I do think that the article in the OP does a poor job of communicating when the author meant something sarcastically or was presenting an argument as an example rather than her own position.
Like if you really parse her quotes in the interview it seems likely she's positing the marriage thing as an example of how radical feminist thought can go off the rails, but the article presents a couple of the block quotes as though that a position she's arguing in favor of.
I would not be all that suprised if that was so.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
I do think that the article in the OP does a poor job of communicating when the author meant something sarcastically or was presenting an argument as an example rather than her own position.
Like if you really parse her quotes in the interview it seems likely she's positing the marriage thing as an example of how radical feminist thought can go off the rails, but the article presents a couple of the block quotes as though that a position she's arguing in favor of.
She did say that her sister's wedding was disgusting. There's tone and body language that we're not getting that might have identified that as sarcastic hyperbole, but as is, there really are a whole lot of statements that sound like she really doesn't like marriage.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
I don't really like marriage either. Combining legal proceedings and parties sounds like a huge pain
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
like, this doesn't happen for environmentalism. nobody tries to pretend like creating garbage or driving a car are somehow environmentalist acts. and nobody thinks that driving a car makes your thoughts on environmentalism and preserving nature invalid. or hell, as if campaigning for and creating sustainable energy is not environmentalism because you flew in a plane once.
Because driving a car is a proven cause of a problem environmentalism is trying to fix. Liking sex with dudes and wanting to get married isn't necessarily a proven cause of female oppression.
the main gist is that sexual roles are laid upon us by society, such that heterosexual sex is done along patriarchal lines e.g putting the male orgasm in the prominent role, expecting the male to initiate/lead, giving more importance to the male's feelings. (and like, making it about penetration and other male-oriented factors)
So it's not "having sex with a man is inherently bad", but "men getting off without women getting off is bad".
I understand that, but that seems like an important point to clarify instead of just implying women having sex with men are traitors.
On the marriage deal, is it primarily the ceremonies involved that bother feminists, or is it just marriage at all? Like is it okay if a couple just goes down to the courthouse to sign a few papers instead of having a ceremony?
Who ever said anything about sex with men being "inherently bad"? Or that women who have sex with men are traitors?
Well if they're patriarchal and the patriarchy is something to be fought against than aren't they bad?
Like, the best I can gather from that interview is that Crispin is against long-term relationships. She doesn't like marriage or people who always have boyfriends, but does like hetero sex.
They should feel bad about it though. It's failing to live up to the standards of feminism to give in to having hetero sex. Or something. Maybe.
shryke on
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
OK, seriously, how the hell is heterosexual sex patriarchal? Is it because it involves men, and men are part of the patriarchy? Because that basically means that everything is patriarchal and you've basically redefined that word to be meaningless.
well more that it involves men and women, and the act can not be seen apart from the societal and political relations between men and women.
there are various theories on it, and afaik nobody claims it is necessarily so. the main gist is that sexual roles are laid upon us by society, such that heterosexual sex is done along patriarchal lines e.g putting the male orgasm in the prominent role, expecting the male to initiate/lead, giving more importance to the male's feelings. (and like, making it about penetration and other male-oriented factors)
this doesn't mean that sex can't be fun and rewarding for both parties. or that you can't strive to engage in more equal sex. but that's the thing, you must actively fight against falling into these patriarchal patterns, and I haven't heard of anyone consistently managing to eradicate these norms and expectations in their sex.
One could argue that queer people, by virtue of being unable to follow these norms easily, break the expectations.
(you can see this in a lot of lit on lesbians - lesbians generally end up having very little sex later in relationships, and scientists jump on this like OH MY GOD LOOK AT THIS, WHAT THE FUCK, when lesbians are fine with it and tend to have marathon sex whenever they do end up doing it, and tend to be way more likely to have orgasms and are just in general not dissatisfied).
Which is not to say that queer people consistently always do, just that there are cases where this is approached.
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AstaerethIn the belly of the beastRegistered Userregular
OK, seriously, how the hell is heterosexual sex patriarchal? Is it because it involves men, and men are part of the patriarchy? Because that basically means that everything is patriarchal and you've basically redefined that word to be meaningless.
well more that it involves men and women, and the act can not be seen apart from the societal and political relations between men and women.
there are various theories on it, and afaik nobody claims it is necessarily so. the main gist is that sexual roles are laid upon us by society, such that heterosexual sex is done along patriarchal lines e.g putting the male orgasm in the prominent role, expecting the male to initiate/lead, giving more importance to the male's feelings. (and like, making it about penetration and other male-oriented factors)
this doesn't mean that sex can't be fun and rewarding for both parties. or that you can't strive to engage in more equal sex. but that's the thing, you must actively fight against falling into these patriarchal patterns, and I haven't heard of anyone consistently managing to eradicate these norms and expectations in their sex.
Hold up a sec.....
Are you saying sex shouldnt be about penetration? And the fact that it is about penetration is because of the patriarchy?
I mean, pleasing your partner physically doesnt have to be, but sex -by biological design- is about penetration. Like...that's the point.
Or am i missing something?
I’m not agreeing with this argument about sex, but I will point out that biology in no way dictates morality.
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
OK, seriously, how the hell is heterosexual sex patriarchal? Is it because it involves men, and men are part of the patriarchy? Because that basically means that everything is patriarchal and you've basically redefined that word to be meaningless.
well more that it involves men and women, and the act can not be seen apart from the societal and political relations between men and women.
there are various theories on it, and afaik nobody claims it is necessarily so. the main gist is that sexual roles are laid upon us by society, such that heterosexual sex is done along patriarchal lines e.g putting the male orgasm in the prominent role, expecting the male to initiate/lead, giving more importance to the male's feelings. (and like, making it about penetration and other male-oriented factors)
this doesn't mean that sex can't be fun and rewarding for both parties. or that you can't strive to engage in more equal sex. but that's the thing, you must actively fight against falling into these patriarchal patterns, and I haven't heard of anyone consistently managing to eradicate these norms and expectations in their sex.
Hold up a sec.....
Are you saying sex shouldnt be about penetration? And the fact that it is about penetration is because of the patriarchy?
I mean, pleasing your partner physically doesnt have to be, but sex -by biological design- is about penetration. Like...that's the point.
Or am i missing something?
Sex is generally understood to have a double meaning - we use the term both to refer to specific intercourse, and to acts of sexuality in general. People do not confusedly look at gay men and go "how do you have sex?" It's well understood. Contrastingly, people DO look at lesbians and ask that question, because there's... no penis then what even is sex? Oral sex is sometimes sex and sometimes not sex, depending on who is analyzing. So sex is generally defined entirely by whether or not a penis does a thing. That seems pretty clearly patriarchical! That's before we even get to penetration.
But no, sex, as in the broad conception, absolutely shouldn't be entirely about intercourse. That it is is the problem.
(do not use biology, it is not your friend, biology has no designs, primates have oral sex and use it primarily for bonding, if it were just about reproduction for us we'd have drastically different sexual biology)
like, this doesn't happen for environmentalism. nobody tries to pretend like creating garbage or driving a car are somehow environmentalist acts. and nobody thinks that driving a car makes your thoughts on environmentalism and preserving nature invalid. or hell, as if campaigning for and creating sustainable energy is not environmentalism because you flew in a plane once.
Because driving a car is a proven cause of a problem environmentalism is trying to fix. Liking sex with dudes and wanting to get married isn't necessarily a proven cause of female oppression.
the main gist is that sexual roles are laid upon us by society, such that heterosexual sex is done along patriarchal lines e.g putting the male orgasm in the prominent role, expecting the male to initiate/lead, giving more importance to the male's feelings. (and like, making it about penetration and other male-oriented factors)
So it's not "having sex with a man is inherently bad", but "men getting off without women getting off is bad".
I understand that, but that seems like an important point to clarify instead of just implying women having sex with men are traitors.
On the marriage deal, is it primarily the ceremonies involved that bother feminists, or is it just marriage at all? Like is it okay if a couple just goes down to the courthouse to sign a few papers instead of having a ceremony?
