An Open Letter to Meghan Murphy, fwiw, from an Other Side of Feminism.

Posted on August 12, 2017 by Nix 66

Editorial Note: This was originally posted by Nix on her tumblr on July 1, 2015.
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I hope you’ll permit me to address you by your first name. I do so not out of any disrespect or desire to minimize you or your work, but because I want to speak with you directly, a bit intimately, as one woman to another, as one Feminist to another, as one human being to another.

I’d like to tell you a bit about my life and the experiences that led me to choose sex work at the comparatively late age of 33. I sort of want to confide…

I’m 34 years old, white, and from a Leftist, activist, middle class background (in Southern California). My family has been torn apart by all manner of deceit, greed, abuse (including sexual), and hypocrisy, but I can assure you that there has never been a conscious moment in my own life when I wasn’t a Feminist. I wasn’t permitted Barbie dolls unless I worked for the money to buy them for myself. I was given unlimited puzzles and books. I was told I could be anything that I wanted to be. And I was encouraged to invest in my intelligence and physical capacities, as opposed to being “pleasing” to men.

I was not raised to see myself as an object. I was raised to see myself as a subject, and a talented one at that.

Anyway, in 2008, I found myself in the very uncomfortable position of reporting two of my colleagues for sexual harassment at Northwestern University. I was two years into a PhD program there. One colleague had grabbed my ass at a bar (he was married and I thought we were meant to be discussing Deleuze) and another had told me that he had raped me and I didn’t remember it because I had been so drunk the last time he saw me (and technically, that was possible).

I did not want to ruin anyone’s career. But I did want to report for record, in case this sort of thing happened to someone else. I also requested sexual harassment training for my entire department in an effort to make sure that it would not.

Unfortunately, the Chair of my department was a woman who would not permit any training session to occur unless she knew which students were involved. Conflict of interest much?

I had planned on letting it all slide. I wasn’t about to out myself like that, as my department was so tiny and gossipy, and there would undoubtedly be negative repercussions. Further, I was TAing for the Chair with that married colleague who had grabbed my ass. I figured that I just needed to make it through the quarter… Until she asked me to compare grades with him at a coffee shop.

So I confessed to her, for lack of a better word, because I wasn’t about to meet with him off-campus.

She told me: “People get grabbed.” She told me: Rape was “unthinkable” and “why would anyone say such a thing?” She told me: “The Sexual Harassment Office is just an excuse for a sad, incompetent woman to hold a job and drink from her Northwestern coffee mug.” She told me: “Americans are too uptight about being touched… Why, even her yoga teacher had to ask before touching students!” She told me: “Reporting sexual harassment is a weak act.” She told me: I needed “to take better care of myself and not worry so much about other people.” She told me, in short, that: The only problem was me! I was just too sensitive, weak, and fragile.

I’ll be honest with you, of all the words used to describe me over the course of my life, that is the only time I’ve ever heard “weak.” She maintained this line and I eventually reported her to the Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention for gender discrimination and a toxic work environment.

She was investigated over the course of a 24 hour period, which is an amazing turnaround, don’t you think? And then, nothing happened! So I eventually attempted to report the entirety of Northwestern University to the Office of Civil Rights for violation of Title IX, arguing that NU has absolutely no protocol to speak of and pointing to their own lack of staff, myriad conflicts of interest, and lack of training, generally.

I still maintain this. And they’ve had three public scandals since I attempted to file a complaint against them with the OCR in 2010: one concerning a fucksaw, one concerning Ludlow and an undergrad, and the latest over this piece of pablum.

Of course, the OCR didn’t take my case. I wasn’t raped, or at least, I don’t think I was. And nothing that happened to me was a big enough offense to move a federal agency like the OCR, even if I was pointing to NU’s bureaucratic structure and lack of training as the root cause of my problems which would necessarily produce more problems for others.

So, by 2012, after fighting within the system with everything I had, I dropped out A.B.D. I couldn’t justify writing a dissertation for a university that didn’t care about my own bodily sovereignty and safety, particularly as a “Feminist.” And how was I supposed to be an authority on any topic whatsoever if I wasn’t the authority of my own personal space? The entire experience was immensely disempowering.

I moved back to Southern California and I set out to get a job. Any job! Because I was starting my life all over! Clearly, the academic route had been a terrible, terrible mistake for me.

As you might imagine, though, no one – and I mean no one – is inclined to hire someone who left their last post because they found out their institution had no functioning sexual harassment policy. It’s too likely that you’re… fragile, weak, and sensitive. And you’re a whistleblower. Who the hell wants to hire someone that you know will blow the whistle on you if she deems it necessary, according to her own lights?

