Male Nerds and Feminism

Are boys really reading about feminism before they begin having lascivious thoughts about the peach-shaped asses of their female schoolmates?

I had the same thought. But… why would it be/have to be before? You have the desires, then at some point you get introduced to “feminism,” and learn they are “bad.” Even if Aaronson said it was in the other order for him (and I’m not clear that he did), why would it matter?

Overall I have little sympathy for Aaronson’s complaints. I was pretty much a nerd (yay cello!), and I just didn’t and don’t feel as put-upon by the demands of being a Good Guy (or whatever) as he unfortunately was. (I was also never particularly concerned about being a Good Guy or really gave much of a shit about feminism at those ages either, though, so perhaps I’m not the best test case.)

But what I’m left wondering as I watch this is what the point of this exercise is. You’re a bit better than Marcotte, but the extremeness (in Marcotte’s case) of the anti-charity in interpreting his arguments makes me completely uninterested in this whole . I’d be more moved by a simple, “You’re a freaking white-guy MIT professor with a wife and kids, I guess things turned out okay for you” (which is in fact kind of my take on the situation). But I’d really be more impressed if the choice was to leave it at that, rather than engage in a kind of false exercise in taking his claims seriously. At least Marcotte disclaims that her treatment is undertaken with extreme prejudice, but that in actuality doesn’t justify falsely interpreting every one of the statements of his she considers.

You’re fairer than she is, but then you claim to be. And you’re not fair.

And I understand why not. I don’t think his complaints particularly deserve fair treatment. But neither do they deserve actively unfair interpretation. Broadly, I think they deserve disregard. But if you’re going to choose to deal with them, you only discredit yourself and any movement you may claim to represent (perhaps that’s none) by doing so in a way that chooses to understand his statements in ways that are least sensible, least defensible, and least flattering to him and his viewpoint. It essentially is an announcement that I (or my movement) can best, and possibly only, deal with this person’s story by interpreting in the way in which it is least challenging to me/the movement, and not if it’s taken roughly as offered, or even in its most sympathetic form. And I think, in fact, both you and feminism could deal with this challenge in its strongest form quite handily.

You’re just choosing not to, and in the process dealing unfairly with someone you could deal with very satisfactorily fairly. And I wonder what the point is. Well, I get the point, actually. It just collapses the value of the discussion to me down to essentially nothing. I’d be more receptive to a simple, “Looks like things turned out okay for you anyway, there, guy.”

But that’s just me. I think I get the point.

> in the process dealing unfairly with someone you could deal with very satisfactorily fairly.

“Fairly”?

Why does the teacher only give me fifty points on the test? They have a limitless supply, they could give me as many as they wanted by a stroke of the pen: why are they keeping the points to themselves?

I agree with Phil that in my experience understanding that women are real people and treating them as such is a 100% human moral imperative and broadly life-improving for men, and also largely in practice orthogonal to succeeding at getting women to want to have sex with you. You do it because it’s good on its own terms, not for the second reason.

“why are they keeping the points to themselves?”

It’s pretty interesting that you analogize feminism with scoring points.

How charatible can one be about this passage:

My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did. Anything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.

Equating being hetero wih being tainted or cursed should be ridiculed, IMHO.

I mentioned in that other thread that I was in a men-only group against rape back in the mid-80s. It was maybe 1/3 to 1/2 gay or bi men (or it seemed like it, anyways), the rest straight, long before Gay-Straight Alliances became popular. And it was generally older people than nerdy teens are (I was an early-20s astrophysics grad student at the time.)

I don’t want to give the impression that this was “macktivism”. But, like, we hugged each other a lot. And I really recommend a version of this kind of thing at the high school level for nerdy male teens concerned about sexuality and so on. This group was animated by straight-up second wave feminism (third wave not existing yet) and it’s really different when it’s all guys talking to each other about it.

Belle, thanks for starting this conversation!

Scott Aaronson’s comment 171 has become identified with this full frontal assault on feminism–nice-guy-ism combined with complete refusal to acknowledge male privilege–which I don’t think is justified from the comment. For example, in the OP, Belle says: “More generally, as a white male MIT professor, Scott Aaronson resents very deeply the suggestion that he enjoys any ‘privilege’ of any kind.”

This is what Aaronson says (his updates to the original comment are in boldface, as in the original):

“Alas, as much as I try to understand other people’s perspectives, the first reference to my “male privilege”—my privilege!—is approximately where I get off the train, because it’s so alien to my actual lived experience. This is not, insanely, to suggest a lack of misogyny in the modern world! To whatever extent there is misogyny, one could say that there’s also “male privilege.” Rather it’s to suggest that, given what nerdy males have themselves had to endure in life, shaming them over their “male privilege” is a bad way to begin a conversation with them.”

He’s not at all saying (and I don’t even think his original comment could be read as saying) that the description of “privileged” is actually wrong, but that it’s often used as if it’s all-or-nothing–some people are “privileged”, others aren’t–and that is–well, I don’t think I can do better than his words: “so alien to [his] lived experience”. Somebody who is bullied in a really severe way, including boys, could be ‘privileged’ in certain ways, but if you tell them that being “privileged” is something that essentially defines their life experience, it makes as much sense as saying that feminism is frivolous because it’s only for upper-middle-class white women.

I was wondering what Aaronson said in response to the hubbub, and found that he wrote a much more formal follow-up post in which he proclaimed “Smash the Patriarchy!”

I should also mention another response to Aaronson that I had mixed feelings about: Arthur Chu’s.

What’s the biggest difference between Scott’s and Amy’s stories? Scott’s story is about things that happened inside his brain. Amy’s story is about actual things that were done to her by other people against her will, without her control.

That’s true, although Scott has told us so little in his post that I wouldn’t at all be surprised if violent bullying and social exclusion were formative experiences for him, and in any case, they are for many other boys and men. But what Chu is saying is basically, this is all in your head. That’s dismissive, and for that matter it could easily describe a huge chunk of the issues that feminism is concerned with, but hopefully nobody here would say those things are unimportant because they’re “in your own brain”.

Belle, I wonder the same thing. This also goes back to fair reading. You can cnonstruct that view from an unfair readng of some feminist authors, but it’s hardly the overall message anyone ought to take from them. But the problem is, feminism is not just an idle intellectual movement. If it was, it could just passivle say, hey, dudes are misunderstanding me. But presumably feminism wants dudes to get it a bit. Does feminism propose to do anything to clarify its message to men? No one is saying it has to (well, maybe some are, but who cares?)… but maybe it wants to? Or maybe it doesn’t. Sometimes I feel like there are things feminism chooses not to do simply because the suggestion that it ought to do it can be identified, when if it weren’t for that suggestion, it would want to. But that’s feminism’s business.

This also goes back to a road I wish you had stayed on a little longer wrt to Aaronson as an example: his seems to be a quite a particular case. With the early reading of Dwarkin or whatnot. Maybe he’s just not.

But that doesn;t mean that young men aren’t getting a fractured set of signals about how to understand how their behavior (and, yes, desires) are understood and problematized, especially as they matriculate on campus. I don’t think Aaronson is wrong that sexual assault/harassment awareness sessions tend to have a pretty strong effect on men – and I’m not sure there’s a whole lot of awareness of what effect that exactly tends to be. I’m also not sure there is always really that much concerted thought that’s even put into defining the message that’s even meant to be sent in them. Then you come to another set of messages for any men who take the step of signing up for a women’s studies course.

I guess my view is that, right now, there seems to be a lack of coordination or wide understanding of best practices for introducing college (or younger) men to, basically, feminism, but at least to the “how not to rape/sexually assault/be otherwise inappropriate sexually” curriculum, with the result being scattershot and unpredictable reactions and levels of understanding among college- and young-professional-age men.

To which your response can not without justice be, “Their problem. They need to figure it out.” Yes, it’s their moral responsibility to figure these things out. I just don’t know why you’d want that to be your response (and I’m using a general ‘you’ there) when something more collaborative and productive might actually result in better conditions.

…Sorry. Maybe Aaronson is just not a case to consider as any kind of useful example in all of this because his life experience is so particular. In which I just feel like the response I’d want to have to him is, Sorry you had a rough few years there, in… adolescence? I’m glad you came through okay.

Isn’t the mixed message which spawned Aaronson’s oversensitivty to “feminism”, just another way that way that the mixed messages our society sends unintentionally cripples many young people with regard to sex? Traditionally it has been religion that served this function, now feminism and political correctness are taking up the slack. But the result is similar, some not insignificant fraction of the young population ends up with seriously dysfunctional with respect to sex related social skills, and has a rough time for several years before their lives normalize. Rather than making a battle of the sexes, or of the sexists versus the enlightened out of this sorry state of affairs, shouldn’t we first and foremost recognize that we have individuals struggling with life’s complexities? I think that would be a more productive mindset, assuming the goal is the advance of human happiness.

AcademicLurker makes a good point about treating comment 171 as some kind of manifesto, when it’s a comment deeply buried in a thread on his own blog.

Brett @15 The idea that, when I encounter a daughter of wealth, who never had to deal with beatings, that I, the son of a blue collar worker, who picked radishes next to migrant workers as a teen, am the ‘privileged’ one, strikes me as more than a little hilarious.

The whole point of the term “privilege” is that different people have different privileges. You as a grown man can move a lot more freely, with a reasonable expectation that people will not sexually harass or assault you, in places where women would not feel safe. A woman raised by no-matter-how-wealthy parents can’t expect the same thing, but has other privileges. I think it does get used as an essentializing term (some people are just “privileged”, others aren’t), because people aren’t always clear about the parameters of discussion–are we saying somebody’s PoV is privileged with respect to one particular situation, or in a more fundamental way? But it’s really unfair and uncharitable to assume all uses of the word “privilege” are the second thing.

I read a lot of feminist material in the ’70s and I don’t recall any of it saying that sex was necessarily bad, or even that male sexual desire was necessarily bad. The nearest I can come to it is that the great demoness Andrea Dworkin wrote that under conditions of political oppression, sexual acts between people of different power classes could be construed as rape, and that is entirely logical, just as financial transactions between people of different classes can be construed as robbery. In those days I hoped the feminists would do away with sex as class on the way to getting rid of class, hierarchy, etc., altogether. No such luck. When feminists started talking about cracks in corporate glass ceilings, I got bored, so maybe I missed something. In regard to Aaronson — I think I read the available material — I could understand how someone might have a personal experience like that, but I think it was an error to generalize much from it.

Michael. I think an important takeaway is that the spectrum of response to the message is very wide. On the one end you have the frat-boy mentality, and on the other a kind of crippling shyness.
As a nerdish type growing up in the seventies, I saw plenty of the later, boys who like me desired a serious relationship with a female, but our shyness and awkwardness almost always prevented that from happening. Even in cases where its obvious to everyone but the subject that that girl simply adores him, he is too inhibited and uncertain to ever make a move, that she ends up giving up on him. I have plenty of regrets about great relationships I probably would have had, but was too hesitant.

My whole point was to say what I thought you should have done (if you wanted me to think more highly of what you wrote, which obviously should not be your priority but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to trouble you with it) rather than what you did, and I made clear what that was.

But obviously you should be you rather than what would make me think more highly of you.

Sex for me (I graduated from high school in Lawton, Oklahoma, in 1961) wasn’t so much the problem — or at least it wasn’t any more a problem than you find described in the literature of pretty much every generation everywhere. The problem was the repressive official culture of American high schools and state universities, particularly in greater and lesser Dixie, (otherwise known as the South and Midwest), and in that era, yes, it very much was a problem.

The answer I found to that problem was subcultures, either informal groups of weirdo friends in my Oklahoma high school, or the elaborate counter-cultural pretensions of my later college years in California. College feminism in its early stages was, frankly, a pain in the ass, in that it provided yet another set of social obstacles on top of those already enforced by the male pecking order passed down from the previous get-a-haircut-and-play-more-football WWII generation, but it always seemed more an intellectual pain in the ass to me than a genuine threat to my sexuality.

Part of this — maybe more than a part of it — was no doubt down to my being an army brat, who grew up mostly in small towns near southern army posts. For those who find themselves at a loss to understand what that was like, maybe reading The Great Santini simultaneously with anything by Faulkner would clear everything up. It was, in short, pretty alienating, and most definitely anti-sex, at least officially.

From my reading — everything from Orwell’s horrorshow schooldays to Dubliners to Ian McEwen’s On Chesil Beach, to Tana French’s The Secret Place — I gather that England and Ireland had/have their own ghastly forms of anti-sex official culture, and that young people have been wounded by them in ways that were different, but no less nasty for all that than mine.

The short version: all God’s children got their problems, real problems, and by that measure, I find complaints like those of Aaronson nothing short of bizarre. It’s not that I’d go so far as to deny them a sort of first-person legitimacy, but honestly….

First, Belle, thank you for several of the most compelling threads I’ve ever read, on CT or anywhere.

There’s so much meat here, I fear that anything I write will already be irrelevant by the time I finish typing…

White. Male. Nerd. Never suffered for it. Lucky me. Happily married. Took a while.

What’s hard for me to tease apart is the different threads of Aaronson’s experience: college at 15 vs. nerd vs. sex dynamics vs. privilege and everything else. The way these threads of Belle’s have built on one another over the last couple weeks is fascinating to me, and it’s made me think about my own experience, limited as it is.

So much of what Aaronson writes about resonates, not because of the root causes he attributes it to, but because of how universal it feels, regardless of the forces it’s attributed to. Friendship has always been easy for me; sexual relationships were tricky, for a long time – because I didn’t know how to ask, because they were shrouded in mystery, and the problem compounded itself as I got older and failed to try, and fail, and make the mistakes that many of us make when we’re adolescents. And when I read Aaronson, that’s what I hear – a misattribution to feminism of what amounted to crushing shyness and not knowing where to start. (And, of course, I’m sure that I’m succumbing to the temptation to interpret my own experience as universal.)

But as I grew older, and somewhat wiser, and the notion of privilege was made clear to me (and yes,it had to be made clear – I didn’t figure it out for myself), I realized how much of my behavior when I was younger, in spite of my shyness and awkwardness, could easily be characterized as manipulative, or abusive, or threatening. It wasn’t intended to be – but I can easily imagine how it might have been interpreted that way. I didn’t have enough self-awareness to recognize that the way I was thinking about sex was too centered on what I wanted and needed, and not enough on how the other people involved were going to feel. I’m blessed by being surrounded by very forgiving people, some of whom would have every justification not to talk to me anymore. And, I think, I eventually figured it out.

Humility. This is what so many people seem to lack. When people talk about privilege, when they toss it as an accusation, or when people catch it as an accusation, it’s so horribly misinterpreted, I think. You don’t have to be free of suffering, or want, to exploit it, just by existing; privilege is the invisible stair we stand on. It’s the whiteness or maleness I don’t even see. People want to believe they’re good; they want to believe that they haven’t taken unfair advantage of others. But privilege is not my own history; it’s how people experience me when they encounter me for the first time.

I don’t walk around in sackcloth because of the advantages I have in life. I try to respect them, and I try to pay back; I probably don’t do a fabulous job, but I try. And sometimes I want to apologize for being a jerk when I was younger, but experience has suggested that it does more harm than good a lot of the time; so what I try to do now is remember that I can be a jerk, and not be.

Once again: once you get in a group of all men and talk about this, a few things become obvious: 1) men suffer from sexual assault as well as women, 2) men commit most of the sexual assaults on both men and women, 3) no one is suggesting that men give up on sexuality as a result. And seriously, straight male nerds should get more exposure to the problems of gay male nerds. “I feel really awkward” then gets decoupled from all of the stuff about mysterious women others.

Brett@15: I take your point about class, but what happens to the daughters of Appalachian farmers? Do they get to go to college as well, if they’re unusually bright and applied? Or do they have all the disadvantages that their brothers have plus extra as well, because they’re women and they therefore shouldn’t be getting educated?

I think that’s the reason that Aaronson and the like rub me up the wrong way: because they talk about how awful their situation is without asking: would it really have been better if I’d had the same personality and social background but also breasts? I was a shy plain bright girl and didn’t have a boyfriend till I’d been at college for several years, so I had to accept as an adolescent that probably no-one would ever desire me. That is the experience that a lot of young men and women have always had, long before feminism existed.

I’d liken nerd-shaming to fat-shaming. Weight is distributed and some people are much heavier than others. There might be genetic factors, there might be environmental factors (class, peer groups, advertising), etc.

What bullies do is they pick on fat people.

What decent people do is accept that there are multiple causes for obesity but more importantly a range of physical form. We are no longer so normative about weight because fat-shaming is morally unacceptable and counterproductive as stigma leads to further isolation, bulimia, anorexia and expensive and largely unnecessary medical procedures to solve something which is essentially someone else’s problem, i.e. bigotry. And for many, the fuller figure is accepted as beautiful because we have expanded out norms. That goes for men, women, straight or gay.

The same goes for social skills: there might be genetic factors, there might be environmental factors, etc. which account for the uneven distribution of social skills but we – at least some of us – recognise that nerd-shaming is not only morally repugnant but exacerbates the problem.

Male ‘nerdiness’ is an expansion of gender performance beyond the thuggish masculinity of the jocks.

I do wonder whether the internet has changed this. Plenty of people (even feminists!) use the consequence free anonymity of the internet to behave like dicks. I certainly think that people going through the awkward and confusing business of learning how to navigate sexuality would do well to avoid feminist identified sites where dickish behavior is the norm, but I honestly have no idea whether this is an issue for a non-vanishingly small number of people.

One of the ways the internet has made things worse is that many people encounter the bastardised forms of intersectionality they find on the internet rather than in gender or colonial studies. On the internet it really is used to dismiss all men or all white people. It’s like a cargo cult built from academic jargon the user doesn’t really understand.

A more rigorous application of intersectionality recognises privilege and oppression are factors in a dynamic matrix of power relationships. That’s not how the concept is used on the internet though: it’s demands to ‘shut up and listen shitlord!’ issued by people oblivious of the real world power differentials between them and the person they are shouting down.

I don’t want to universalize my own experience, but I’d say the problem for relatively nice (or “nice”) shy nerdy teen dudes wasn’t feminism, but the intersection of feminism with prudish patriarchal disney princess it’s all about falling in love and living happily after culture. This is not the fault of feminism, of course, but the fact that teen boys who are perhaps trying to be a bit more enlightened and good are getting a bunch of mixed up cultural signals about what it means to be enlightened and good. So you hear the radical message that woman are actually human beings too and you should treat them decently AND you get the message that all women really want is to fall in love and settle down and get married and have babies and therefore the combination leads you to think that the way to treat women with respect is to not have sex with them until the honeymoon.

And then you’re sexually frustrated and notice that some of these women are having sex with “bad” guys who aren’t necessarily bad but they are bad because they’re having sex with women, the women you were nice enough not to have sex with because they just want rings and marriage and babies, and you get confused.

Yes this is all stupid. But it isn’t feminism.

I’ll second Anarcissie up there at 25. The feminism, singular, that captured the attention of pop culture is an absurd caricature of the feminisms, multiple, that were being produced. Andrea Dworkin happened to be one of the finest exponents of a literary approach to the polemics. I read her then and read her now not just to learn from her experience and analysis, but to watch her operate with words. I have no tolerance for the willful misreading of her good work and that of others as a means of justifying one’s own shortcomings.

In a new found spirit of empathy I am trying to be sympathetic to Scott Aaronson’s complaints, and I am sorry he was so unhappy and hurt for a big junk of his life, but it seems to me his problem was a mental health issue and not the result of a feminist conspiracy to make men feel bad for wanting sex.

Also given gamergate my patience for nerds against feminism is wearing pretty thin at the moment. Yeah being called a neck beard or loser sucks, however it is nothing compared to some of the threats that some female members of the gaming community are receiving. There is a misogyny in the nerd community that I feel is a much bigger problem that needs to be dealt with.