Who ever said anything about sex with men being "inherently bad"? Or that women who have sex with men are traitors?
Well if they're patriarchal and the patriarchy is something to be fought against than aren't they bad?
Not just bad, you said, "inherently bad". There's a difference between saying that men having sex with women has been co-opted or corrupted by patriarchy and saying that it is the cause of patriarchy.
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
Or, to put it another way, that intercourse involves penetration is not controversial, that sex is treated as synonymous with intercourse probably is.
It is certainly the case that many women like penetration and would find sex unsatisfying without it. Surely it's possible to do PiV and not contribute to the patriarchy?
This seems like a huge stretch.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
OK, seriously, how the hell is heterosexual sex patriarchal? Is it because it involves men, and men are part of the patriarchy? Because that basically means that everything is patriarchal and you've basically redefined that word to be meaningless.
well more that it involves men and women, and the act can not be seen apart from the societal and political relations between men and women.
there are various theories on it, and afaik nobody claims it is necessarily so. the main gist is that sexual roles are laid upon us by society, such that heterosexual sex is done along patriarchal lines e.g putting the male orgasm in the prominent role, expecting the male to initiate/lead, giving more importance to the male's feelings. (and like, making it about penetration and other male-oriented factors)
this doesn't mean that sex can't be fun and rewarding for both parties. or that you can't strive to engage in more equal sex. but that's the thing, you must actively fight against falling into these patriarchal patterns, and I haven't heard of anyone consistently managing to eradicate these norms and expectations in their sex.
One could argue that queer people, by virtue of being unable to follow these norms easily, break the expectations.
(you can see this in a lot of lit on lesbians - lesbians generally end up having very little sex later in relationships, and scientists jump on this like OH MY GOD LOOK AT THIS, WHAT THE FUCK, when lesbians are fine with it and tend to have marathon sex whenever they do end up doing it, and tend to be way more likely to have orgasms and are just in general not dissatisfied).
Which is not to say that queer people consistently always do, just that there are cases where this is approached.
oh yeah non-hetero sex is more likely to break them, both by virtue of being unable to follow them and because what might be non-hetero norms are less enforced. though obviously that doesn't mean queer people are totally free from it.
By definition improving the system is not a negative, but I think the problem is that we have a narrow view of improvement and are quick to label shit as such when it isn't. Ultimately, getting slightly more white women to oppress isn't an improvement. It is bad when women gain power if they simply use that power like everybody else did. If half the republicans in congress where white women but they voted exactly the same it wouldn't do shit for feminism.
Yes it would. C-level execs or Republican Congresspeople, even if they acted identically to the men who hold those jobs now, would still be a victory for feminism! Because those are women and they deserve an equal share of power, no matter what they choose to do with it.
But one of the main tenets of the Republican party is oppressing women. In no way is it a victory for feminism if the one's doing the oppression are themselves women. That's like saying the existence of black slave owners was a victory for abolitionism. or like hippofant mentions, locking up more women to make a gender-neutral incarceration rate. Feminism isn't about just 50/50-ing existing power structures. that would be dumb. it doesn't matter to whom the hand holding the whip belongs, the point is to get rid of the whip.
To me this goes back to “is it feminist for me to choose to be a housewife?”
There’s an important gap in my mind between “I am glad you have the freedom to be who you want to be” and “I don’t like who you want to be.” On the one hand this is a moral universe and I have the right to question someone’s choices. On the other hand I should not be standing in the way of a human being achieving their chosen potential.
the "is it feminist to -" question gets kinda loaded because people are very fond of labels and not very fond of being critical of themselves. so people want to think of themselves as feminist and thus every action they take has to be feminist too. it leads to labelling everything as feminist, including taking away access to abortion because the person doing it is a "strong independent woman".
ultimately it's a choice between just accepting your actions aren't feminist or just paying less attention to claiming a label. choosing to be a housewife isn't feminist, but that doesn't mean you can't still work to promote feminism and support it. life is complex and hard and you can also have other values than feminism. just don't try to make it into something else.
When I really think about it, it's really hard to reconcile choosing to submit to the role that an oppressive system assigns you as any sort of anti-oppressive act. I get that personally it can be empowering, like how Sisyphus can find existential relief in embracing the endless futility of his boulder-pushing, but the slave who chooses slavery isn't an abolitionist, nor are the battered spouse who chooses to return to their spouse or the employee who chooses not to fight for fair wages ... I dunno what the corresponding descriptor would be, but, they're not that.
Sex workers are, of course, the particularly problematic exemplar of this issue in feminism.
I think those analogies are problematic, for two reasons that are related.
First, most people are not going to choose slavery or spousal abuse or low wages because most people like money and don’t like being beaten. This is pretty universal and it’s why slavery is considered evil and not, like, a kink.
But “raising your children” is not a universal hardship that human beings and animals alike detest. The oppressiveness here is not “the system is forcing me to do something terrible,” it’s “the system is forcing me to do x” because x is not for everybody and neither is force. So choosing to do x is not a problem so long as nobody is forcing you.
Now, the related issue is, but wait! The system is kind of forcing you by influencing your choice, because society is set up to tell people how to want...
But knowing “I like the idea of being a mother because my upbringing told me that was a good thing” doesn’t make that feeling go away and doesn’t make that person any less deserving of having that desire fulfilled.
So while we should attack the structures that create these desires, and the structures that enforce these roles, an individual can still triumph by freely choosing to be the person that makes her happy.
I am struggling so hard with this.
We should attack the structures that create the desire to raise your children as your primary job? Is that what you meant to say?
Yes and yes. Because when a woman makes that choice it should be her choice, not something she decides under the influence of social pressure, advertising, the toys she played with as a child, etc. There’s historically a lot of external factors that tell women “this is the only right path for you” and those factors should be attacked.
That is definitely not what I thought you meant, and I suppose I mostly agree. I'd quibble some with the social pressure part but that veers off topic.
It is certainly the case that many women like penetration and would find sex unsatisfying without it. Surely it's possible to do PiV and not contribute to the patriarchy?
This seems like a huge stretch.
The universe does not care about anyone's desire for or standards of purity.
It is certainly the case that many women like penetration and would find sex unsatisfying without it. Surely it's possible to do PiV and not contribute to the patriarchy?
This seems like a huge stretch.
It's rubbish to begin with.
If anyone lobs that kind of statement out into the public they're not arguing in good faith, even if they have some relevant or decent points.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
It is certainly the case that many women like penetration and would find sex unsatisfying without it. Surely it's possible to do PiV and not contribute to the patriarchy?
This seems like a huge stretch.
While I am not sure how I feel about it, the idea that PiV being considered "standard" sex with everything else being foreplay or deviant is a patriarchal stucture, and anything that reinforces it is mildly patriarchal (which isn't a bad thing!
Of course, this reads a lot like "no ethical consumption under capitalism" or "why do you have a job if you hate capitalism", but I think the paired argument with "hetero sex is patriarchal" is supposed to be the point that nobody can avoid it and not every act is or can be feminist.
On the one hand, the train of thought is pretty easy to follow. Hetero sex is deeply entrenched in various patriarchal structures, both legally and culturally. Even for a woke couple, separating yourselves from all that to enjoy sex with each other without any of it intruding, in any way, is essentially impossible.
However, what strikes me is that this analysis fails to account for the fact that women are also part of the patriarchy. Any activities taken in this arena -- lesbian sex, self-pleasure, and even absolute abstinence from all of it -- will also to some degree have influences and pressures from the patriarchy included. So it's not like you can get away from it by just dropping sex with men.
I can see some value in applying this information to your own life, such as to reflect on how much of your intimacy with your partner is defined by these external pressures moreso than what you individually and as a couple might actually want or prefer. That seems pretty in-line with where our society is headed anyway. I'm not sure there's much value to all of this beyond that.
It is certainly the case that many women like penetration and would find sex unsatisfying without it. Surely it's possible to do PiV and not contribute to the patriarchy?