This left me in the position where I would have to fabricate a biographical lie for job interviews, which frankly I see as censorship and a disavowal of what happened to me. This seems resolutely anti-Feminist to me and I was unwilling to make prospective employers comfortable with me, my past, or Northwestern. I was unwilling to deny what I saw to be a fundamental injustice that must necessarily perpetuate itself by way of an almost willful negligence on the part of NU admin. Not having a functioning sexual harassment and assault policy at a major university seems to me like a fucking crisis if ever there was one. People should know. And why should I be ashamed? I left. I didn’t stay like some obedient slave. That would have been truly shameful, in my opinion.

Thus, I was unemployed for a good 6 months before I started my first business – which failed – after which I finally got into phone sex and camming as an independent domme in August of last year. I’m a newbie, but the decision to do sex work was a long time coming and there are two important moments/thoughts that brought me there, and which I’d like to share with you. (I thank you if you’ve made it this far.)

The first was when I was still at Northwestern. I told a few of the professors, in 2010, that in light of the Chair’s clear policy on ass-grabbing, they really weren’t paying me enough and, indeed, I didn’t think they could afford me, and even if they could, it certainly wouldn’t go down like this. I am not some unoccupied lot of land waiting for some intrepid male moron to come squat on me! My existence is not an invitation to anyone for any reason! I am not your Lady Everest!

The second thought occurred to me in April of last year. I was very much unemployed and sort of psyching myself out for homelessness when I realized – If I was an exotic dancer at a reputable club, my ass would not be grabbed against my will because there would be bouncers. Any ass-grabbing would only ever happen on my terms, with my consent, for money.

How in the hell is it that I’d be better protected from sexual assault taking my clothes off as sensually as possible in a designated area for money than as a PhD student at Northwestern University interacting with colleagues? That’s a very sincere question. How is that possible? What insane fucking world is this? But there you have it.

So, about four months later I spent an entire week researching my sex work options and deciding what I might commence with, what I was willing to do, what I was not willing to do. I bought stock photos of sexy ladies – no shortage of those! – and framed body parts as if I was creating examples for a Mulvey lecture. That wasn’t hard, as I’m sure you can imagine. (I use my own image now, but I didn’t start that way.)

And you know what I thought? If this works, I’m finally going to profit off of the very thing that has been harming me my entire life. It felt like grifting a system that had only ever grifted me. And that felt really good.

The clients were not at all what I expected. There are creeps, to be sure, but most of my clients are not even remotely abusive or rapey, because the most entitled men don’t pay for sex at all. They just take it. There are no boundaries with them, only overarching entitlement. Ratio-wise, though, I encounter far more of these rapey men in my day-to-day than at work. And I think there may be a plethora of them in academia, but who knows? Still, there does seem to be a suspicious trend.

This all leads me to making the online acquaintance of Noah Berlatsky, a man you clearly hate, I understand… but I do think you have the wrong end of the stick here. Please bear with me and grant me the possibility of a free (and stubborn!) will. I do appreciate your consideration and time.

Noah wrote an article that I became a little obsessed with on the UVa Rolling Stone scandal and Eden. I was reading it because I was a sex worker and his work had been referred to often enough. I liked his articles. But what struck me the most with this one was how it related to what I had experienced at Northwestern. What happened to me was quotidian, not a big deal, something I was supposed to suffer under to prove that I was “tough.” In it, he quotes Jessica Luther as telling him that:

“We are saturated by a culture that sexualizes women but also demonizes them, that celebrates fuzzy consent and certainly doesn’t punish it, that blames victims for the sexual violence done to them, that is sometimes willing to ask people to intervene but is never willing to directly say to men that they should not rape. This kind of saturation makes it so people don’t really want to hear another story about a woman being sexually assaulted—and even if someone is willing to listen to story after story, what has to change to make it so these kinds of violent acts don’t happen with such regularity feels insurmountable. So there is this idea then that to get people to care, the story of that violence that you share (either as a journalist or a survivor) has to shock people so that they say, “Damn, even in THIS culture that doesn’t care much for women, THAT is bad.”

This quote seemed to exactly sum up my problem at NU and with the OCR. And Noah seemed to be tracking two problems of which I was, and am, particularly aware – Sex worker stigma and sexual assault. Or to put it another way – If I use my sexuality to extract cash from men, I’m a victim. But if male sexuality is aggressively thrust upon me, that’s somehow my fault. It honestly feels to me like my limited agency within this jackass culture is completely inverted, and whatever I say about myself will be turned upside down by those who “know better” than me, about me.

