Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Best sentence I’ve read all week, check it out: A. Serwer of TAPPED takes mild exception to a recently-released poll touted by the ACLU as showing specific support for the Paycheck Fairness Act. Serwer says that while the questions in the poll probably weren’t specific enough to show support for one particular piece of legislation. Which is fine because he says what it does show is even cooler.

What the poll does show is that Americans, broadly speaking, think the freedom of getting paid for your work regardless of your gender is more important than the freedom to pay people less money for the same work because of their gender.

Read the quote in context here.

That’s a great sentence! If you follow the link to his post the embedded graphic shows a bit over 60% of Republicans answered “strongly support!” Nearly 80% of Republican answers indicated some kind of support. Of course the 20% of Republicans who didn’t answer in support are members of the hard core that’s been dominating in primaries lately. So if they win big in November (and that’s possible but not too likely) they may be able to block progress for a few more years. But Serwer’s point stands.

Summary: The benefits of taking a gender-neutral approach to solving the problem of highly differential gender pressure on boys and girls are likely to be huge. So we ought to stop buying the same old gendered construction of gender construction.

So I was driving through rural Tennessee just now (I’m home on a very brief visit for an elderly relative’s funeral) and was listening to an NPR program on satellite radio.

The topic involved the beating death of a (Vermont?) college lacrosse player at the hands of her domestic partner. The host and three guests were all women with professional experience related to relationship abuse.

Without taking anything away (seriously!) from the nuanced, non-black-and-white-answer guests, or the somewhat less savvy host, all of whom I thought asked and answered questions pretty well, I would like to make a pitch for a more gender-neutral approach to the problem.

I don’t mean a “but men can be victims too” approach, although several of the guests made clear that sometimes happens. And I don’t mean a “gender blind” approach either because, sorry, even when you factor out stereotypical assumptions and biases by pretty much every measure of relationship violence the patterns of control and abuse are more likely to involve men shepherding, controlling, and injuring their partners than women.

So. What do I mean by “gender neutral” then?

Two items have been on my mind lately, and the discussion helped bring it to a head.

First of all, the host and two of the guests spoke confidently only about problems with “ever younger sexualization of girls.” In her concurrence the third guest, a judge, carefully agreed there’s a problem with increasingly sexualized youth.

And that’s the first important point where gender neutrality seems important. Yes, girls are increasingly sexualized at increasingly younger age (“anyone remember those rhinestone “hottie” and “tease” thong undies for pre-teens? I think they sold them at J.C. Pennies!) What’s overlooked is that boys are being similarly sexualized. Just not as “hotties” or “teases.” Instead they’re being groomed to value themselves by conquests, by self-confidence, by “that’s what bitches want,” and even, more prosaically, “girls my age are doing it already, what should I be doing?”

In other words, while the nature of the sexualization is absolutely, 100%, incontrovertibly gendered, the sexualization itself is gender neutral: it’s happening equally to girls and boys. Failing to recognize this — failing to see that not all the influence is generated by older men grooming eternally more precocious girls but that boys are also sucked into the vortex and are influenced to identify as sexualized earlier.

Which leads me to the other point: I think pretty much everyone on the planet can recognize that girls are often (not always but yeah, pretty often) pressured into performing sexuality before they’re necessarily ready before their ready to be actually sexual. Again, those “hottie” thongs for 4th- or 5th-graders? Rest my case, m’kay?

What I think isn’t as well recognized is that boys are often pressured into performing sexuality before they’re ready to be sexual. In fact I think it’s not just poorly recognized, I think it’s pretty much fucking invisible!

And this is where I think gender neutrality comes in handy again. Because if you just assume, as society as culture does, that “already has a y-chromosome” equals “already ready for sex” then you’re going to interpret the behavior of boys as if a) they instinctively know exactly what they’re doing, b) they instinctively know exactly what they want, and c) they themselves see their (frankly predatory) behavior as predatory rather than as, say, defensive. Oh yes, and that therefore d) predatory boys behavior, being intentional, competent, and instinctive, is therefore immutable. And therefore, e) there’s no point trying to change male behavior – except possibly by supervision, restriction, and threats.