/In my experience, so many of self-identified nerds who claim that women won’t have sex with them really mean that “hot” women won’t have sex with them. My heart fails to bleed for them.

magistra @37 I think that’s the reason that Aaronson and the like rub me up the wrong way: because they talk about how awful their situation is without asking: would it really have been better if I’d had the same personality and social background but also breasts?

Scott Aaronson says: The second concession is that, all my life, I’ve benefited from male privilege, white privilege, and straight privilege. I would only add that, for some time, I was about as miserable as it’s possible for a person to be, so that in an instant, I would’ve traded all three privileges for the privilege of not being miserable.

See how he’s pointedly not talking about having the same personality, but with breasts?

Yes, MPAVictoria, I do think many men way overestimate their willingness to have sex with anyone. And, hey, perhaps they are at 2 in the morning when they’re drunk and have failed to score with or even talk to that hottie they had their eye on, but one can perhaps understand why their 2nd or 3rd choice might not appreciate their late night drunken stumbling pass.

Belle — I haven’t read every comment on this thread (or the others! but like other people I;m sure I’ll go back over and over again). But I think I have something to say about one of the things that puzzles you. I came of age in the late 70s/early 80s, when information wasn’t everywhere. I did encounter a lot of feminist thinking, both in print and among my the (considerably older) crowd I hung out with, when I was 15, 16, 17, 18. No doubt I had experienced some sort of sexual desire by then (indeed I know had) but I was alienated from it by a generally repressive attitude toward sex and sexuality, and in fact emotion altogether, that prevailed in my family and broader environment. Sure, boys shared pornographic images, including boys who were friends of mine, but they wouldn’t have shared them with me because I was a repressed (and somewhat stuck up) prude. The variants of feminism I encountered were definitely not sex-positive, but even if they had been more balanced than they were, it wouldn’t have mattered. You are assuming that when people read or encounter a body of work they take from it the message it is sending. But they don’t!! Not even people who read CT! They take from it the message that comes through, which is filtered by and has interacted with all their prejudices, biases, phobias, etc. I was already predisposed to be pretty repressed, and the message I took from feminism reinforced that. I didn’t at all have Phil’s fear of being found out or off being a user, but I was very alienated from whatever desires I had, and reacted to them erratically. Certainly in my head the alienation from desire (and consequent withholding from many kinds of intimacy, not just physical) was strongly connected to my feminist beliefs and commitments. I was determined not to hurt anyone, and that nobody would do anything with me they didn’t want to, with the consequence that I did in fact hurt people (by being withdrawn) and (semi-hilariously in some cases which I won’t go into) people not being able to do things with me that they really wanted to (and I wanted too, but was largely incapable of recognizing signals that were… well, the semi-hilarious bit is that they were sometimes so unsubtle not even to count as signals, really).

I regret how I conducted myself at that time of my life, partly because I missed out on a lot, partly because missing out on a lot has resulted in subsequent things in my life being less good than they could have been, and mainly because it resulted in other people, then, and more recently, missing out.

BUT! How much of whatever I regret is a result of my encounters with feminism? Impossible to know! I’ve no idea what I’d have been like otherwise, but I very much doubt I would have been someone who was able to identify my desires and emotional reactions to other people and situations, and able to integrate them into my self in a way that was sensitive and balanced and gave proper weight to my own emotions and desires.

And how much is feminism to blame for what I regret? Easy to know — NOT AT ALL! To associate one’s encounters with feminism with bad things in one’s life seems entirely reasonable in many cases (and I’d include my own case), but blaming and resenting it is a completely different matter.

Quite apart from the upside of of feminism. Feminism is at least somewhat (I suspect very considerably) responsible for a social environment in which men can more easily have richer, closer, relationships with a wider variety of people than before, including but not limited to their spouses and children (but also… friends!). All sorts of things in my own life are so so much better not at all because of my encounters with feminism (though there’s that too), but because feminism has hugely reshaped the social environment for the better (for me, and everyone else). My female students, so few of whom consider themselves feminists, all have substantive moral views and empirical beliefs that, if you held them 40 years ago, would have made you a radical women’s liberationist.

And then there’s what magister says. Except what she says is probably not true, it just seemed to be true to her, because the boys who find ‘shy plain bright girls’ attractive at 16 are keeping themselves to themselves.

Hix — that’s definitely true now. Definitely wasn’t, even 35 years ago.

“but not very much to be upset with each other about, in the grand scheme of things.”

Hmmm ask the women chased from their homes by angry gamers for daring to say that perhaps today’s games are a little too focused on appealing to young males how they feel about that.

But I hear what you are saying more generally.

“SA says himself that a few generations back he would have most likely had a marriage arranged on largely economic grounds. That doesn’t happen in his ethnic group anymore.”

A marriage to a partner who did really choose him! Forgive me if my heart fails to bleed because women are not traded like cattle anymore.

should read: “but who didn’t avoid girls for the reasons you describe–but because they were afraid of being insulted or laughed at,”

Abbe Faria @41, I think you maybe did a better job of making the point I was trying to make @45.

This broad/deep cultural base of feminism is something we should pay more attention to. I think the internet actually helps this a lot, it lets you connect the well-documented and ephemeral stuff a lot, because people’s words get preserved…

It seems like the experiences Aaronson & others had have a lot to do with some kind of interaction between feminism and a broader social attitude of sex-negativity, which sex-positive feminism does a lot to fix. I’ve noticed that Dan Savage has done a good job in his column of acknowledging that male sexuality is demonized and declared dangerous in a way that female sexuality isn’t. (This is not saying that male sexuality doesn’t have many entrenched, institutionalized structures working to satisfy it, or that female sexuality isn’t also ‘dangerous’ in a big way–this is not talking about the MPAA rating certain films NC-17, but about how civilians interact…)

Ditto on what the Timberman sayeth. Especially the part about Faulkner. And Joyce, hoo boy. I read a few before I was twenty and said to myself, so that’s what’s going on! These uptite people around me are all fucked up and these writers are fascinated and write about it exquisitely, but I’m personally just, well, disgusted. And my refuge subculture was nerd overachievers simultaneously rebelling as outrageously as possible. I read my Dworkin and Frieden et. al. but also the Joy of Sex and I adore(d) shy nerdy feminist girls. I went to Georgia Tech in the early ’80s (M:F ~ 5:1) and I had no problems at all[1].

What I don’t understand about Aaronson, by analogy with my similar experience as an accomplished (but not as accomplished as Aaronson!) student at the local region’s premiere nerd school, is you get a *lot* of cred with the girls at all the less esteemed schools surrounding the temple. It’s easy to date, on account of the perception that as a smart *white guy* you’re going to conquer the world. (er, those were the days…) There’s weekly organized mixers, has been for centuries. I’ve even heard such things about Harvard and MIT. If your eyeballs are the least bit open, this social structure is impossible to miss. This man is not stupid (the extreme opposite), and is described by his female students as personally engaging and inspiring. I can see having him as a valued friend, in some other life. But in my opinion, he made a social perception mistake, and then makes another mistake by blaming it on feminism.

[1] I cannot resist recounting this anecdote. My freshman year (1980) I was a pledge(!!) in a white, deeply southern (chivalrous) frat and this nerdy feminist girl I was interested in says she has an extra Bob Seger ticket and would I like to go. Now having read my feminist manuals, it occurred to me that a feminist wouldn’t expect me to pay, if she asked me. Being interested in such things, I put the question to the frat: should I pay for my ticket? It was unanimous that I wasn’t a real man unless I paid. I decided I wasn’t going to offer, but would pay if asked. She never asked, and eventually we became the couple that we are today. This outraged a number of the elder brethren (sans girlfriends). Threw beer on us at a later party, they did. I found that puzzling, shouldn’t they be rooting for me? I ditched the frat not long after that.

Background: (1) I never comment on this blog and don’t follow posts very closely. (2) I only know as much about contemporary feminism as I read in the NYT.

I guess I missed the last thread, but in the interest in expanding horizons, let me offer a few issues that are seen from the outside.

Issue 1: Descriptively normal male-female sexual dynamics are effectively normatively pathologized by loud voices in feminism. Example: the escalating active verbal consent policies for sexual encounters on college campuses. Example: female attraction to male aggression is not discussed (in places like the NYT) as a confounding factor in any policies of these issues.

Issue 2: Exaggeration of the rates of (criminal) rape in college campuses. What Belle described would have lead to a criminal prosecution and jail time if I were a prosecutor or juror. But redefining rape to any regretted sexual encounter after the fact or as any sex while intoxicated is a disservice to actually taking seriously and fixing real problems of rape. We don’t need an epidemic of rape to deal with rape. It’s a CRIME!

Issue 3: A general tendency among feminists to ascribe the poorer outcomes among men to intrinsic properties (or to just ignore them) and poorer outcomes women to extrinsic properties. (The fundamental attribution error writ large?) Generally when feminism veers from pro-equality to pro-women, it starts to lose folks like me. In my personal experience, women can be every bit as nasty, vile and brutish as men, but are more often given a pass for that behavior. If a person can’t be criticized for their bad behavior then there’s no way to correct that behavior.

Issue 4: [no doubt this will get everyone fired up] No public discussion that the lived experience of leading feminists who were lesbians (e.g. Dworkin) could be very different than the average heterosexual women who’s rights they were arguing for.

So, please continue correcting me as you feel I wrong, but I am honestly quite interested in whether you feel that feminism is a societal force arrayed against nerdy men, which shames them about their natural desires and causes needless suffering. It ain’t supposed to be like that, and Aaronson did a very poor job advancing his claims. If you share his view to any degree, would you be kind enough to do better?

See, I really don’t understand why you do this. You take something I wrote and twist it out of recognition.

I never said ‘feminism is a societal force arrayed against nerdy men.’

I said many feminists nerd-shame men.

Can you really not see the difference?

Nerd-shaming is punishing men who do not meet a narrow definitions of masculinity: physically, socially, emotionally.

That shaming should be anathema to feminists.

It’s no use asking why aren’t the Scott Aaronson’s of the world blaming patriarchy while so many feminists are acting as agents of that patriarchy.

What the hell happened to the notion of ‘patriarchy harms men too?’

I don’t think there’s much feminist nerd-shaming of men in any general sense. I think there’s some “back at you” stuff – if you’re going to focus on my looks, then fine I’ll make fun of your neckbeard (currently sporting one as I need to shave) and your probable tiny penis. Sometimes women respond in kind to make a point, and, yeah, maybe some dudes don’t pick up on that dynamic and it makes them sad.

“Once again: once you get in a group of all men and talk about this, a few things become obvious: 1) men suffer from sexual assault as well as women, 2) men commit most of the sexual assaults on both men and women, ”

2 might be true as a statistical matter, in fact, I’ll accept it as true. OTOH, the extent of this difference is rather exaggerated by the reluctance, verging on complete refusal, of the legal system to admit it when a woman has raped a man. In fact, about the only circumstance under which the legal system is willing to make this admission, is when their relative ages render the rape statutory.

Shatterface @70

It’s no use asking why aren’t the Scott Aaronson’s of the world blaming patriarchy while so many feminists are acting as agents of that patriarchy.

I’m not sure that so many of them are, really. Although it is fashionable for everyone to call themselves “feminists” now (cf. the “This is what a feminist looks like” t-shirt thing), I think it’s unfair to blame feminism-the-intellectual-tradition for the actions or words of anyone who vaguely associates with feminism-the-tribal-affiliation.

Actually, the dynamics of the internet argumentation culture here are really interesting. Feminism-the-intellectual-tradition has spent quite a long time pursuing the valid and beneficial project of figuring out ways of talking and arguing about things without being trapped by certain patriarchal tropes or forms of argumentation. As a result, feminist arguments are actually really hard to effectively rebut using some of the standard tools of Western rhetoric (you basically can’t use analogies at all because feminism is premised on some strong ideas about the subjectivity of experience). This is all fine and good, but arguing on the internet is modern society’s favourite form of ritual combat, where what matters is beating your opponent using whatever means you have to hand. On the internet, a good working knowledge of feminism is a substantial advantage in that ritual combat. Tools that were developed by academic feminists to better understand and navigate the path towards equality are basically being used for the purpose of handing out verbal beat-downs to people for fun. C’est la vie, of course – this is what we use the last 3000 years of the Western tradition for too. It’s just that right now, there aren’t many intellectual antibodies around for misuse of feminist argument, because it’s pretty new and somewhat different to the kinds of argumentation that we’re used to (especially nerdy men).

I’ve learned to not take this too seriously. Some people clearly do: the worst cases are your gamergate morons who know that they don’t like what Anita Sarkeesian is saying but can’t really articulate why; in the best cases they’re people like Scott Alexander, who has the rationalist’s belief that intellectual ritual combat is important, possibly even slightly sacred, and is worried that the use of feminist argumentation is bringing nuclear weapons to a knife fight. And, if I look at how a lot of these arguments play out, I can’t really say that he’s wrong. I can just say that it probably doesn’t matter very much, in the long run. It’s a shame that some people are going to be beaten up by pseudo-feminists, and we should probably try to stop that from happening when it does, but society will survive and we’ll probably end up intellectually better off once we figure out how to avoid the misapplications of feminist arguments, just as we learned to avoid the misapplication of Kantianism or Marxism or what-have-you.

Belle @50:

STEPHENSON-QUOTER-KUN! SUUUGOI! Nice to see you, man. How’s tricks?

Until very recently, I have been greatly enjoying myself by not arguing with people on the internet. Right now I’m supposed to be writing a book, so I might have to blame you for distracting me with discussions interesting enough break my self-denying ordinances with regard to internet ritual combat (though not really, I actually wanted to be distracted. And also the safe space thread was fantastic, I know everyone has said this already but you’re, like, pretty awesome and stuff for starting that).

Yeah, I’ve been trying to understand this, but so far without success. Bullying of nerds is a real thing. It’s bad. It should be taken seriously and fought. I don’t get what it has to do with feminism. At all.
So far the two things I have seen is internalized and de-contextualized Dworkin and the fact that some feminist react to attacks by trolls with ridicule. Neither seems like a particularly strong case, to put it mildly.

77: If Aaronson was seeking out feminist writings at the age of 14-15, then this would have been around the early-mid 90s, when Dworkin’s cachet was considerably greater than it is now. I can see how he could have stumbled on the her work without deliberately looking for the most extreme stuff he could find.

That’s far too charitable to feminist theorists. Simon de Beauvoir works solidly in the Western intellectual tradition, and credits the utilitarians with having overcome misogyny. Was something wrong about that? The turn from a political movement as expressed by Juliet Mitchell and others to a form of psychotherapy was not completely forced by circumstance, but was rather a political move, just as Ta-Nehisi Coates is a black nationalist, and not a socialist.

Society didn’t survive the Enlightenment. Auschwitz exists because of the crisis of the Enlightenment. Feminism in its identitarian form is not socialism. We can’t recognize that 1917 universalized labor, made divorce easy, legalized abortion and homosexuality, socialized cooking, because to recognize that reality is to realize that the question of feminism could be made one about universal rights, instead of an essential difference.

You don’t need to abandon reason to promote women’s rights.

overlapped with @81 — glad we had the same thought there.

‘Bullying of nerds is a real thing… I don’t get what it has to do with feminism’

What it has to do with feminism is that feminism is supposed to be opposed to patriarchy (rule by jocks, to use the dumb US vocabulary which I suppose were all stuck with at this point).

There’s no pro bullying factions anywhere on Earth. Must be no bullying either.

A good chunk of internet feminism main protest activity is bullying. #shirtstorm is a great example. At the culmination of an ostensible campaign for respectful, tolerant, and non-hostile workplaces they made a guy break down in tears at his job while live on TV – that’s almost performance art.

Anyway to clarify my point about this not translating well outside of US- I’m pretty sure there weren’t any jocks at my (working class) secondary school and I’m dubious of the existence of nerds (we didn’t have a prom queen either). There were in groups and out groups of various kinds but it was generally a far less hierarchal place than my (posh) university.

Pete in 79 gets a lot right.

A lot of the feminist rhetoric against “male nerds” boils down to “you say you have problems, but they a) aren’t that bad, b) are kind of your own fault anyway, and c) other people have worse problems so you shouldn’t complain about yours.”

Which may be true!

But has that approach convinced anyone of anything ever?

I can’t speak for others, but I will try after a short description of my own background. I grew up in a middle-class family in small town India. Talking about sex was taboo. My parents never mentioned sex, except disapprovingly. Respectable/good (‘sharif’ in Hindi/Urdu) boys were supposed to respect women and only platonic conversations were appropriate; flirtatious talk was tantamount to an assault on the honor of women. And any sort of gazing at women was the most despicable of lecherous behavior. Actual society and Hindi movies didn’t operate that way, but the honor code imposed by my family was strong enough to overcome the influence of media and reality.

I think it was my overall upbringing rather than radical feminist literature that made me think of my desire as evil (although my mother self-identifies as a feminist). May be this is true for other male nerds too.

When I was an undergraduate college in the US, I felt I was surrounded by people engaging in sex. Since it had always been morally wrong for me to flirt or express any sexual interest in women, any attempts that I undertook came across awkwardly and unattractively and hence failed spectacularly. The only people who seemed to be in my boat were (other?) male nerds.

The intense desire for sex combined with my inability to get any did make me contemplate chemical castration and suicide on more than a few occasions although I was too cowardly to go through with either. I feel a bit invalidated when people mock me for having those feelings – they were intense and they still hurt sometimes. Sure it is a personal problem and it has nothing to do with feminism, but for someone who has felt starved for approval from women, mockery by women (feminists or others) even now sometimes makes me wish I had in fact committed suicide.

What the internet has made me realize over the last few years is what I considered to be a personal problem is much more widespread and common than I had ever imagined. Thankfully, other male nerds who seem to suffer from this problem also tend to be rather cowardly in general; if cowardice and insecurity were not so highly positively correlated, my guess is we would have seen many, many more successful suicides and castrations by this population than we currently do. And so I want to say ‘it gets better’ to male nerds and others who find themselves sex- starved in a society where sex and sexualization is rampant.

I believe many male nerds will agree that they are privileged as males along every dimension, except for may be one: they feel (or felt, during their formative years) inferior to women (women who had the power to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, since in the male nerd’s mind at least, their own answer was always a ‘yes’ to any woman, regardless of her ‘attractiveness’ – in a sense, the male nerd feels that his ‘yes’ is a helpless, powerless ‘yes’ driven by a cruel, immoral, uncontrollable, unrequited physical lust burning within him). And male nerds may consider the asymmetry of responses to personal ads as evidence of the continued prevalence of this power differential.

What does any of this have to do with feminism? Nothing really – women have MUCH more serious problems to contend with everyday, systemic problems that have much worse consequences and are much more deep-rooted.

The fact that I was a virgin (not really by choice) until I was 28 is trivial in the grand scheme of things. The fact that I desperately yearned for sex and almost everyone was getting it but me is also trivial in the grand scheme of things. The fact that I erroneously believed that women had the power to end my misery (even if only with some pity sex) while I mistakenly felt powerless is also trivial in the grand scheme of things.

I mean, let’s face it, women are much, much more likely to be victims of extreme barbarism like rape, sex trafficking, dowry deaths, etc. And its not just these drastic problems… Even within my field of academia, I understand that it is easier for me get good teaching evaluations solely because I’m a man. So yes, I am, as a matter of undeniable fact, very privileged due to my being a man.

And so I completely understand why I must not mention my own problems and instead be apologetic for all my unfair privileges as well as contribute to the cause of feminism more broadly.

This has been very hard for me to write.

I read somewhere on Twitter that there’s been a dialectical synthesis of jocks and nerds: gamers.

Pete #79 YES!

There’s some good stuff being written about this topic using the religious concept of scrupulosity. That is, some people are not able to read a biting critique of their group and say to themselves ‘Yeh, but that’s not me.’ Some people have a default setting of ‘OMG, that must mean me — I didn’t *think* I was like that — OMG…’

I think people who choose to read radical critiques of their segment of society are perhaps more likely to be over-scrupulous. Also, I think the people who a movement is targeted at are less likely to be over-scrupulous. This leads to a problem where the activist speaks as if people were only going to pay attention to 10% of what’s said if they’e beaten over the head with it, and the scrupulous reader reads as if every casual word were the law graven in stone.