So I tweeted at Noah and told him how much I appreciated his articles. And that was that.

I’ve had a ton of online exchanges with him and one chat by phone. He has not once commented on how I look, referred to me by any diminutive, called me food items or pastry titles, solicited my services, pried into my personal life, condescended, or even ignored me, the latter of which wouldn’t be gendered violence so much as modern busyness and I-can’t-even. That is pretty rare.

And that’s why women, and perhaps sex workers in particular, are willing, and even enthusiastic, to speak with him. He isn’t objectifying us. If he was objectifying us we would most certainly be charging him, or he’d end up listed as a loser by STUPIG or some other service like it. It’s that cold, jim. It’s that cold. But there is nothing of the kind.

This leads me to the travesty that you think sex work is. It wasn’t because I wanted to be an object that I got in to sex work. It’s because I found myself sexually objectified even in places wherein I was meant to be valued for my intelligence. It’s because I’m supposed to interpret an invitation to discuss philosophy as a sexual overture by virtue of me being cast as “girl” and my colleague being cast as “boy.” And this ridiculously heterosexist garbage passes as “common sense” and even “professionalization” amongst people certified in the Humanities. Ha! Great. Why would I ever want to finish my degree?

So you tell me: What made me a whore? It wasn’t sex work. I got into sex work because I wanted bouncers, distance, control, agency, choice, money, and all that freedom that I’m well aware you don’t like. I got into sex work to capitalize off of what was always and already, my objectification. And before you call me a capitalist, please know that I am not. But this is a capitalist society. And I do seem to be reduced to my sex no matter how smart or competent I might try to be.

No. I got into sex work because I don’t care what men think. I don’t want their love. I don’t want their approval. I don’t want their advice. I just want their cash, after which point I want appropriate behavior, and then I’d like them to go away.

As for Playboy… I get it. It’s probably the premiere magazine in which the Beauty Industry and the Sex Industry overlap most overtly. And that is a problem. But it does have an impressive readership as well as a history of fabulous interviews with intellectuals. Further, the sexism is not denied and the women do get paid. It’s not free as you indicated in The New Statesman. Sex workers are hustlers, if nothing else. We want money, not to be told by the 50 billionth schmuck that we’re “fuckable.” We know we’re “fuckable.” As dumb as you might think sex workers are, we’re crystal clear on this. That’s the business.

But this business doesn’t function with quite the stringent “boy”/”girl” beauty standard bullshit you might expect. Really, this industry is built on fantasy, fetish, and to be perfectly frank, I think shame. There is a performative quality to sex work that has the potential to be very subversive and very political. But mainstream crap is generally just that, and it’s always been regressive and propagandist, not just in the sex industry. My point is – It’s not the only type of sex work out there, even if it is the “norm,” which is, of course, a fiction.

With that said, I can’t say that I have a problem with a fantasy sex world existing, pending it is circumscribed and designated between consenting adults. But I do have a problem when those fantasies start being projected on real people trying to live their lives in peace.

Personally, I am much more disturbed by The Chronicle of Higher Education. This is a supposedly non-sexist, sober-minded American standard that has continuously and seemingly willfully made errors of fact concerning specific allegations of rape and sexual assault on my former campus against one professor in particular. These two cases don’t concern me personally in the slightest, but the negligence with which The Chronicle has addressed them here, here, and here – and the way in which every other news source has parroted Kipnis’ thesis again and again, from Jezebel to NPR to Reason just yesterday – is distressing to me, to say the least. I don’t know what to call it, save a snow job.

I think Kipnis, who repeatedly calls herself a Leftist and a Feminist and then gives not one whit of proof by way of any of her arguments is more damaging to Feminism than Playboy, because she’s more sinister and covert. And if I were to be mad at Noah Berlatsky for being published in Playboy I’d likewise have to be miffed that he’s published by Reason. I mean, Kipnis actually says in her latest interview that she feels sorry for men making 98 cents on their past dollar when women currently make some 70-something cents. Ha! Wow. I honestly can’t wrap my head around this. And she also re-uses the same example of an “anonymous prof and student dating” which she was specifically taken to task for here because it’s from the professor’s testimony only and concerns a rape case that is still being considered.

Anyway, while I do understand that you’re angered by the existence of Playboy, I’d be really happy if you might consider those day-to-day factors which might lead a woman to choose sex work and attack those much bigger issues, as opposed to attacking sex work, itself.

