Meet Kyle, Dumbass of the Week

In case you've been living in a cave with no WiFi, let me introduce you to Kyle.  At midnight (better known as save-in-draft-mode-until-morning-o'clock) on Thursday, Kyle decided that the world needed to hear these words of manly wisdom:

Kyle personifies 2017.  Kyle has never seen a female orgasm so, instead of asking women about it, he mansplains that female orgasms must not exist.  Social media now guarantees he will never see one—by noon on Thursday, Kyle's asinine, patronising post had gone viral.  In football (soccer) they call this an "own goal."

Yes, instead of asking women about the female orgasm, he tells women they're a myth. Instead of considering that women might know more about our sexual experience than he does, he says we are wrong not to be sexually satisfied sans orgasms.  I can't wait for his next post telling us we should be satisfied as helpmeets without education and careers.

Even if chauvinist Kyle refused to believe women about their own orgasms, a quick Google search would have informed him that male researchers have documented the physiology of the female orgasm. But he couldn’t be bothered because clearly his own research on the subject is definitive, and finding evidence that the female orgasm exists would mean facing what a loser he is in bed. I guarantee that Kyle has never fucked the same woman twice. No woman makes that mistake more than once.  One commenter noted that apparently Kyle hasn't even had a woman bother to fake an orgasm Katz's Delicatessen style, implying he made so little effort that no one ever felt obliged to spare his feelings or give him some credit for the attempt.

Kyle's post is such an obvious indictment of his own skill that one can't but wonder if he is trolling.  Who in their right mind would advertise, using his real name and photo, on a worldwide public billboard, "I AM TERRIBLE IN BED."  To be fair, it was midnight, and we don't know what he was drinking/smoking, or if his roommate hacked his account.  His post is reminiscent of Ryan Williams, the 19-year-old British assclown who, just over a year ago, tweeted "If a woman ‘cannot hold in her period until she gets to a toilet’ then it is her problem, not the taxpayer’s.”  Last fall, the UK was considering removing the VAT (sales tax to Americans) on feminine hygiene products because they are a necessity.  Three weeks later, after what he claimed were "death threats from feminists," he said his Tweetastrophe had been a hoax.

Ryan initially invoked a tiny amount of sympathy from people who thought he was ignorant due to poor education rather than assholery, but Kyle has no such excuse.  He richly deserved the unlubricated public ass-reaming he received.  Unless he is currently incarcerated in a maximum security single sex prison, in which case he would not have access to the internet, he could have simply asked a woman.  Heck, even in Supermax, his fellow inmates would have told him he was full of shit.

Perhaps, like most men of his generation, Kyle's sex education has come mainly through internet porn.  There are female-friendly porn sites (trust me, I have them all bookmarked) but you can count them on your one (free) hand.  99.99999% of porn focuses on male pleasure.  When women are depicted as having orgasms, it is not to showcase female pleasure but male prowess, and they are transparently fake, with none of the physiological signs of a real orgasm, which are delightfully apparent in the real deal.

Those of us who had the luxury of misspending our youth before the internet but after the sexual revolution reached sexual maturity at a time when women expected to both give and receive sexual pleasure.  From the time of our first awkward kiss onward, we never got our boyfriends off without extracting quid pro quo orgasms.  Even the most fumbling, bumbling 80s teenage boy understood that pleasing his partner was non-negotiable.

We assumed that subsequent generations of women would be even more sexually demanding; instead, they seem to be regressing.  Boys raised on internet porn form their sexual expectations based on what they see onscreen.  Since porn focuses exclusively on male pleasure, young men today don't consider female gratification.  For a guy, being a good lover used to mean the ability to please his partner; now it means having lots of selfish, meaningless porn-style sex, parroting the anal, blowjobs, and degrading insults.  No man under 40 has ever seen pubic hair.  They don't see it in porn (where it is treated as a fetish) so young men don't expect to see it in real life and women have complied.  In a recent survey, 62% of women under 40 reported removing all of their pubic hair and 40% of men admitted to asking their partners to do so.