There was a sort of thing last year on a lot of activist sites — It’s not about you. It was supposed to keep people from interrupting threads to say ‘But not all ___ are like that!’ and I found it the most ridiculous thing ever. I mean, you have a whole thread titled ‘haploids be like…’ and the haploids reading it are supposed to assume it’s not about them? How could anybody even think that’s possible? But lots of activists not only seem to think that’s possible, but to be peeved at people who can’t do it.

Oh, and someone said feminism wasn’t into nerd-shaming way upthread. It may have already been mentioned, but here’s an article about the web site ‘Fedoras of OKCupid’ analyzed as an exemplar of shaming in feminist activism.

This is the correct response to Aaronson:

“Here’s what I thought. If someone came to me and said that he earnestly believes that he will be “expelled from school or sent to prison” if a woman finds out that he finds her attractive, and that he has “constant suicidal thoughts,” and that his daily existence is characterized by “crippling, life-destroying anxiety,” I would not recommend that he read Andrea Dworkin or attend a sexual assault prevention workshop. I would recommend, gently and tactfully, that he go see a therapist.

“I would do that because these are very serious issues. They are serious enough that, when a client tells me that they have “constant suicidal thoughts,” there is an entire protocol I’m required to follow in order to ensure that they are safe and receive appropriate care if they accept it.

[…]

“Maybe Aaronson didn’t think to seek therapy as an adolescent, because therapy and mental illness are still quite stigmatized and would have been even more so when he was younger. Maybe nobody close to him noticed or cared what was going on, and therefore did not encourage him to seek therapy. Maybe the psychiatrist he asked to prescribe castration drugs did not pause to consider that a teenager seeking castration is a red flag, and that maybe he should refer him to a colleague who practices therapy. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

“But why aren’t we talking about it now? Why are people blaming feminism–the feminism of the 1970s or 80s, no less–for failing to cure what appeared to be a serious psychological issue? Why are people claiming that the solution now is simply for feminist writers and activists to be more compassionate and considerate towards male nerds like Aaronson, as though any compassion or consideration could have magically fixed such a deeply layered set of deeply irrational beliefs?

“This troubles me. If I ever start claiming that, for instance, I’m a terrible person and deserve to literally die because I’m queer, or that I cannot be in the same room with a man without literally having a panic attack, I sincerely hope that people advise me to seek mental healthcare, not to read feminist literature.”

That nails it. Aaronson isn’t a kind of extreme case of a normal problem; the way he presents himself is someone with an actual other kind of problem altogether.

When it comes to what I do think is a pretty normal kind of problem, I agree a lot with Rich and Janie: getting to see how little of the routine social hardships have to do with boy + girl in particular is very liberating.

However, I think when I have to distinguish between ‘fedoras’ and ‘neckbeards’ in a discussion of feminist rhetoric, more serious questions have been raised than answered. I didn’t sign on to feminism so we could make up clever insults.

Oh, no criticism, Rich – I was writing in a “yes, and” spirit.

The benefits of taking part in talk about romantic trouble with people who don’t share your orientation seems to me to work with both kinds of pairing: “someone like me, interested in someone like me” and “someone like I’m interested in, interested in someone like I’m interested in” both illuminate a lot.

Pat – did you even read the article you posted? Fedoras (which are a piece of clothing as opposed to neckbeards, which are a piece of a person’s body, just so we’re clear) were specifically chosen for their close association with the pick-up artist movement. The people were shamed for wearing headgear closely associated with a super-sexist scene and saying sexist or super-sexist stuff.
Now, you may want to argue that shaming is never the right way to go. I think some of the stuff that Rich P. has been writing here goes into that direction. But that’s an entirely different topic and has zilch to do with feminists “bullying” male nerds.

@102 Bruce — agree that is an excellent response.

Speaking as someone who was born in 1950 and raised by one Catholic and one Baptist parent, and had twelve years of Catholic school, I just want to point out that the idea that “sex is bad” is hardly new, whatever new clothes it’s wearing these days, and regardless of our sex-drenched pop culture.

I have a little trouble following this as I can’t really place the idea of a ‘nerd’ social category/subgroup.(I’m also not an American) I thought it was more just something that existed in high school tv shows than in reality. I guess I knew people who might have had ‘nerd’ tendencies, but they certainly weren’t defined by them and social groups weren’t explictly created around these identities.

I am an American but was lucky enough to go to K-12 schools where physical bullying wasn’t tolerated at all. Until my late teens I thought the idea of students being threatened with violence or actually experiencing it at the hands of other students was a crazy TV convention like “cars explode when you shoot them” or “people wake up in bed with their hair already styled.” When I came to gather it was actually A Real Thing that still gets tolerated in a lot of contexts I was stunned. Doubly so when I heard some of the excuses for not dealing with it. It was like someone snuck behind my back while I was sleeping and replaced reality with the sinister visions of Philip K. Dick.

I was/am quite a nerd but more verbal than mathematical, though I did well in the latter area too. I liked talking to girls or to anyone with anything interesting to say. I liked public speaking and performances. I was a literature and drama nerd who attended a SLAC before I was a STEM nerd. I went with technology later in graduate school and professional life because the employment opportunities are so much better. For a long time I didn’t understand at all shy nerds who could never talk to women or socialize with them. I was a nerd — I had better grades even! — and it was easy. Maybe the shy nerd pain is more about shyness than nerdiness.

The two prior paragraphs are not totally independent. What I also realized much after leaving elementary school was that I bullied other students when I was 11 or so. TV bullies were beating people up and I was just talking. But I could make people laugh with me, invent nicknames, do funny voices and imitations. I sometimes used that to hurt people who annoyed me. When I was considering colleges as a high school senior I encountered another prospective student who I had bullied that way in elementary school before my family moved to another city. We hadn’t seen each other in years. I apologized for what I had done back then. She told me she was depressed and in therapy for years. I’m sorry, Crystal, and I still think about it. For me it was a lark and for you it was hell. I can’t reverse it or erase it.

I like verbal sparring, argumentation, and rhetoric. Nobody ever made me cry or despair with words. But I think about the hurt I caused all those years ago when someone says that words, written or spoken, hurt them a lot more than I could imagine the same words hurting me.

adam.smith: “Now, you may want to argue that shaming is never the right way to go. I think some of the stuff that Rich P. has been writing here goes into that direction. But that’s an entirely different topic and has zilch to do with feminists “bullying” male nerds.”

I’m trying to avoid going into my usual rant: “activism — what it is for”, with sub-branches “why ‘shaming’ a corporation is not really the same as shaming an individual” and “changing group behavior through shaming individuals: does it really work?” (yes, sometimes, but wow is there a lot of technique to consider).

Rich @ 105

“Val, I think that if you ask more or less typical gay men about how their recent dates have gone, you’ll find a good number of them saying something like “Tonight’s was bad: that guy never stopped talking about himself.” It’s an open question whether this happens less often to gay men than to women dating men or to women dating other women, but I don’t think that it happens zero times for any of these cases.”

Rich I can certainly see that the fact that some gay men talk about themselves all night on dates is not irrelevant to what I said. So I hope you can also see that I have some serious concerns about what you’re doing here. I gave a fairly complex account of my own experiences of dating a significant number of heterosexual men who seemed to me to be anxiously performing a version of masculinity which prevented them from making contact with me as a person. You gave a reductionist ‘well gay men sometimes talk about themselves too much on dates as well’ response which seemed to be rather like ‘nothing to see here, move on’. And so my experiences and thoughts about dating “nerdy” men get dismissed as irrelevant to the conversation.

I hope – and in fact trust – that you won’t just tell me I’m over-reacting and being emotional, but if you don’t understand what I’m saying here, please tell me and I’ll try to explain it better.

Fuzzy: Yes, I think so. There’s a lot to be said about fragile men’s emotional needs and the difficulties of establishing a sense of self and place in the midst of deeply conflicting directions from competing authorities. That’s real stuff, and serious. But unrecognized, untreated mental illness is also serious, and it’s important to separate it from other things. Yes, I would say “you should have gotten therapy then; have you since?” I owe a lot to the trusted friends who helped me recognize when I needed it and for what, and it did a lot to make my general social development easier because I wasn’t tangling the two.

From my perspective there’s a fair amount of hypocrisy in modern-day feminism, in that let’s be honest, most self-proclaimed female feminists still essentially find stereotypical patriarchal male attributes sexually desirable and cultivate/use their own feminine sexuality to advance socially as well. So you get people like Hugo Schwyzer on the one hand abusing the system, but then on the other men like Aaronsen who don’t have those attributes and are treated as the lowest rung on the social totem pole.

There seem to be many feminists who want to have their cake and eat it too – i.e. participate in, value and benefit from patriarchy and de-valuing men who lack traditional patriarchal male qualities, while simultaneously demanding those men’s allegiance to the cause of feminism, a cause many more socially adept men cynically ally themselves to and benefit from, escaping criticism even though their personal behavior appears far less feminist than Aaronsen’s.

ie Aaronson “At one point, I actually begged a psychiatrist to prescribe drugs that would chemically castrate me (I had researched which ones), because a life of mathematical asceticism was the only future that I could imagine for myself.”

I’d agree that the point here is that the nerdy guy’s dilemma (if we can even agree that it exists) isn’t the product of feminism, but patriarchy. Having been a nerdy guy who didn’t want to be a Neanderthal but also wanted to have sex and have been friends with a number of other nerdy guys, there’s some truth to the feeling if not the causal account.

Thing is, from a young age patriarchy makes you feel unmanly if you don’t play sports, pick fights, harass women, etc. And this is enforced not only normatively but by the manly guys who pick on you and the like. So you end up with a counter-culture identity of not-being-like-one-of-them-Neanderthals. (And in my case, you also end up with more female friends, nerds and not, as they didn’t torment you for your unmanliness.) But when adolescence rolls around you have more desires that are in conflict with your oppositional identity. And it’s difficult to reconcile the two without feeling like you’re betraying who you are (or what makes you better than the Neanderthals), in a sense. So you either have inner turmoil, a sexless life, or a betrayal of your own previous sense of self as the only options. In fact, my partner and I had these discussions about our sex life very early on in our relationship as we tried to reconcile sexual desire with our norm breaking selves.

But again, this is the Patriarchy, not the Feminism, making this happen. Feminism is actually the antidote as it would liberate men from their narrow social roles as much as women.

I’m old enough that all of this comes before the current nerdy is cool ethos of Silicon Valley. So that might change things up a bit.

women are expected to do emotional labor for men, make them feel better &c.

This touches on my note above about the context of Aaronson’s comment.* If he had been showing up on feminist websites derailing threads and demanding that people address his past trauma’s I would be inclined to be much more critical, but he wasn’t doing that. I do think that complaining on your own personal blog is different. Not that no one should discuss his comments, but I see a lot of entitlement being projected onto Aaronson when he wasn’t demanding much in particular from anyone, at least not in a very obtrusive way.

*This is not to complain about Belle mentioning him in the OP. As Fuzzy Dunlap says upthread, the cat is already well out of the bag, so there’s no harm in discussing it.

The fact that dude asked a psychiatrist for “chemically castrating” drugs doesn’t at all imply that he sought therapy (I’d have thought this is fairly obvious).

“The fact that dude asked a psychiatrist for “chemically castrating” drugs doesn’t at all imply that he sought therapy (I’d have thought this is fairly obvious).”

Yes. I have a lot if experience dealing with mental illness and it seems pretty obvious to me that Aaronso was hurting inside like a bag of broken glass and was desperately in need of help. His issues, for which he has my greatest sympathy, are not the fault of feminism.

“The fact that dude asked a psychiatrist for “chemically castrating” drugs doesn’t at all imply that he sought therapy (I’d have thought this is fairly obvious).”

Yes you’re right that he didnt say he had therapy. (as I said above) I still dont see the evidence for this specualtion though:(which is what I was responding to)

“Maybe Aaronson didn’t think to seek therapy as an adolescent, because therapy and mental illness are still quite stigmatized and would have been even more so when he was younger. Maybe nobody close to him noticed or cared what was going on, and therefore did not encourage him to seek therapy. Maybe the psychiatrist he asked to prescribe castration drugs did not pause to consider that a teenager seeking castration is a red flag, and that maybe he should refer him to a colleague who practices therapy. Maybe, maybe, maybe.”

The post is about a specific person not a ‘broad based social pattern.’ If you want to speak about a specific person then you have an obligation to get their story straight, no ? Especially if by ‘just tossing out speculations’ you imply his parents didnt care, the psychiatrist he visited was incompetent and he was an idiot. (and just in response to something Bruce said above, there’s obviously a huge difference between gently saying to a friend you’re worried about them and telling a stranger what to do, publicly)

Rich @ 125
I don’t really understand what you’re saying Rich. Are you saying that patriarchy doesn’t say getting a woman is the reward for performing like a man? What do you think it says?

The other point of course is that we all still largely live in the contemporary version of patriarchy (males at the top, hierarchical, competitive, unequal sharing of resources). Of course it’s not total, and there are alternatives and resistances in society, but that’s the overall shape. Think of most large corporations, for example.

So it’s not surprising that anyone, male or female, straight or gay, might be tempted to ‘talk themselves up’ in a situation of anxiety. We’re all taught to perform that way now, except women were traditionally taught to perform the complementary role – listening and rewarding the performance (so that we’re now also being told it’s our fault we’re not getting ahead in the hierarchy and we should ‘lean in’ more).

Look I got married way back in the dim dark ages, but my then husband told me something his father had told him: the best thing a man can say to a woman is ‘I love you’, the best thing a woman can say to a man is ‘I’m proud of you’. Ok I’m getting on, but if you think the influence of that sort of thing has somehow totally disappeared from society within my lifetime, I think you are kidding yourself.

It’s the “mishmash” that some men make of traditional patriarchal messages and feminist messages that confuses them, as Tiny Tim said up thread @ 99. I actually know a lot of young men who seem really sorted out, but I think there are many men in the in-between or older generation (my age group) who are confused by the mishmash in their heads, and unfortunately through the MRA movement etc they are now influencing some young men also.

“And be permanently resentful at feminism? BUT NOT AGAINST THE PATRIARCHY?”

Belle, did you read Eszter’s post of a few weeks back?
https://crookedtimber.org/2015/01/27/crying-babies/

When her father was three, he was interned in a concentration camp for Hungarian Jews, where he cried himself to sleep every night, much to the annoyance of fellow inmates. Years later, when he met other survivors, they complained to him of the difficulties he’d caused them. Decades had passed, and who did they resent? The Nazis? The Hungarian authorities? No. A 3-year-old.

In the spirit of Matt at 112, I’m going to plead guilty to being one of those snarky feminist students at my university back in the 1980s. I was smart, and convinced of my own correctness, as many young people are. I had also been unpopular and boyfriendless at school, and had channelled that energy into beating everyone at my school in our end of high school statewide exams, which I accomplished.
When I got to university, there was no stopping me. I threw myself into student politics, feminism, ‘theory’, socialism — all the options. There were right-wing born-to-rule boys in our students’ association political battles who felt the sting of my rhetoric and resented it deeply. Thinking about it now, I was not taking care only to dish it out to those who could take it, and it is highly possible that a number of those now 50+ year old men took away from ANU’s students’ association meetings painful memories of being laid in a pool of metaphorical blood by ‘a feminist’, over issues as diverse as Palestinian women’s rights in Israel, abortion law reform, women-only spaces on campus, support for the local rape crisis centre and so on. I wasn’t the only one, there were lots of other women and blokes in the socialist caucus who could also cut down a conservative argument with ease.
Here’s a thing — I know that the right-wing guys often took it badly BECAUSE I was a woman speaking forcefully, which in their ideal world would not even happen. One of them grudgingly admitted that my sister and I “argued like men” (we’ve called each other ‘bro’ ever since). He meant it as a compliment. That was what really got on their wicks, that we would not step back, be quiet and behave in a way that they thought was suitable.
I am actually very sorry for any damage I might have caused, both to individuals (even right-wing ones), and to the cause of feminism itself. I now look back on that unforgiving and sharp-tongued young woman with regret, because I also used those skills on people on my own side, and ruined some friendships that I valued because of them. But the ones that might have put my youthful aggression down to feminism, rather than to me? They WERE on the wrong side. Some of them probably still are. If you don’t fight, you lose.

You make a valid point.

At worst, it’s bullshit

I also filed this one in the “currently calling bullshit on …” mental category, because as it happens, I read “Intercourse” by Andrea Dworkin a couple of months ago, and … well, it’s not that it doesn’t say any of these things. It’s more that it doesn’t say anything that could reasonably be interpreted, at all, even at a stretch, as meaning any of these things. It’s mainly a book of literary criticism. If you were going to take any message from it addressed to men (which would mean you were already doing something quite odd), you would interpret it almost as a “how to” manual for someone who wanted to have a sex life that followed Dworkin’s utopian model. Seriously, show of hands – how many people who have been using Andrea Dworkin’s name in this thread as a shorthand for man-hating anti-sex feminism have read “Intercourse”? Is there another (obviously less famous because that’s her most famous book by an order of magnitude) book by her that carries a totally different message?

Val, I think that I have too many different inchoate things to say about this, most of them off-topic, for me to really respond well. Mostly I think that you’re turning from your observation to a conclusion that I don’t necessarily agree with. When you start saying that “anyone, male or female, straight or gay, might be tempted to ‘talk themselves up’ in a situation of anxiety”, I’m not sure if you can put that under the heading of patriarchy saying that if you perform as a man you are rewarded with a woman. Capitalism has quite a lot to say about social status anxiety too. This whole question of performance and what happens when the message gets sent to different addresses seems to me to be around where second-wave feminism turns to third-wave feminism.

Daniel @147, Thank you, and fucking amen. It is literary criticism, literature was of paramount importance to Andrea Dworkin and Intercourse is one of her spectacular literary achievements.

Ronan @121: “Aaronson did say he got therapy at the time (afaicr[)]”

Ronan @122: “ie Aaronson “At one point, I actually begged a psychiatrist to prescribe drugs…”

Fuzzy Dunlop @123: “Ronan @122 Oh yes, it’s right there, about the psychiatrist, isn’t it? That really makes (much of) the ‘see a therapist’ response seem kind of silly.”

Me @124: “The fact that dude asked a psychiatrist for “chemically castrating” drugs doesn’t at all imply that he sought therapy”

Hope that helps.

Daniel at 147: Seriously, show of hands – how many people who have been using Andrea Dworkin’s name in this thread as a shorthand for man-hating anti-sex feminism have read “Intercourse”?

Aaronson claims to have read and appreciated _Intercourse_, but he does not actually specify it as the source of her “disapproving” views on male sexuality. Rather, he mentions _Intercourse_ only as part of a general claim to have read a certain amount of feminist literature. Here is his reply to the commenter “Amy”, part of the famous blog post:

You also say that men in STEM fields—unlike those in the humanities and social sciences—don’t even have the “requisite vocabulary” to discuss sex discrimination, since they haven’t read enough feminist literature. Here I can only speak for myself: I’ve read at least a dozen feminist books, of which my favorite was Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse (I like howls of anguish much more than bureaucratic boilerplate, so in some sense, the more radical the feminist, the better I can relate). I check Feministing, and even radfem blogs like “I Blame the Patriarchy.” And yes, I’ve read many studies and task force reports about gender bias, and about the “privilege” and “entitlement” of the nerdy males that’s keeping women away from science.

(blockquote experiment, we’ll see if it worked)

So you can’t pin it on Aaronson that _Intercourse_ has been mis-characterized in this discussion. If bring up his blog page and search on “Dworkin” you’ll see (unless I missed it) that he doesn’t actually name any other book as a specific source, but seems to expect that the readers will be familiar with her generally as the avatar of what you term “man-hating anti-sex” views.

It is right after this, in the famous post, when he takes issue with the application of the concept/term “privilege”, which really marks the introduction of the shit to the fan.

