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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They should just spread their legs and shut up and take it, because they are “selfish” other wise?
Yes, I think you are.
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You seem to be invested in establishing me as a hostile interlocutor instead of actually engaging with anything I said. This is completely polarized thinking, the notion that somebody who does not share your framing must be opposed to it, and fought. I even gave a cautionary example in my initial post of how people routinely do this, and yet you go ahead and do it anyway.
I never indicated that individualism is “wrong”, nor that anyone isn’t entitled to live this way. What I said is that insisting that is the only way others can possibly see the problem excludes (apparently by design) those who live by other systems. It throws the rest of us under the bus with exploiters because you can’t/won’t have a nuanced discussion. But I guess my experiences with having been raped, assaulted, and harassed don’t count, because I am not responding to it in the right one-size-fits-all Western centrist perspective. “We need diversity and equality, but only the kind they preach in upper-middle class US universities! Oppressed people in the real world may have uncomfortable ideas about how to remedy injustice and need to be second-guessed like children, boogymen, or both.” /s
It’s “funny” (as in sad-funny) that you are saying that I am disingenuous - yet you have not directly engaged with anything I have said, not answered any of my questions in response, and instead are asking questions I already answered. Why is that? Do you honestly believe that everybody who sees things differently than you do, sees them the same way?
If you disagree with anything that I have actually said, then that’s great, I am interested to hear it. What I don’t abide is being confronted with some projected ideological straw-person as a show for how terrible you imagine my intentions to be. If my posts were not worth reading clearly, then please ignore them, rather than trying to turn them into something else.
ETA: Fuck NYT.
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“Selfishness” usually carries an undertone of “excessively privileging one’s own self-interest.” It’s painted as a vice, not a natural drive.
When you say that “women are acting selfishly” by doing something, the meaning being carried is that there is an expected behavior that women should be conforming to, but are not, due to their selfishness.
Women not wanting to be raped is self-interest but not selfishness. They are inflicting no great hardship on anyone else, and are asserting ownership of the one thing anyone can truly be said to own: their own body. How could that be in any way considered excessive?
Men raping women, on the other hand, goes beyond self-interest and into selfishness. For a momentary gratification, they are inflicting a horrible trauma onto another human being. “Excessive” is understatement to the point of being insulting.
Language aside, that I can see the point that you’re trying to make (both sides are acting in what appears to then to be their own self-interest) doesn’t excuse that drawing an equivalence between the two is tone-deaf at best, and utterly revolting if one is not giving you the benefit of every doubt.
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Temporarily closing this to review flags. It’s late and I’m returning from travel. More tomorrow.
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I have. You’ve always and endlessly ignored me.
We’re done here.
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I was working on some instructions and @mindysan33 got in before I got that posted. Going to do a little more work on this and close this again and then paste in what I had to say so it’s up before the thread gets rolling again.
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