Remember here that I’m really clearly not saying the behavior is gender neutral, it’s way generally not. Instead I’m saying that pressure to behave in gendered ways is gender neutral (it happens to boys and girls of all persuasions.) And I’m saying that the best analysis is gender neutral as a result of effort not to buy into gender-biased assumptions.

In the face of gender-biased analysis items a-e, above are taken as fixed. And consequently you see almost all discourse in the terms I heard tonight: how do we warn girls? How do we train girls to recognize abuse? How do we recognize girls who are abused? All of which, obviously, is itself highly gendered. And all of which, I think, we’re (finally) less willing to tolerate when it comes to questions of sexual assault. (For instance we’re no longer talking only in terms of what women can do to avoid assault. Nor, thank goodness, are we assuming if a girl is assaulted there must have been something she could have done to avoid it.)

A gender neutral approach, one that I think is finally seeping in to the issue of sexual assault, is…

Not just checking in on boys. Not just intervening with boys. Even though thouse are good ideas. But also instructing boys. Also reassuring boys. Also warning boys. About the sexualization that’s happening to them. About the risks of feeling pressure not just to respond but to act before they’re ready. Of the patterns of pressured behavior that can first shade and then plunge into abusiveness.

Because it seems to me it’s doing a great disservice, not just to boys but to everybody to write them off as unalterably malevolent, whether or not its imagined to be intentional or impulsive malevolence.

I’m trying to think of a comparable example and one of them would be the whole “purity ball” abstinence-fetish business where the purity instructions for boys are… all about girl’s purity — “you wouldn’t want your sister…” or “how would you feel about some other boy touching your future bride…” all with no, zero, none regard for the possibility that “purity” could be anything besides a euphemism for “untouched pussy” or that “not ready” could be anything but a euphemism for “keep her pristine for her purchaser,” or that “protect from emotional harm” could mean anything more than “kept naive enough to imagine picking out the wedding dress is the last choice she’ll ever need to make… or be allowed to.”

Never mind that boys don’t automatically know what to do any more than girls do. Never mind that boys actually seem to start being “ready” a year or two after girls their ages are. Never mind that boys have their own emotional needs, their own crushes, their own naive assumptions, their own internal and external experiences of peer pressure.

And here’s the point: it’s a gendered assumption that only girls are vulnerable to sexualization just as it’s a gendered assumption that boys are immune to it. It’s a gendered assumption that only girls are responsive to mitigation of gendered construction. And when we’re able to start assessing boys with a gender-neutral eye I have a feeling the social benefits will be exponential rather than incremental.

We ought to start trying it.

Lindsay Beyerstein of Big Think says

In his latest op/ed Nick Kristof is lamenting the fact that girls are outperforming boys at school. Kristoff is as ardent a defender of women’s rights as anyone in the established media, so he gets a proverbial clitoral ‘hood pass. Yet Kristof seems oblivious to the fact that many self-appointed advocates for boys in the school system are trying to address educational disparities by further institutionalizing male privilege. Instead of demanding more resources to help boys succeed within the system, they want to overhaul the system to cater to male developmental quirks. Boys are just that special.

Read the quote in context here.

Kristof handles the most conventional “yes but” explanations, for instance the “yes but” that performance by local-minority children drags down national averages (the declines are mapped across most demographics), but buys into the possibly-correct notion that increased and earlier academic focus plus disciplinary screw-downs tend to disproportionately alienate boys. So that’s all ok.

And while he points at residual privilege as an even more-likely source for boy’s underperformance he earns more gender-neutrality points, at least from me, in his concluding paragraph (emphasis mine)

At a time when men are still hugely overrepresented in Congress, on executive boards, and in the corridors of power, does it matter that boys are struggling in schools? Of course it does: our future depends on making the best use of human capital we can, whether it belongs to girls or boys.

He said it here.

It’s true! Making the best use of human capital really is the clearest path towards a brighter future! And so I’m strongly inclined to split the difference between Kristof and Bayerstein. As long as boys and their parents could count on a vast series of structural institutions they could also count on being able to lump along on privilege plus Harry Potter / Ron Weasley style luck, pluck, and “girls suck.” Meanwhile over the last 40 years girls, and their parents, have been rather critically aware that if they were going to get anywhere they were going to have to work their asses off Hermione Granger style. Parents have been taking their daughters to work since the 1980s… a period roughly coinciding with strong movement in the workforce away from the kinds of jobs sons were previously brought lump-along style into.