Pat #98
“ I mean, you have a whole thread titled ‘haploids be like…’ and the haploids reading it are supposed to assume it’s not about them? ”

Gamategate.

Bruce Baugh at 102, re-quoting the “correct response” to Aaronson:

“But why aren’t we talking about it now? Why are people blaming feminism–the feminism of the 1970s or 80s, no less–for failing to cure what appeared to be a serious psychological issue? Why are people claiming that the solution now is simply for feminist writers and activists to be more compassionate and considerate towards male nerds like Aaronson, as though any compassion or consideration could have magically fixed such a deeply layered set of deeply irrational beliefs?

(another blockquote experiment; you really have to spell the closer right)

I don’t at all agree; just the opposite, in fact, as I think this reply is a rather transparent sleight-of-hand that avoids the main point altogether.

Why are people blaming feminism–the feminism of the 1970s or 80s, no less–for failing to cure what appeared to be a serious psychological issue?

Aaronson, and people taking his side, are not blaming feminists of the era for failing to cure anyone, they’re blaming feminists for hurting people and exacerbating their problems. And, if you believe that to be the case, then is it not reasonable to ask that they stop? and also admit some responsibility? Falsely recasting “he asked not to be hurt” as instead “he insisted on being healed” is really moving the goalposts sideways, and I can’t respect it.

Similarly, I think the description by Fuzzy Dunlop at at 117

This point implied by that post is good though: women are expected to do emotional labor for men, make them feel better &c.,

is an invention and an over-reach. The standard of expected to do emotional labor for men is a loooong way past what Aaronson was asking for, which was more like don’t hurt men by telling them over and over again that they’re all basically rapists in waiting. Exaggerating his argument with a straw-person accusation doesn’t help anyone in this discussion.

Val @ 116

Many, many people spend dates talking about themselves, men and women both.

From a review of Self-Made Man, Norah Vincent
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/apr/01/highereducation.biography

Some of Vincent’s most appalling stories are about going on dates, through which self-involved, demanding and resentfully unhappy women never ask about Ned, his feelings or his past, and never shut up about theirs. Single women might be well advised to read this chapter as a How-not-to guide. Determined to have their cake and eat it, Ned’s dates expect an impossible combination of new-age sensitivity and old-fashioned toughness. Ned learns not only how relentlessly men are obliged to suffer romantic rejection, but how hard it is to surmount a woman’s cumulative grudges against their whole sex. “When a woman approaches a man armed to the teeth with ulterior wounds for which men as a species are presumptively to blame, the man has no choice but to fight back, and when everything he says and does is measured against the front-loaded politics of sex, he can’t help but shrivel or putrefy under the scrutiny.” Intelligent, articulate and perceptive, Self-Made Man has much to offer men and women alike.

” Seriously, show of hands – how many people who have been using Andrea Dworkin’s name in this thread as a shorthand for man-hating anti-sex femini Seriously, show of hands – how many people who have been using Andrea Dworkin’s name in this thread as a shorthand for man-hating anti-sex feminism have read “Intercourse”?”

Well, I didn’t intend for my mention to mean “man-hating anti-sex-feminism[sic]”.

It’s not on my shelf, though there are another 20 standards from that vintage in this category, but I did read it and was not impressed. But I didnt’ think it was man-hating anti-sex feminsism. What did impress me though is that through all the vilification of Dworkin, at the time, 30+ years ago, she had a live in man, who was quite happy to talk about the relationship. Carefully listening to him, he didn’t seem oppressed at all! I thought at the time that that was very interesting.

I think I should go revisit some of these earlier books. Thank you for being a good example Daniel.

There’s just not that many feminists who want to get up and make a big deal about wanting to be allowed to sleep with not-that-attractive-but-actually-decent-and-interesting guys without suffering a loss of social standing. ”

There are feminists who would like to be in female-breadwinner male-caretaker relationships without shocking their bosses or families. (Scorn if he has a job instead of a career; shock if they have the same career but he’s the trailing spouse.)

Also, my memory of being a teenage nerdess is that I wasn’t allowed to suggest I could desire, even in theory in the future. It was unfeminine and threatening and made me “any man’s meat”. (Threatening to guy nerd friends; the comment from a non-friend.) I have found feminism very useful for saying I could have sexual agency, not just choose between the bowerbirds in front of me.

The standard of expected to do emotional labor for men is a loooong way past what Aaronson was asking for, which was more like don’t hurt men by telling them over and over again that they’re all basically rapists in waiting. Exaggerating his argument with a straw-person accusation doesn’t help anyone in this discussion.

Wait a minute… Just which is the exaggeration here? I find the idea that feminists feel men are “all basically rapists in waiting” to be at at least as big a stretch as an assumption that men feel that women should do the emotional labor for them.

Aaronson, and people taking his side, are not blaming feminists of the era for failing to cure anyone, they’re blaming feminists for hurting people and exacerbating their problems. And, if you believe that to be the case, then is it not reasonable to ask that they stop?

Two things about this: 1) his evidence of this damage done by feminism is a) Andrew Dworkin and b) sexual harassment prevention, neither of which is all that convincing and
2)
there is this passage:

So I scoured the feminist literature for any statement to the effect that my fears were as silly as I hoped they were. But I didn’t find any. On the contrary: I found reams of text about how even the most ordinary male/female interactions are filled with “microaggressions,” and how even the most “enlightened” males—especially the most “enlightened” males, in fact—are filled with hidden entitlement and privilege and a propensity to sexual violence that could burst forth at any moment.

(my emphasis) First, he’s very clearly blaming feminism for not presenting a solution to his problems here.
But beyond that–Fuzzy, he is clearly claiming to read academic feminism here. And this reading of academic feminism during the mid-1990s is, frankly, absurd. If you read bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, This Bridge Called My Back (all of which were classics by that time that any intro to feminism reader or class would have introduced him to) and that’s what you get out of it–well, I don’t know what to say.
Remember–this wasn’t some guy in a basement in rural Oklahoma. He was in Cambridge, MA at that point. It wasn’t hard to learn about that stuff if you actually wanted to. I’m not saying everyone needs to become an avid reader of feminist literature. The point is that if you were reading feminist literature in the mid-late 1990s and this is what you were getting out of it, the problem was you, not the literature. And so blaming the literature for “hurting you” does in fact blame the literature for not fixing you.

Part of the reason, by the way, that I find it easy to think of Aaronson’s specific problems as being mental illness is that I get that too. I have PTSD and am prone to bouts of severe depression, and while in them I have to cut off most of my regular reading and viewing and heavily monitor the rest, because my poor damaged, struggling brain then casts everything in the worst possible light. Everything becomes props for self-condemnation, nihilism, despair, and rage, which can all too easily catapult me right into the realm of suicidally dangerous self-neglected or worse.

People who are healthier in this regard get that too, of course. Anyone can despair, and when you do, the beast can feed itself on anything to hand right down to food labels. But as a recurring part of one’s life, this form of it is as distinct from the regular woes of mental life as, well, depression is from feeling very sad and discouraged at the moment.

I know exactly what it’s like to energetically, diligently pore over tomes in search of the relief I crave…only to realize later that I was doing so in an entirely self-sabotaging way that made it all useless. It’s not that I wanted to waste my time and passion, it’s that physical conditions in my brain were such that the plaintive cry “I need a break!” was doomed to go awry. It’s the same general kind of problem as trying to run a marathon without being aware that one of your legs is broken in three places and hasn’t been set – all the good will in the world won’t get you there right then. You have to start with identifying and treating the barriers before you can move past them.

Note that this is emphatically not a matter of reading (viewing, listening, etc.) dishonestly. At least it wasn’t in my case- and won’t be in the future, because I know I’m not shut of it – and I don’t see any reason to believe it of him. What it shows, rather, is that conscious desire is sometimes not worth the powder it would take to blow it up in terms of getting results. So yeah, I have no problem believing that he went to late ’90s feminist literature and came back with a reinforced sense of what an awful person he was. He would have gotten the same result for the same effort on military history, fashion reporting, pop music reviews, or simulations of biogenesis in the early earth’s mantle, because when you’re screwed up that way, it all becomes about the damage and the part of you that wishes you harm.

More Laurie Penny. She’s great :)

http://laurie-penny.com/fifty-shades-of-socialist-feminism/

I dunno if this is going to help – I try not to comment in arguments like this these days because yelling at people on the Internet has a lost a lot of its fun for me in recent years. But it’s hard not to hang my head in nerd shame at a lot of men, men whose lives and experiences I can recognize as a lot like mine, opposing a strawman man-hating feminism (the kind you get from selectively quoting Dworkin and MacKinnon) to a very non-strawman structural and cultural problem that leads to very real rape. The inability to distinguish the things in your head from the things that really exist is something inward-facing, nerdy guys have a general problem with and has nothing to do with the specifics of rape culture.

The problems of sexuality that you see as a social, cultural and political struggle is something a lot of nerdy young men can only see as very personal, individual and immiserating. Yes, when you are the horny young man who just can’t seem to get anywhere with women and all you can feel is what’s wrong with me?!?! your needs feel a lot more pressing than a campus rape crisis center. Being a grown up means recognizing that other people’s problems may be more important than yours, but it’s far from some shocking act of misogyny to be young, horny and hard-pressed to make good judgments about the greater good.

And yes, there are some women in the commentariat who don’t see that very well, including some who probably should – I’m looking at you Marcotte – but whatever shortcomings their comments have are nothing compared to the point that the rape culture they complain about really exists and shy nerds play a part in it not really very different from the stereotyped entitled date rapist jock.

So instead I’m going relate the experience that stuck with me when I felt the temptation to see myself as some Nice Guy who lying, hypocritical women rejected in favor of assholes.

When I was 18, I was living in France and I was, one afternoon, on the bus from Strasbourg over the border to Kehl. There was a tall, pretty, blonde, roughly my age, on the bus, and it was crowded and standing room only. The bus jerked a lot as it stopped and started and I struggled to keep a handhold, and at some point, I found my hand pressed down against a bar set at the back of the bus by something I could not see, So I tugged and moved it around and finally – after 15 seconds or so – managed to free it, only to realize that it had been this young woman’s bottom that had been pinning it. I looked at her for a moment and then turned away, embarrassed. Later, I managed to find a seat, and I looked at her again. She saw me, and this look of fear and withdrawal came over her that I had simply never seen before, at least, never directed at me. She thought I had been groping her!

I was 18, my French wasn’t very good, my women skills were even worse, and an older and more mature me would have dealt with this very differently, apologizing terribly, working very hard to look embarrassed and ashamed and harmless (and maybe then tried to get her number – she was really very pretty and it never would have occurred to me in a million years to think of my sexual interests as somehow wrong, rather than frustrating, ego-crushing, or pitiful). But at the time, I did nothing but remain silent.

Up to that point in life it had never occurred to me, ever, that any woman, anywhere, would be scared of me. That any woman, ever, would see me as a potential perpetrator even of the very minor form of sexual assault she probably thought I was guilty of, much less as a potential rapist.

That experience informed a lot of my future efforts at, well, trying to pick up women – the realization that men are dangerous, even shy, nerdy men, and that seen from the perspective of young, sexually interesting women, the Nice Guys and the Rapist Assholes look a lot alike and there is no magic test to tell them apart. But when you don’t get that – when you are young, male, horny, and especially not very successful with women – it’s easy to interpret your personal, deeply felt unhappiness in terms of how either something is wrong with you, or something is wrong with women, or both, and reinterpret every bit of gender politics from feminist literature to calls for colleges to do a better job dealing with rape claims, in terms of your sexuality and problems.

“Gender equalization is an important goal to strive for and recently it’s become obvious there are a number of arenas where this is painfully necessary. ”

Suicide rates, lifespans, things like that.

I think more widespread use of sexual surrogacy in conjunction with counseling can greatly alleviate some of the mental health problems that appear to be widespread among certain social groups.

These mental health problems and their solutions are orthogonal to feminism in my view.

I think feminism gets unfairly blamed because sex deprived men think that the women who refused their advances are privileged in relation to them. I think when feminists say that men are privileged, it upsets these men who have found themselves at the bottom of the social/sexual attractiveness hierarchy/ladder from where they have been looking at women who appear to have stratospheric status.

I think most reasonable men would agree that society privileges men greatly and in most respects. But on this one issue a non-trivial percentage of men (nerds?) feel that they are underprivileged vis-a-vis women (and other men).

I mentioned working with a Rus Funk-organized group briefly before, and I guess I’m going to somewhat reluctantly link to his recent work. “Somewhat reluctantly” both because I’m not sure whether I agree with all of it — there are some points at which it’s more second-wave than I’d like — and because it tells people to consider context carefully and this isn’t its intended context. But here’s a link to something that might be useful.

The article contains “a list of beliefs that are useful when educating men about sexual and domestic violence.”

* Everyone has experienced various forms of violence and abuse.
* Everyone has the right to be free from violence, abuse and threats
* The problem of violence is both a social and a justice issue, as much as a personal one.
* Men are not the problem.
* There is more to those who perpetrate sexist violence than the violence they perpetrate (i.e. men are more than “rapists,” “batterers,” or “pornographers”).
* Men do care.
* Men, like women, have an unlimited and inherent capacity to feel empathy for others.
* There is nothing natural or innate about sexist, violent or abusive behaviors.
* Being violent or abusive is a choice.
* Men can change.
* There is much to benefit males by working to end violence and abuse, and by challenging sexism.
* Males can work effectively alongside women and become strong allies in the work to promote social justice and human rights.
* We can all handle being angry as well as any other emotions that arise.

The article does acknowledge that the kind of thing that happened with Aaronson is a general problem, though of course much more often to a lesser extent:

One of the first steps in engaging men is to define sexist violence as something that men could and should care about. Once defined as a men’s issue, a challenging balancing act follows: men must take sexist violence personally enough to be committed to act, but not so personally that they take blame for all sexist violence.

Bruce just wanted to say those were really compelling comments at 178-179. Thank you.

My contribution to the winding-down thread, from R Taggert Murphy, Japan and the Shackles of the Past, 2014. Murphy is a professor resident in Japan for forty years, gay; all material below from the book, italics mine

The herbivore label suggests, however, that we are dealing with some-
thing beyond palpably relaxed mores. Again, neologisms provide a clue.
Like the sodai-gomi epithet applied to retired men, the flippant terms often
used for younger men can border on open contempt. Many young Japanese
women today refer to their boyfriends as KÄ«ppu Kun. KÄ«ppu is the English
“keep” while Kun is, as noted above, the suffix used instead of the usual
San (“Mr./Ms.”) when speaking to or about a boy. The implication is that
the boyfriend is kept around because he is useful in some material way to
the woman, not because she has any deep feelings for him. Thus Asshi Kun
(literally, “Young Master Legs”) can be relied upon to provide transporta-
tion because he has a car, Meisshi Kun (“Young Master Food”) will take
her out to fancy restaurants, and Mitsugu Kun (“Young Master Presents”)
provides her with expensive baubles.

This kind of table-turning in which women now feel free to use the
same kind of objectifying language about men that males traditionally
used about women is a phenomenon that, of course, can be seen elsewhere
in the developed world. But again, what is interesting here is the differ-
ence in the underlying assumptions about what has happened to men.

In the reflexive misandry that pervades American popular culture today, males—at
least straight males—are depicted as clueless losers; as insensitive, boorish
louts.

In Japan, they are more likely to be depicted as weak, as passive—herbi-
vores at the mercy of nikushoku onna (literally, “carnivorous women”).

Maybe it has to do with the difference between different forms of social space. The teenage Aaronson probably realizes that if he’s talking to a girl he’s met at a party or a bar and says “do you want to come by some time and see my etchings?”, even if he gets a scornful refusal it’s unlikely that he’ll be viewed by polite society as having done something akin to harassment. It’s a party. But nerds don’t get out much. They spend a lot of time at school or college. Which is a space with something of the air of the workplace, where women have the reasonable expectation of being able to go about their business without being hit on, because the official point of being there is to earn money or to learn, not to socialize. If teenage Aaronson’s stammering clammy-palmed attentions are unwelcome at a party, people might think he’s a loser, but he’s aware that they probably won’t think of him as infringing on her right to be treated with respect. Around class, he’s not so sure. In fact, he’s quite worried. And he’s worried not just about how an explicit pass would be viewed, but about what happens if the desires he’s anxiously trying to keep under wraps are recognized. This is neurotic but has a certain logic to it. And he sees feminism as having expanded the territory where the workplace moral regime operates, from the literal office and classroom into certain allied spaces, and as having intensified the taboos within that territory. He may even recognize the justice of it, but he sees himself as collateral damage. Just a theory.

“Sorry, but I’m calling this one: rancid bullshit.”

No it sadly isn’t. I wish it was but it isn’t.

Landru 02.16.15 at 3:00 pm @ 194:
‘… But to say, without qualification, as you have that there is no operationally discernible difference between the actual kind and generous person who would actually never hurt anyone, and the murderous sociopathic felon who certainly will, is an absurdity, insulting to all human beings….’

It’s a spectrum, not a binary division. There are a lot of people in the middle. The nastier types learn to get along in the world by simulating niceness, and they also create cultures in which nasty qualities are valued, admired, and rewarded. The nastier they are, the harder they work at both projects.

Meanwhile, sexual attraction operates on an entirely different and more fundamental plane than moral and aesthetic judgements about people’s characters, often overpowering them. That’s why it’s called ‘chemistry’.

What i can resonate with a lot here is that gender role expectations are also a major problem for guys. Emotional pain is no pain, pretend it does not exist is something i got told a lot by both my parents. Feminism was definitly not a topic back in school in any way and there never were girls involved in the more unpleasant parts of my school time.

Fast forward to me being a very old undergraduate student right now. I just cant feal any male priviledge in this environment. Its rather strange to hear all that women are so disadvantaged (because they got problems to get top management positions etc.) stuff – and just that, no deaper discussion of gender roles or anything- , when 85% of the students are female (and the dropouts were also far disproportional male, just like the female students grades are overall better). Other issues that might cause a disadvantage, class in particular are completly ignored or discussed in a way that is not framed in a disadvantage awareness frame. Im sorry, im from a background where graduating college is still a big thing. So while im completly aware there are more than enough situations where its far better to be male in my own or a younger age cohort, i do very much tink this is not always the case.

I just saw the movie “horns”.

It was horrible, but illuminating on male nerd fantasies. Sexual desire is ridiculous and demeaning. Initiating sexual relationships is particularly bad. The protagonist straight up causes pain and destruction and it somehow isn’t his fault, but he never actually initiates sexual interactions. Coupling is possible if is initiated by the women for non-sexual purposes. Uncoupling is not acceptable.

If these are your fantasies, being attracted to the ideas of Andrea Dworkin isn’t really a stretch.

Carrot and stick, bob. Can’t have one without the other. What meaning wealth without the spectre of penury? If the world is just an undifferentiated mass of possible utilities, we’re back in the realm of neoliberal ideology.

As for your @192, I’m having trouble parsing it. I’m going to assume you don’t think the ‘misandry’ part should be taken too literally, since the tropes of the boorish or henpecked man are as old as — what? Plautus? Aristophanes? If the popular culture of a civilisation in which women were routinely subject to physical violence and were (in the Greek case) not even allowed to *eat a meal* until the men of the house had finished could produce jokes about worthless men, then ‘misandry’ means something I don’t have a word for.

In the Japanese case, a culture in which men are (were? are things changing?) within their rights to strike their wives, in front of guests, for speaking out of turn at the dinner table (i.e. having an opinion, about anything), it’s not surprising that women might be (or be seen to be) distant and manipulative. And of course, we know that in both cases men *do* feel emasculted. Easier to admit to being frustrated by the alien sex than by other men, though.

lemmycaution @ 202

I think there is some thing in the culture that, if taken to an extreme, makes it look like Andrea Dworkin’s ideas are just plain true, and simultaneously makes it look like that kind of fantasy is just the way things are. I personally don’t know what to conclude from that fact. There’s probably something to the idea that people who “got out more” wouldn’t appreciate either Horns or Dworkin as much (that is, I tend to think Andrea Dworkin took ideas in her head too seriously, as much as people on this thread are accusing any “nerd” of doing). But that doesn’t mean we should ignore them or dismiss them (the books/film or the people).

