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Retorts to Retards:
The Secret Sexism of Sensitivity
[NOTE:
The
article to
which we respond below was found by Sexa Rubelucia, and this was
originally
supposed to be a solo response by her.
In the course of writing it, however, she decided
that her boundless and
sexy rage about the issues concerned here was best served by a longer
stand-alone essay, which is forthcoming.
This response, therefore, is presented in our
default first-person
plural, but is based on a draft by the Baroness Rubelucia.]
The
first (irrefutably
brilliant) installment in our Retorts to
Retards series concerned
religion. For the
second, we’ll be
switching over to our other favorite topic, sex—and not just sex but, more specifically, the ways in
which sex has been fucked up by the Bad Kind of Feminism (the academic
P.C.
kind, which hates all forms of power—as opposed to the Good
Kind of Feminism,
which is the kind that actually
empowers women instead of just training them to be terrified of
everything… Seriously,
how the fuck can you empower anyone
if you hate power?).
And,
just to make things
interesting, the article we’ll be
responding to is by a man. This not only makes things
more complex,
but also makes our point more clear—our point being that the
Bad Kind of
Feminism actually hurts women in the long run, because it only ends up
reinforcing the forms of sexism that were the whole problem in the
first
place. Case in
point: the below article,
scanned from the “A Man’s Opinion”
section of a recent issue of Glamour,
is written by a guy who is
under the impression that he’s being
“sensitive,” and saying what women want
him to say—namely, that kink and aggression are terrible, and
that it’s
terrible how women feel all this terrible pressure to do all these
terrible
things just to please men, when they certainly don’t need to
do all these
terrible things to please a nice guy like him.
What he consistently fails even to consider for a
moment, however, is
the possibility that many women actually
like these things—which would mean
they’re not so terrible.
First of all, we realize
there’s the question of audience to
consider here. We
are aware that this
article appeared in Glamour, for
fuck’s sake, and that actual glamorous women don’t
read Glamour any more than actual
seventeen-year olds read Seventeen. As with most
women’s magazines, it is a
mainstream publication aimed at unremarkable people—which is
the problem not
only with women’s magazines, but with any mainstream medium. Since the majority of
people in any broad
demographic are dumb and boring and suck, and anything that
doesn’t tell those
people exactly what they want to hear will not make much money, there
is a
pronounced tendency for media to tell people who are dumb and boring
and suck
exactly what they want to hear. And,
it
turns out, the things that people who are dumb and boring and suck want
to hear
are not always 100% accurate.
This would not be the biggest
deal in the world if we were
just talking about mindless entertainment—but, unfortunately
for women, nothing
aimed at women (or any other marginalized
or disadvantaged or silenced
or whatever-the-fuck group) can
ever be seen simply as mindless entertainment.
There is always the question of whether said thing
is helping or hurting
them. Obviously, Maxim is not improving men,
but men don’t have to worry about whether something is
“improving” them, and
women do. Come to
think of it, women also have to
worry about whether
something is improving men—so,
apparently, women just have to worry about everything.
Except
whether
they like to bite people, because this is no big deal, which brings us
to our
response.
Jake opens by relaying (what is
to him) a horror story about
a date with a chick who was into biting.
At least, that’s the way we see it.
The way Jake sees it is that he was on a date with a
chick who was under the impression that men
wanted her to
be into biting, which is very different. We’ll
ignore our desire to rip on Jake for
recoiling in panic from the bite like a prepubescent Mormon, and get
right to
the heart of the problem: the fact that his instantaneous appraisal of
the
situation was “I realized she was
only
doing what she thought men wanted.”
Says who, Jake?
Some
people just like biting, and some of those people happen to be chicks. If you don’t
like it, then don’t date chicks
who do. Problem
solved. At least,
the problem would be solved, if not
for the fact that this is an article in a
mainstream women’s magazine.
As such,
its top priority isn’t the Good Kind of Feminism, which would
seek to defend
the predilections of kinky women, but rather the Bad Kind of Feminism,
which
seeks to tell the unremarkable majority what they want to
hear—namely, that
they are normal, whereas the kinky
minority are brainwashed whores.