This seems like a huge stretch.
i see what you did there
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
OK, seriously, how the hell is heterosexual sex patriarchal? Is it because it involves men, and men are part of the patriarchy? Because that basically means that everything is patriarchal and you've basically redefined that word to be meaningless.
well more that it involves men and women, and the act can not be seen apart from the societal and political relations between men and women.
there are various theories on it, and afaik nobody claims it is necessarily so. the main gist is that sexual roles are laid upon us by society, such that heterosexual sex is done along patriarchal lines e.g putting the male orgasm in the prominent role, expecting the male to initiate/lead, giving more importance to the male's feelings. (and like, making it about penetration and other male-oriented factors)
this doesn't mean that sex can't be fun and rewarding for both parties. or that you can't strive to engage in more equal sex. but that's the thing, you must actively fight against falling into these patriarchal patterns, and I haven't heard of anyone consistently managing to eradicate these norms and expectations in their sex.
One could argue that queer people, by virtue of being unable to follow these norms easily, break the expectations.
(you can see this in a lot of lit on lesbians - lesbians generally end up having very little sex later in relationships, and scientists jump on this like OH MY GOD LOOK AT THIS, WHAT THE FUCK, when lesbians are fine with it and tend to have marathon sex whenever they do end up doing it, and tend to be way more likely to have orgasms and are just in general not dissatisfied).
Which is not to say that queer people consistently always do, just that there are cases where this is approached.
oh yeah non-hetero sex is more likely to break them, both by virtue of being unable to follow them and because what might be non-hetero norms are less enforced. though obviously that doesn't mean queer people are totally free from it.
It's also easy to start throwing off social norms once you're an outcast. Once forced to confront how norms are bullshit in one arena, it's not that hard to consider it in other arenas, which leads places. However, you're still steeped in a fucked up culture, so it's hard not to absorb some of that.
It is certainly the case that many women like penetration and would find sex unsatisfying without it. Surely it's possible to do PiV and not contribute to the patriarchy?
This seems like a huge stretch.
While I am not sure how I feel about it, the idea that PiV being considered "standard" sex with everything else being foreplay or deviant is a patriarchal stucture, and anything that reinforces it is mildly patriarchal (which isn't a bad thing!
Of course, this reads a lot like "no ethical consumption under capitalism" or "why do you have a job if you hate capitalism", but I think the paired argument with "hetero sex is patriarchal" is supposed to be the point that nobody can avoid it and not every act is or can be feminist.
But there's a world of difference between Not Feminist and Contributes To the Patriarchy. I don't think the second half of that paired argument can be matched to the first.
OK, seriously, how the hell is heterosexual sex patriarchal? Is it because it involves men, and men are part of the patriarchy? Because that basically means that everything is patriarchal and you've basically redefined that word to be meaningless.
well more that it involves men and women, and the act can not be seen apart from the societal and political relations between men and women.
there are various theories on it, and afaik nobody claims it is necessarily so. the main gist is that sexual roles are laid upon us by society, such that heterosexual sex is done along patriarchal lines e.g putting the male orgasm in the prominent role, expecting the male to initiate/lead, giving more importance to the male's feelings. (and like, making it about penetration and other male-oriented factors)
this doesn't mean that sex can't be fun and rewarding for both parties. or that you can't strive to engage in more equal sex. but that's the thing, you must actively fight against falling into these patriarchal patterns, and I haven't heard of anyone consistently managing to eradicate these norms and expectations in their sex.
Hold up a sec.....
Are you saying sex shouldnt be about penetration? And the fact that it is about penetration is because of the patriarchy?
I mean, pleasing your partner physically doesnt have to be, but sex -by biological design- is about penetration. Like...that's the point.
Or am i missing something?
I'm not a huge expert on feminist perspectives on sex, but in at least some theories, yes. I'mma gonna try and explain it, best I can, but watch out - it's not my surefire opinion, and I'm not entirely up on it.
Firstly, the view of sex here isn't of biological reproduction, but rather of sex as a social act between two people. Frankly, modern humans have WAAAAY more sex for pleasure and intimacy and other reasons than we do for reproduction, so if we consider sex as being some sort of act of bonding, of "sealing" a relationship, as it were, then why must it involve penis in vagina? Why is it that on the night of marriage must a penis go into a vagina? How many people are actually conceiving on their marriage night now anyways?
So once you start viewing sex as not a primarily reproductive act but as fulfilling a particular role in human relationships, you can now start to question why we have sex the way we do, and whether the way we have sex is actually a good, logical way of fulfilling the role that it plays now in our relationships. Obviously, this gets super-fucking-complicated, because people have sex for many different reasons in many different ways, and I don't really want to get into it, so I'm going to just generalize a bit and throw out the crux of the heterosexual sex as patriarchal idea (as best I understand it), which is....
That women receive the most sexual pleasure not from penetration, at least not by a penis. There are different justifications for that idea, such as sexual pleasure for women being "brainier" than for men, or that the clitoris is the most sensitive part of female genitalia and most women require clitoral manipulation to achieve orgasm. There's also the fact that most (all?) females are multiply orgasmic. So some feminists then look at stereotypical heterosexual sex and question, why is penetration of the vagina by the penis considered to be the start of sex and the man's ejaculation considered the end of it? That seems inherently inequitable to the woman, for whom the most pleasurable part of sex is and for whom satisfaction are not included in that conception. The male orgasm is specifically included; the female orgasm is sorta a happy byproduct, if it even occurs.
Now, to be clear, some of you may or may not have sex in this manner. I'm not particularly familiar with Crispin, so I don't know if she's saying all men and women engaging in any sexual relations in any way is patriarchal or what, but I have heard feminists describe "heterosexual sex" as I have briefly circumscribed above, and have that particular conception of sex be the target of their ire. For them, it's the fact that there's this outdated idea of what sex is that is propagated through society to the younger generations, that this idea is unhealthy and male-focused, and it causes young people to start with screwed up conceptions of what sex is and what sex should be for from the very beginning. (Pornography is also typically criticized in the same vein, seen as a force multiplier for this traditional conception of sex.) And so you have sexually unsatisfied young women, because the young men don't know what the fuck they're doing, because they've been "taught" to have sex in ways that are entirely unsatisfying for their partners, and this begins a deeper patriarchalization of sex in society, such that sex work becomes one primarily of women serving men, and pornography becomes prototypically for men, virginity becomes a shameful thing for men to have but a virtuous thing for women to have, slut shaming, etc., because at the very crux of it, we've idealized "heterosexual sex" in a manner such that it is pleasurable for men and (not necessarily) pleasurable for (most) women.
N.b. whether this is an appropriate use of "heterosexual sex" is unknown to me. It's not the term I'd use. I'm kinda fishing in the dark, thinking that this might be what Crispin is referring to, because it's the only feminist ideology I've heard of that's related, but I might be wrong.
I'm going to answer the basic question of "why is it bad?" I'm touch on why this is specifically a problem for men and why this is a feminist issue in a little less detail.
One of my favorite books is Triumphs of Experience by George Vaillant. Frankly, this book is fantastic and if there's any book from any of my posts that you read, I'd wish it to be this one. (But don't worry, I'll summarize. I don't mean to drop a reading list on you.) It's about the men of the Harvard Grant Study - paired with its parallel study, the Boston Glueck Study, they are most in-depth longitudinal study about human lives ever performed. Sadly, it only included men... the study started in the 1930s and used Harvard students who were mostly men at the time.
The study tracked the life trajectories of these men. Everything from marriage to employment to drug addiction to mental and physical health was recorded. What Vaillant and the other researchers found, overwhelmingly...
“The surprising finding is that our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health,” said Robert Waldinger, director of the study, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too. That, I think, is the revelation.”
Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives, the study revealed. Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. That finding proved true across the board among both the Harvard men and the inner-city participants.
