I don’t know about anyone else, but I thought this was hilarious. Maybe because I bore (and still do -HA!) a boy, lol?
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Wait. Wait wait wait. Since when is freaking Minecraft a boy’s game? My niece spent half my youngest brother’s wedding running around after zombie pig men screaming “DIE DIE DIE!” and starting forest fires with TNT blasts.
(While wearing a white party dress with sparkles.)
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That kid is being raised right.
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As the aunt who got her into Minecraft in the first place, thank you! 
(I promised to buy it for her for Hallowe’en, but she wouldn’t shut up about it so her parents bought it as a back to school gift a couple of years ago.)
She has now started a comic book series about getting magically transported into her Minecraft world, and having to use her knowledge of the game mechanics to get out.
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Let’s just presume, please, that she’s imitating a boy who’s into Minecraft. I didn’t see how this video even says it’s a game that only boys play. Really, where was that?
And I drank milk from the carton or jug. Still do. Thank goodness my son is lactose-intolerant.
Maybe someone will make a “Girl Dad” as a companion piece or rebuttal-of-sorts?
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That woman did some Lucille Ball-worthy physical comedy, to be sure.
I kind of hope there isn’t a Girl Dad or other kind of rebuttal. It was weird for me to watch since I’m the only girl of three, the boys were definitely the favourites, but there is no way in hell they would have been allowed to do 75% of the stuff in the video. Complete non-starter.
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I think this is the right place for this article:
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I wish we lived in a world that encouraged women to attend to their bodies’ pain signals instead of powering through like endurance champs. It would be grand if women (and men) were taught to consider a woman’s pain abnormal; better still if we understood a woman’s discomfort to be reason enough to cut a man’s pleasure short.
But those aren’t actually the lessons society teaches — no, not even to “entitled” millennials.
I can’t quite figure out how in the hell I grew up believing I did live in that world. I’ve talked before about how my upbringing in the 70s and early 80s seemed to be informed by a growing cultural consensus that women were just as important and competent and deserving as men. Now, in hindsight I understand that that was far from an actual consensus, and in fact there was a lot of pushback against “uppity women forgetting their station,” but my point is that the cultural messages that landed with me, the ones that stuck and made sense and formed my own sensibilities, were the ones that went contrary to the hideously unhealthy cultural pressures described in the article. And it wasn’t like I enjoyed any specifically progressive upbringing! At least, no more progressive than just being raised in Southern California in a family of Democrats with a working mother who had, before she met my dad and had three more children, had been a working single mother of four in the early 1960s. I learned to read from Sesame Street. Somebody played Free to be You and Me at some point. We rarely went to church, and not at all after 1982 or so.
And yet, even with this utterly half-assed, public-schooled, too-busy-to-put-in-that-much-effort upbringing, I still grew up believing that other people’s feelings and desires and misgivings and emotions were at least as important as my own. It wasn’t hard to grasp, as it wasn’t a particularly esoteric concept. It was a Rule widely described as Golden centuries before I was born, but applied to everyone. And remember: my mom was a lot of things, but “progressive activist” was not one of them. She was raising kids all her adult life, starting at the age of 19 until her dying day. And she was raised by her own grandparents, who were actual honest-to-God Victorians born in the 1880s, stern and rock-ribbed St Louis Methodists who probably disapproved of color photography as being “too racy.”
And yet somehow I’ve never felt socially threatened by female students outperforming me in class or in sports. I’ve never had a problem working underneath female bosses. I’ve never felt a woman owed me anything just because I was a man and she was a woman. In sexual situations, I make it a point to be attentive and tender and caring, for two reasons. The primary reason is because it’s the right thing to do, of course! But there’s also a selfish reason: I am most turned on by people who are turned on by me. I don’t actually want to have sex with someone who isn’t enjoying it. Could it be that that is a strange and unusual fetish? Is it an uncommon peccadillo to cease sexual activity at the first sign of discomfort, and ask about it, perhaps to find out if there might be a different, more mutually pleasing way forward? Or even to ask if she mightn’t prefer to stop for now, if she’s not in the mood?
Nobody had to teach me that attitude, as such. It just seemed self-evidently the right way to do things. I certainly didn’t learn it in my college Human Sexuality class, nor in ninth grade Health, nor in sixth grade Sex Ed. My parents didn’t specifically sit me down and come right out and tell me that my sexual partner’s safety and comfort and satisfaction and happiness were as essential to the overall experience as my own, not because they didn’t believe it, nor because they were prudes of a bygone era, but rather because doing so would have been as redundant-seeming to themselves and their son as it would have been to remind him not to shit in other people’s beds. I guess, by their reasoning, if their kid learned enough basic civility to let other people speak (rather than interrupting everyone whenever a thought struck him), to pass the peas without complaint when asked, to take his place in the queue rather than just muscling up to the front, to treat his sisters and brothers (whether older or younger) with respect and fairness, and to be reasonably interested in the opinions of others, then he’d probably end up being a decent sort in bed.