In other words while for the last couple of generations social intertia has continued raising boys in the traditions of casual, lump-along privilege society has also tended to be expressly intentional a.k.a. affirmative about raising girls.

It’s for this reason that I’m more sanguine about us becoming more intentionally affirmative about how we raise boys — the old techniques of greasing the skids so they can coast (into Congress, CEO offices, or other corridors of power) isn’t just unfair, and isn’t just increasingly ineffective (while Harry and Ron could skate without exerting themselves in the the pseudo-1940 or 1950s universe Rowling created for them, Hermione would become CEO and/or Prime Minister and… would be unlikely to hire either of the boys into positions of responsibility) it’s also gets back to the waste of human capital Kristof mentions. Given affirmative, intentional, non-negligent educations boys can grow up to be as productive as girls. It might not happen overnight (old traditions seem to die very hard) but if we choose to put as much effort into boys as the old status quo forced us to put into girls it might take less than 40 years for boys to catch up.

Hugo Schwyzer takes conservative nepotism beneficiary Jonah Goldberg to task for arguing that women should be given a little more power in “backwards” cultures. You’d think that would be a good thing but Goldberg’s arguing only that women should have only enough power to be more effective “gatekeepers.” (Emphasis mine.)

Jonah concludes his piece … with this gem:

“Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands will allow. “Liberate” men from those expectations, and “Lord of the Flies” logic kicks in. Liberate women from this barbarism, and male decency will soon follow.”

Give Jonah credit. He’s not blaming women directly for their failure to civilize men. Rather, he’s blaming certain cultures that fail to give women sufficient authority with which to do their civilizing. But that doesn’t change the basic problem in his argument, based as it is on pseudo-science, Victorian sentimentality about women’s “nature”, and a William Golding novel about pre-pubescent boys.

Read the quote and Schwyzer’s analysis in context here.

Goldberg says “Women civilize men. As a general rule, men will only be as civilized as female expectations and demands will allow.”

Which would be… Goldberg, a man, setting expectations for male behavior. Very low expectations, sure, but not ones set by women.

Which is, of course, the nice little trap men like Goldberg want to set for us: expect to be able to indulge your more infantile and/or animal impulses; then either blame women letting us live up to the expectations we ourselves set, or else resenting women for using sexual access (the only leverage we permit them to have) in order to get us to act like actual adult men. The minor “upside” for anti-feminists like Goldberg is that men are absolved of all responsibility for, well, responsibility. The infinitely larger downside is that women are expected to have all the responsibility but none of the authority (we just call them “bitches” when they try to make us do the task Goldberg assigns them.) The end result isn’t even zero sum, it’s negative sum: grown men and women are reduced to Cathi Hanauer’s acute phrases The Bitch in the House and The Bastard on the Couch

Quick question for Goldberg: what does he imagine, say, Aristotle, or Augustine, or, Confucius or, I dunno, Maimonides, or even Tolstoy would think of his assertion that women are a civilizing influence on men? I happen to think all those gentlemen were dead wrong to believe men are uniquely moral and civilizing compared to women. But Goldberg and his desperately anti-feminist ilk just as wrong to imagine their fantasy of essential gendered women’s morality is any more real.

Another quick question: Goldberg, like Satoshi Kanazawa and millions of other anti-feminists, believes women’s magic lady part… and their “power” to withhold it... are the only thing that civilizes men. To which I’ll just rephrase Holly’s observation: Does that all those gay artists and writers and politicians and freakin’ gay fry cooks for that matter never get around to contributing to society because they’re way too busy not withholding sex from each other?

In fact we men set expectations all the time. In fact the whole idea that women don’t have anything better to do with their own sexuality than to use it to manipulate men’s behavior (coughno-sex classcough) is a completely male expectation.

Screw Goldberg and the coin-operated horsie he rode up on. I expect better of him.