Because, ultimately, I think the main reason that you and Noah butt heads is because you’re trying to deconstruct Femininity and those with less power, when you really might want to start with Masculinity and those with more power. Masculinity is a far more damaging and destructive force than Femininity at the moment, as the two genders are currently culturally coded. And Femininity is put down all the time. Indeed, it’s hard for me to see Whorephobia as anything other than internalized hatred that originates from male violence. Because let’s be honest: We’re called “whore” no matter what we do. Or to quote Emma Goldman:

“Nowhere is woman treated according to the merit of her work, but rather as a sex. It is therefore almost inevitable that she should pay for her right to exist, to keep a position in whatever line, with sex favors. Thus it is merely a question of degree whether she sells herself to one man, in or out of marriage, or to many men. Whether our reformers admit it or not, the economic and social inferiority of woman is responsible for prostitution.”

Anyway, I’m rather sorry this is so long and I sincerely thank you if you made it to the end. I don’t want to start a feud with you and I don’t want to convert you. Indeed, I don’t really expect anything from you. But I did want to share my perspective with you because I am angry, I am Feminist, I am activist (albeit despite myself), but my traumas and targets seem to be a bit different than yours. It sort of seems a shame that we should be on different sides. But then, I suppose it takes all kinds.

Take care, and thanks for your time, Meghan. – Nix

Is Fury Road Really All That Feminist?

Posted on May 25, 2015 by Philip Smith

I read a few reviews of Fury Road, then, with my expectations set suitably high, I went to watch it. The main point that struck me as I sought to reconcile what I had read with what I was seeing, was how readily some seem to be to award the title ‘feminist’. Men’s rights activist Aaron Clarey called the film ‘Feminist Propaganda’ (I am not linking to his review because I don’t want to give him the hits, but go ahead and google him if you must). Kyle Pinion of The Beat described the film as a ‘feminist blockbuster’. His review went on:

[I]t’s one of the most feminist action films in recent memory. Fury Road centers on a group of women taking their own agency and pushing against patriarchal rule. While this franchise has always had an undercurrent of pacifist themes, Miller has laser-focused his message, to a point where one interaction at the midway point of the film ends up stating the obvious: this is what happens when old white men run the world unchecked. That may rankle some feathers in the audience, but this is an action movie that isn’t just empty spectacle or aiming for the lowest common denominator. This is a motion picture that’s actually about something with a strong point of view, and that’s worth standing up and applauding for. It’s basically the film equivalent of an album by The Clash dropping in the middle of a sea of bad arena rock.

Furiosa (Theron) is, indeed, a strong female character leading freed female slaves (who we see symbolically stepping out from the jagged chastity belt of male power) to what she heavily implies will be an Amazon-style eco-feminist utopia. She shoots better than Max, is as tough as he is, and makes many of the major decisions in the film. Even her apparent breakdown is brief and expressed not through uncontrollable sobbing but by falling to the knees Platoon-style. She does not become embroiled in a romance plot and, at the end of the film, appears set to lead a large group of people.

The film does, further, suggest that patriarchal dictatorships are a bad thing – Furiosa has liberated the harem of an altogether despicable warlord named Joe. The all-female group who the characters later encounter are Amazon warriors in the sense that they are competent, comparatively democratic, mutually-supportive, and (perhaps) ecologically-minded. So far, so laudable.

The feminist reading collapses there, however. The mcguffin of the film is a group of five women (what NY Daily News calls ‘the beauties’) who spend the majority of the story being beautiful, inept, and providing reaction shots for explosive spectacle. Rescuing the women (and the death of one of the women) serve as the primary motivation for the male characters and one female outlier. These women are not people in any meaningful sense – they are in equal parts prop and chorus for the main actors in the story. The first time we see them proper they are hosing one another with water. They are pictured in parts rather than as a whole, scantily-clad, nipples erect, and apparently unaware of the camera’s presence. The sequence is a depressingly textbook example of Mulvey’s male gaze theory. This is disappointing but hardly surprising. It is, if anything, par for the course for a blockbuster action film.

What concerns me is that one is presented as though it excuses the other – that once the film has established its feminist credentials it feels that it has a free pass to indulge the male gaze and present certain female characters as the prize in a wholly phallic contest between male agents.