Well, apparently this very basic minimum level of decency turns out to be laughably rare. I did learn the lessons quoted above, but from whom did I learn them, if society has failed so utterly to teach them to other men? If I, I, y’know… Donald, who still laughs at every single fart joke no matter how lame and juvenile, who is so unsophisticated as to think Mountain DEW-S.A. (the version that mixes three flavors of Mtn Dew into one red-white-and-blue can) is pretty fucking brilliant, who never graduated from college, who has read practically zero scholarly books or articles regarding feminism and sexuality that didn’t appear in his sister’s issue of Cosmo on the toilet tank, who has taken a completely aimless, meandering, privileged, uninformed, undereducated, devil-may-care path of least resistance through life to arrive at his current sociopolitical state of mind… if even a clueless dipshit like me can grasp this concept and do his level best to live it, then oh my fucking God, how hard could it even be?!
Women are constantly and specifically trained out of noticing or responding to their bodily discomfort, particularly if they want to be sexually “viable.” Have you looked at how women are “supposed” to present themselves as sexually attractive? High heels? Trainers? Spanx? These are things designed to wrench bodies. Men can be appealing in comfy clothes. They walk in shoes that don’t shorten their Achilles tendons. They don’t need to get the hair ripped off their genitals or take needles to the face to be perceived as “conventionally” attractive. They can — just as women can — opt out of all this, but the baseline expectations are simply different, and it’s ludicrous to pretend they aren’t.
I learned this lesson decades ago, when I first tried wobbling down the hall in a pair of heels that even my mom had given up wearing long before her fifth child was born. When I asked how anyone could stand wearing them, I was told that women simply got used to them, the unspoken subtext being because they had to. Years later, I asked why anyone actually felt they had to dress uncomfortably to be seen in public, since God knew I certainly didn’t feel that pressure on most days, and complained quite loudly whenever I had to wear dress socks and shoes, or a necktie, or had to comb out the chronic tangles in my hair. I tried to boysplain that nobody actually had to wear such uncomfortable things if they didn’t want to, this naivete informed by that same upbringing that told me that girls and women should be able to do whatever they wanted, at least to the same degree that boys and men could.
Well, here we are. I’ve been a somewhat active participant in the Tyranny of Fashion discussion for over thirty years, and it seems to have progressed not at all toward a more level playing field. The patriarchy, I know, and apparently it’s reinforced by both men and women who buy into it, even unconsciously. I remember the knowing nods shared among women I know when Amy Schumer did her “Girl You Don’t Need Makeup” video.
And it frustrates the hell out of me, because if people really weren’t that dishonest and un-self-aware as the boy band in that video, then Ms Schumer wouldn’t have bothered to make that joke. I’ve never liked makeup (outside of special effects), and I’ve always devoutly hoped that nobody’s bothering to wear it for me.
I’ve strayed from my original point, which is nothing new, but I really do wonder why so very many men cling to such outdated and fundamentally wrongheaded ideas about the purpose of women, and why so little progress has been made in that area in the last few decades, when somebody like me was successfully raised to reject such notions without even consciously trying. I’m no genius, nor am I any saint. But Christ, I read articles in, of all places, Penthouse magazine over 30 years ago that tried to explain the importance and singular wonder and beauty of female sexual pleasure and how to cultivate it through attentiveness and listening.
What the everloving fuck is wrong with men today?
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Some women still internalize the idea that men’s feelings matter much more than our own, and/or the idea that our feelings don’t matter one whit.
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Word.
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Did I really write this 10 years ago? Apparently so. I still think it’s kinda funny. Please let me know what you think.
Writing a Love Letter (or, Thank Goodness for Alexander Graham Bell)
April 17, 2011 at 1:34pm
I wrote this in 2008. I think I was inspired by Robert Benchley.
Well, it’s Valentine’s Day, and I’ve decided to write a love letter to my love. I mean, the person I love, not just my emotion of love. How would I address a letter to an emotion, and why would I waste the stamp, even though postage rates won’t go up until later this year?