Consent is now emphasized on college campuses because the old double-standard survives in uneasy juxtaposition to hook-up culture.  Women can have casual sex like men but they can't want it—they can't have sexual agency.  It's the tired, old Madonna/whore complex but updated for the 21st century: Women aren't expected to be chaste—then they are harangued as prudes and of no interest/use to men—they just aren't expected to like or want sex themselves.  College sex looks a lot like rape: Men initiate it and order women into the porn star contortions they've grown up watching.  Young women comply but they are not saying "yes," they're just not saying "no."  Depressingly, studies of high school and college women show that the idea that they should get something out of the experience never crosses their minds.  Women over and under 40 give starkly different answers to the question, "Do you expect to have an orgasm during sex?"  For younger women, sex seems to be more about pleasing the man than reciprocal.  I'd like to think that as women have made progress towards economic and social equality that progress would manifest in the bedroom but the reverse seems to be happening.

Although the female orgasm indisputably exists, it usually takes more time, effort, skill, and communication to bring off than the male version.  There are doubtless evolutionary reasons for this—the biological purpose of female orgasm is still hotly debated.  (Alas for that brief era of medieval history when it was thought to be as necessary as the male orgasm for conception.)  In today's Tinder-driven hook-up culture, couples sometimes don't copulate more than once and it can take some practice together before even the most willing and considerate man learns how to get his woman off.

Those willing and considerate men are few and far between.  When a recent survey asked college-age men if they cared if their partner orgasmed, they responded that they sometimes cared in a relationship but never in a hook-up.  "I don't give a shit" said one.  Hook-ups are understood by both men and women to be exclusively about male  gratification. Women report not feeling comfortable asking their partner to help them cum, as if it is unreasonably demanding.

Kyle's mansplaining chauvinism indicates that he assumes sex is all about him:  In his mind, women should be satisfied with being desired but not experience desire ourselves.  We should be happy to settle for letting the Kyles of the world get off any way they choose to use our bodies and not expect any more from sex.  Kyle's attitude fits perfectly into the culture that produced Todd Akin, the Missouri Rep. who thinks women can't get pregnant from rape, and the growing list of rich and powerful men whose history of viewing women as objects without independent agency is coming to light.  And let's not forget the pussy-grabber-in-chief, who famously said on the Howard Stern show that "I couldn't care less" if the women he slept with got any pleasure.  You're in great company, Kyle.  Go fuck yourself.

P.S. #NotMe?

A quick addendum to my previous post:

In the wake of the Weinstein revelations, there is a viral trend on Facebook to call attention to the ubiquity of sexual harassment by asking women to post "Me too" as their status if they have ever been a victim of sexual harassment and/or assault.  Since literally every woman on the planet has been sexually harassed at some point in her life, the response rate if every woman on Facebook participated would be 100%.  In fact, there was previously a #YesAllWomen tag on Twitter to highlight that fact.

I had mixed feelings about this request.  I am not a joiner by nature; if everyone is asked to post something, even if it is something I agree with, my instinct is not to follow the crowd.  It's like in yoga class when the teacher asks us all to breathe or do an asana in sync with everyone else in the room.  I always follow an irresistible urge to break the rhythm, do my own thing.  I am both a feminist and a knitter but I didn't knit a single pussy hat last January.  I am quite proud of this trait—you wouldn't catch me participating in a wave in a stadium or holding up a lighter and swaying to the music with the crowd at a concert—so there is no chance I'd play along with a Facebook request.

I also felt I had never been sexually harassed seriously enough to merit saying "me too".  I've been catcalled on the street and online but I have never been personally harassed or assaulted in a work or dating situation, or any other context.  The random catcalls that all women experience just form part of the backdrop of being a woman in public; they're not in the same league of awfulness as, say, the childhood neighbour who was raped by her father when she was 12.  I fear my "me too" would minimize hers by seeming to equate our experiences.

There is also a form of survivor's guilt:  All these other women have been harassed and assaulted, why not me?  It is never the victim's fault—not at all, not even a little bit, not in ANY circumstances—so there is no possibility of rationalizing that I avoided it because I didn't engage in any particular behaviours.  The explanation that whispers in my head is that I simply wasn't attractive enough.

