It’s Time For People to Stop Using the Social Construct of “Biological Sex” to Defend Their Transmisogyny, Mey, Autostraddle, June 5, 2014
Time and time again, transmisogynists and transphobes go back to that old excuse that they are just standing up for the reality of “biological sex” when they spew their ignorance and hate. They say that no matter what a trans woman does, no matter what she believes, she’s still actually a man. Others cede the fact that trans women are women, but stop there and say “gender is what’s between your ears, sex is what’s between your legs” and therefore trans women are still males. Although this is a popular idea, it is based on a misunderstanding of biology, social constructs and anatomy, and it needs to stop.
The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer, Mark Greene, The Good Men Project, November 4, 2013
In American culture, we believe that men can never be entirely trusted in the realm of the physical. We collectively suspect that, given the opportunity, men will collapse into the sexual at a moment’s notice. That men don’t know how to physically connect otherwise. That men can’t control themselves. That men are dogs.
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Not only do we men distrust others in this muddled realm of physical touch, years of shaming and judgement have left us distrusting ourselves. Did I enjoy that too much? Am I having taboo thoughts? This distrust leaves us uncertain about touching another human being unless we have established very clear rules of engagement. Often we give up and simply reduce those rules to being in a relationship. We allow ourselves long-lasting comforting touch with our girlfriends or boyfriends. The vast universe of platonic human touch is suddenly reduced to the exclusive domain of one person and is blended into the sexual. That’s a lot of need to put on one person, however loving and generous they might be.
Which leads to the question, how do we teach our sons to understand how touch works? How to parse out the sexual from the platonic? Is the pleasure of human contact inherently sexual to some degree? I doubt its a question the average Italian man would ever ask himself. But here in America, generations of Puritanical sexual shaming have made it a central question. By putting the fear of the sexual first in all our interactions, we have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, avoiding all contact rather than risk even the hint of unwanted sexual touch.
Space Bras and Sexism – An Analysis of the Carol Marcus Scene in ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’, Johnny Donaldson, Geek League of America, May 25, 2013
As a straight man , I get it. Alice Eve is good-looking, she’s half-naked and I like to look at half-naked attractive women. As a straight man, I also realize I don’t have to deal with things in society on a day-to-day basis that women are confronted with as a whole. So I get why most of the men who took the poll could comment, shrug it off as a non-issue and then respond with crude jokes about wanting to see her further undressed. Men don’t get it. We don’t have to deal with it, and when you don’t have to deal something, you tend to lack the empathy for the people who do have to deal with it.
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There is nothing inherently wrong with showing a woman in her underwear in a movie, if it fits the context of the scene in question. Some commenters suggested that, as geeks, those who were against the scene were afraid of women’s bodies. That’s hardly the case; and the prudish dismissal of Eve in her near-nude glory, the desire to reduce a woman to a Madonna archetype (the biblical kind, not the singer kind) is its own kind of sexism. Aye, but here’s the rub — there was also no single reason to include this scene in the movie. Not one. It was probably one of the single most gratuitous moments of exploitative sexuality I’ve seen in a movie in a long time. It was so random, so out-of-place that it took me right out of the film. On a sheer technical note it was inept: a clumsily placed insert shot that did not flow directly out of the preceding shot or easily into the next one. In terms of cinematic grammar, it was some really bad editing, regardless of what it represented.
(And the picture is here, in case you’re curious.)