Also, by rules @203, I don’t mean men and male nerds, because we all know “rule following” is a euphemism for “autistic” (????). I mean women and left bloggers, too. You can bet Amanda Marcotte and Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig have their rules, and I’ll bet Belle does, and so do I.

Luke @ 205:

I agree with your emendation assessment; indeed, I believe I shall commence using emasculted as a marker for the debilitating emotional/mental/spiritual states devolved from the influence of charismatics, such as provided the impetus for the baseball-backgrounded mass marriages performed under the auspices of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon…

As I understand it, Scott Aaronson’s point is not that feminism is to blame for the fact that ‘shy male nerds’ have a tough time in school and college. Instead, his point (compressed severely, so lacking nuance) is the following: Feminism is associated with one specific problem that aggravates the difficulties faced by these nerds. Sexual harassment seminars and related events (associated, for good or ill, with feminism) are a good thing, in that they presumably have the direct positive impact of reducing sexual harassment of all kinds, and in particular of reducing sexual assault / rape. However, for a certain group of shy males (‘nerds’), they can have the negative effect of making them feel like they are Bad People ™ for having sexual desires and that they would be Evil ™ if they made unwelcome advances to women who then felt uncomfortable / threatened.

Aaronson feels that these seminars and other events (even in their current form) and of course, the existence of feminism more broadly, are a huge positive, because the tradeoff is worth it: The societal good outweighs the possibly minor harm to a small group of people, many of whom will probably get over it (as he did himself). On the other hand, he claims that we don’t really acknowledge the existence of a tradeoff; no attention is paid to the harm suffered by the shy male (or female!) nerds. Therefore, we are unaware of the extent of the problem (How many people feel this way? How severe are the consequences?), and are missing out on opportunities to mitigate this harm. For example, perhaps the seminars could include more examples of positive romantic interactions? Perhaps the existing centers could have a staff member who specializes in counseling students who feel this self-doubt (or extreme self-loathing in the severe cases, such as Aaronson’s)? Of course, we can dismiss it and say that the group of affected students is small, and hence not worth attention. If we don’t do anything to help people in this group, though, then many of them are going to end up (unjustly) blaming feminism as the message-bearer, even if / when they eventually grow out of their problems. That’s because the feminists are the ones telling them that they are bad people (not really, but that’s how it’s perceived), and who likes to hear that? He wrote: “That I managed to climb out of the pit with my feminist beliefs mostly intact, you might call a triumph of abstract reason over experience.”

If one hasn’t read the entire context, of course, this may not come across as being his main point. (Life is short, and who has time to read multiple threads with hundreds of comments each? And from his perspective, as a couple of earlier commenters here alluded to, why provide additional context when writing deep in a comment thread?) But, for instance, he explicitly mentions a couple of times that his problem was not that he was only attracted to “hot” women; instead the girls he found attractive were the shy female nerds. While he said that he felt his personality was optimized for the ‘shtetl’ era, he also said that he does not yearn for this era, and regards the fact society now believes that “no one has the right to anyone else’s sexual affections [as] one of the triumphs of modern civilization.” In fact, this was a large part of the reason for his self-loathing: He believed he was a person suited for a system he regarded as oppressive, and that this made him an evil monster.

@Tyrone
Indeed. That, or some sort of ritual transvestitism. Pentheus in the Bacchae, even.

@bob
“Japan could conceivably be left with what the enemies of feminism have
long warned would be the consequences of a society-wide displacement of
males: enervated, emasculated upper-class males together with feral male
loutishness at the lower levels”

This sets off alarm bells, because, as your source says, it’s exactly what conservatives have been angsting over since the 19th century at least, and yet the threat never materialised. And Murphy is most definately not independent of US or Anglophone culture. See also: responses to industrialisation and working women in the US, scholarly work on Tudor-era gender roles, early Westerns and a lot of right-wing science fiction. For that matter, consider A Clockwork Orange or even Burke’s Reflections from the perspective of gender politics.

I think there are two themes here. One is more extensive proletarianisation and its social effects. The ‘tiny feudalism’ of the home collapsing once again under the weight of wage labour now that the interregnum of the post-war compromise has ended, etc.

The other is whatever the hell capitalism means for gender and the body. I wouldn’t assume the answer is female empowerment: there’s a bit of work (e.g. some articles by Stallybrass, Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, which I have on my desk but haven’t really delved into) looking at enclosure and compartmentalisation as themes of (esp. female) body politics.

Thanks Landru.

Luke @205: “sounds unpleasant, though.”

No. To be emasculted is to be apotheosized into the realm of the high-brow!

It’s a good thing. Really.

There is something a bit absurd about reading Laura Penny (Brighton College, Wadham College, Graun, Harvard, …) instructing Aaronson to ‘check his privilege’ .

Did I miss the bit where Aaronson was brought up on a shtetl or is the son of Appalachian farmers? I don’t know enough about the US class system to know the details, but his background sounds fairly prosperous, like Laura Penny’s. And she’s always been honest enough that she’s benefited from her parents being well-off (e.g. by them paying for her treatment for eating disorders). Aaronson mentions the ‘privilege’ of being white, male and straight, but does he have anything to say about class?

Horatio #194: Thank you; that’s one of the most perceptive things anyone has written about my situation. I’d go further and say that, when I was growing up, there was nowhere—no place whatsoever—where I could interact with girls my age and where what you call the “workplace moral regime” wasn’t basically in force. There were parties, of course, but they were either nerdy or academic gatherings of various kinds (“come, have a good time, just be sure to continue obeying the workplace moral regime!”), or else they were affairs that I could “attend” only as an anthropologist attends a hunter-gatherer ritual. I.e., I could show up, but only as an observer—at best, an observer who a few of the natives knew and respected for intellectual reasons. If I danced, it was an amusing novelty, like the anthropologist putting on the natives’ headdress for kicks, but then the novelty would wear off.

In my much-vilified comment about the shtetl, I simply meant that in earlier eras, there were other socially-sanctioned escapes available from the workplace moral regime: the people you grew up around (and still saw), the people your parents arranged for you to meet, etc. Today, the best replacement we have for those is online dating, but at least when I was growing up (which was before Tinder…), that wasn’t a realistic option for a straight male until he was in his mid-20s.

So, yes: the creeping expansion of the “modern workplace moral regime” into literally everywhere that a shy nerdy male feels comfortable being himself—an expansion that clearly has something to do with feminism, though it also has other causes—is an excellent way to understand the problem I was talking about.

Incidentally, I just saw all the comments above speculating about whether I tried therapy. Of course I did. Maybe I just didn’t find the right therapists, but in my experience, it’s profoundly unhelpful for this sort of problem. The best you can hope for is that, very occasionally, the therapist will break out of therapist mode and show some human sympathy. But to the extent they act as therapists, the most they can do is check that you’re not at imminent risk of suicide, check that you’re not going to harm anyone else, and check if there’s some generalized anxiety disorder. They constantly want to steer the conversation away from expressing romantic interest; the idea that a crippling anxiety could be specific to that one issue, that one could be extremely functional otherwise (if anything, TOO sane and rational :-) ), isn’t one that they seem to like at all. Many are also much more interested in coping with the situation, in reconciling oneself to it internally, than in solving it in the external world.

One final thing: I vehemently agree with everyone who pointed out that my teenage anxieties are not the world’s most pressing issue! For godsakes, I brought them up in one blog comment (!), which was part of a much longer thread that had already veered into all sorts of gender issues, mostly as a way to get Amy and my other interlocutors to understand where I was coming from. But if even two months later, this is still something others want to blab about … well, I guess I’m one source of relevant information on the topic. And I’m nothing if not open. :-)

I actually quite like that post. It succintly captures everything I dislike about ‘PRIVILEGE!!’ as ad hominen conversation stopper. I agree with her that her articles should be judged on their content, not her class background.
Having said that, I havent paticularly liked many of her articles that I’ve read.

Oh look, it’s positional social goods again. Yes, if you are competing for one of the few top-level jobs in global media, then it makes a real difference if you’re in the top .00001%, the top .001%, or merely the top 1%. Someone in the top .1% can look at the top .001%’ers above them and cry out “Look at the personal connections you have to have to get one of these jobs! Just skill, wealth, and education won’t do it!” Which is true. But this is no longer a privilege conversation in any sense that most of us recognize.

Engels @ 227 and following
In my experience of reading your comments, you seem to be one of those people who regularly suggest that class is more important than gender as an explanatory theory. As I’ve explained previously, I don’t think they are alternative theories, I think they interact. However I have noticed that in discussions of gender and patriarchy (like this one) you quite often seem to bring in issues of class, with the implicit suggestion that class is more important than the gender issue being discussed (as you have above in relation to gender).

In #219 you say that you are depressed by seeing debates about media carried out “almost entirely by public schoolboys and girls”, but my impression is you usually bring the issue of class up when people are trying to talk about gender privilege. I am not sure if you think that gender is important, or whether you think patriarchy is real or important? It would be interesting to know, because sometimes it seems as if you are trying to derail discussions of gender, or suggest that it’s not important.

Laura Penny says in the piece you linked to, that she comes from a working class background but is now relatively privileged. In world terms of course, she is very privileged, as am I, and no doubt you. I don’t know about Aaronson’s original background, but certainly he too would now be privileged.

I have gone to the trouble of finding some evidence on gender privilege in both academia and the media:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/global-gender-index-2013/2003517.fullarticle

http://www.iwmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/IWMF-Global-Report-Summary.pdf

I am wondering whether you will care to admit that it does exist? Also, do you believe that patriarchy exists, is unfair, and should be opposed?

My reaction to Aaronson was (a) vague familiarity with the concept he described and (b) immediate certainty that his personal response indicates a deeper, probably psychiatric issue. Everybody is socially anxious — only those with a more significant challenge wish for chemical castration. I hope he gets therapeutic assistance to help work through the issues. A lot of people have different, individual challenges (ASD or are asexual/sex-negative) and their opinions are both valuable and not representative of the majority of the population.

As for Belle’s question about how is feminism learned before encountering a sex-positive issue — that’s pretty much definitional for pre-teens. Pushback on gender stereotypes starts happening way, way before sex-ed (Sesame Street, etc). And most sex-ed is not exactly sex positive. Especially for kids. So you know you are supposed to treat women “right” for some definition of right, long before you have any idea what it would remotely feel like to want to treat a women “wrong” (for definitions of wrong related to being sex-negative).

But the answer is exactly to the point that you/we need more interactions across gender, especially in adolescence. As a very nerdy type, it was easy for me to find myself not having a lot of interactions with women. Women didn’t hang out in the computer lab or ask to play Dungeons and Dragons with the nerds. Probably the interested ones were afraid of our reactions, because they hadn’t interacted with us either. By late high school and into college, as I had more chances to just hang out and talk with women, everything started to make a lot more sense. It wasn’t that hard to understand normal human desire (and nervousness) and the difference between that an neanderthal ass-grabbing. As soon as I had female friends, it was immediately obvious that they were also somewhat socially anxious, had desires and wants — but there were important differences too. Women have some built in social pressures towards marriage/stable partners that are different than men, especially in college where it is really too early to be worrying about that.

The “Nice Guys” who resonate to/champion Aaronson are mostly just assholes wrapping excuses for their assholery in MRA claptrap. However, the awkward feminist line of argument probably sweeps up a few young men who are basically really feminist, socially anxious and have not yet grown out of the adolescent hormonal fear thing. The solution is to talk to more women, ideally in contexts based on some other shared interest so you can get to know people without the immediate overhead of possible dating. Then those young men who briefly think they might be Nice Guys can grow out of it as quickly as possible.

Practically, my opinion is we need even more forceful rules against sex segregation in schools. No more Boy or Girl Scouts and no clubs can be one gender only (Chess club is canceled unless you can get some girls to play). By college, all dorms need to be co-ed by room, not even floor. Both my college age kids have co-ed by floor dorms and I think it really restricted their interactions. You can guess how I feel about Fraternities and Sororities (outlaw or require mixed gender houses). My hunch is that this would reduce misogyny in male-majority fields like videogame, increase female participation in STEM fields, and everybody gets a pony, too.

I vaguely sympathise with Laurie Penny – I’m well aware that the recipe for getting a start in high-profile journalism is

a) move to London
b) pitch
c) get invites to parties
d) make contacts
e) get lucky

where steps b)-d) can go on more or less indefinitely (and not all the parties have free bars, let me tell you). Some people have steps b)-e) more or less in the bag before they even arrive in London, and some have to work much harder at it. And I’ve read enough of Laurie’s blog to know that she’s been seriously hard up along the way.

But still… how in hell do you get to start at the bottom of the ladder “with an Oxford degree and some savings“, quote? I mean, when I finished my (Cambridge) degree I had money in the bank, but I think it was about £26.

Here’s a story I told here once before, down at the bottom of a moribund thread.

At a friend’s wedding, soon after leaving college, I listened politely as an acquaintance told me he was thinking about going into journalism, quietly thinking to myself I don’t seem to remember you writing regularly for Stop Press for almost a whole year – and considering that I’ve sent my c.v. and cuttings to all the main places and had no replies, well, jolly good luck with that…

And that was the last time I saw Anatol Lieven.

Val, while I’m flattered to be object of an ongoing personal critique your comments on my behavioural patterns seem rather odd

1 I didn’t bring up class, Brett and Magistra did
2 I’ve already said clearly I think patriarchy exists and that it’s oppressive
3 the only time I’ve ever interacted to my knowledge with you was on Holbo’s affirmative consent, where I didn’t mention class iirc

“Coming from that background, I think you kind of have to pick a stance; either ‘privilege doesn’t matter’ or ‘privilege invalidates your argument’. ”

I don’t see why these ar ethe only two options.

I suppose a kind of wallowing in our own feelings towards other people – prioritised a hundredfold over the effects we’re having on those people, or the demands we’re making of them – is the pattern I’m trying to name. (Porn probably doesn’t help here, for obvious reasons.)

That and genuinely, sincerely denying it all when called on it – then doing it again and not really feeling guilty (until the next time we’re called on it).

Why should Aaronson necessarily have been suffering from some psychiatric trouble? He may have been alarmed that he might somehow offend others, despite his innate sense of justice. His reward for bearing his soul is an unfalsifiable criticism, which looks like a decomposition theorem from communication theory: any and all messages Aaronson received from the environment about his sexuality can be decomposed into two components: a Feminist signal, and noise. The noise is due entirely to the Patriarchy.

Engels @ 231

“Val, while I’m flattered to be object of an ongoing personal critique your comments on my behavioural patterns seem rather odd”
– you’re not the subject of an ongoing personal critique, I just asked you a question about an issue I’m interested in. My impression that you have previously introduced class as a counter to arguments about gender may be wrong, but you did seem to be doing so on this occasion.

“1 I didn’t bring up class, Brett and Magistra did”
– Brett Bellmore raised the subject of class @ 15. Magista responded, politely presenting an alternative viewpoint at 38. That was a long way back. You raised it in regard to Laurie Penny which was a new issue. Brett is a well-known contrarian on this as on many issues, I don’t think referring to what Brett said so far back as some kind of justification for what you said really adds much to the discussion.

“2 I’ve already said clearly I think patriarchy exists and that it’s oppressive”
– I’m glad you think that, but it wasn’t clear to me, that’s why I asked.

“3 the only time I’ve ever interacted to my knowledge with you was on Holbo’s affirmative consent, where I didn’t mention class iirc”
– I don’t actually see what this has to do with my question. Perhaps you could explain?

Overall I have to say that your comment about Laurie Penny, and your reply to me, both sound a bit, to me, like ‘you feminists are wrong and should be quiet’, which is really unfortunate anywhere, but particularly on this thread.

How do you prove that Patriarchy is solely to blame for these messages? It seems to be taken uncritically. Not unlike Aaronson, as a boy I received the impression that I was destined, on account of my sex, to grow up to become an oppressor, despite my interests, inclinations and abilities. I could not imagine a more tedious occupation. This was before I had any understanding of sex. A formative experience. How do you know, a priori that the message was solely my perverse interpretation of external influences that could only be as pure as the driven snow?

in my CS class in the 80s, shy nerds of all racial stripes and sexual proclivities got along perfectly well, for shy nerd values of ‘well’. Sometime after PC gaming and internet pr0n and guys making coding fortunes, that changed.. I really miss the days when a nerd was someone who liked math and reading, and we had women in CS. I never managed to date any of them, but they were good company (never managed to date any other women either, which is a different though related issue).

There should be a left that (among other things) tries to create a society that provides people with help when they need it, and such a left can only be profeminist. But feminism can’t be about everything. Certainly not my mental problems.
I read separatist feminists in the early 90’s, and what I remember as having shocked me was the signs of what I now know as oppression olympics — you people are facing an immensely powerful and ruthless enemy and you waste time on this?

I think there’s a jump that I often find odd in these discussions from:

A very strong component of the feminist message as it makes it into the public consciousness is “unwelcome sexual advances are wrong.”

to:

I can’t read people well enough to make a reasonably good judgment as to “would this person find being asked for a date unwelcome?”

Asking a girl or woman (who doesn’t work for you) if she would like to have coffee with you is normally just not a problem, provided you can graciously accept a no. And I dare you to find me any feminist pamphlet or anti-sexual harassment training manual that can in any way be read to suggests otherwise.

And once you have established some type of relationship with a woman that you think may go in a romantic direction, feminism actually does give you a set of rules, clearer than anything non-feminist dating would provide you with: affirmative consent. Go slowly and ask at every step. If the woman tells you she doesn’t want you to hold her hand, she’s very clearly not interested and you respect that. If you’re smart/lucky enough to date a feminist woman, she’ll recognize what you’re doing and in all likelihood appreciate it.

What I often read as the subtext of accounts by people who say they’re bad at reading social cues and so they can’t have a sex life is that they can’t hook up with girls they’ve just met (or pick up girls if you want to use a more loaded phrase). And there, I’ve gotta say: sorry dude. If you’re not good at reading social cues, that’s just not something you should be trying to do if you don’t want to be a creep. If it’s any comfort, a lot of us guys who are perfectly fine with social cues don’t do it, either.

Just to add: there has been some skepticism that men actually do receive messages that communicate that they are violating monsters. Its hard for me to see ‘affirmative consent’ as anything other than this, to be honest.

As I said above, part of toxic masculinity is that men have no emotions other than anger and lust. Their consent is always assumed, they are always the aggressors. Surely that comes across very clearly with this construction of ‘affirmative consent’?

Val: Ive appreciated your comments throughout this thread, and agree with pretty much everything you say. Of course women get rejected too, that’s clear. But, without wanting to be patronising, do read adam.smith’s comment. It frames consent as something a woman gives a man. My point is that this framing is wrong headed; I take consent very, very seriously, and I worry that some versions of consent being proposed actually undermine the very thing they claim to support.

Like I said, different people mean different things, but I certainly agree that ongoing consent is important and withdrawn consent is to be absolutely respected. I have no problem with any of that. Do you really not agree that this is often framed in a one-sided way that assumes a particular gender dynamic? Because to me that seems apparent.

(As I’ve said before, I practice consent in kink spaces, where probably people assume that I am the top, because I am male – nothing could be further from the truth. So when I say that this form of consent is unworkable, I mean that pretty literally, as someone whose safety depends on it.)

I’d be interested to know what people think of Orwell as I assume he could justifiably criticised from a feminist perspective but I think he does write well about sexual repression (1984), the aggressive aspects of male sexual desire (op. cit.) and the ‘nerd experience’ (Keep the Aspidistra Flying).

Val, I don’t think Laura Penny is wrong and should be quiet. I agree with her about a lot of things but there is something about her ‘I’m not privileged because I smoked roll-ups and lived in a terrace on Cowley Road too’ vibe which really rubs me up the wrong way.