But the factor Vaillant returns to most insistently is the powerful correlation between the warmth of your relationships and your health and happiness in old age. After The Atlantic’s 2009 article was published, critics questioned the strength of this correlation. Vaillant revisited the data he had been studying since the 1960s for his book, an experience that further convinced him that what matters most in life are relationships. For instance, the 58 men who scored highest on measurements of “warm relationships” earned an average of $141,000 a year more at their peak salaries (usually between ages 55 and 60) than the 31 men who scored lowest; the former were also three times more likely to have achieved professional success worthy of inclusion in Who’s Who. And, in a conclusion that surely would have pleased Freud, the findings suggest that the warmth of your relationship with Mommy matters long into adulthood.
The Grant and Glueck studies are observational, so they can't conclusively prove causation. But the case is pretty strong. Many of the Grant study men were late bloomers - they were depressed and isolated at age 25 but got married and raised families by age 40. Those men ended up healthier in old age than men who did the inverse.
This is corroborated by plenty of other data. For example...
Beginning in the 1980s, Schwartz says, study after study started showing that those who were more socially isolated were much more likely to die during a given period than their socially connected neighbors, even after you corrected for age, gender, and lifestyle choices like exercising and eating right. Loneliness has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke and the progression of Alzheimer’s. One study found that it can be as much of a long-term risk factor as smoking.
The research doesn’t get any rosier from there. In 2015, a huge study out of Brigham Young University, using data from 3.5 million people collected over 35 years, found that those who fall into the categories of loneliness, isolation, or even simply living on their own see their risk of premature death rise 26 to 32 percent.
I'm also an introverted male closing in on the age of 40. We can still be introverted without being isolated. Introverts tend to have a smaller number of friends, but those friendships tend to be strong. Just having two or three persistent close relationships throughout your life can be enough to keep the deleterious effects of isolation at bay.
The mistake many men make is to rely on our spouses for all of our social interaction. (BTW, this is one of the reasons it's a feminist issue.) Besides being a lot of work for your wife to be literally the only person in your life you can confide in, it also means that widowers are much more likely to become completely socially isolated in old age than widows. When a woman becomes a widow, she's more likely to have some close friends in her life. When a man becomes a widower, there's a common risk that he literally doesn't have any other strong emotional attachments at all.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I think it's essentially problematic to claim an entire gender gets off in a certain way. Those are all good points in re: how we classify sex, but claiming PIV is "patriarchal" is disingenuous.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I think it's essentially problematic to claim an entire gender gets off in a certain way. Those are all good points in re: how we classify sex, but claiming PIV is "patriarchal" is disingenuous.
The act? No. How it is framed within society? Less concrete. Academic feminist theory does not take place within a vacuum and the two most important things to remember are
A) it is an examination of how something applies within society and not the mere concept of something
And it is not, in and of itself, supposed to represent a call to action.
That is to say, academic feminist theorists will often come to a conclusion that something is patriarchal without needing to come to a decision on whether it is good, bad, or if anything should be done about it.
I think it's essentially problematic to claim an entire gender gets off in a certain way. Those are all good points in re: how we classify sex, but claiming PIV is "patriarchal" is disingenuous.
The act? No. How it is framed within society? Less concrete. Academic feminist theory does not take place within a vacuum and the two most important things to remember are
A) it is an examination of how something applies within society and not the mere concept of something
And it is not, in and of itself, supposed to represent a call to action.
That is to say, academic feminist theorists will often come to a conclusion that something is patriarchal without needing to come to a decision on whether it is good, bad, or if anything should be done about it.
That is really interesting. Coming to a conclusion that something is patriarchal without deciding that it is bad.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
I think it's essentially problematic to claim an entire gender gets off in a certain way. Those are all good points in re: how we classify sex, but claiming PIV is "patriarchal" is disingenuous.
The act? No. How it is framed within society? Less concrete. Academic feminist theory does not take place within a vacuum and the two most important things to remember are
A) it is an examination of how something applies within society and not the mere concept of something
And it is not, in and of itself, supposed to represent a call to action.
That is to say, academic feminist theorists will often come to a conclusion that something is patriarchal without needing to come to a decision on whether it is good, bad, or if anything should be done about it.
That is really interesting. Coming to a conclusion that something is patriarchal without deciding that it is bad.
In particular this is what feminist critique is. It examines a thing through the lens of feminist theory to see how it relates to women in society, and through that view many things can be viewed as patriarchal. However that doesn't directly correlate to that thing also being bad.
One of the things that goes wrong with this kind of clinical view of academic feminist theory is that it doesn't translate well outside of an academic setting. This is why you get so many people on every side of an issue assuming that if you describe something as patriarchal or stemming from patriarchy, then you are calling it bad. Both those in the feminist movements and antifeminists will often equate anything that is called patriarchal as being called bad. This is not the case.
It is also not a call to action. Someone doing a feminist critique may describe violence in a movie as patriarchal, but that doesn't automatically mean that they hate violent movies or want to see it removed.
Do some people turn this kind of critique or theorizing into a call to action? Sure. You look enough and you'll find people who will turn anything into a call to action. But that's not always the case and why it's important not to automatically assume that something being called patriarchal is being used as a call to stop it.
Regarding the question of "why is [heterosexual/PIV] sex patriarchal?" this is an idea that comes mostly from second-wave radical feminism. I don't know where Crispin is coming from in the interview; I can't speak for her. I can only relate the arguments I've encountered before.
The most extreme version of the argument is that penetrative sex is intrinsically violent because it involves inserting something into another human being's body. This is definitely a minority viewpoint and I've only seen it seriously considered in communities like the now-defunct radfemhub (which was a wretched hive of transphobia and villainy) but a handful of particularly extreme voices still say crap like this. (Spoilered for crazy)
80% of them [women] do not climax from PIV, and who knows, of the 20% remainder, I wonder who lies. In my scrupulous studies, adventures, and trying to speak the truth to generations of females now I realize how many of us faked, and I wonder, how many still do?
PIV and rape are one and the same thing. Given its risks and consequences to women, no women would consent to PIV under normal circumstances, that is, would she not be groomed to it by force, psychic violence or decades of endoctrination. PIV only exists because of men imposing it to women, individually and collectively. Women don’t choose it, any part of it, we just get to accomodate to it, and that’s what rape is, *at the very least*. I used to say that any non-desired PIV/genital contact is rape, but in fact, it makes no sense because (a): it’s possible to have genital stress-related stimulation even during a rape with the use of violence (which sometimes gives the impression you’ve desired it when in fact it makes you feel horrible) and (b): the risk of PIV always remains, so except for reproductive purposes only, PIV can never be desired by any women for fun or recreative purposes under normal circumstances. So PIV *is* rape.
It seems to me that sexually transmitted illnesses are all about males out of control, males demanding PIV, males refusing to take safety seriously. From syphillis in the 17-19th centuries and early 20th, to HIV AIDS to HPV, I’d say the male body is the disease factory to note, the behavior of males globally the big issue, so we need intervention on all levels to just say sex with men is inherently dangerous, that men can’t be trusted in any way to respect the bodies and health of women. From forced childbirth, to massive death in childbirth… I think we pretty much have the cause of the problem.
I cannot stress enough that this is an extremist position.
Normally it wouldn't fucking matter, they'd be yet another example of an extremist fringe just like every movement has. We could treat them like the Westboro Baptist Church of feminism. The problem is that some of the key people behind radfemhub have done shit like doxxed trans women and sex workers. There are a couple of them who literally sit around and Google their own names (to this day) to find arguments to get into, which is why I'm specifically avoiding posting even their usernames here. So even though radfemhub is gone, you still encounter some of that crap in discussions around social media & the blogosphere.
I don't think Crispin is arguing all that.
The more moderate version of the argument is one that I sympathize with. I'll use Andrea Dworkin as an example. Self-plagiarism ahoy!
A huge part of her [Andrew Dworkin's] oeuvre involves the how the social and economic power differentials between men and women skew the sexual dynamics of heterosexual relationships. When women have less social freedom, when their choices are constrained by the desires and permission of men, then they have less ability to choose partners, less ability to escape relationships, less ability to express their needs within relationships.
