The Feral Men and Boys of Steubenville, Ohio

road_warrior2, via dangerousuniverse.com

Look, Steubenville, even the character named “the Feral Child” managed to keep it together (via dangerousuniverse.com)

This is pretty much the only conclusion I can reasonably reach, given all the talk about how the real lesson of the Steubenville rape case is the dangers of drinking too much. I’m not going to link to some of the more ridiculous commentaries, but the line of thinking amounts to: a girl got so drunk that she couldn’t control herself, and she got raped (see the Public Shaming Blog for a collection of tweets and other social media updates: 1, 2, 3.) Missing from this analysis is the moral agency of anyone else in town. All I can think is that the men and boys in this town are so lacking in self-control that they actually register below most members of the animal kingdom, because most animals have at least some concept of consequences for their actions.

Even the people who say that the boys are at fault, but so is the girl for getting drunk miss the point so much that it is doubtful they even know the point exists. All the girl is guilty of doing is getting drunk while underage. That barely registers on the scale of criminality next to the crime of rape. If you do not understand that, maybe you should not be allowed in public near drunk people.

This is such a ridiculously defamatory notion, that men cannot control themselves around a drunk/sexy/scantily-clad/female woman, and that the onus is entirely on the woman to protect herself. It has served as cover for men for a very, very long time, though, and it may only be recently that it occurred to men that this idea actually makes us look like idiots. I assume women have known this all along, and that privilege blinded the guys from seeing it. Some guys seem determined not to get it. Some women and girls go along with it, too.

Guys, we can do better than this. Have a little damn pride in yourselves, because if you really have such a serious problem with self-control, maybe we need to be the ones covering up all the time.

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How the Loss of Male Privilege Affects Men Who Don’t Care About Male Privilege (Short Title: Suck It Up, Dude)

(Originally posted in a Facebook comment thread.)

I used to bristle at being “lumped in with rapists, chauvinists and domineering punks” too. The problem is that, as a society, we are trying to have it both ways, and the only means of achieving equality that I can see is for men to endure a tiny bit of stereotyping (and honestly, who among us men has actually suffered real harm solely by being “lumped in with rapists, chauvinists and domineering punks”? I’m guessing none. Any harm that might seem to result from that is more likely to be based on individual circumstances.)

Back to my original point about having it both ways, just to give one example, a common trope with regard (trigger warning) to sexual assault is that women need to be more watchful and mindful, while at the same time men get offended when a woman acts as though he might be a potential rapist. Those two ideas cannot coexist. I hope that we can one day live in a world where avoiding sexual assault is 100% the purview of the potential assailant, but we are not there yet by a long shot. Until that time, so long as any men in our society continue to act as though their loss of male privilege somehow constitutes actual oppression, the rest of us have to live with that tiny bit of stigma.

Two conclusions I draw from this: (1) let’s focus our efforts on rooting out the male behavior at the core, rather than criticizing the largely-female-held opinions that are merely the result; and (2) we’re men, so according to our own folklore, we can handle a bit of criticism, right? (BTW, the opinions I am referencing are by no means limited exclusively to men, women, or any gender in between or elsewhere.)

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Porn and Prejudice: The Right Not to Be Harassed, No Matter What You Do for a Living

668px-Stoya_at_AVN_Awards_Expo_2012

This is the closest I’ll get to posting anything NSFW on here.

“I’m a Porn Star, and if You Harass Me I Will Punch You in the Balls.”

I couldn’t think of a good opening for this post, so I just used the headline from an article by Stoya, posted on Jezebel on Monday. Not everyone knows who Stoya is, and many people pretend they do not know who she is, so let’s get this out of the way. Stoya makes her living as an adult film actress, a/k/a a porn star. If you can handle reading about concepts of opposing the harassment of women in public, and you can handle it in the context of pondering a person who makes a living doing sex stuff in front of a camera, read on. Otherwise, Disney still has a website.

Stoya provides a direct attack on the idiotic notion that, if a woman has sex on film or video, she must like having sex with everyone, and therefore she’ll have sex with me. A South Park episode once featured Kurt Russell being forced to go through a Stargate-like device, because he once did it in a movie. The point of the joke was that it is absurd to expect a person to do something in real life just because they did it in a movie. Porn actresses do not get that sort of deference, though. When you stop to think about it for more than one second, it makes sense that she ought to be able to have a normal life, free from excess groping, the same as anybody else. And yet: Continue reading

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