The central slogan of the women’s escape is that women should not be kept as slaves. They make sure we get this point by painting it on the walls of their cell before they depart. Female slavery is, of course, a very real problem. Even if we set aside imprisonment through economic and social systems, there are women today who are literally kept as slaves. I am not sure that Fury Road is quite the venue to address this issue, though. The majority of the audience for this film, I would hope, are not in a position where they are undecided whether or not the trafficking of women is a bad thing. As a feminist assertion, therefore, the statement that women are people and that people are not property is something of a low bar, and an argument, one would hope, that only has relevance to human traffickers and wavering sociopaths.

An argument could be made, however, that raising awareness of these issues (albeit very indirectly) is important and if this were the central message of the film, even as a relatively uncontroversial assertion, I would still read it as largely positive. The presence of a group of women, however, who lack agency and, to all intents and purposes, are treated as objects in the context of the film, undermines the message. What we are left with is a movie which alternately gestures toward a feminist message while simultaneously offering the female body as erotic spectacle. It tells us that women are people while simultaneously treating the majority of the female cast as objects.

P. Marie, Zoe Samudzi, and Julia Serano on Feminist Exclusion

Posted on April 27, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

Last week I wrote a piece about Laverne Cox’s nude photoshoot for Allure and how various feminisms have often failed black women and trans women. The piece was in particular a response to a post by Meghan Murphy in which she criticized Cox in what I argued were transphobic, racist, and cruel terms.

For my essay I conducted several interviews — but as often happens, I was only able to use little bits of them. The interviews were all really thoughtful and enlightening, though, and it seemed a shame to waste them. So I asked folks if it would be okay to reprint them here, and everyone (including Playboy) kindly agreed. All the interviews are below, from shortest to longest responses, more or less. My questions are in italics; answers are of course by the interviewees.
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P. Marie is a former sex worker; she blogs a mix of trash, nail art, and selfies at pmariejust.tumblr.com and @_peech on twitter.

Why has feminism and radical feminism had trouble respecting black women?

As far as I can see, the problem can be boiled down to (among many things) entitlement and a sense of ownership. For decades, white feminism has said things like “being a voice for the voiceless” – essentially taking ownership of the voices (and bodies) of Black women, sex workers, and Transgender people through exclusion and subscribing to violent, racist, and transphobic rhetoric.

While at points in history, speaking up to protect others was necessary and desired by us from them, it’s now turned into a clear case of overbearing entitlement and greed for the spotlight. Opportunistic hatred is published quickly and easily by both news houses and blogs with large followings, giving bigoted white feminists a platform to share their trash with a digital megaphone.

The shame in all this is how difficult it seems for feminists as a community to see this happening as often as it does.

With dangerous ideas like “women born women”, the new emergence of the “rescue industry”, and anti sex work and anti black feminists these newest waves of feminism are going on the offensive and becoming more harmful by the day. The problem blooms larger when the actuality of “being the voice for the voiceless” is comprised solely of ignoring people who are willing to speak for themselves. Feminism isn’t helping anyone anymore – unless helping yourself to take the stage by way of abusing women you don’t like counts, and I don’t think it should.

Could you talk just briefly as a black woman and a sex worker what your reaction to the Laverne Cox photos are? Is it empowering or satisfying to see black women recognized as beautiful in that way? Do you see sexualized images of black women as a problem at all, or does it depend on agency/the situation?

As for my reaction to Laverne’s pictures, I feel a sense of happiness for her. She’s done interviews and spoken about her self esteem/appearance, and to see her be able to have those photos done and (very obviously) look and feel so beautiful, what a happy moment. It helps me as an individual when I see any Black woman feeling beautiful and sharing that with the world – reminding people we ARE beautiful, desirable, feminine, and strong – which is exactly, thankfully, what Laverne Cox has done for us.

When it comes to sexualized images of us, for me it’s all about agency! Did we consent? Are we respected? Is this our choice? Is this a collection of body parts or erased humanity? There are a lot of questions that run through my mind at that intersection of sex work and being a Black woman.

What Laverne Cox did put a smile on many faces and some hope in a lot of hearts. I think there are very few better things a person could do in life.
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Zoe Samudzi is a researcher and activist; she’s a project assistant at UCSF. You can follow her on twitter, @ztsamudzi.

Could you talk just briefly about how some strains of radical feminism have marginalized black women and trans women? Like, specifically, why does feminism have trouble embracing those groups? Are the reasons linked?

