier path towards reaching income parity when she chooses to return to the workforce.

Yeah, it doesn’t have to be that way As we see in parts of Scandinavia for instance a really strong public/private/family network can be pretty powerful. But at least for now it is that way. And so a trend towards women earning more, at least initially, at least in theory, ought to support more egalitarian — and therefore stronger — long-term relationships.

Over time people are going to stop hauling out traditionalist “silver linings” the way the article Hugo cite does, and instead start noticing that the end results are more egalitarian. I’m guessing it’ll take one more generation but I’m pretty sure we’ll see the first articles discovering the virtues before then.

—-

One other thing, by the way. The article Hugo quotes in turn quotes political economist Stephanie Coontz

“We’ve known for some time that men need marriage more than women from the standpoint of physical and mental well-being,” said Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., and research director for the Council on Contemporary Families, a research and advocacy group. “Now it is becoming increasingly important to their economic well-being as well.”

I’m… kind of curious whether the well-documented tendency for married men to be healthier and happier in marriage than women is an artifact of them having what amounts to a stay-at-home personal caregiver. And consequently I’ll be curious if those numbers hold up when divisions of labor equalize inside as well as outside the home. My intuition would be yes. Although based on personal experience and those I’ve seen of other relationships with lower-earning and stay-at-home dads is that their partners really are going to have to give up the traditional and/or “second shift” notions about who establishes and enforces domestic standards and practices. Also based on experience this will have a lot more to do with when working women stop being judged by themselves and others on domestic decor, schedules, etc., even when it’s very, very clear it’s not their responsibility. (For instance how often are working men judged personally when their stay-at-home partner doesn’t iron the sheets?)

Flitter of My Precious Midlife Crisis collides with Rule Number One (emphasis mine.)

How to Become Invisible in Your Marriage Counseling

Say you want satisfying sex. Watch hubby and male therapist go carefully blank for a moment while you go on to the next thing on your list of things you want out of your marriage.

I’ve brought up the sex thing a couple times in our first couple sessions, and hubby and therapist won’t touch it with a ten foot pole. I can’t help but wonder how things would be if it was hubby complaining about the sex. Sex seems to me like an important part of marriage. Even if you’re not having sex, both partners should be on the same page and happy with that arrangement. If both partners are struggling with frequency, or more importantly in my mind, how satisfactory the sex is when it does happen— well, who else are you gonna snog? Shouldn’t you be trying to make that happen inside your marriage? Even if you have an open marriage and you’re both open to other partners, that shouldn’t be something you seek out because sex with your spouse is distasteful.

She said it here.

Can’t remember the source now but even I was startled to read that more than half of all heterosexual couple’s decisions to go to sex therapists over problems with a partner’s libido are initiated by the woman.

I don’t know why I’m surprised, though. I noticed early on that more than half the blogs where the author is disappointed about a partner’s low libido and/or general lack of attentiveness are written by women.

And yet we “know” women have lower libidos than men. We “know” men “need” prostitutes because their wives just can’t keep up. We “know” women would rather just sit around talking about their feelings and baking bread or something.

What if the much-mocked and often dreaded “feelings” women wanted to talk about were about sexual desire?

What’s especially frustrating is how likely it is that men’s belief in rule number two is just as responsible as our belief (against so much evidence) in rule number one.

—-

That rule number two business is especially ironic when you consider, for instance, this post by Hugo Schwyzer.

Following up on my previous post about problems with blaming the victim: You might have noticed that throughout the post it looked like I was assuming all rape and sexual assaults are committed by men.

Actually, no, I’m not making that assumption at all — if for no other reason then because when I was roughly pre-school age I was physically sexually assaulted by a roughly middle-school aged girl. (And, of course, there are plenty of other reasons.) I also wasn’t making that assumption even the vast preponderance of sexual assaults really actually happen to be perpetrated by men. I wasn’t even making an assumption because narratives about male predation are even more prevalent than actual male predation.

Nope. I made the calculated decision to speak about men in the context of “she asked for it” victim blaming because…

you ready?...

When a woman sexually assaults or rapes someone — a man, another woman, a child, whatever, you know what they don’t say?

They don’t say “well, the victim was asking for it.”

They don’t say “well, she just couldn’t help herself.”

You know, the way they do when a man sexually assaults or rapes someone.

What do they say instead when a woman does it? That she’s mentally ill? That she’s traumatized from her own abuse (as, incidentally, I strongly suspect was the case with the girl who assaulted me.) That, in other words, she was broken, damaged, crazy, or otherwise not an otherwise perfectly normal person who’s hormones just got away from her in the face of irresistable provocation.

In other words when a woman does it there’s never any question about who’s at fault. No question that she deliberated, made a decision, and then acted on that decision. No question that it’s the assailant’s fault and not her victim.

Yes, yes, if you thought about that for very long you notice the bitter irony that whether as victim or assailant rape is always held that the woman is at fault. Believe me that hasn’t escaped me but while it’s not a small issue it’s one that’s heavily dependent on the main point of this post:

Notice how the characterizations of women perpetrators do not mitigate the assumptions about men’s inherent weakness and sub-human dependability and responsibility inherent in the standard “blame the victim” scripts mentioned in the preceding post: in one important regard women are held responsible for their victimization because men aren’t expected to be responsible in the first place.

And, once again, they say feminists hate men!

Robot-Heart has a cool post that gets back to problem with the whole “myth of male weakness“ ideology

“Left to my own devices, I never would have been raped. The rapist was really the key component to the whole thing. I was sober; I was wearing sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt; I was at home; my sexual history was, literally, nonexistent—I was a virgin; I struggled; I said no. There have been times since when I have been walking home, alone, after a few drinks, wearing something that might have shown a bit of leg or cleavage, and I wasn’t raped. The difference was not in what I was doing. The difference was the presence of a rapist.”

Shakesville

It bears repeating.

I don’t understand the contortions of logic people go through to find reasons why a rape victim is at fault for some other person raping them.

You know what is logical? Blaming the person who decides to rape someone else.

Read the quote in context here.

Once again, the problem with blaming the victim (she must have known that sitting at home in sweatpants watching a movie was asking for it!!!!) isn’t that it absolves the assailant(s) it’s a declaration that men are weak, impulsive, hormonal, dictated to by their organs of reproduction, undisciplined, infantile, base, and governed by their animal nature and an overwhelming, instinctive drive to inseminate.

You know what it is? (You’re not going to like it.) It’s saying that rapists are indistinguishable from all other men. Which created an unholy uproar when Susan Brownmiller or Andrea Dworkin or Mary fucking Daly said it. But which passes not simply without comment but as conventional wisdom whenever someone says “well, she must have been asking for it” or “what did she expect?”

If you’re a man and you hear someone blaming a victim for rape why not take it as a personal slap in the face?

How about saying “no, she didn’t ask for fucking anything — a man who knew exactly what he was doing made the deliberate choice to rape someone he believed he could get the drop on under circumstances he calculated minimized the chance of being brought to justice.” I mean, seriously, every time someone blames the victim they’re letting the rapist slide on the low, low expectations their shitty attitude about men’s incapacity for responsibility creates.

To paraphrase The Elephant Man “men are not animals, they are human beings.” And like all human beings men deliberate, decide, and then act. When anyone gets raped it’s because someone deliberated raping them, decided to rape them, and then acted on their decision to rape them.

Remember: it’s not feminists who believe in blaming the victim. Consequently its not feminists who can be held accountable for society’s predators-from-the-sewers narratives about men.