Just to add to the data pool: I could probably write an Aaronson-like account of myself, if I were a whingy guy with zero self-awareness. (Also: going to college at 15 didn’t contribute to his problem? What bullshit. How could it not?)

The truth however is that I have a morbid fear of rejection, which I blame on my own psyche, not on Andrea Dworkin. So I wait to be hit on the head with a rolled-up newspaper before feeling confident that, yes, this woman really is attracted to me.

I don’t know how typical such a fear is (and as noted, it’s hardly a guy thing), but I don’t see WTF it could have to do with feminism. I suppose some people have got to blame anything other than their own weird selves.

‘I don’t see WTF it has to do with feminism’

Imo: because feminism should be in charge of sexual politics, if this problem is a widespread source of female and male misery (as this thread makes clear it is) then feminism should own it. The forms I support do.

256: your comment makes no sense to me, but I havent had my coffee yet.

255: idk, but the males I’ve known seemed to have no such problem. And as noted upthread, women have their own rejection issues. 20 years ago, counseling might’ve been useful for me. At 45, divorced, & single-dadding, I’ve turned to more plausible forms of self-realization. Like, Twitter. And snarky legal briefs.

Fuck. My comment vanished.

Anderson, I’ll try again. Sexual repression under capitalism has everything to do with feminism, which isn’t to say feminism is to blame. It isn’t and it’s generally been a positive force (Kate gave examples above). Imnsho liberal feminism does have sexually repressive aspects, not because it’s feminist but because it’s liberal.

¿Comprende?

Anderson @258
255 but the males I’ve known seemed to have no such problem.

That might say more about you than it does about the issue. When I was younger, I know it was an issue for me. I didn’t want to be in the position of chasing something I decided I didn’t want and hurting someone in the process. That problem only got solved by somebody else chasing me.

So my take is that fear of rejection is really fear of acceptance (if it wasn’t you would just chase everybody).

” Sexual repression under capitalism has everything to do with feminism”

I disagree with this. Religion, right wing cultural beliefs and patriarchal social structures have WAY WAY WAY more to do with sexual repression than feminism.

engels@259: Are you talking about existing capitalist societies as having no sexual repression except coming from feminism (certainly not true for e.g. US)? Or do you mean that a purely capitalist/libertarian society would have no sexual repression, on the grounds that any form of sexual desire for which there is a market would be OK? I can imagine some forms of unrestricted capitalism in which if you were so poor that you had to sell yourself permanently as a sex slave to any willing bidder that would be OK: ‘look, you made a contract with your own freewill’. And I’m sure liberal feminists would be against that.

The conversation between Val and Armando exemplifies why feminism can’t be let 100% off the hook here.

Armando feels that the overly rigorous requirements of affirmative consent include some very hostile messages about male sexuality. Val tells him that affirmative consent is just about things like not intimately touching women you don’t know well, and adds some frustration and contempt to her tone. Val is objectively wrong- affirmative consent goes much further than she’s acknowledging (obvious example- claiming that explicit consent is required before all forms of sexual contact including kissing, saying that relationship status and past consent don’t change this, saying that you don’t have to have verbal consent, but if you’re not sure about the non verbal signals you’re receiving you should get verbal consent, and suggesting that you better be really sure because if you think you have non verbal consent and you’re wrong you’ve committed sexual assault… I could go on here).

This is a recipe for paralysis. And yeah, of course it makes young men who accept it feel like their sexual desires are dangerous things that they need to hide away from the world.

This is exactly the sort of messaging that becomes infuriating for a young man who wants to be a good person, and also wants to participate fully in romantic life. The rules are clear, but no one will own them, meaning that the real rules are secret. But what are they? The only way to figure them out is trial and error. But trial and error is really scarey when error puts you at risk of being viewed as a sex offender. This is particularly true when you combine it with a culture where young men who ignore feminism can be successful in romance with no negative social consequences for behaving in ways that feminist messaging condemns.

Patrick @269 The rules are clear, but no one will own them, meaning that the real rules are secret. But what are they?

I think you have a good point–or rather, there is a concept of affirmative consent that many of us believe in, which nobody is actually keeping secret, but that is still different from the way some people have put affirmative consent into writing, and those written standards are really out there and need to be taken into account if we’re going to talk about “affirmative consent”. Or maybe those standards are a myth/hugely exaggerated and people should stop bringing them up? But if that’s not the case…

People tend to say sexual harassment = unwelcome sexual advances, but Val and magistra have both described situations where unwanted sexual advances/attention were absolutely not sexual harassment. What we all clearly mean by actual sexual harassment is repeated or otherwise egregious sexual advances, which means we do demand some ‘reading of the situation’ from would-be bestowers of sexual attention. IME lots of people defending ideas like affirmative consent have acknowledged this, even shouted it from the rooftops–that some ‘reading of the situation’ is not an unreasonable thing to expect of people (I certainly don’t think it’s unreasonable). But then we should all be very clear that this is what we demand, and that it’s what we ought to demand.

MPA at 265 is patently correct.

My hunch is that when women feel rejected they blame themselves, & when men feel rejected they blame women.

Get intersectional, Engels! ;)

Fuzzy Dunlop@271 I think you’re right about the ‘repeated or otherwise egregious sexual advances’; the problem is how legally you deal with the ‘egregious’ ones. The dilemma is that for the mental well-being of nervous young men/women, you need some leeway for a single mildly sexual advance that is refused and then stopped without it being sexual assault. But if you explicitly have that leeway, then certain jerks are going to claim that it’s OK to stick their tongue down someone’s throat or grab someone’s arse out of the blue and then say: ‘but I stopped as soon as they said no’, so how can it be harassment’? I don’t see an easy solution to that one.

bianca@272: Brett Bellmore talked about what happened to him on the Safe Space thread and it was precisely that kind of horrendous and violent over-reaction by a girl. (I hope it’s OK to refer back to that thread, when it’s not to attack anyone’s opinion in that, just refer to people’s experiences).

(OSU’s “consent” page is at http://swc.osu.edu/sexual-violence-education-support-sves/consent/ )

magistra, I’m not sure what you’re saying.

Are you referring to what Brett said happened to him in grade school (or high school, I don’t know why I assumed the kids were under fourteen at the time), where he was beaten up? That was horrible.

But men seem right now to be complaining that, as adults, they are being told either that it is sexual harassment to approach an adult woman who doesn’t want to be spoken to by them, or that if they had “normal” ability to follow social cues, they would be able to unerringly figure out which women don’t want to talk to them. This seems pretty unbelievable. I don’t think you mean to suggest that they’re projecting from their childhood experience onto things that they’re simply imagining.

I don’t think this was what you were saying, was it?

#278 Thanks

Lets not add too much heat here: at no point did I feel that Val was expressing contempt.

Yeah, that’s my gloss, not Armando’s. I’m willing to own it. Any heat in response should go my way.

Thank you Raven at 286. 100%, 0% wrong.
:-)

I’d like to throw in here that “affirmative consent” is not an anti-sexual-harassment policy but an anti-sexual-assault policy.

Affirmative consent doesn’t apply to asking people out on dates at all. It doesn’t even apply to much of sexual harassment, even the type that (almost?) everyone here would agree is wrong (e.g. sexist comments at the workplace). It’s about sexual activity:

The act of knowingly, actively and voluntarily agreeing explicitly to engage in sexual activity.

(that’s from OSU about consent).

“re Brett’s story from before, I wasn’t there and he may want to disagree, but I’d suggest that the problem there wasn’t that he misread a social situation and got an over-the-top reaction, but that he was subject to a social hierarchy where a trivial misreading of a social cue was widely seen as a legitimate pretext for violence (Cf. “he whistled at her…”). If the girl in question had brought this complaint to the teacher, the reaction probably would not have been so outrageous, much less violent.”

What was the girl supposed to complain about, that I maliciously said “Hi!” to her? I didn’t make an unwanted sexual advance, I was young enough I wouldn’t have known what a sexual advance even was, let alone been inclined to attempt one. The problem had everything to do with social hierarchy. I was at the bottom, she was at the top, I didn’t know this, and didn’t know that people at the bottom weren’t allowed to initiate conversations with people at the top.

That I was a guy, and she was a girl, might have had something to do with it on her end, but not on mine. I was barely starting to think girls didn’t really have “cooties”, whatever they were.

I think that we need to be clear about what affirmative consent is and when the more literal forms are needed. The whole point of affirmative consent is to insure that there is clear communication by both parties on what is acceptable. With a long-term relationship, you can establish an understanding of acceptable behavior – my partner knows she can come behind me and run her hand over my but, and that will be welcomed. There is no need to ask every time, though if I ever said to stop, it should be respected.

But with someone you don’t know well, or with whom you are initiating any sort of sexual advance for the first time, you absolutely need to ask, and verbally check in, at every step of the way. Whether there may be a problem of over-reach where some people want to require clear verbal consent of every action even for long established couples, that really isn’t an issue if you are approaching someone for the first time or initiating the next step in a sexual encounter. If you haven’t been together for a while,

(in the case of the kink space, I would assume that there are a set of rules for the space that address safe words and what not, that would be a substitute for affirmative consent. At least, according to the sex radicals a few years back, BDSM circles were even more attentive to consent than others, precisely because of the potential risks. The language used may not be the same, but it was embedded in the role-playing.)

I remember reading somewhere that female bullying tends to be majoritarian and male bullying minoritarian because of girls’ and women’s greater solidarity orientation but perhaps that is contested.

I’d add to Raven’s list above of things feminism isn’t responsible for: progressive education. I’ve been wondering, reading these threads, about relative age and national origin of posters, and how many are, like me, second-generation productions of progressive education (that is, raised by a mother who attended this same kind of school).

@296 If you know that someone is being approached repeatedly, this is straightforward, but if not, doesn’t that move into the territory of ‘you should have known she was too hot for you’? I mean, actually, personally, I would try to make that call when deciding whether to approach somebody flirtatiously, but hopefully people can see how affirming the need for this type of consideration also affirms that sexual advances are judged according to a separate social hierarchy, and that this is something (pro-)feminists should be sensitive to?

“Was this on CT? Links! though I think the Hubble constant was straightened out well in advance of the founding of CT.”

No, sorry, although that would have been awesome. I was remembering back from when I was a grad student in the 1980s.

So difficult being in such a different time zone to most commenters! You go to sleep at night, having written a late night comment, and wake up in the morning to find 50 more. So hard to keep up.

Patrick @ 274
I wasn’t in the least expressing contempt for Armando’s views. I thought it was genuinely sad that he should (even theoretically) feel that affirmative consent treats male sexuality as “toxic”. I feel that there’s a whole world of meaning lurking in your misunderstanding, although I shouldn’t read too much in it I guess – but don’t you think it could be an example of the way people “read in” hatred and contempt to feminism ?

Rich @ 299
Two aspects to my position on class and patriarchy: one is I don’t think they’re alternative explanations, I think they are interconnected, but following Gerda Lerner, I think patriarchy is the ‘ur-form’ of oppression, that precedes others. I’m interested in hearing other views on this, even though I already have an established view, partly because I have to write a convincing thesis eventually.

The other aspect is that I think bringing up class is sometimes used as a derailing tactic in discussions of feminism, which is what I suspected Engels was doing re Laurie Penny. I think it is used sometimes by people who are antagonistic to feminism, or aspects of feminism, but don’t want to say so directly. (I won’t get into the dispute between me and Engels again because I’ve said enough on that already).

I just want to add, there are so many interesting viewpoints here. I loved that info about Russia, so fascinating. And it seems when I scan back through the thread that new and interesting ones have been released, including one from Scott Arronson, which I hadn’t seen, and was certainly interesting although I still don’t agree with a lot of it. But appreciated! As are all the different viewpoints.

The question you (Rich) raise re expertise is interesting – certainly people shouldn’t be excluded because they haven’t formally studied a topic, because they would just be hierarchies and privilege again. But many people – not here so much, but in other parts of the Internet – do treat feminism as if it’s just a lot of rubbish that silly women made up, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that if someone has spent years studying feminism, that should be respected in discussion, just as it would with other topics.

Armando thanks for your comments, I understand your position better now. I think again there can be a “mishmash” in people’s minds (I love that expression, thank you Tiny Tim @ 99) of feminism (affirmative consent) superimposed on patriarchal attitudes (men have to do the chasing). But I didn’t think adam.smith was doing that – I thought (as he later said) he was writing from the starting point of the thread, nerdy heterosexual males.

Scott Aaronson @213 Thank you for writing this, because these thoughts are actually very familiar; they were never a severe problem for me to the point of causing crippling anxiety, but were real enough to have been detrimental to my ways of interacting with people, and probably contributed to reservations I had many years ago about fully sympathizing with feminism:

…the main things to know about girls are DON’T BE A CREEP, and YES THAT MEANS YOU, and if you have to ask what ‘creep’ means, that’s likely because you already are one… Everyone knows how not to be a creep: you just need to read the subtle nonverbal or subverbal signals that we’re all instinctively born with, and which tell you when to attempt something—say, taking a girl’s hand, or leaning in for a kiss—that you’ve never before attempted in your life, and that indeed you must NEVER, EVER attempt if the signals are wrong.

…which boiled down to “DON’T BE A CREEP” and “the more you avoid flirting with girls, the more of a potential creep that makes you, ergo the more you must, morally, avoid flirting, and so on forever” and “the guys who succeed at this are not only your social superiors, but your moral superiors as well.”

To clarify my own suggestions up-thread about what this means for feminism, and in what ways bullying should be a feminist issue, I think men ought to be proactive in having these discussions and creating spaces for them (Belle has done so very graciously here), and that we can reasonably call these discussions/spaces a part of feminism. In other words, part of feminism, but not something that anyone should demand other feminists devote time to, beyond just basic consideration/acknowledgement.

One of the things that occurs to me from reading Scott Aaronson@213 (and some other posters), is that some people feel far more unhappy with ambiguity than others: they want really strict, precise rules about what is right and what is wrong. And I wonder whether that kind of personality it connected with a strong mathematical/scientific bent: when I was young and doing a degree in maths, I certainly wanted to be sure I got the right answer for a lot of RL situations as well. And for people who are unhappy with this kind of ambiguity, then the ordinary rules of thumb about how you behave towards the opposite sex aren’t satisfactory.

The problem is that it’s impossible to give more than rules of thumb, because there is no absolute objective standard for what is creepy behaviour. It depends at least partly on the person who is or is not being creeped out. Just as there isn’t 1 specific blood alcohol level at which someone is too drunk to consent and it would be unrealistic to try and claim there is. You have to make judgement calls, but that it difficult if you’re lacking in self-confidence in your own judgement.

I also wonder if maybe what attracted Scott to reading Dworkin and the rad-fems etc was a search for black and white colours and certainty on the topic of sex: a lot of radical/extreme moral thought is marked by that clarity, whether it’s fundamentalist religion or left-wing politics.

passer-by @ 249

Interesting comments. I’ve heard the phrase “war between the sexes” or “war of the sexes” and it often seems as if this is considered to be the fault of feminism. I remember hearing an interview with Doris Lessing where she remembered being criticized for taking part in the “war of the sexes” and she said she tried hard not to. But I don’t know why it would be assumed it didn’t exist until feminism did. (There used to be at least one Usenet troll who kept blaming quite traditional, if not especially classy, behavior on “feminism,” in a way that was pretty odd, but kept at least one feminist biting.)

As I said up top though this all sounds very USian to me

hix@313,

If you have the same kind of scientific mind, you’d also be carefully trying to assess your cognitive biases, to see whether you are noticing unfair treament of your in-group, but not favourable treament of your in-group.

scott@314,

Wasn’t your original comment in a discussion about the lack of women in STEM subjects? That hardly suggests that feminism has WON.

Scott @ 213, “Everyone knows how not to be a creep: you just need to read the subtle nonverbal or subverbal signals that we’re all instinctively born with, and which tell you when to attempt something.”
Then on the twitterstream,
http://adequateman.deadspin.com/how-to-talk-to-girls-on-twitter-without-coming-off-like-1685707661
which basically is saying exactly that.

Some decades ago I settled upon a guiding principle of not talking to girls except to respond to questions, because anything else would usually lead to feeling like a creep. It was the effort to avoid that unpleasant set of emotions which put a stop to my attempts at dating. It wasn’t feminism made me feel that way, rather it was the same set of things that feminism reacts against. As Jagiello observes in one of the O’Brian novels, “Women are the Jews of the world – spat upon, reviled and persecuted for centuries, until it is hardly possible for a friendship to form between a man and a woman.”

Soundtrack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3euYclhRmw

I’m glad I’m not young anymore.

bianca steele @314 Yes, “war between the sexes” certainly predates 1960s+ era feminism. Here’s an Ngram query showing it to creep into the language a decade prior to 1900, but with significant post 1960 rise (also graphed “war of the sexes”):

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=war+between+the+sexes%2Cwar+of+the+sexes&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=2&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cwar%20between%20the%20sexes%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwar%20of%20the%20sexes%3B%2Cc0

Val, a ways back in the thread, you mentioned in response to several of us your particular take on the history of patriarchy. I agree with you that patriarchies have been dominant in various cultural contexts throughout the world.

My question is, “In what way do these patriarchies evolve?”

Because if we accept, as you said, that patriarchy has been the “dominant social order for the last few thousand years,” and we also accept that patriarchy comes in “variants” of particular political/economic arrangements, such as “capitalism, socialism, liberalism, neo-liberalism, etc,” then we also need to recognize in what ways any of these variants are either innovations from outside patriarchy that came to vary it or evolved clades from within the patriarchy that’s dominant over the last few thousand years.

If patriarchy has so thoroughly captured all of human cultural progress that any contemporary -ism traces itself back to it, then there’s not really much hope for anyone to find something outside or untainted by the particular conceptual frameworks and nonconceptual realities patriarchy, as a variant-unifying theme across -isms and global cultures, has locked us into. How can we separate ourselves from it, if any of the significant “social orders” we summarize with an -ism in our contemporary lives are variants of it?

I am not sure the patriarchy diagnosed today is actually the same as the patriarchy we diagnose in a culture several thousands of miles and years away, or even several hundred in either of those. I tend to find it more fruitful to ask about a local patriarchy, how it works and moves and values in particular geographical settings, places with their own histories and graves and old traditions. I do think there are ‘family resemblances’ among the patriarchies, and maybe tracing backwards across the variants the historical patterns through which the various -isms became variants of the patriarchy will produce a convincing and persuasive story of what that patriarchy was—sort of the way we can trace the idea of gravity over the cultures as though it was always ever the same thing just understood differently. But it’s the sort of maybe that makes me think the term ‘patriarchy’, much like any of the terms ‘liberalism’ or ‘Marxism’ or ‘capitalism’ or ‘fascism’, has less to do with definitions and concepts and understandings, and more to do with one’s own immersion in a local geography, where today such geographies not only include social media networks but all the extended institutional networks the Internet provides for people to communicate so much faster than word-of-mouth oral practices of shaming and gossip allowed.

By coming at the Big Picture from seeing the patchwork of rivers, creeks, oceans and various other dividing and inscribed lines separating one moral system from another moral system, I think we’re in a much better position to start divesting ourselves of our own moral authority of declaring definitively that this action or that action is patriarchal, capitalistic, socialistic, assholish, or whatever, as though this authority had something more for it than where we were born, where we grew up, where we go into debt, where we find safety from the world. This isn’t to say we stop using shame or the usual sorts of corrections people make when they publicly declare this behavior or that behavior is odd, creepy, uncomfortable, or awkward, weird, bizarre.

It is to say we stop thinking any one of us holds a better and clearer edge than the other as to what’s the best way to see the behaviors of another. These are all evolved and evolving ideas, and the selection process isn’t driven by True Morality or Divine Foresight.

The selections occur without any of our expectations, as they have naturally, ‘natural’ in the sense Nietzsche criticized the Stoics for thinking their own Nature was what they were submitting to: it’s all a part of life, whether we want to admit this or not, because we were born long after the fuckup already happened. All actions, especially those in the past, have consequences.