It isn’t just radical feminism, but also mainstream White Feminism that has targeted and excluded women of color, sex workers, trans women, and others marginalized identities. But these radical second wave feminisms emerged in reaction to traditional femininity, a part of which is female sexuality, which they characterized as “slavery to patriarchy.” These radical feminisms, in my opinion, don’t even feign inclusivity: there’s a very prescriptive understanding of what emancipation and liberation looks like and in the rejection of femininity, it fails to recognize women’s agency (including sexual agency). Couple this misogynistic demonization of femininity with the general devaluing of certain bodies and identities – black women, trans women, and sex workers most notably – and you have shaming, commentaries about “self-objectification” (actually the imposition of the male gaze) when women pose nude, refusal to recognise sex workers as agents, and so on. This exclusion and marginalisation links to white female entitlement and the refusal to de-center whiteness. White women have historically been perpetrators of violence against black women’s bodies, and the same entitlement and identity-centerdness in feminism has enabled them to proclaim themselves as the arbiters of womanhood. It’s also worth nothing that it isn’t just radical feminism that has marginalized trans women and sex workers: that has and does happen in black feminism/womanism, as well.

Do you see fashion images of black women as disempowering? empowering? Some mix of both? Do black women have a different relationship to objectification/sexualization than white women do?

I guess I don’t pay them much attention, but the models are gorgeous. Beyond being empowering or disempowering, I see fashion images of black women as promoting similar discouraging messages about body images as white ones. But black women lend an element of “cool” and afford a cultural capital to fashion that white models to not (they’re always thrown in there for some performance of athleticism or exoticism). The objectification of black women is both gendered and racialized: there’s not only a gendered sexualization, but also a fetishization as an exotic radicalised “other.”

I know you don’t identify as a feminist right now…I guess I wondered what feminism would have to do to get you back? What needs to change before you’d feel comfortable identifying as a feminist again?

I don’t think I’ll ever identify as a feminist again, though there’s a tremendous amount of scholarship in marginal feminisms (i.e. from sex workers, in transfeminism, from migrant/immigrant women, from disabled women, from women in the Global South, and so on). I’m not spending any more energy trying to convince white women that my identity is worthy: I’d rather invest my energy in gender politics grounded in intersectional understandings, as womanism is.
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Julia Serano is a trans feminist and author. Her most recent book is Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive.

Why has feminism been so resistant to including trans women?

There was a time when most feminists (like society at large) were very resistant toward trans women, largely because of misconceptions that people in general had about us. But with increasing trans awareness over the last ten or twenty years, most strands of feminism now acknowledge (and sometimes ally with) trans people and issues. One major exception has been trans-exclusive radical feminists (often called TERFs).

While they may differ to some degree in their perspectives, most TERFs subscribe to a single-issue view of sexism, where men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed, end of story. This rigidly binary view of sexism erases transgender perspectives. It leads TERFs to view trans men as “dupes” or “traitors” who have bought into patriarchy’s insistence that being a man is superior to being a woman. This framing also leads them to depict trans women as entitled men who are “infiltrating” women’s spaces and “parodying” women’s oppression, or as “gender-confused” or androgynous people who transition to female in some hapless attempt to “assimilate” into the gender binary. Which is so bizarre that they think that, because no one in the straight mainstream views out trans women as being well-respected legitimate gendered citizens!

Is that linked to, or how is it linked to, feminism’s discussions of objectification, or with its discomfort with sex workers/sexualized portrayals of women?

Yes. Their single-issue view of sexism (i.e., men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed, end of story) ignores intersectionality—the fact that there are many forms of sexism and marginalization that exacerbate one another, and that people who experience multiple forms of marginalization may view sexism (and feminist responses to sexism) very differently.

Some feminists (including many trans-exclusionary ones) forward the following overly simplistic argument: In patriarchy, men sexualize and objectify women, therefore women should avoid being sexualized and objectified, because it is inherently disempowering and anti-feminist. This seems to be the case that Meghan Murphy is making. But it ignores the fact that all women are not seen and interpreted the same in the eyes of society. If you happen to be a disabled woman, or a woman of color, or a queer or trans woman, or a sex worker, then you are also constantly receiving messages that you are *not* considered desirable or loveable according to society’s norms.

Feminists have long discussed the “virgin/whore” double-bind: If we express our sexualities and/or expose our bodies, many people will sexualize and objectify us. But if we repress our sexualities and hide our bodies, that also has negative ramifications, especially for those of us who are deemed to be non-normative or undesirable for some reason or another.

I completely understand why, in a world that constantly attempts to erase and eradicate trans women of color, Laverne Cox might feel that that photo-shoot might be empowering for her and for other trans women who share similar identities, backgrounds, or circumstances. This does not by any means imply that they are “buying into the system”—rather, it most likely means that they are navigating their own way through society’s mixed messages (e.g., women are seen as sexual objects, but at the same time, trans women and women of color are viewed as sexually deviant, undesirable, or sexual abominations).