First, I need to decide on a salutation. “Dear Beelzebub” reads dully; he may well think it is a form letter, soliciting for a donation of funds, or trying to get him to subscribe to a magazine of some sort. “My Dearest Beelzebub” sounds as though I have a whole slew of Beelzebubs in the wings somewhere who are less dear to me than the object of my affections. “Hey There, Beelzebub” - hmmm, that is more like something I’d shout out at a bar or grocery store.
Well, let’s just skip the salutation and go to the body of the letter. I don’t think I wish to say common things that one would say in an ordinary missive; i.e., “How’s the weather?” Even if he lived in the same zip code, or even area code, the weather conditions could be (and in Michigan, more than likely would be) drastically different from those that occurring outside my bedroom window. I could quote poetry, but that smacks of plagiarism, as well as making me seem so idiotic that I can’t think of anything original to say to the one I love. “How are you?” is just as bad, so trite, so overused. Besides, it sounds as if I’m asking him to rate himself as a partner - shouldn’t I already know that? “I miss you very much” makes me appear to be a clingy, codependent, wretch of a woman who can’t live her own life at all without him constantly at my side. But if I don’t let him know that I miss him, he may think I’m spending all of my time at the karaoke bar, singing racous choruses of “All By Myself”, “Alone Again (Naturally)”, or worse “Indiana Wants Me (But I Can’t Go Back There)” to a group of sex-starved, beer-swilling automotive assembly-line workers.
Since I am not having much luck with the body of the letter, perhaps I should just start at the bottom and work my way up…interesting, why does that sound like something he would enjoy doing rather than reading? But I digress. “Yours truly” - boring, plain old boring. “Adoringly yours”? No, I don’t want him to think that I spend my time mooning over his photo that I have placed strategically on a small table by my bed where I can see it as soon as I awaken, day or night, even though I really do have his photo placed that way. How about “Relentlessly yours”? That makes it sound as if I will NEVER give up on him, through distance, time, space, restraining orders…well, maybe it does smack a bit of being a stalker.
I need to wrap this up, so how about the following:
"To Whom It May Concern:
I am fine. We are having weather here, as I am fairly sure you are having wherever it is you happen to be at the moment you read this. It would be nice to see you again, but only if you can forward to me your express consent to same in writing to the return address on the envelope in which this correspondence came. I look forward to a reply at your earliest convenience.
I remain,
Rialtonasia"
Not very romantic, is it? Tell you what - I’m just going to call him and leave a naughty voicemail. But AFTER 7:00 p.m., when it won’t cost me a 50-cent piece.
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But where does that come from? Who even says that? I know it can’t be a made-up fictitious problem, and I know that I’m a clueless privileged dude who can’t see the sun that shines so prettily on his head all the livelong day, but I just can’t picture the grown-ass man (or even boy over the age of four) who can say out loud “my feelings are more important than hers,” or even think it to himself without actually pronouncing it in a cartoon baby voice.
Do women warn each other not to elevate their own needs over those of the precious men in their lives? (If so, I don’t doubt it’s based on cold, hard experience.) Has it always been impossible or inadvisable to inform men when they’re acting like spoiled children? Would it be helpful at all for men to start their own hashtag movement berating and shaming other men for being such self-absorbed, petulant, wimpy-ass crybabies for daring to suggest that women are somehow lesser than men, with ignorable needs and irrelevant desires?
I confess my ignorance and frustration must seem tired and quaint to most of you, and I know a lot of the most pernicious societal messages are lost on me because they’re not targeted at me. Again: straight white cisdude. All the same, the messages of equality I absorbed in my youth, and which continue to inform my attitudes toward women, have not been challenged in ways that I could perceive. Whenever I’ve expressed those beliefs in public, I’ve been mildly lauded for them by the men around me (not handed any trophies or anything, just a general acknowledgement that I was doin’ the right thing in that regard). I have yet to meet the Actual Meathead who would come right out and say that women need to take a back seat to his priorities. Probably a function of where I live and work, to a degree, but even the Hollywood sexists I’ve known (and they are Legion, and they are SEXIST) don’t feel comfortable openly expressing such arrogance, especially now (of course), but even a few years ago. They pretended to be halfway decent, mostly because societal pressures still expected them to publicly respect women, at least a little bit. Which doesn’t make them remotely acceptable people, of course. It just illustrates that their duplicity was motivated in part by a social message that one should not treat women like second-class citizens.