Both of those thoughts—that my harassment wasn't serious enough and that I wasn't attractive enough to be a target—are appalling.  Yes, it's objectively true that rape is way worse than a catcall, just as lynching is way worse than using a racial epithet.  But both are forms of sexism or racism and neither is acceptable in a civilised society.  And I certainly don't think any woman should judge her own attractiveness on the basis of whether she has been sexually harassed.  The fact that either of those ideas crossed my mind is indicative of how persistently patriarchal our culture is.

Finally, I was uncomfortable with the idea of the onus being on the victim, and it seems that I wasn't the only one as these two responses popped up:

"'If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote 'Me too' as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.'

Let me translate that.

"If the victims would just all get it together to say something all at the same time, maybe then somebody will listen."

If the victims would

It's on the victims

It's on (statistically) women.


SUGGESTION FOR REPLACED LANGUAGE:
  'If all the men who have sexually assaulted, harassed, or coerced women into sex, allowed it to happen without doing anything about it, or ever gaslighted a woman about it, wrote 'Me too' as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.'  There.  I fucking fixed it."

Not a Good Week for Women

Oh, it's great that Jabba the Hut in a bathrobe is finally being held accountable for 30+ years of sexual assault and harassment.  But the unfolding story is like Weinstein's expanse of back hair:  It just goes on and on and you don't want to contemplate its existence, let alone look at it.

(Incidentally, Weinstein's behaviour would have been reprehensible whatever he looked like but his hideousness and smarminess are so extreme that if this were fiction and central casting had sent an actor who looked like that to play the role he would have been rejected as a caricature.)

Weinstein harassed, threatened, groped, and assaulted women in many different places and contexts but his favourite method seems to have been to invite actresses to a hotel room to (supposedly) review a script and discuss a part for her.  He'd then request some sexual favour as a condition of getting the part.  His accusers have said he demanded everything from massages to threesomes but my personal favourite was this one:

"He allegedly emerged in a bathrobe and told her he would green light her script if she watched him masturbate. She left the meeting."

He is definitely not alone amongst members of his sex in wanting hot young women to watch him flog the bishop, but definitely alone in thinking they would actually enjoy it.  Dozens of women (by the time you read this, there will probably be a few dozen more) have said that when they turned him down, their careers suffered.  Unfortunately, this means that we now look at the young women in his films with an automatic question in our minds about whether they gave in.  Even more disturbing are the rape allegations, and those victims are also coming out of the woodwork by the dozen.  It's easier for the ones who got away to admit they were propositioned than for the ones who either acquiesced or were raped to speak up.

What they all have in common this week is an unjustified backlash for not speaking up sooner.  The general outcry is that if someone had said something years ago, he could have been stopped before he harmed more women.  I even had to school one shithead who was calling for women who hadn’t spoken up to be prosecuted as accessories for his subsequent crimes.  Sexual harassment and assault victims who don't report the crime are sometimes wracked by guilt that the perpetrator will go on to hurt others.  But the cost to victims of speaking up is almost always higher than to perps.  Less than 12% of reported rapes result in any kind of conviction.  Some of Weinstein's victims did go to the police, who did nothing.  Others were paid off for their silence.  No-one in Hollywood was surprised, both because actresses had warned others and because the environment of male entitlement to, and objectification of, women is ubiquitous, both inside and outside of the movie industry.  The casting couch isn't a myth; it's a cliché.

The Weinstein scandal coincided with my efforts to help a friend who finally left her abusive husband, got a no contact order, and is attempting to start divorce proceedings.  But she has been unable to get an attorney because she was a SAHM for 18 years.  He was the breadwinner; he controls the money, and he has withdrawn all the money from their joint bank account.  She has called literally every divorce attorney in her (red) state, along with the bar association, legal aid, charities for domestic abuse survivors, etc., but there are no pro bono legal services for divorce in her area.  It's infuriating.  I did some research on her behalf and found precedent for petitioning the court to order the breadwinning spouse to pay for the homemaking spouse's costs in a divorce to make it a fair fight but when she ran that by some lawyers they scoffed that it wouldn't fly in 2017.  So, she is screwed.

Add to that Trump gutting contraceptive coverage, yet another anti-choice Congressman urging his mistress to get an abortion, and the fact that all of it is Hillary Clinton's fault ("Hog Emperor of Rape Culture" is my new favourite name for Trump), I was in no mood to deal generously with the inane diarrhea of messages from the online dating site I have been using.