Laverne Cox is an outspoken feminist who has been raising public awareness about sexism and multiple forms of marginalization for several years now. Given that history, Murphy’s response seemed especially condescending to me. It is okay for feminists to disagree. But when you accuse someone who is creating positive change in so many ways of “reinforcing” sexism (especially when they face obstacles that you do not have to face), then you should probably consider whether you are the one who is “holding back the movement” by excluding women who differ in their experiences from you.

The Handmaid’s Tale and Bad Slavery Comparisons

Posted on January 4, 2015 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared on Splice Today.
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According to Godwin’s Law, whoever compares their opponents to Hitler first in an online argument loses. Maybe it’s time to develop a similar rule of thumb for comparisons to chattel slavery. Stop Patriarchy an activist group which presents itself as fighting for reproductive rights in Texas has been especially busy recently in promulgating poorly thought through slavery comparisons, as in this tweet. “BREAK THE CHAINS! BREAK! BREAK! THE CHAINS! IF WOMEN DON’T HAVE RIGHTS WE ARE NOTHING BUT SLAVES.” Just to make sure you don’t think it’s a one-off mistake, their twitter bio helpfully declares, “End Pornography & Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women!”

Local Texas anti-abortion groups have responded by fervently telling Stop Patriarchy to cut it out and go away. The all caps declamations do make you wonder though; why on earth does Stop Patriarchy think this is a good idea? What exactly is the comparison supposed to accomplish? What is appealing in taking this other, different oppression and casting it in the language of slavery? Is it just a particularly clumsy way to say, “curtailing reproductive rights is really bad”? Or what?

One way to answer that question is to consider one of the most famous feminist novels of the last thirty years: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood’s novel, published in 1985, is set in a dystopian near future in which right-wing family-values religious fanatics have taken control of the United States. The nameless protagonist and narrator was a librarian prior to the coup. The new rulers stripped her of her money, her profession, and her child and marriage, the last of which is considered invalid since her husband was previously divorced. She is forced by the new government of Gilead to become a Handmaid, assigned to various important men as a kind of official mistress, in hopes that she will bear them children — an imperative since chemical and radioactive pollution has sterilized much of the population.

The Handmaid’s Tale clearly owes a debt to other totalitarian dystopias, most notably 1984. But it also borrows liberally from the experiences of non-white women. In fact, the novel’s horror is basically a nightmare vision in which white, college-educated women like Atwood are forced to undergo the experiences of women of color.

This transposition is not especially subtle, nor meant to be. Handmaids wear red, full-body coverings and veils which reference the burqa. In case the parallel isn’t sufficiently obvious, Atwood has her narrator directly compare the Handmaids waiting to perform their procreative duties to “paintings of harems, fat women lolling on divans, turbans on their heads, or velvet caps, being fanned with peacock tails, a eunuch in the background standing guard.” The narrator has been teleported into an Orientalist fever dream, the irony only emphasized early in the novel by a group of modern, Japanese tourists, who stare at the debased Occidental women just as Westerners stereotypically stare at the debased women of the Orient. The stigma against Islam is leveraged along with, and blurs into, the stigma against prostitutes; the horror here is that middle-class, college-educated white women will be forced into the position of sex workers.

Slave experiences are appropriated with similar bluntness. The network that secretly ferrets Handmaid refugees over the border to Canada in the novel is called, with painful obliviousness, the Underground Femaleroad. We learn, in an aside, that the regime hates the song “Amazing Grace” — originally an anti-slavery song. It’s reference to “freedom” has been repurposed here to apply to Gilead’s gender inequities. The specific oppressions the Handmaids face also seem lifted from slave experience — they have their children taken from them; they are not allowed to read; they need passes to go out; if they violate any of innumerable rules, they are publicly hanged. The tension between white mistresses and black women on slave plantations is even reproduced; the narrator’s Commander wants to see her outside of the proscribed procreation ceremony. She of course can’t refuse — even when she finds out it provokes the commander’s wife to dangerous sexual jealousy. This is a familiar dynamic from any number of slave narratives (12 Years a Slave is a high-profile recent example) with the one difference that here, not just the oppressor, but the oppressed, is white.