This was a major theme of second wave feminism and was also expressed by Simone Du Beauvoir and Betty Friedan. Dworkin took it to a new level, in some good ways and some bad ways.
A common misquote of Dworkin is "all sex is rape." She didn't actually say this. She did say that the dominant mainstream expressions of male sexuality focused on possession and control of women, while the dominant mainstream expressions of female sexuality focused on succumbing to male expectations.
It's not merely enough to say that a woman consented to sexualization and therefore everything is hunky-dory. If a woman is brought up in a culture where all the talk about sex and all the depictions of sex are from male perspectives, then that woman may not have an organic understanding of her own sexuality separate from those male expectations, and consequently her sexuality is entirely performative - she's acting sexy because that's what she's been taught to do.
Again, these themes come up a lot in the feminist literature from the latter half of the 20th century. There were a lot of women saying "yes, I feel out of touch with my own sexuality. I feel like my sexuality is artificial. I feel like I'm drowned out by male expectations." This was a big part of the sexual revolution and a huge part of women's lib. It dovetailed very well with the growing acceptance of homosexuality and the burgeoning field of sex research in the 1970s and Dworkin's work grew out of that.
However, here's where I personally break from Dworkin. She was very pessimistic about the possibility of men and women having equal sexual relationships at all. She felt that possession and control of women was so deeply ingrained in our culture's concepts of masculinity that egalitarian heterosexuality simply could not happen without a complete tearing down and rebuilding of masculinity. She even went a bit further and argued that the problem wasn't simply masculinity, but gender - that sexual power differentials were intrinsic to the concepts of male and female, and that removing those power differentials meant tearing down gender as we know it.
BTW, this is what the term 'radical feminism' means. It doesn't just mean 'an extreme form of feminism' (though that description is arguably fair), it specifically refers to feminism that holds that patriarchy is intrinsically ingrained in very old (possibly prehistoric) concepts of masculinity and femininity; that we can't simply adapt our existing ideas of gender to accept equality; we have to rebuild them.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Seems to me that the whole thing would get more traction if it was framed as "men need to work harder at pleasing their partner" rather than framing it in some complex twisty version of sex with penetration is the patriarchy.
I'm not a feminist so maybe i'm missing the guiding principles of that discussion -and if so my bad.
But, it seems to me that Its combative phrasing. Meant to illicit a response more than the goal.
The goal being more equality during sex (as i understand it) which is abso-friggen-lutely a thing to support.
In particular this is what feminist critique is. It examines a thing through the lens of feminist theory to see how it relates to women in society, and through that view many things can be viewed as patriarchal. However that doesn't directly correlate to that thing also being bad.
Or, even if it is bad, doesn't directly mean that it needs to be torn down/removed.
What Dedwrekka is describing certainly isn't isolated to feminism. This is what academia is, in a lot of ways: the take-up and analysis of extreme/non-mainstream ideas. Even in science academia, the point is to study things that nobody's studied before, to stretch our current understanding of the universe outwards. When people pick out one particular feminist paper/academic/theory and hold it aloft to bash all of feminism, it's like if they pick out one scientific paper and bash all scientists as being out of their minds.
Seems to me that the whole thing would get more traction if it was framed as "men need to work harder at pleasing their partner" rather than framing it in some complex twisty version of sex with penetration is the patriarchy.
I've encountered plenty of men who turn pleasing their partner into a challenge to be conquered.
The notches on the bedpost are no longer women I've fucked but become orgasm's I've induced in women.
This can reinforce performative, male-oriented sexual paradigms when a man becomes so emotionally invested in his partner's orgasm that she feels like she has to orgasm to keep him from feeling disappointed.
The balance between being attentive towards my partner's pleasure vs taking ownership of it is a legitimately difficult one.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Seems to me that the whole thing would get more traction if it was framed as "men need to work harder at pleasing their partner" rather than framing it in some complex twisty version of sex with penetration is the patriarchy.
I'm not a feminist so maybe i'm missing the guiding principles of that discussion -and if so my bad.
But, it seems to me that Its combative phrasing. Meant to illicit a response more than the goal.
The goal being more equality during sex (as i understand it) which is abso-friggen-lutely a thing to support.
That would seem to me like it's missing the point that men are also subject to patriarchy, and that feminists are also questioning why men don't "work harder" at pleasing their partner. That criticism is coming in at one level too shallow, I think. What a lot of feminists - but not all - might say in response would be, it shouldn't be "work" and it shouldn't be an extra responsibility incumbent on the man; the whole act of sex should be thought of as one of mutual pleasure, and if you're not giving your partner pleasure, you're not having sex at all! And also that can be okay, because not everything needs to be perfectly reciprocal, but quit calling it "sex"/elevating it as the apex of relationship intimacy then, because that should have mutualism built into it from the start.
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ShivahnUnaware of her barrel shifter privilegeWestern coastal temptressRegistered User, Moderatormod
edited October 2017
I think it's important to remember what Dedwrekka said:
The act? No. How it is framed within society? Less concrete. Academic feminist theory does not take place within a vacuum and the two most important things to remember are
A) it is an examination of how something applies within society and not the mere concept of something
Which is to say, the problem isn't that people put their genitals in each others', but
1) that that never occurs in a vacuum
2) the particular non-vacuum in which people desire, plan, carry out, and conceive of it is extremely sexist and patriarchal, and
3) you cannot escape to the vacuum
Stripped of all context, vaginal intercourse is an act by which two individuals have a sexual encounter. But we are never able to strip away all context.
Spherical cows are all well and good, but most models worth paying attention to don't use them.
It's kind of work cause of the inconvenient difference in how the sexes orgasm
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Seems to me that the whole thing would get more traction if it was framed as "men need to work harder at pleasing their partner" rather than framing it in some complex twisty version of sex with penetration is the patriarchy.
I've encountered plenty of men who turn pleasing their partner into a challenge to be conquered.
The notches on the bedpost are no longer women I've fucked but become orgasm's I've induced in women.
This can reinforce performative, male-oriented sexual paradigms when a man becomes so emotionally invested in his partner's orgasm that she feels like she has to orgasm to keep him from feeling disappointed.
The balance between being attentive towards my partner's pleasure vs taking ownership of it is a legitimately difficult one.
Sure those guys exist, but.....i have to be honest, that seems like a lot of logical gymastics -and not in very good faith- to just continue to stick to the position of "patriarchy".
Most men (that i'm aware of) just try hard because that's the right thing to do.
Is there pride involved in pleasing your partner? Hell yea. But that's a good thing.
Seems to me that the whole thing would get more traction if it was framed as "men need to work harder at pleasing their partner" rather than framing it in some complex twisty version of sex with penetration is the patriarchy.
I'm not a feminist so maybe i'm missing the guiding principles of that discussion -and if so my bad.
But, it seems to me that Its combative phrasing. Meant to illicit a response more than the goal.
The goal being more equality during sex (as i understand it) which is abso-friggen-lutely a thing to support.
That would seem to me like it's missing the point that men are also subject to patriarchy, and that feminists are also questioning why men don't "work harder" at pleasing their partner. That criticism is coming in at one level too shallow, I think. What a lot of feminists - but not all - might say in response would be, it shouldn't be "work" and it shouldn't be an extra responsibility incumbent on the man; the whole act of sex should be thought of as one of mutual pleasure, and if you're not giving your partner pleasure, you're not having sex at all! And also that can be okay, because not everything needs to be perfectly reciprocal, but quit calling it "sex"/elevating it as the apex of relationship intimacy then, because that should have mutualism built into it from the start.
Just the bolded:
Yea it should be. And that is fine.
It is the same part of my brain that "works" at putting on a good show on stage. Its work. I have to work at it. Practice it. Think about it. Get advice about it. But its rewarding and the pleasure/entertainment of the parties involved is the important part of it. That's why you do the work. That's why you try.
I'm going to answer the basic question of "why is it bad?" I'm touch on why this is specifically a problem for men and why this is a feminist issue in a little less detail.