So whence comes the message that men’s feelings matter so much more than women’s? It’s certainly easy to spot in advertising from yesteryear, but there’s a reason why such images and words look so shockingly dated today. The message must be presented more subtly today. Understand: I don’t doubt that it’s out there, and I really don’t mean to gaslight people about its existence. But where is the cultural message that it’s okay for a man to seek gratification at the expense of a woman coming from? I’ve seen countless representations in movies and TV shows of men who roll off their wives/girlfriends/victims after achieving their own sexual gratification and going straight to sleep/work/videogames without a 2nd (or 1st) thought about her needs and desires, but that guy is invariably portrayed as a clueless douche, never as any kind of remotely positive role model. Why would any man get to the point where he thinks it’s okay? And who’s telling women to settle for men like that?
Ms Loofbourow’s article frustrated me for a couple reasons. I have no doubt she wrote it in good faith, and has plenty of truth on her side. It’s not her job to point out to me the facts that women take for granted based on their day-to-day lived experience. But she did say this:
We don’t really have a language for that amazingly complicated transition because we don’t think about the biological realities of sex from the woman’s side.
We don’t? I certainly have, and I assumed most of the rest of us have as well. Why wouldn’t we? Isn’t it interesting?
Women have spent decades politely ignoring their own discomfort and pain to give men maximal pleasure.
That’s a tragedy. I have not had occasion to believe that to be the case with most of the women I have known. I have always sought feedback during sex (not praise, but feedback) and been fairly obvious in my attempts to read and listen and adjust and adapt and make the whole experience as enjoyable for her as possible, because I can’t enjoy it if it only feels good to me. Several times the encounter ended because it wasn’t working for one or both of us… because if it’s not working for her, it’s certainly not working for me, either.
I can’t remember the last time a woman ignored her own discomfort to give me maximal pleasure, unless it was that one woman I dated briefly in 2004. It was around our sixth date, we’d been intimate a few times, and we’d planned a sleepover. Due to some medication she was taking, she wasn’t feeling particularly amorous, but told me I could make love to her if I wanted to, so I wouldn’t feel disappointed. I thought that was awfully considerate of her, but also felt that that was not normal, and indicative of bad prior experiences with men. And now, of course, I find that that was exactly what was perfectly normal about her history: bad and unsatisfying experiences with men.
It’s all quite depressing. We are so overdue for a Lysistrata moment. But I think I’d rather just knock some male heads together.
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Women train girls and young women to do this: mothers, teachers, managers. The message is more “serve others” or “don’t be selfish”. There’s that acronym evangelical Christians teach women: JOY (Jesus first, Others next, You last).
If boys and young men aren’t getting the same memo, then you’ve got a society where one gender gets told constantly not to be “selfish” and the other gets told to get out there and self-actualize, achieve, whatever.
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I think that “both sides” are being selfish, but in different ways. I can appreciate subordinating myself to the greater good, but that is not another person’s desire. The same issue comes up in arguing against property - the notion that a thing is systematically not to be owned by anyone gets misunderstood as a personal problem of trying to take a thing away to give it to someone else, which is very much missing the point. A analogous thing happens when dealing with sex as a social activity (as distinct from reproduction), and arguing over which individual is more entitled to it. These are individualist problems, and not very helpful to collectivists.
So, there is a different set of ethical concerns when some people are trying to put society first as a system, rather than the exploitation of one individual or group by another. It’s rather difficult when trying to get on and live by any “golden rule” when people assume that you yourself need to be motivated by personal desire. To individualists, there might be no such thing as “for ecology” or “society itself” which does not essentially boil down to being a front for yet another individual, because that fundamental assumption frames all of their interactions and thinking.
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Women are being selfish for not wanting to be raped, sexually assaulted, or harassed? Really?
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Why would you deny that they are acting out of self-interest? That is literally what pushing for personal agency and autonomy is about. What is the rhetorical purpose behind rephrasing it, if not to imply that “selfish” is an ameliorative or pejorative term? What emotional weight we may give it doesn’t seem relevant to pointing out that individualist and collectivist ethics have different basis.
The flip side is that those who do rape, assault, and harass are also acting out of perceived self interest. I am not justifying those, either.
And the notion that either party should prevail in their interest is framed from a perspective of individualism, and the ethical systems this implies. So any such framings and solutions are only going to be meaningful to other individualists. Is that not so? I am not saying that that is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is a reality that this is neither a culturally nor ethically universal perspective. Nothing is!
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The thing is, when some people teach us to ignore our own needs, whether they sexually abuse us, or encourage others to beat us, or just emotionally abuse us, it really makes it hard to assert our own needs. Abusers insert power, and fear, and toxic silence into our relationships with non-abusers with similar power/position over us.
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