Did it ever cross
Jake’s mind to give the biting a try,
because he might like it? Or
to
encourage the readers of Glamour to
give it a try, because they might like it too?
If it did, then these thoughts didn’t make
the final cut. What
did make the final cut is the “obvious”
conclusion that the biting was merely a show put on for his benefit, as
is
nearly every other sexually adventurous thing a woman might ever do:
Sex toys are “fun, but
daunting?” No,
actually, they’re
just fun. But
anyway, nice job on establishing
that you’re a red-blooded sexual “regular
guy” while simultaneously making
yourself out to be sensitively intimidated enough that your readers
won’t
resent you (we’ll come back to that later).
Lots of women these days have
“piercings in uncomfortable places?”
So do lots of men.
Have they been
brainwashed too? News flash: people do sexy
things because
being sexy is fun.
And what’s the deal
with criticizing “lingerie
that’s more dungeon than demure?” You do realize
it’s lingerie, right? Do you
honestly think the point is really to fucking sleep
in it? AND WHO THE
FUCK CAN EVEN SAY “DEMURE”
WITH A
STRAIGHT FACE?!
“There’s
also lots of
instruction-giving (I’ve even heard “Pull my
hair!”).”
Horrors!
For fuck’s sake, none of us has ever slept
with a chick who didn’t
tell him to pull her hair. Was
this guy Amish until recently or
something?
Now, one would think that the
very act of typing the
sentence “there’s also
lots of
instruction-giving” might have made Jake consider
the possibility that the
point of said instructions is to inform
him of what will please the woman giving them. But one would be wrong,
wouldn’t one? The
only explanation Jake considers is that
the women are instructing him to do
things that they think will please him.
Some “sensitive” guy!
Inevitably (as is the case with
all Bad-Kind-of-Feminist
harangues, be they written by woman or man) Jake blames the
media—specifically, the internet…
because no-one was ever kinky
before the web was invented (you know, just like how no-one ever had
sex at all before movies and TV
were
invented). “What’s a woman supposed to think,”
Jake asks, “when she finds out her
boyfriend spends hours every night watching
barely legal girls stripping in their bedrooms on YouTube?” Well, there are any number
of possible
responses here. We
could ask the woman
from this couple why their sex life is so boring that her boyfriend
needs to do
this. Or we could
ask the man from this
couple whether he’s aware that there are way, way
better things to spank off to on the web than fucking
YouTube. Or we
could ask Jake whether it
occurred to him that the girls stripping on it are women themselves,
and why he
apparently decided that they don’t count as such for some
reason—we have many
friends of whom there are YouTube stripping videos, and they are much
smarter,
nicer, and more socially aware people than whoever the fuck it is that
reads Glamour.
Yes, yes, we know: Jake is
trying to make the women who
aren’t cool enough to act like this feel better about
themselves, and that’s
“nice”…
Right? Wrong.
Because this paragraph ends with the sentence
“But that’s not
necessarily what your
boyfriend wants you to
do—that’s why we have YouTube in the first place.” First of all, yes, it is
what your
boyfriend wants you to do—unless he’s one of those
guys who buys into the
Good-Girl/Bad-Girl dichotomy so
hard
that he has to mentally shuffle the girls he respects over here and the
girls
he can get his rocks off to waaaaaay over there.
So, we’re back to “Good
Girls” who deserve
respect and “Bad Girls” who don’t? If that’s
Feminist sensitivity, then what’s
sexism?
Now, of course, it isn’t
Feminist sensitivity—it’s simply what the majority
of women want to hear. And
we’re spelling this point out here
because it’s vitally important that
people—especially those who write for
women’s magazines—realize that what
ultimately helps women and what the
majority of women want to hear are not necessarily always
going to be the
same thing.