One of my favorite books is Triumphs of Experience by George Vaillant. Frankly, this book is fantastic and if there's any book from any of my posts that you read, I'd wish it to be this one. (But don't worry, I'll summarize. I don't mean to drop a reading list on you.) It's about the men of the Harvard Grant Study - paired with its parallel study, the Boston Glueck Study, they are most in-depth longitudinal study about human lives ever performed. Sadly, it only included men... the study started in the 1930s and used Harvard students who were mostly men at the time.
The study tracked the life trajectories of these men. Everything from marriage to employment to drug addiction to mental and physical health was recorded. What Vaillant and the other researchers found, overwhelmingly...
“The surprising finding is that our relationships and how happy we are in our relationships has a powerful influence on our health,” said Robert Waldinger, director of the study, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too. That, I think, is the revelation.”
Close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives, the study revealed. Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes. That finding proved true across the board among both the Harvard men and the inner-city participants.
But the factor Vaillant returns to most insistently is the powerful correlation between the warmth of your relationships and your health and happiness in old age. After The Atlantic’s 2009 article was published, critics questioned the strength of this correlation. Vaillant revisited the data he had been studying since the 1960s for his book, an experience that further convinced him that what matters most in life are relationships. For instance, the 58 men who scored highest on measurements of “warm relationships” earned an average of $141,000 a year more at their peak salaries (usually between ages 55 and 60) than the 31 men who scored lowest; the former were also three times more likely to have achieved professional success worthy of inclusion in Who’s Who. And, in a conclusion that surely would have pleased Freud, the findings suggest that the warmth of your relationship with Mommy matters long into adulthood.
The Grant and Glueck studies are observational, so they can't conclusively prove causation. But the case is pretty strong. Many of the Grant study men were late bloomers - they were depressed and isolated at age 25 but got married and raised families by age 40. Those men ended up healthier in old age than men who did the inverse.
This is corroborated by plenty of other data. For example...
Beginning in the 1980s, Schwartz says, study after study started showing that those who were more socially isolated were much more likely to die during a given period than their socially connected neighbors, even after you corrected for age, gender, and lifestyle choices like exercising and eating right. Loneliness has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke and the progression of Alzheimer’s. One study found that it can be as much of a long-term risk factor as smoking.
The research doesn’t get any rosier from there. In 2015, a huge study out of Brigham Young University, using data from 3.5 million people collected over 35 years, found that those who fall into the categories of loneliness, isolation, or even simply living on their own see their risk of premature death rise 26 to 32 percent.
I'm also an introverted male closing in on the age of 40. We can still be introverted without being isolated. Introverts tend to have a smaller number of friends, but those friendships tend to be strong. Just having two or three persistent close relationships throughout your life can be enough to keep the deleterious effects of isolation at bay.
The mistake many men make is to rely on our spouses for all of our social interaction. (BTW, this is one of the reasons it's a feminist issue.) Besides being a lot of work for your wife to be literally the only person in your life you can confide in, it also means that widowers are much more likely to become completely socially isolated in old age than widows. When a woman becomes a widow, she's more likely to have some close friends in her life. When a man becomes a widower, there's a common risk that he literally doesn't have any other strong emotional attachments at all.
I think this is deserving of a God Damn Separate Thread. I was considering making one myself when I had time, but it looks like you've got a better start.
A few things I would add to an OP:
- The high incidence of social isolation in the backgrounds of mass shooters.
- The negative influence of social anxiety on establishing relationships.
- Location-related barriers to forming relationships.
Personally I've felt very lonely for a number of years now and am at a loss for how to solve it. I've tried getting to get a girlfriend because, in my experience, once a guy gets a girlfriend or marries they prefer to spend way more time with them than they ever did with their friends. I've tried making friends where I live, but I'm a gigantic liberal nerd in a rural conservative area, plus I have social anxiety, so I have a hard time finding anyone I can trust and feel like I'd have fun hanging out with. I don't feel like I could afford to live in a city, and trying to at least find things to do on occasion while visiting the city has been a challenge (Meetup and Facebook groups are scarce).
OK, seriously, how the hell is heterosexual sex patriarchal? Is it because it involves men, and men are part of the patriarchy? Because that basically means that everything is patriarchal and you've basically redefined that word to be meaningless.
well more that it involves men and women, and the act can not be seen apart from the societal and political relations between men and women.
there are various theories on it, and afaik nobody claims it is necessarily so. the main gist is that sexual roles are laid upon us by society, such that heterosexual sex is done along patriarchal lines e.g putting the male orgasm in the prominent role, expecting the male to initiate/lead, giving more importance to the male's feelings. (and like, making it about penetration and other male-oriented factors)
this doesn't mean that sex can't be fun and rewarding for both parties. or that you can't strive to engage in more equal sex. but that's the thing, you must actively fight against falling into these patriarchal patterns, and I haven't heard of anyone consistently managing to eradicate these norms and expectations in their sex.
Hold up a sec.....
Are you saying sex shouldnt be about penetration? And the fact that it is about penetration is because of the patriarchy?
I mean, pleasing your partner physically doesnt have to be, but sex -by biological design- is about penetration. Like...that's the point.
Or am i missing something?
I'm not a huge expert on feminist perspectives on sex, but in at least some theories, yes. I'mma gonna try and explain it, best I can, but watch out - it's not my surefire opinion, and I'm not entirely up on it.
Firstly, the view of sex here isn't of biological reproduction, but rather of sex as a social act between two people. Frankly, modern humans have WAAAAY more sex for pleasure and intimacy and other reasons than we do for reproduction, so if we consider sex as being some sort of act of bonding, of "sealing" a relationship, as it were, then why must it involve penis in vagina? Why is it that on the night of marriage must a penis go into a vagina? How many people are actually conceiving on their marriage night now anyways?
So once you start viewing sex as not a primarily reproductive act but as fulfilling a particular role in human relationships, you can now start to question why we have sex the way we do, and whether the way we have sex is actually a good, logical way of fulfilling the role that it plays now in our relationships. Obviously, this gets super-fucking-complicated, because people have sex for many different reasons in many different ways, and I don't really want to get into it, so I'm going to just generalize a bit and throw out the crux of the heterosexual sex as patriarchal idea (as best I understand it), which is....
That women receive the most sexual pleasure not from penetration, at least not by a penis. There are different justifications for that idea, such as sexual pleasure for women being "brainier" than for men, or that the clitoris is the most sensitive part of female genitalia and most women require clitoral manipulation to achieve orgasm. There's also the fact that most (all?) females are multiply orgasmic. So some feminists then look at stereotypical heterosexual sex and question, why is penetration of the vagina by the penis considered to be the start of sex and the man's ejaculation considered the end of it? That seems inherently inequitable to the woman, for whom the most pleasurable part of sex is and for whom satisfaction are not included in that conception. The male orgasm is specifically included; the female orgasm is sorta a happy byproduct, if it even occurs.
Now, to be clear, some of you may or may not have sex in this manner. I'm not particularly familiar with Crispin, so I don't know if she's saying all men and women engaging in any sexual relations in any way is patriarchal or what, but I have heard feminists describe "heterosexual sex" as I have briefly circumscribed above, and have that particular conception of sex be the target of their ire. For them, it's the fact that there's this outdated idea of what sex is that is propagated through society to the younger generations, that this idea is unhealthy and male-focused, and it causes young people to start with screwed up conceptions of what sex is and what sex should be for from the very beginning. (Pornography is also typically criticized in the same vein, seen as a force multiplier for this traditional conception of sex.) And so you have sexually unsatisfied young women, because the young men don't know what the fuck they're doing, because they've been "taught" to have sex in ways that are entirely unsatisfying for their partners, and this begins a deeper patriarchalization of sex in society, such that sex work becomes one primarily of women serving men, and pornography becomes prototypically for men, virginity becomes a shameful thing for men to have but a virtuous thing for women to have, slut shaming, etc., because at the very crux of it, we've idealized "heterosexual sex" in a manner such that it is pleasurable for men and (not necessarily) pleasurable for (most) women.