To shorten the rambling:

Cultures evolve. Is patriarchy something like four legs for animals—a series of evolutionary paths taken from which no alternative is possible without deliberately engineering the genetic code? Or is patriarchy something more like flight—a design feature several evolving cultures stumbled into because it happens to redirect their moving parts in ways reproducing themselves much faster than other cultures can compete? Or is patriarchy something more like spots—a design itself a variation on a theme of pigmentation? If it’s the first: then either we swallow one morality while instituting another and begin engineering cultures at their ‘genetic’ levels (something I argue the CIA did through MK-ULTRA or COINTELPRO, and what the DOD, various other state militaries, and public relations and human resources departments of firms and large corporate organizations do) or we swallow a different morality while instituting another and begin taking ourselves completely out of those cultures doomed to being patriarchal; if the second: then either we perform deeper analysis on the metaphorics and nonconceptual underpinnings of all the various designs patriarchies stumble into in order to better understand what are the cultural transformations these designs require or, similarly with the first, we take ourselves completely out of those cultures whose reproduction depends upon patriarchal designs; if the third: then either we alter the ordinary cultural selection procedures to remove these particular spots or to promote other spots.

Either way from any of these ways, making these choices means operating from the kind of moral standpoint and assurance about how evolution has altered the courses of human histories that got so many of us locked into these cultures of horrific genocide and destruction.

That is, if we think patriarchy is something we are all evolutionarily bound to, as something so pervasive and invasive that any one of our mistakes can be attributed to it—a kind of new ‘original sin’ already corrupting us before we began to make moral decisions as members of social communities. If, instead, it is something we can evolve out of—the truth growing from the lie, so to speak—then I do think it is appropriate to ask by what mechanisms we’ll do it. For a lot of folks, that’s something that looks like legislation, or like public education, or the right kind of discourse. I think, if we take very seriously the idea that patriarchy is that old and that rotten within us all, that if we took it to be something made up of parts, patterns, logics, and conceptual movements, cobbled together from all too human encounters, then we’re going to have to be prepared for a struggle that will never end, won’t be solved through talking or sharing alone, and will result in the unintended consequences of disrupting fragile mechanisms people use to survive within it, especially the deeper and more towards the core we go to excise from ourselves such a cancer.

Meanwhile, those who are already going beyond good and evil have already been mixing and matching the pieces and parts of cultural ideologies in order to create the new -isms that won’t make sense from our older, more traditional approaches to thinking of our isms as collections of doctrines and propositional ideas. Having no clear idea what patriarchy is, placing those new, engineered -isms into it will be a costly mistake —assuming we don’t like or want either those or patriarchy. Inaction also has consequences.

I’m starting to think that maybe I should just repeat bob mcmanus’ recommendation that people should watch WataMote. It’s only 12 episodes and should be available on the Web at various places. What I think that bob mcmanus left out of his recommendation is that the protagonist is 15 and that a whole lot of her awkwardness is about sexuality. It may be good to get a fictional look at this without the baggage of the character being male: the character is also refreshingly nasty, which may help to dispel some of the victimhood.

Note: for guys who want clear rules, responding with “She’s a girl, it’s unpossible that she’d be troubled by this!” is not the response that people are really wanting to hear back.

Magistra at 312: some people feel far more unhappy with ambiguity than others: they want really strict, precise rules about what is right and what is wrong.

I don’t think this is at all an unreasonable standard, if the consequences for “wrong” are vilification, imprisonment, or worse. So I’m a bit dismayed by your exaggerated rhetoric and negative tone here, as though people who don’t want punishments to be arbitrary are somehow lesser beings, to be pitied or looked down upon.

I’ll tell you my own standard — which is probably already covered in Rawls or something, it’s hardly likely I’ve come up with anything original here — which is very simple: If someone is going to impose rules for behavior that they think can and should be punished (and we’re talking much more generally than just state legal codes), then those rules should be sufficiently clear and well-defined to where anyone performing an act can tell if it’s a crime at the time they’re doing it. Is this the same as what you were saying? I can’t see this as unreasonable in the least, it seems like basic, cellular-level justice to me.

If anything, I would expect that people interested in social justice — and, who among us is opposed to social justice? show of hands? — would generally be very much in favor of having rules for punishments in society spelled out more explicitly. Having open, explicit rules can be a huge help to out-groups and put-upon minorities: they work against the kind of arbitrary, subjective decision-making by which the in-power groups promote their own members, or they force the slanted decision-making of those groups to be laid out publicly for examination. So it sounds funny to me, to hear people of a supposedly progressive persuasion disdaining a desire for clearer rules.

there is no absolute objective standard for what is creepy behaviour. It depends at least partly on the person who is or is not being creeped out.

Yes, this is true by abundant observation. But, what might it be telling us? that an experience which is so meaningful to so many people, e.g. being “creeped out”, still can’t be defined at all non-subjectively, even for a single individual. Perhaps it’s because the term functions as a code or unconscious euphemism for some other perception that goes unnamed?

Consider the famous “halo effect”, for example, whereby people who are attractive to a viewer, ie sexually or just aesthetically appealing, tend to be judged by that viewer as being more competent, intelligent, trustworthy and moral, independent of any actual facts. Presumably, then, there’s also a flip side, that people who are significantly less attractive than average, sexually or aesthetically, will tend to be perceived as untrustworthy, malevolent, threatening, etc. Or, in short, “creepy”, which to me always has an overtone of being threatening or dangerous.

Now, this is not to say that people don’t have a “right to feel creeped out” if that’s their subjective experience. But perhaps it does hint, that that subjective feeling shouldn’t be such a strong basis for vilifying someone; hey?

Perhaps it’s because the term functions as a code or unconscious euphemism for some other perception that goes unnamed?

Or maybe it doesn’t.

I think a woman or man should be able to turn down any other individual for arbitrary reasons.

Indeed, and therefore sensitive man and sensitive woman both will have a worse time of it than others when preferences emerge. Yet sensitive woman has a much greater chance of sexual assault.

I’m hoping and thinking Landru is talking less about law and more about the area of the OP, the supposed norm of fear the sensitive nerd has as a result of feminism (which I do not buy) and the rules of engagement that condemn some men to wear the scarlet C of creepiness.

To add to adam.smith@333, it’s be interesting to hear from any of the commentators who have ASD whether it would help them if explicitly asking before making a sexual advance became a more common or acceptable practice (even if it wasn’t universal)? I’ve certainly heard some non-neurotypical people saying that they already take an explicit ‘no’ far more seriously than many neurotypical people, because they’re not likely to pick up (or believe they pick up) ambiguous body language.

adam.smith @282

(OSU’s “consent” page is at http://swc.osu.edu/sexual-violence-education-support-sves/consent/ )

You have got to be fucking kidding me. Right there in black and white: “disabled people cannot ever be allowed to have sex. The end”. I can’t say anything polite about that, so I will refrain.

Circumstances in which a person CANNOT legally give consent: … The person is physically or developmentally disabled

I am also curious about 13 being the age of consent – that seems young to me.

My attempts at trying to explain to her the (not perfect, but) great partnership I had with my husband were met with disbelief

In Australia at least that’s a transition that I see some immigrant communities going through. I presume a lot of them do. And not evenly – there are the second-generation men who discover “loose” local women, and ditto women who discover men who are not useless, violent alcoholics. And, naturally, members of the community who object to those discoveries. I benefit from this, although we do have it backwards – I’m a white immigrant and she’s a “made in Australia” asian.

But on topic, that’s a case where I “picked up a hot chick”{cough} by being non-threatening and friendly until she hit on me so blatantly that I actually noticed. ASD is quite annoying sometimes, but being conventionally attractive enough has saved me from complete frustration.

I wonder if there’s a nerd parallel to the (probably former) “lesbian sheep dance” that really does/did happen to new lesbians – they do passive flirting and frustration at each other, neither realising that someone actually has to do something or they’re both going home alone. Ditto the nerdy kids – possibly a lot of them sit there waiting for the quiet nerdy object of their affections to make the first move, while the object of their admiration does the same in their own nerdy way.

@Moz: Yes, I do completely get that it may be difficult for socially awkward men who don’t want to be jerks to navigate the Western dating scene. But it should be obvious that there is no alternate reality where socially awkward young nerds get to have a satisfying romantic / sexual life without working a bit on their social and emotional skills. Feminism gives them the tools for doing so – being friendly, respectful, non-threatening, encouraging open communication, and empowering the women to express their desires and expectations. Does not work every time, but it does seem to work out often enough. Without feminism, the socially awkward young nerd is stuck with:
a) conforming to the much more brutal expectations of traditional masculinity,
b) trying to find a way, all on their own, to build a non-conventional, respectful, trusting, emotionnally satisfying relationship with a woman who first has to be convinced that such a thing is even possible. This requires social skills and sensitivity waaaay beyond what whatever feminist standards expect.

passer-by@340: I think we agree. By “One approach that I find helpful” I meant that that explanation seems to explain *why* the problem exists, which I like to know. It’s unlikely to be the whole truth, but I think it helps (surely I can’t be the only ASD person to whom social-science type postmodernism seems like a statement of the blindingly obvious). For me feminism as academic discipline was also very helpful in explaining some of the literal nonsense that I’d been told.

But in social terms, I kinda had to accept that I learned social skills more slowly than most people and try not to get stressed by that. I mean, I learned that arguing with my first girlfriend that I thought she made the first move made her unhappy. But I learned that by doing it, not by looking at her and going “conservative hypochristian family” and realising that she’d probably be like that. Repeat for 10 years until I ground enough rough edges off to keep a girlfriend for more than a year or so… not that that makes me unique, I realise.

I also benefited greatly from finding a social circle of accepting, geeky types. That not coincidentally was fairly matriarchal and very consent-focused. Viz, people practicing feminism. That helped a lot. But I am not sure how to create such a group, let alone generalise their system out to wider society. Observation suggests that neither are the people who did those things. It’s hard to scale from tribal to state level.

Again, personally I get on best with people who are different, and consciously so. For them/us the idea that you have to ask is natural, since otherwise how would we know what the other person wants? For people who see themselves as normal, it’s obvious that you just know what other people want because everyone wants what normal people want. That’s the golden rule… do unto others as you would be done unto. That’s just intuitively obvious (to cross with Quiggen’s property thread, it’s “natural law”, innate an unquestioned)

I know I’m late to the party here, but can everyone at a minimum get LAURIE Penny’s name right, please?

passer-by:

I’d like to point out that most “normal” people…

Yes, definitely. There’s enough of that for everyone to have a bit :) My experience is that some people will just refuse to discuss or negotiate, saying something like “can’t you just be normal” or “why aren’t you like everyone else”. I think I’m generalising that response into “normal people don’t explicitly negotiate much in intimate relationships”. Also that I read and see a lot of queer/ feminist/ activist material that says “we must change. Negotiating consent should be normal” which makes me think it’s not common (enough) now. Although I suspect that as you point out, there’s more negotiating than it might appear, it just doesn’t take the form of two people sitting on opposite sides of the kitchen table in daylight talking about it.

magistra: again, yes, definitely. Even if you’re a “simple” vanilla, heterosexual person with a disability getting your sexuality acknowledged can be a huge issue. Variants… even more difficult. Being defined out of the discussion before it begins is distressingly common.

I am reminded of Scalzi’s “lowest difficulty setting” essay again. And the cliche black lesbian in a wheelchair…

Do the women reject BB before or after he talks politics?

Moz in Oz, thanks for bringing to our attention the concept of the ‘lesbian sheep dance’. However, I think your direct analogy to nerd-on-nerd mating somewhat obscures the possibility of non-nerd intervention, which has the potential to be quite incendiary (eg as in the film ‘Cruel Intentions’)

‘as long as you’re respectful you’ll be fine [ie not creepy]’ (adam smith)

I think I disagree: it’s possible to be _extremely_ creepy by being inappropriately respectful to someone.

magistra @341: Your link about disabilities includes part of a detailed consent definition at Reed College which seems to recognize nuances of responsibility better than many of the standards that I’ve seen defended here (if applied more broadly). It’s also out of date: the post is from 2011 and the link there to Reed now has conventional boilerplate about sexual assault.

Magistra, I think it is true that the definition of murder has been made clearer over time and this has reduced injustices. One example: the obsolete defence of ‘provocation’ (now ‘temporary loss of self-control’) which while. unclear favoured men in its application (iirc). I also think the law of assault _is_ unclear (more than murder) and it’s abused by the police.

331 Of course everyone has the right to reject anyone they wish for any reason but I think most people would think one can still act unethically by exercising this right in a prejudiced way, eg one can be shallow, or racist or prejudiced in other ways. And when the effects of prejudice are combined with many individuals making similar decisions serious injustices result. I’ve seen the argument made the ‘nerdiness’ overlaps with racial categories.

novakant 02.18.15 at 2:50 pm @ 353 —
It seems that certain kinds of people (besides children) are simply not supposed to be sexual, among them the disabled, the elderly, and those with non-standard bodies, at least according to the squares, the Straight World. There is really an enormous body of prejudice out there, still, about who can have sex with who, and some of it is bound to creep into the laws and regulations. The disabled can’t consent because their lord protectors don’t want them to.

adam.smith @333 This is one of the reasons why I’m so skeptical about the “shy nerds who can’t read social cues suffer from ambiguity” argument about feminism. They should be at the forefront of the movement. I’m not sure if affirmative consent is going to do much to prevent or better prosecute sexual assault. But if there actually _are_ people concerned about committing assault because of ambiguity, they should be super excited about this.

It was actually things like this that helped turn me on to feminism long ago–this is I think years before affirmative consent was a thing, but similar issues were in play. I guess I’m one of those feared “social justice warriors” or “white knights” or something.

Writing like the stuff you linked (re how to talk to women w/o being a creep) is part of the reason I said earlier that I rarely find anything wrong with things feminists write–like, people who are thoughtful about what they put into writing–and I wish things like this had been around many, many years ago when it would have helped me understand certain things sooner (specifically, what things are actually considered non-creepy; obviously anyone who pulls off a strange woman’s headphones on the subway should be smacked…).

Brett @345 At #230, drlemur suggested that, if the girls didn’t feel like joining the chess club, the boys shouldn’t be permitted to have one. Does that sound like abolishing patriarchy to you? No, that’s instituting matriarchy. The boys don’t get to do anything the girls don’t enjoy. And, did anybody besides me take exception to that suggestion? Maybe I just missed the outraged comments?

I thought it was dumb, saw somebody else shoot it down, and since nobody came back to defend it, didn’t think it was worth bringing up again. I don’t think that amounts to implicitly condoning it.

I think we all forget the fact that we are all slightly less hairy apes. A certain degree of our hangups about physical and sexual fitness are hardwired into mate selection. And a certain amount of it is media and society-driven nonsense that an intelligent person should have the ability to see beyond. And guys, let’s remember, it goes both ways. If a nerdy guy isn’t looking for a nerdy girl to engage in relations with, what makes him think a beautiful woman is going to look for him?

As a nerdy guy, I agonized over this stuff endlessly as a teenager in the 80s. I went to gifted schools and hated the ridicule that earned me in the neighborhood. I even went as far as joining a middle-class pseudo-gang to participate in the male group socialization, learn the strategic use of violence and to gain access to females, which seemed back then to be the primary vocation of “manhood”. And it worked. Women miraculously became willing to get physical with me because of my group association, but you know what? It wasn’t real. They weren’t interested in me, but only in a mate who enjoyed some sort of peer-group status (however tenuously it was enjoyed). But it makes sense. They’re primates also and, because we share the same species, are subject to the same instinctual urges and socially-developed neuroses that we are. But I also engaged in way too many fights, got beat up a couple of times, tried my hand at selling drugs, got arrested and nearly flunked out of college over it. If I had my druthers, I would rather have continued playing D&D, Gamma World and Traveler and found someone as homely as me to get involved with.

Trying to measure up to a group that was fundamentally ‘not-me’ caused me a whole lot of headache and heartache along the way. About the only value I got out of it was that it helped abate my fear of other guys and getting beaten up. You get hit, you bleed, you heal. No big deal. And sometimes, you may even win a fight or two. So guys, instead of agonizing over limited access to women, either develop the attributes they find attractive (whether Neanderthal or rock star or whatever) or learn to be attracted to someone like yourself, with whom you will probably have a more fulfilling relationship anyway. One of the few good things about being homo sapiens is that we have the ability to use our brains to think differently.

Feminism is NOT the source of anyone’s problems and any intelligent male should see it as key to women’s empowerment. It is needed in a society where they are subjected to systematic subjugation, whether by threat of the use of violence or socialization into groups that have internalized this status and propagate it as “culture”. More feminism is the answer, not less.

‘wanted to live in a social environment where sex wasn’t this transgressive thing’

More and more this thread is making me feel like Lemmy Caution

Moz in Oz- Did you catch where the “elderly” can never give consent? No definition. Just, “elderly.”

Thank heavens my wife is too old to read this. And me? Just call me Rebel Without A Clue.

As engels, Ronan(rf) and passer-by have already said, there is something quintessentially American about this debate.

It’s not that it’s Manichean, but you have to take all the Manicheans into account.

Charles @ 324
Hi Charles sorry it took me a while to read your comment properly because I’ve been quite busy, but I think maybe you didn’t see some of my earlier comments. By no means do think I think patriarchy is some kind of inevitable evolutionary thing or anything like that, I think its social and quite short lived in historical terms. Hunter gatherer type societies have been around for 60,000 years or so, patriarchy maybe about 3-5000, I think.

I think there’s always been alternatives and resistances, and I agree with you there are patriarchies – probably the most well known alternative being fraternal patriarchies (Patemen) which brings in the idea that all men are equal as ‘heads of households”. Really in its full form that only lasted from between the time all men got the vote till women got the vote, and it was never fully realised as there were always subordinate males even within that time, eg Indigenous people and slaves or non-whites.

However Gerda Lerner argues that patriatchy is the original form of oppression in which men learnt they could treat someone as other and inferior on the grounds of particular qualities and get them (the oppressed class) to accept it. Having done that with women, powerful or victorious men were then also able to apply it to other groups – slaves, non-whites, indigenous peoples, conquered people in general. You should read Lerner because I’m probably not doing her justice. Also what Magistra is doing sounds great and I hope she will keep us informed.
Class in the sense of industrial capitalism is a much later phenomenon but still occurs ‘within’ patriarchal systems (or states).

There’s always been resistance to patriarchy and I think particularly since women got the vote, it’s being steadily dismantled but it’s a slow and frustrating process. I’m particularly interested at present because in my research it’s become apparent to me that a lot of the professional tensions and challenges the people I’m studying face is due to operating in two discourses: one, their professional one, being collaborative, inclusive and concerned with equity; the other, most of their workplaces and funding arrangements, being hierarchical and I equal in terms of pay and power to make and enforce decisions.

That’s enough for now I think.

Val 02.18.15 at 10:11 pm @ 368:
‘… However Gerda Lerner argues that patriatchy is the original form of oppression in which men learnt they could treat someone as other and inferior on the grounds of particular qualities and get them (the oppressed class) to accept it….’

I would think the original form of domination, if not oppression, would be the parent-child relation. A female may be smaller, weaker, and slower than a male, but if the male is too oppressive she can kill him when he falls asleep, or run away. A small child, however, has no such powers, and given the long time which humans require to mature, can be thoroughly trained to be a slave.

sorry, magistra@341, I meant to say: good article. It’s very polite about the problems.

I would love to see that addressed by explicitly accepting the complaints of people like Aaronson and saying “yes, you’re right, that is a problem, we will classify you as disabled. In fact, shyness is a disability. And MRA’s, don’t feel left out, we’re going to count ‘being unable to pick up chicks’ as a disability too”. Problem solved, we’ve defined them as being incapable of consent so sex is not an issue any more. (not sure whether my giggles are the demented sort or evil cackling).

Anarcissie: anarchist parenting is amazing to watch and challenges a whole set of ideas about children and power relationships. Just saying “children can consent, and their consent is important” shakes things up. But it also reveals that even the most “you must obey” parent negotiates with their children a lot more than they might think they do.