I get around 10 messages/day and most fall into one of the following categories:

1) Men who send a generic impersonal message that they clearly send to everyone that gushes “I love your profile" or "we have a lot in common" yet when I check their profile, we’re 100% enemies.  This is the biggest category.  It seems to be common practice for men to send messages based on photos without reading profiles.  Wow, so, you’re a smoker who voted for Trump, doesn’t want kids, and is just looking for hook-ups.  Under favourite book you state that you don’t read and you think the country’s biggest problem is that “libtards" are trying to take your guns.  What is it exactly that we have in common?  Breathing oxygen?

2) Xtians telling me that I am going to hell for being an atheist and/or supporting abortion & evolution.  They usually have Bible quotes in their profiles.

3) Men who message me again after I don’t reply to their first message to tell me I must be some kind of stuck-up bitch.  That’s so endearing!  Gosh, I really missed a good one by not responding.  My loss!

4) Married men who are looking for some on the side.  (These constituted the majority of responses I got at first but they have tapered off since the site started filtering them.)

5) Men who are only looking for hook-ups.

6) Men who don’t want kids.  100% of the men who have messaged me so far don’t want kids.  At the very top of my profile it states that the ONLY reason I am on there is because I want biological children before I am too old.

7) Men who state in creepy, disgusting, or threatening terms what they want to do to me sexually.  I include in this category all the men whose messages aren’t explicitly sexual but ask bluntly where I live, if I am alone, what my phone number is, or ask me to send nude photos.

8) Men who are so illiterate or drugged out I can barely decipher their message.

9) Men who message just to tell me why they aren’t interested in me.  I find this category particularly hard to fathom as I have never felt a compulsion to message someone who doesn’t appeal just to tell them why.  (It has been suggested that men do this to women they feel are out of their league, but that's cold comfort for enduring the insults.)

10) Men who think I should feel blessed by their attention.  They usually say something to the effect that at 48 I must be thrilled to get any response.  They seem to assume they are the only one messaging me and expect me to fuck them in gratitude.  This category overlaps with one for men who tell me that I will never find what I am looking for so I should instead take what they are offering.  The married men and the men looking for hook-ups say that as a follow-up.  If I say, “not interested, looking for a relationship” they respond that, at 48, I should be grateful anyone wants to fuck me.  They disguise it as a compliment, “Wow, are you really 48?  You look amazing!  Maybe we could hook up?”  Their profile will list an age range of something like 20-35.  They don’t want to date me but deem me still attractive enough for a hook-up.  I can’t resist mentioning that these guys are usually ugly.  I get married Danny DeVito lookalikes who somehow imagine that I'd be eager to be a piece on the side for them.  The hubris that enables them to believe that any woman would want to fuck them must be staggering.  Is it the same mentality that leads repulsive monsters like Weinstein and Trump to believe that there is any woman on earth who wouldn’t be nauseated at the very idea of them?

11) Men who are looking for a rich woman to support them.  Yes, this happens a lot; it’s not all the other way around.

12) Men who friend-zone me because of my age, usually apologising that they are looking to date someone younger but that we both like horses or opera or Byatt or whatever so perhaps we can be friends.  I am happy to make new friends but could do without the preemptive age-related rejection leading into it.

13) Subs who want me to tie them up and humiliate them.  This dating site isn’t FetLife and I am not a pro domme, although it might be more lucrative than adjuncting.

14) The outliers: I’ve gotten the odd message from couples looking for a threesome, men in open relationships, and men who live abroad but travel to the U.S. on business looking for stateside pussy, etc.  What all the outliers have in common with the other categories is that they haven’t read my profile.  I have filled out every section, ticked every box that specifies serious, long-term relationship only.  Almost no-one who messages me is looking for that.  Of those that are, they have huge deal breakers:  they don’t want children, they’re Republicans, they smoke, etc.  I am overwhelmed with messages and I answer less than one out of 50.

Why don’t I just message men instead?  Because there aren’t any men whose age range goes up to 48.  60-year-olds list 25-45.  The only guys who have an open-ended age range are just looking for hook-ups.  The serious blokes are looking for someone younger even if they are my father’s age.  Yeah, yeah, I can’t blame them; it’s a biological imperative.  But that doesn’t mean it can’t piss me off and frustrate me.