N.b. whether this is an appropriate use of "heterosexual sex" is unknown to me. It's not the term I'd use. I'm kinda fishing in the dark, thinking that this might be what Crispin is referring to, because it's the only feminist ideology I've heard of that's related, but I might be wrong.
Okay, that makes more sense. It's an unfortunate result of men and women achieving sexual satisfaction in ways that are weirdly incompatible for whatever reason. I appreciate you taking the time to explain it.
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She did say that her sister's wedding was disgusting. There's tone and body language that we're not getting that might have identified that as sarcastic hyperbole, but as is, there really are a whole lot of statements that sound like she really doesn't like marriage.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Because driving a car is a proven cause of a problem environmentalism is trying to fix. Liking sex with dudes and wanting to get married isn't necessarily a proven cause of female oppression.
Well if they're patriarchal and the patriarchy is something to be fought against than aren't they bad?
They should feel bad about it though. It's failing to live up to the standards of feminism to give in to having hetero sex. Or something. Maybe.
One could argue that queer people, by virtue of being unable to follow these norms easily, break the expectations.
(you can see this in a lot of lit on lesbians - lesbians generally end up having very little sex later in relationships, and scientists jump on this like OH MY GOD LOOK AT THIS, WHAT THE FUCK, when lesbians are fine with it and tend to have marathon sex whenever they do end up doing it, and tend to be way more likely to have orgasms and are just in general not dissatisfied).
Which is not to say that queer people consistently always do, just that there are cases where this is approached.
I’m not agreeing with this argument about sex, but I will point out that biology in no way dictates morality.
Sex is generally understood to have a double meaning - we use the term both to refer to specific intercourse, and to acts of sexuality in general. People do not confusedly look at gay men and go "how do you have sex?" It's well understood. Contrastingly, people DO look at lesbians and ask that question, because there's... no penis then what even is sex? Oral sex is sometimes sex and sometimes not sex, depending on who is analyzing. So sex is generally defined entirely by whether or not a penis does a thing. That seems pretty clearly patriarchical! That's before we even get to penetration.
But no, sex, as in the broad conception, absolutely shouldn't be entirely about intercourse. That it is is the problem.
(do not use biology, it is not your friend, biology has no designs, primates have oral sex and use it primarily for bonding, if it were just about reproduction for us we'd have drastically different sexual biology)
Not just bad, you said, "inherently bad". There's a difference between saying that men having sex with women has been co-opted or corrupted by patriarchy and saying that it is the cause of patriarchy.
This seems like a huge stretch.
oh yeah non-hetero sex is more likely to break them, both by virtue of being unable to follow them and because what might be non-hetero norms are less enforced. though obviously that doesn't mean queer people are totally free from it.
That is definitely not what I thought you meant, and I suppose I mostly agree. I'd quibble some with the social pressure part but that veers off topic.
The universe does not care about anyone's desire for or standards of purity.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
It's rubbish to begin with.
If anyone lobs that kind of statement out into the public they're not arguing in good faith, even if they have some relevant or decent points.
While I am not sure how I feel about it, the idea that PiV being considered "standard" sex with everything else being foreplay or deviant is a patriarchal stucture, and anything that reinforces it is mildly patriarchal (which isn't a bad thing!
Of course, this reads a lot like "no ethical consumption under capitalism" or "why do you have a job if you hate capitalism", but I think the paired argument with "hetero sex is patriarchal" is supposed to be the point that nobody can avoid it and not every act is or can be feminist.
They will in fact stress that
However, what strikes me is that this analysis fails to account for the fact that women are also part of the patriarchy. Any activities taken in this arena -- lesbian sex, self-pleasure, and even absolute abstinence from all of it -- will also to some degree have influences and pressures from the patriarchy included. So it's not like you can get away from it by just dropping sex with men.
I can see some value in applying this information to your own life, such as to reflect on how much of your intimacy with your partner is defined by these external pressures moreso than what you individually and as a couple might actually want or prefer. That seems pretty in-line with where our society is headed anyway. I'm not sure there's much value to all of this beyond that.
It's also easy to start throwing off social norms once you're an outcast. Once forced to confront how norms are bullshit in one arena, it's not that hard to consider it in other arenas, which leads places. However, you're still steeped in a fucked up culture, so it's hard not to absorb some of that.
But there's a world of difference between Not Feminist and Contributes To the Patriarchy. I don't think the second half of that paired argument can be matched to the first.
I'm not a huge expert on feminist perspectives on sex, but in at least some theories, yes. I'mma gonna try and explain it, best I can, but watch out - it's not my surefire opinion, and I'm not entirely up on it.
Firstly, the view of sex here isn't of biological reproduction, but rather of sex as a social act between two people. Frankly, modern humans have WAAAAY more sex for pleasure and intimacy and other reasons than we do for reproduction, so if we consider sex as being some sort of act of bonding, of "sealing" a relationship, as it were, then why must it involve penis in vagina? Why is it that on the night of marriage must a penis go into a vagina? How many people are actually conceiving on their marriage night now anyways?
So once you start viewing sex as not a primarily reproductive act but as fulfilling a particular role in human relationships, you can now start to question why we have sex the way we do, and whether the way we have sex is actually a good, logical way of fulfilling the role that it plays now in our relationships. Obviously, this gets super-fucking-complicated, because people have sex for many different reasons in many different ways, and I don't really want to get into it, so I'm going to just generalize a bit and throw out the crux of the heterosexual sex as patriarchal idea (as best I understand it), which is....
That women receive the most sexual pleasure not from penetration, at least not by a penis. There are different justifications for that idea, such as sexual pleasure for women being "brainier" than for men, or that the clitoris is the most sensitive part of female genitalia and most women require clitoral manipulation to achieve orgasm. There's also the fact that most (all?) females are multiply orgasmic. So some feminists then look at stereotypical heterosexual sex and question, why is penetration of the vagina by the penis considered to be the start of sex and the man's ejaculation considered the end of it? That seems inherently inequitable to the woman, for whom the most pleasurable part of sex is and for whom satisfaction are not included in that conception. The male orgasm is specifically included; the female orgasm is sorta a happy byproduct, if it even occurs.
Now, to be clear, some of you may or may not have sex in this manner. I'm not particularly familiar with Crispin, so I don't know if she's saying all men and women engaging in any sexual relations in any way is patriarchal or what, but I have heard feminists describe "heterosexual sex" as I have briefly circumscribed above, and have that particular conception of sex be the target of their ire. For them, it's the fact that there's this outdated idea of what sex is that is propagated through society to the younger generations, that this idea is unhealthy and male-focused, and it causes young people to start with screwed up conceptions of what sex is and what sex should be for from the very beginning. (Pornography is also typically criticized in the same vein, seen as a force multiplier for this traditional conception of sex.) And so you have sexually unsatisfied young women, because the young men don't know what the fuck they're doing, because they've been "taught" to have sex in ways that are entirely unsatisfying for their partners, and this begins a deeper patriarchalization of sex in society, such that sex work becomes one primarily of women serving men, and pornography becomes prototypically for men, virginity becomes a shameful thing for men to have but a virtuous thing for women to have, slut shaming, etc., because at the very crux of it, we've idealized "heterosexual sex" in a manner such that it is pleasurable for men and (not necessarily) pleasurable for (most) women.
N.b. whether this is an appropriate use of "heterosexual sex" is unknown to me. It's not the term I'd use. I'm kinda fishing in the dark, thinking that this might be what Crispin is referring to, because it's the only feminist ideology I've heard of that's related, but I might be wrong.
@Heffling
I'm going to answer the basic question of "why is it bad?" I'm touch on why this is specifically a problem for men and why this is a feminist issue in a little less detail.