As for Jake’s pals
Scott and Brian—we’re not 100% sure they
exist (“I was psyched that she
wanted to
use a condom, but I wish she’d said ‘Can I do this
for you?’ I
would’ve felt more involved”
doesn’t
exactly sound like a real person talking—we’re
obviously pro-safe-sex, but… “psyched?” And what woman doesn’t want to use a condom?),
and if they do, they have a serious
problem with false dilemmas: “A woman doesn’t have to offer me a lap
dance
to be desirable—I think it’s hot when she just
comes up and talks to me.”
Well, women don’t
“offer you lap dances” to be
desirable—they offer you lap
dances because you’re in a strip club and they’re
strippers and it’s their
job. Didn’t
someone explain this to you
at the door? Yes,
obviously it is
awesome when a woman comes up and talks to you—but how is
this mutually
exclusive to doing cool hot stuff?
We
find it hard to believe that these three guys are so awesome that women
are
always just coming up to them and giving them lapdances without even
saying
anything—on the other hand, however, we find it easy to believe that the type of woman
who reads dumb women’s
magazines thinks that other women are doing this; hence the
presence of nutjob rhetoric like this in one of said magazines.
The main focus of the next
paragraph, aside from subtly
re-establishing how sensitive Jake and his made-up friends are (Brian
is turned
on by “big teeth,” which is something about a
woman’s face! And they waited
“a few
weeks” to have sex and had “about 20 all-night
conversations” first! Awww…),
seems to be establishing that “the
librarian who waits to get to know you, then takes out her bobby pins,
shakes
loose her hair and ravages you” is the “quintessential
male fantasy.”
Now, we are totally
into the sexy librarian thing—but this is because we dig
intelligence, glasses,
and business suits, not because we
only respect women who wait several weeks before having sex with us. If she wants
to wait, that’s fine, but why should she have to if she
doesn’t want to? Just
to please you, because
that’s your
fantasy? But we
thought the ostensible
point of this article was that women don’t
need to do things just to please you… Oops!
And while we’re on
the subject of “waiting a few weeks,” we
might point out that it apparently also never occurred to Jake, Scott,
or Brian
that any number of these poor, brainwashed-by-YouTube women may have
simply
considered them one-night-stands,
because they were just horny and that’s it.
Nope—these three guys are so fucking
awesome that every woman in the
world obviously wants to marry
them,
but is just going about it the wrong way,
hence all the women who keep walking up and giving them lapdances in
the
street. At least
here at 1585 we’re
totally open and self-aware about the fact that we have a high opinion
of
ourselves.
And the fact that Jake saves
the whole “woman-on-top” thing
for his closer is just sad. “She was a master of porn star tricks,”
he empathetically laments, “yet
she’d
never been in the position even I had read was supposed to be the best
for
women?” First
of all, Jake must have
read that in Glamour, because no
it’s
not. The position
that women get off the
hardest in is either doggie or the kind of missionary where
she’s got her knees
pressed up to her shoulders. None
of us
has ever been with a chick who even likes woman-on-top at
all, much less the best. It’s good if
your guy has control problems,
because guys last the longest in that position, but that’s
about it. A chick
can get off pretty hard if she does
the thing where she gets on top and then leans way back so that
you’re making a
kind of “V,” but at that point it’s not
“woman-on-top” anymore, it’s
“scissors.” Thanks
for playing.
Oh—maybe he means the
kind of woman-on-top where the woman
faces away from the man and leans back against his chest. That hits the g-spot
pretty good, and it’s
easy to reach around and rub her clit at the same time (which is really
hard to do in normal
woman-on-top). But
it’s called “reverse cowgirl,” to avoid
confusion with the normal, boring type of woman-on-top.
Jeez, he would know this stuff if he ever
spanked it to something besides YouTube.
Of course, it’s
entirely possible that by “the best for
women,” Jake meant something other
than frequency/intensity of orgasms—which is, once again,
just sad. Or the
data might have been compiled from
women who are so repressed that being on top is what passes for kinky
with
them, or from women who are used to fucking guys who are so bad in bed
that
running the show themselves is the only way they can make anything that
feels
even the slightest bit good happen—either way,
that’s a big “just sad.”