Arnacissie I’m trying to remember what Belle’s formula for politely disagreeing was – something like ‘oh do you really think that? well I’m afraid I strongly disagree’.

Actually I don’t disagree that children were, and sadly still are, enslaved. Probably one of the worst things I’ve read about lately is Ana Isla writing about the sex trade in poor women and children in Costa Rica (and just for the record, she acknowledges there is a trade in young men for tourist women, though it’s much smaller).

But the process of having and caring for a baby – who is as you say totally dependent – is experienced by many women as the most physically and mentally exhausting thing they have ever done. Caring for a totally vulnerable being who is dependent on you 24 hours a day is extraordinarily hard, especially since they are adjusting to life outside the womb which means they have many discomforts which cause them to cry and be hard to comfort at all hours of the night and day. This is of course particularly hard in individualistic societies where young women are trying to cope alone much of the time, but I don’t think it’s ever easy.

I’m sure if you asked new mothers who is the “enslaved” one in that relationship, they wouldn’t say the baby! But of course it isn’t actually like being a slave (though it may feel like it sometimes) because the ‘everyday miracle’ of bringing a new person into the world makes all the hard work worthwhile. Anyway you might like to add this in to theory and see how it changes it.

Also I agree many people do treat their children in an authoritarian way which is really unpleasant. But I think you can explain that better through patriarchy than through parenting as such.

Val 02.19.15 at 1:12 am @ (373&374) —
I write in blogs like CT precisely to get disagreement and opposition; to get someone to hit the ball back over the Net. You don’t even have to be polite.

I have wondered for some time how one could get militarism and slavery started, in other words, the state, beginning with a largely egalitarian population who would see no benefit in it. Part of the problem is that it arose in more than one place, which suggests strongly that it is an unfortunate but likely consequence of human nature, of the way people are. One suggestion is that some men could beat up women (and other men) and make themselves slavemasters. But people who have not been raised to be slaves and who are not surrounded by slave culture resist slavery very strongly. Sooner or later they will run away or kill their masters — this is one of the reasons Europeans, coming to the Americas, had to import slaves from Africa; the indigenous people would not generally submit to slavery. I mentioned the physical differences between men and women, but I have read that it is much less marked in sex-egalitarian cultures, that is, where women are not bred and trained to be weak and unaggressive. It would be no easier to overpower one of them than to overpower the average grown male.

I am aware of Engels’s and Eisler’s work on these question, but the turning point remains mysterious to me, and I think it’s of considerable importance to figure out what happened so that it can be avoided in the future, should we ever succeed in reestablishing a noncoercive social order.

Allow me to hit the ball back; I seem to wildly disagree with most of your latest statements. Firstly, why do we assume that early human societies were egalitarian? Most social animals are not; far from it. Secondly, slavery does not make much sense without economic specialisation, a large enough surplus to have a leisurely ruling class, and possibly war as a source of slaves. Lastly, I can’t begin to understand your point wrt male-female physical differences being a product of culture. Individuals may vary, but men are, in fact, larger, stronger and yes, more aggressive. Again, comparison with other close animals really should leave little room for doubt on this matter. Perhaps crucially, also, men do not go through 9+ months at a time when they are extremely vulnerable each time they have a child (and in a primitive society, that would have to be several times). Culture may change attitude, but little else.

Robespierre @ 377

I don’t assume that early human societies were egalitarian; but it seems pretty clear that women were not the property of men in these societies. The key fact that would seem to me to undermine this assumption is that women were economically independent of men; it was the women who brought in most of the day to day protein, at least in traditional Australian Aboriginal societies.

There is the idea of alloparenting in which women (and perhaps some men for whatever reason) cooperated to care for pregnant and lactating women and their children so that neither these women nor their child was dependent on any one man for survival during this period.

It is thought that it may have been the evolution of long lived females in pre-human primates who were responsible for this cooperative way of behaving, as they were motivated to help their daughters raise their grandchildren.

I think you can see that traditionally they accepted and expected violence from both men and women, in the way that Indigenous women will not report the violence but will ‘get even’ in other ways – like maybe a delayed physical assault and this is approved behaviour and men do not retaliate further if the violence by the woman is seen to be ‘lawful’.

Although, there is not much of the real traditional laws remaining and the men in particular just make it up now, so the domestic violence situation is pretty bad in their communities. Without proper laws the undeniable propensity for violence and aggression that men have – and it is this rather than their size that could be the important factor predisposing the development of patriarchal societies – does win out now.

In the traditional cultural practices of the Australian Aborigines although the men are the showy ones and the ones who dress up their hair paint their bodies and dance and fight, they defer to women as the bringers of life. The men acknowledge this in all ceremonies.

The myths refer to sisters who made the country and one narrative that explains the position of men and women with respect to power is that the women were in charge in the beginning but either they didn’t want to be the bosses or the men took the responsibility from them.

Also the bogey man of the well-documented initiation ceremonies – see W.E.H. Stanner work – is actually an All-Mother figure and female monsters like the Snake woman are used to inculcate the ‘right’ attitude toward women through out their lives.

I haven’t read Eisler ‘The Chalice and the Blade’ yet (I will) but I just read a short article from Futures 1989 ‘The partnership society: social vision’, in which she talks about the alternative to patriarchy/hierarchy as being “the partnership model, where, beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species between male and female, diversity is not equated with either inferiority or superiority and the primarily [sic, should be primary] principle of social organization is linking rather than ranking”. I really like “linking rather than ranking”, very good.
Thanks for the recommendation Arnacissie.

Robespierre @ 377
“Firstly, why do we assume that early human societies were egalitarian?”
Because a lot of historians and archaeologists who have looked at the evidence are telling us this.

Val & magistra, thank you both very very much! I love new books and new avenues and new recommendations for ideas.

You have both given me a lot of things to mull, and I hope my thinking wasn’t too muddled or confusing, but sensible enough to gauge what I’m attempting to say. A good mull is important on cold days like these.

I’m also going to say that Anarcissie in #381 an Julie in #382 are saying things I’d like to say if I wrote more clearly and less networked/hypertextual. Good models to have.

The other aspect is that I think bringing up class is sometimes used as a derailing tactic in discussions of feminism, which is what I suspected Engels was doing re Laurie Penny. I think it is used sometimes by people who are antagonistic to feminism, or aspects of feminism, but don’t want to say so directly.

As I said, I feel the fact that it wasn’t actually me that brought up class might count for something… It isn’t a ‘discussion of feminism’ but of ‘male nerds and feminism’. Penny’s piece attacks Aaronson for failing to confront his male privilege; I observed briefly that it seems to me that Penny fails to confront her own, class privilege. Are you saying it is illegitimate to make such a point in a feminism discussion? Or that it would only be legitimate if it could be made out exclusively in terms of gender? And as smears go ‘antagonistic to X but unwilling to say so directly’ is a great one to use, because if your target denies it – well that’s exactly what you’d expect them to say!

Repeating defamatory personal comments in a measured, academic tone (while being scrupulously polite to others) doesn’t make them less defamatory, or this kind of boundary-policing more respectable.

Engels @ 388
I shouldn’t have said my impression of you was that you try to shift discussions of gender to discussions of class, because that’s all it was – an impression. I don’t have any evidence, and I’m not, at the moment anyway, going to go trawling back through past threads looking for any. I apologise for saying it.

Beyond that though, I just don’t see what you are trying to prove in your discussion of Laurie Penny and Scott Aaronson. A Guardian journalist critiques a piece by a professor, and you say she should check her class privilege. Why? You haven’t produced any evidence that she is any more privileged in class terms than he is, as far as I’m aware. Absent that, the argument is irrelevant.

I’m just saying it’s not relevant to bring in class to discredit a British Guardian journalist when she is critiquing a U.S. professor, unless you can actually provide some evidence that she is more privileged in class terms than he is..

I don’t agree with this law and I ‘d like to know who legislated it.

I’m not ‘discrediting’ LP’s criticisms of Aaronson. I believe I’m broadly in the same camp she is politically, (pro-) feminist socialism (although I have a lot less time for US-style identity politics than she does, among other differences).

She accused Aaronson of writing about his experiences of social injury without seriously reflecting on his own privileged structural position — when the subject is class, she just does exactly that herself. Imo this is rather ridiculous.

Incidentally, I just saw all the comments above speculating about whether I tried therapy. Of course I did. Maybe I just didn’t find the right therapists, but in my experience, it’s profoundly unhelpful for this sort of problem. The best you can hope for is that, very occasionally, the therapist will break out of therapist mode and show some human sympathy. But to the extent they act as therapists, the most they can do is check that you’re not at imminent risk of suicide, check that you’re not going to harm anyone else, and check if there’s some generalized anxiety disorder. They constantly want to steer the conversation away from expressing romantic interest; the idea that a crippling anxiety could be specific to that one issue, that one could be extremely functional otherwise (if anything, TOO sane and rational :-) ), isn’t one that they seem to like at all. Many are also much more interested in coping with the situation, in reconciling oneself to it internally, than in solving it in the external world.

It sounds to me you were very badly served by the therapists you had. Thanks a lot for commenting.

> It sounds to me you were very badly served by the therapists you had.

Enh.

People only deal with their own therapist, by-and-large. This means that a person’s experience with therapists is shaped by:
+ what therapists in general do
+ the specific distinctivenesses of the therapists they see
+ their own personal challenges.
Only your own challenges; you don’t get to see how therapists treat people who aren’t you and who have different challenges.

Now. “the idea that a crippling anxiety could be specific to that one issue, that one could be extremely functional otherwise (if anything, TOO sane and rational :-) ), isn’t one that they seem to like at all.” is… look. This is clearly a therapist’s response to a specific patient. It might be a correct response, it might be an incorrect response — more on that later — but whatever it is it’s clearly responsive to and shaped by the individual patient’s problems.

But, no, it’s a universal tendency. Nothing to do with the patient at all.

TLDR: most likely^W^W almost certainly the therapist had the right of it. If multiple therapists — for some reason my instincts say “probably not”, which would make use of “they” indicative of problems — say it, then even more so.

[“TOO sane and rational :smiley:”. Yeah, no.]

Collin #396: It’s impressive that you’re able to diagnose how insane and irrational I am (or was)—and moreover, how insane and irrational in areas of life other than those discussed in comment 171—without once having met me. (And that “for some reason” your instincts let you know that I’m “probably” lying about the straightforward facts of my life.) But there two things I’ve kept asking myself in this affair. First, do my critics ever wonder how well their neuroses and problems could withstand the withering attacks of hundreds of strangers on the Internet, were they as open as I’ve tried to be in answering people’s questions? And second, do the critics at least admit that there’s a puzzle about how, if I’m such an insane, irrational nut, then I managed to become (to all appearances) a harmless and functional nut, with wife and daughter and friends and career doing what I love and off-the-charts teaching evaluations and other good stuff?

Rationing posting, but finally able to address the subject of the OP! before the closing bell, I hope.

Belle at 11, waaay above:

But I really kind of don’t get the massive fire-hose of information spraying directly on young men that heterosexual desire is a Bad Thing full stop. Who is telling them this?

Wow; just wow, as they say. It’s utterly flabbergasting to me that any human familiar with the internets can write such a thing with a straight keyboard. It’s almost as though … there’s oppression going on that’s invisible to you, because it’s happening to people who are not like you. Hmm, I wonder where I’ve heard of a dynamic like this described before?

Too good not to mention: I can recall seeing recently a quickie blogthread exchange between two feminist young ladies, which read approximately thus:

A: These men, they think they they can just, like, come up and talk to us! Who told them they could do that?
B: Yeah someone’s going to have to straighten them out about that.

I didn’t keep a link (sorry) so I never did find out what solution they eventually settled on.

Seriously, this stuff is everywhere, and if you aren’t seeing it then it’s like not seeing the air. Or, it’s more like the ocean: you can scoop out as much as you like to examine, and there’s still an infinite amount remaining. Here’s a passage from an earlier Scott Alexander post from 2013:

…the sort of men who are exposed to feminist articles like the one above (exactly the sort of men who are in the best position to help women!) have to take in quite a bit of information. For example, this morning when I checked Facebook I was helpfully suggested links to the “all men should be taken off the streets” article above, a blog called “Creepy White Guys”, an OKCupid app that claimed to be able to tag people you looked at as “likely rapists” based on a sketchy machine learning claim about their profiles, and a link to an article called “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Level There Is”. My RSS reader then directed me to my favorite blog, which had suspended its usual discussion of abstruse philosophy to host an article called “Submissions on Misogyny”, which included bits like where someone talked about her boyfriend raping and physically assaulting her and then claimed “You might think my ex was a sociopath, but no — he’s a normal male”.

This was, more or less, a typical day for a somewhat liberal guy on the Internet. So this idea that men never have to hear anyone speaking against them and these sorts of “all men are dangerous and defective” articles are just an unexpected breath of fresh air no longer track reality, if they ever did.

Really, as much as you want to look at, and then infinitely more. His full post is here, btw http://www.donotlink.com/dsm1 ;since Belle seems not to favor S. Alexander I’ll hide it in a “do not link”; do note the trigger warnings, etc. It has just the sort of pedantic reasoning by analogy that seems beloved by so many at CT, plus an admirably civil comment section.

One could say he’s exaggerating, or getting a slanted view, and then lecture him at length about how Not All Feminists Are Like That, etc., etc., etc. But, then, that would constitute discounting the lived experience of someone not like you, and overriding them with explanations about how they are wrong about their own experience. Now, where have I heard that dynamic described before? Let me think….

Meanwhile, back to Belle:

I am like a bantam-weight semi-professional teller of shit about feminism on the Internet and I have never said anything remotely like that to anyone. I don’t know who did.

**Applause** Epic, artful, truly majestic self-trolling.

Unless … eerm .. you’re serious here? Nah, couldn’t be. But you really had me going there for a moment; so for the sake of kabuki I’ll play along. *wink*

Detailing in how many ways, and in how many places, the bog-standard language of late 20th-century feminism directly vilifies male heterosexual desire would be the work of many years, and would yield a groaning shelf full of masters’ theses — if it were ever allowed to be discussed in polite academic company, which I’m personally not waiting up for. But just to take the easiest example off the top, do you remember the great War on Objectification, that grinds on to this day? Of course you do. If what you say about yourself is even half-true, then I would bet every dollar I have in the bank that you have spat the word “Objectification!” more times than, well, I have dollars in the bank (admittedly not that high a bar).

Looking at how the word is used — as a pseudononymous commenter I can of course cite the Wikipedia definition on “Sexual Objectification” as a modal example — what it boils down to operationally is: (1) A man committing the mortal sin of “Objectification” is BAD, BAD, BAD, EVIL, BAD, and a stinking example of Everything That’s Wrong With the World; while (2) a man is committing “Objectification” any time he so much as walks across a room to talk to a physically attractive woman, before knowing anything about her personality, when he wouldn’t have done so for a non-attractive woman. Or, if he just looks at her. In short, basic, elemental hetero male behavior. Which is a sin, full stop.

Do I sense that you think I exaggerate? Story time!

In the mid-1990’s I worked at a large company, of a type that may be familiar to many here. Vaguely technological, well-oiled with doughy slogans and “mission statements” (that was a thing back then), organized on no particular ideology other than to maintain its food supply of contracts from the federal government. One thing such companies have to do to stay in the fed’s good graces, and by extension that of polite society, is mandate ethics training for all employees. These are the usual stations of the cross; don’t take bribes, don’t use drugs, don’t steal money, protect your computer, as well as sexual harassment [awareness/prevention] training (I have to add the bracketed modifier, which was awkwardly not in the original).

Sexual harassment awareness/prevention training included a somewhat-professional video presentation, to help illustrate and make clear what would constitute serious and fireable offenses under this heading. In one illustrative example, the offender (they are always male) commits the following act against the offendee (they are always female): he turns his head to look at her as they pass each other in the hallway. Yes, that was it; that was enough, in principle, to get you fired. We’re not talking about some greasy quid-pro-quo, we’re not talking about cornering someone in a broom closet, we’re not even talking about lingering too long by someone’s desk. We’re talking about turning your head to look at someone as you walk past them in the hallway. A fireable offense. A fireable offense.

So, sorry; but, no. I’m not going to listen to any talk about how anti-hetero-male-sexuality rhetoric isn’t really present in society, and isn’t pushed directly in front of people in everyday life. This is, really, a philosophical system gone utterly mad, having cut its last mooring line and drifted off from the mainland of reality. Crack the hatch on the echo chamber, breath some fresh air, and you’ll see what’s really going on.

” the fewer women there are in so-called STEM fields. ”

Probably not going to change, short of Harrison Bergeron level efforts at ‘remediation’. It’s a basic fact of human biology that males have more variance than women, probably because of those X chromosome genes we guys only have one copy of, and women have two of. In terms of intelligence, this means that a larger proportion of men are both morons and geniuses than women, and fewer men are of normal intelligence.

If you’ve got a field where people of normal intelligence can’t compete, men will tend to be over-represented. That’s as true of prison as it is of STEM. It’s just a consequence of the fact that, while men and women are equal, they aren’t the same.

Now, I followed your link, and this struck me: “Now, Swarthmore’s alumni magazine graduate data shows the majority of women studying sociology, women’s studies and art history. There are fewer women graduates in math, physics and chemistry than ever. What happened? Why is it worse?”

Maybe it’s worse because bright women who could have succeeded in STEM are being somehow encouraged to go into “women’s studies”? (Were there even women’s studies to go into, 20 years ago?) Anyway, if somebody is doing that, I’m pretty sure that they’re not men.

Ellie #401: That sounds like a lovely comment—thank you! I can’t find it in WordPress, and the only explanation I can think of is that my spam filter might have caught it: it happens sometimes, even to totally innocuous comments. If it ever happens again, just shoot me an email. Meantime, if you’re ever in the Boston area, let me buy you a coffee to apologize for coming across as “distant and perfunctory” (even if by mistake). I’ll try to keep my ego under control. :)

Brett Bellmore 02.21.15 at 2:46 pm @ 405 —
Actually, mathematical thinking and knowledge are quite different from computer programming, although they have been forced together by fiat. My personal experience has been that whatever talents enable the latter, they are pretty evenly divided between the sexes. Plus, women seemed to be steadier and less egotistical about work and less likely to roam mentally or physically. But this is all very anecdotal and intuitive; I don’t know if anyone has done an objective examination of the situation.

Possibly, category X Studies are a way of shunting smart, ambitious category X people out of mainstream academic work, where they might make trouble. It may be related to a practice used in business and the military: you gradually transfer all the problematical people to a special department or unit, and then shut the department down or ship it off somewhere.

I’m struggling to fill in the chain of reasoning that would get you from:

Success in STEM requires high mathematical aptitude, and this is just the element of IQ that has the highest difference in variance between men and women.

to

[representation of women in American STEM fields as of 2014 is] Probably not going to change, short of Harrison Bergeron level efforts at ‘remediation’

(not that I’m endorsing the first statement)

The opening graph on that NPR article gives the lie to Brett.

Barry@ 410: Yes. Everything we know about acculturation– esp. the inculcation of gender roles– gives the lie to Brett.

First comes the stocking of little Nell . . . there is a dolly that laughs and cries . . .

Next comes the stocking of little Will . . . there is a hammer and lots of tacks, also a ball and a whip that cracks.

Not to mention that almost no regular reader/ commenter on CT believes in the mythology of “intelligence” testing– except for BB and a handful of other reactionaries who troll here.

Behavior is objectifying when it’s expressed in a way that’s insensitive to the person’s reaction or feelings

– Frank, we’re no good together. You only lived for police work.
– You lived for the N-zone layer!
– Ozone layer!You never did understand.
– How can you say that,when I bought acres of Brazilian jungle, then had it slashed and burned to build our dream-house?
– You’re so insensitive!
– Insensitive?! You think it’s easy displacing an entire tribe? You try!

(PS. Bad though this is, I don’t it’s what objectification means.)