One of my favorite books is Triumphs of Experience by George Vaillant. Frankly, this book is fantastic and if there's any book from any of my posts that you read, I'd wish it to be this one. (But don't worry, I'll summarize. I don't mean to drop a reading list on you.) It's about the men of the Harvard Grant Study - paired with its parallel study, the Boston Glueck Study, they are most in-depth longitudinal study about human lives ever performed. Sadly, it only included men... the study started in the 1930s and used Harvard students who were mostly men at the time.
The study tracked the life trajectories of these men. Everything from marriage to employment to drug addiction to mental and physical health was recorded. What Vaillant and the other researchers found, overwhelmingly...
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-harvard-study-has-been-showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/thanks-mom/309287/
The Grant and Glueck studies are observational, so they can't conclusively prove causation. But the case is pretty strong. Many of the Grant study men were late bloomers - they were depressed and isolated at age 25 but got married and raised families by age 40. Those men ended up healthier in old age than men who did the inverse.
This is corroborated by plenty of other data. For example...
https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2017/03/09/the-biggest-threat-facing-middle-age-men-isn-smoking-obesity-loneliness/k6saC9FnnHQCUbf5mJ8okL/story.html
I'm also an introverted male closing in on the age of 40. We can still be introverted without being isolated. Introverts tend to have a smaller number of friends, but those friendships tend to be strong. Just having two or three persistent close relationships throughout your life can be enough to keep the deleterious effects of isolation at bay.
The mistake many men make is to rely on our spouses for all of our social interaction. (BTW, this is one of the reasons it's a feminist issue.) Besides being a lot of work for your wife to be literally the only person in your life you can confide in, it also means that widowers are much more likely to become completely socially isolated in old age than widows. When a woman becomes a widow, she's more likely to have some close friends in her life. When a man becomes a widower, there's a common risk that he literally doesn't have any other strong emotional attachments at all.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The act? No. How it is framed within society? Less concrete. Academic feminist theory does not take place within a vacuum and the two most important things to remember are
A) it is an examination of how something applies within society and not the mere concept of something
And
That is to say, academic feminist theorists will often come to a conclusion that something is patriarchal without needing to come to a decision on whether it is good, bad, or if anything should be done about it.
That is really interesting. Coming to a conclusion that something is patriarchal without deciding that it is bad.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
In particular this is what feminist critique is. It examines a thing through the lens of feminist theory to see how it relates to women in society, and through that view many things can be viewed as patriarchal. However that doesn't directly correlate to that thing also being bad.
One of the things that goes wrong with this kind of clinical view of academic feminist theory is that it doesn't translate well outside of an academic setting. This is why you get so many people on every side of an issue assuming that if you describe something as patriarchal or stemming from patriarchy, then you are calling it bad. Both those in the feminist movements and antifeminists will often equate anything that is called patriarchal as being called bad. This is not the case.
It is also not a call to action. Someone doing a feminist critique may describe violence in a movie as patriarchal, but that doesn't automatically mean that they hate violent movies or want to see it removed.
Do some people turn this kind of critique or theorizing into a call to action? Sure. You look enough and you'll find people who will turn anything into a call to action. But that's not always the case and why it's important not to automatically assume that something being called patriarchal is being used as a call to stop it.
The most extreme version of the argument is that penetrative sex is intrinsically violent because it involves inserting something into another human being's body. This is definitely a minority viewpoint and I've only seen it seriously considered in communities like the now-defunct radfemhub (which was a wretched hive of transphobia and villainy) but a handful of particularly extreme voices still say crap like this. (Spoilered for crazy)
I cannot stress enough that this is an extremist position.
Normally it wouldn't fucking matter, they'd be yet another example of an extremist fringe just like every movement has. We could treat them like the Westboro Baptist Church of feminism. The problem is that some of the key people behind radfemhub have done shit like doxxed trans women and sex workers. There are a couple of them who literally sit around and Google their own names (to this day) to find arguments to get into, which is why I'm specifically avoiding posting even their usernames here. So even though radfemhub is gone, you still encounter some of that crap in discussions around social media & the blogosphere.
I don't think Crispin is arguing all that.
The more moderate version of the argument is one that I sympathize with. I'll use Andrea Dworkin as an example. Self-plagiarism ahoy!
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'm not a feminist so maybe i'm missing the guiding principles of that discussion -and if so my bad.
But, it seems to me that Its combative phrasing. Meant to illicit a response more than the goal.
The goal being more equality during sex (as i understand it) which is abso-friggen-lutely a thing to support.
Or, even if it is bad, doesn't directly mean that it needs to be torn down/removed.
What Dedwrekka is describing certainly isn't isolated to feminism. This is what academia is, in a lot of ways: the take-up and analysis of extreme/non-mainstream ideas. Even in science academia, the point is to study things that nobody's studied before, to stretch our current understanding of the universe outwards. When people pick out one particular feminist paper/academic/theory and hold it aloft to bash all of feminism, it's like if they pick out one scientific paper and bash all scientists as being out of their minds.
I've encountered plenty of men who turn pleasing their partner into a challenge to be conquered.
The notches on the bedpost are no longer women I've fucked but become orgasm's I've induced in women.
This can reinforce performative, male-oriented sexual paradigms when a man becomes so emotionally invested in his partner's orgasm that she feels like she has to orgasm to keep him from feeling disappointed.
The balance between being attentive towards my partner's pleasure vs taking ownership of it is a legitimately difficult one.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Whether that is the intention? I don't know, it just feels.. not sincere? I like Ferals post though.
That would seem to me like it's missing the point that men are also subject to patriarchy, and that feminists are also questioning why men don't "work harder" at pleasing their partner. That criticism is coming in at one level too shallow, I think. What a lot of feminists - but not all - might say in response would be, it shouldn't be "work" and it shouldn't be an extra responsibility incumbent on the man; the whole act of sex should be thought of as one of mutual pleasure, and if you're not giving your partner pleasure, you're not having sex at all! And also that can be okay, because not everything needs to be perfectly reciprocal, but quit calling it "sex"/elevating it as the apex of relationship intimacy then, because that should have mutualism built into it from the start.
Which is to say, the problem isn't that people put their genitals in each others', but
1) that that never occurs in a vacuum
2) the particular non-vacuum in which people desire, plan, carry out, and conceive of it is extremely sexist and patriarchal, and
3) you cannot escape to the vacuum
Stripped of all context, vaginal intercourse is an act by which two individuals have a sexual encounter. But we are never able to strip away all context.
Spherical cows are all well and good, but most models worth paying attention to don't use them.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Sure those guys exist, but.....i have to be honest, that seems like a lot of logical gymastics -and not in very good faith- to just continue to stick to the position of "patriarchy".
Most men (that i'm aware of) just try hard because that's the right thing to do.
Is there pride involved in pleasing your partner? Hell yea. But that's a good thing.
Just the bolded:
Yea it should be. And that is fine.
It is the same part of my brain that "works" at putting on a good show on stage. Its work. I have to work at it. Practice it. Think about it. Get advice about it. But its rewarding and the pleasure/entertainment of the parties involved is the important part of it. That's why you do the work. That's why you try.
I think this is deserving of a God Damn Separate Thread. I was considering making one myself when I had time, but it looks like you've got a better start.
A few things I would add to an OP:
- The high incidence of social isolation in the backgrounds of mass shooters.
- The negative influence of social anxiety on establishing relationships.
- Location-related barriers to forming relationships.
Personally I've felt very lonely for a number of years now and am at a loss for how to solve it. I've tried getting to get a girlfriend because, in my experience, once a guy gets a girlfriend or marries they prefer to spend way more time with them than they ever did with their friends. I've tried making friends where I live, but I'm a gigantic liberal nerd in a rural conservative area, plus I have social anxiety, so I have a hard time finding anyone I can trust and feel like I'd have fun hanging out with. I don't feel like I could afford to live in a city, and trying to at least find things to do on occasion while visiting the city has been a challenge (Meetup and Facebook groups are scarce).
Okay, that makes more sense. It's an unfortunate result of men and women achieving sexual satisfaction in ways that are weirdly incompatible for whatever reason. I appreciate you taking the time to explain it.