Or the women they asked might have been lying, and just saying they liked
woman-on-top the best for political reasons, e.g., they felt like they
weren’t
allowed to say doggie, and were supposed to say woman-on-top because it
corresponds perfectly to the juvenile oversimplification of Feminism,
i.e.,
“feminism means believing that men do everything
wrong.” If
that was the case, then it means that Feminism
is encouraging women to pretend
that the position that feels the least
good for them is in fact their favorite—which
is the biggest “just sad” of all.
Wait a minute.
If
Jake is a proponent of woman-on-top because he is under the impression
that
it’s the position women like best, then why did he pitch it
as “I decided to show her what I
like?” Which
is it?
Oh, wait, of course: it’s both,
because Jake is so sensitive that the position he likes the best is the one that he read women like the
best. Yeah, so
sensitive that he had to read it,
because even at his age he
still hasn’t managed to somehow obtain first-hand information
about what does
or doesn’t get women off.
Also, we
should probably point out that, by phrasing it this way, Jake is
admitting that
he likes a particular sexual activity based on the fact that it is
pleasurable
for the other person and he gets off on pleasing them, and enjoys
feeling like
an impressive, adept lover—so he should probably have figured
out that it can
work that way for women too, but
that
would have defeated the point of the whole article.
And that concluding image of
the woman just chillin’ in one
of his t-shirts? Please.
Having a
Girl-Next-Door fetish doesn’t mean
that you don’t have a
fetish—it means
that you have a Girl-Next-Door fetish.
How could it not
be readily transparent to anyone
that
this article bashing “Sexy 9.0” is really just
“The Virgin/Whore Complex 9.0,”
masquerading as enlightened sensitivity?
Regardless of the extent to which it might take the
pressure off for
women who are not inclined to be sexually adventurous, the Virgin/Whore
Complex
is not
“sensitive”—it lies at the
very core of misogyny, and Feminism should be more opposed to it than
it is to
anything else. A
female friend once told
one of us that her boyfriend can’t get it up unless
she’s wearing white
lingerie—this is not
“sensitive” (it
is, however, the only reason we know they even still make
white lingerie).
Several female friends have told us that
they’ve been in relationships
where the guy said they had to stop
having
sex once he developed deep feelings for her—this is also not “sensitive.” If a man is
not capable of simultaneously caring for a woman and
acknowledging that she enjoys fucking, or that he himself
enjoys fucking her, this does not mean that he is
sensitive—it means he is an even
bigger sexist asshole than the guy
who can recognize any porn star just from a close-up of her clit
piercing. If the
Virgin/Whore Complex is sensitive,
then Jack the Ripper is Phil Donohue.
But we can’t fully
blame Jake, or white-lingerie guy, or
even all those “we can’t have sex anymore because
now I actually give a shit
about you” guys out there.
After all,
the reason so many guys think that women don’t actually like
crazy sex, or that
we wouldn’t have any desire to fuck women if we actually
cared about them, is
that, starting in Junior-High Health Class, this
is what the majority of women actually tell us for some reason, even
though
it’s not true, they know
it’s not true, and they don’t
even really want us to believe it anyway.
When we were in college, there were even PSAs on TV
about how if you
want to have sex with your girlfriend, you’re a terrible
person. Now, in
keeping with the main issue here,
which is the fact that this rhetoric is ultimately bad for women,
we’ll skip
right over how this commercial made guys feel, and ask: how do you
think it
made girls who actually wanted to fuck
their boyfriends feel? Pretty
fucking confused, we would imagine.
And, in the cases of any cool
sexy chicks who happened to
come across this issue of Glamour,
the same goes for Jake’s article.
If any
of those chicks are reading, we have one final piece of advice for you:
stop
reading bullshit women’s magazines and start reading The 1585. We won’t judge
you based on your piercings, we’re
not daunted by what you’ve got in your nightstand drawer, and
you can bite us
anytime.*
*(NOTE:
Guarantee
also extended by Sexa Rubelucia.)
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