Another thing that pissed me off this week:  The site has a rule that all photos must include your face.  No body-only shots, no pets, no inanimate objects, etc.  Most guys have multiple photos that violate this rule—their dog, a sunset, their six-pack, etc.  I have 7 clear face shots, more than most people, and I added in a photo of some ice cream, just for fun, with the joking caption that you have to compete with this.  Well, someone reported it and they removed it.  WTF kind of petty bullshit is that?  Why did this bother someone enough to report it?  I could report pretty much every guy’s profile for photo violations in retaliation.

Most of the messages I get are so daft or disgusting or show the asshole didn’t so much as glance at my profile, that I am getting both fed up and creeped out.  I am there for ONE purpose only: To have children.  I am not interested in hooking up.  I am not interested in dating.  I am not interested in a relationship.  (Am I not ever horny? Yes, unbearably so, constantly, but getting laid is not worth living with some narcissistic jackass.)  Above all, I am no longer interested in them.  They are a means to an end, nothing more–just as they are not interested in me as a person based on my profile but only as an object based on my photo.  Turnabout is fair play, dickheads.  I can’t afford a sperm donor nor can I afford to go abroad for IVF (no U.S. IVF clinic will take someone at 48 who refuses to use donor eggs because no-one has ever yet conceived via IVF with their own eggs at 48. The Guinness World Record is 46.) so I am looking for someone with the money to drop on IVF who wants kids right away.  That’s it!  I think the rest are all scary, egotistical douchebags & women should run a mile from them.

Now, is this bitter misandrist screed (which I appended to my profile and will probably delete in a week or two) going to reduce the number of messages I get?  No, because no-one reads my profile.

Defending Gravity

Young women are rejecting the term "feminist".  When I hear a woman state that she is not a feminist, I grill her on her views.

"So, you don't think women should vote?  You don't think we should be allowed to drive?  Be educated?  Own property?  Leave the house without a man's permission?"

They are invariably shocked and stammer that they believe in complete equality of the sexes.

"Ah," I reply, "you are a feminist."

At which point they protest that they don't hate men and they don't believe women are superior.  That is what they believe the definition of "feminism" is.

According to one survey, only 23% of Americans identify as "feminists" but 82% agree with the statement that “men and women should be social, political, and economic equals.”  In a survey of millennials, only 35% identify as "feminists" but a majority agree that discrimination against women is still a problem.

It seems we have a semantic snag.  According to the OED, the definition of feminism is, "The advocacy of women's rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes."  Not, please note, "the advocacy of women's superiority on the basis of misandry."

So, help me out here, people.  I'm having a Rip Van Winkle moment.  When and why did the definition of feminism morph in the popular view from equality to misandry?

I can take a guess:  It's the same problem as Charlottesville.  The civil rights movement changed the laws of the land and forbid legal discrimination on the basis of race and sex.  But it didn't change people's attitudes.  It affected how they could behave, what they could say in polite company, but not their mindset.  The disgusting racist displays we have been seeing since Trump's ascendance to the presidency indicate that racist attitudes have not died out; they were just hidden underground (another reason to protect free speech, but that's a rant for another day).

In a related fashion, men have increasingly been called out on sexist behaviour so some of them have learned to put on a veneer of civility to women in the workplace to avoid getting fired.  But it hasn't changed their attitudes, just their surface behaviour.  Their resentment at having to treat women like equals has manifested in a victim mentality.  They used to be in charge and having to share power with women (and minorities if they are white) feels like a defeat, a blow to their egos.  So, they retaliated by labeling feminists as man-haters, claiming we want special rights rather than equal rights.

Gays have also been accused of requesting special rights when seeking equality.  When same sex marriage was being debated, it was common to hear opponents blathering that gays were asking for special rights.  That twist was a way of delegitimizing a bid for equality.  It's the same with feminism.  By claiming that women who seek equal rights with men are man-haters who think we are superior to men, they delegitimize the term.  Don't buy into it.  Call yourself a feminist.  Reclaim the word.  Defend gravity.