Atwood is hardly the first science-fiction author to create a white future from elements of past non-white oppression. As I’ve written before , this kind of reversal is central to the genre; H.G. Wells, explicitly compares the invasion of the Martians in The War of the Worlds to European colonization of Tasmania. Wells explicitly presents this parallel as a moral lesson; he asks Europeans to imagine themselves in the position of the colonized, and to think about how that would feel. You could argue, perhaps, that Atwood is doing something similar — that she’s trying to get white people, and particularly white women, to imagine themselves in the position of non-white women, and to be more appreciative of and sympathetic to their struggles. You could see The Handmaid’s Tale as analogous to Orange Is The New Black, where a white women is a convenient point of entry to focus on and think about the lives of non-white women.

Orange Is the New Black actually includes Black and Latina women as characters, though.The Handmaid’s Tale emphatically does not. The book does say that the Gilead regime is very racist, but the one direct mention of black people in the book is an assertion of their erasure. The narrator sees a news report which declares that “Resettlement of the Children of Ham is continuing on schedule.” Here Atwood and Gilead seem almost to be in cahoots, resettling black people somewhere else, so that we can focus, untroubled by competing trauma, on the oppression of white people.

Atwood and Gilead are in cahoots in some sense; Atwood created Gilead. You can hear an echo of the writer’s thoughts, perhaps, in Moira, the narrator’s radical lesbian friend, who is not shocked by the Gilead takeover. Instead, the narrator says, “In some strange way [Moira] was gleeful, as if this was what she’d been expecting for some time and now she’d been proven right.” The Handmaid’s Tale presents a world in which white middle-class women are violently oppressed by Christian religious fanatics. As such, it is not just a dystopia, but a kind of utopia, the function of which, as Moira says, is to prove a certain kind of feminist vision right.

That vision is one in which women — and effectively white women — contain all oppressions within themselves. The Handmaid’s Tale is a dream of vaunting, guiltless suffering. Maybe that’s why Stop Patriarchy finds the slavery metaphor so appealing as well. Using slavery as a comparison is not just an intensifier, but a way to erase a complicated, uncomfortable history in which the oppressed can also sometimes be oppressors.

Existential Angst: Men vs. Women in Autobio

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Kim O'Connor

In 1972, the genre of autobiographical comics was born unto us by a mysterious penis with magical powers. Technically, of course, there was a man attached to the penis, though mostly he was just in its thrall. The legacy of that immaculate conception lives on today in the long line of tortured male cartoonists who express intense dissatisfaction with their lives and art via detailed accounts of everything they have ever done or imagined doing with their genitals.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. As with any subgenre, some works of dick-centric autobio are good, some are bad, and some are in between. Justin Green is not just first, but also probably the finest, of its lauded practitioners, including Robert Crumb, Ivan Brunetti, Joe Matt, and Chester Brown (to name just a few). Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is not exactly a meditation on Green’s struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder, but is a visceral account of what it’s like to live with that condition—and the way in which Green rendered his interiority still strikes me as singular in what has since become a very crowded category.

In Binky Brown we see two interwoven themes that appear with great frequency in autobio: sexual obsession and the torturous act of cartooning.

Cartooning is hard, god knows, especially when you’d rather be doing PEEN STUFF. The tough compromise that some men have made is to simply draw their dicks constantly, very often sacrificing any semblance of story or self-respect in the name of their art, such as it is.

Recently, I was reminded of the inalienable right of tortured male cartoonists to create work — entire catalogs of work — about their dicks when I read this “positive” review of The Truth Is Fragmentary at The Comics Journal, where reviewer John Seven explores Gabrielle Bell’s conflicted relationship with making art. Within it is a note of condescension that is perhaps most palpable as the review begins.

Poor Gabrielle Bell. You’d think a cartoonist’s life would be perfect for her loner tendencies, but she’s constantly having to deal with being flown to comics events around the world and facing expectations to interact with the community that comes with cartooning. She doesn’t always do so well.

Which sure, Bell writes a lot about loneliness and social awkwardness, but the subtext here is that she whines about it. There is an implicit question — Why on earth would she complain about her “perfect” cartoonist’s life? — followed by an implicit answer. The poor gal simply can’t handle the basic functions of her job.

Antisocial behavior is, of course, celebrated in men’s autobio, which rarely traffics in stories about friendship (as Bell’s often do) or even feature any round character that is not the protagonist — or, more specifically, the protagonist’s penis, which is all at once the hero, the villain, and the love interest of his story. Anyway, it’s not until much later in the review that Seven (who seems to hold Bell’s work in high regard) begins to ask much more explicit questions about his subject.

Why does [Bell] challenge herself to these diaries when she also often mentions how dissatisfied she is by the prospect of doing them? What is she trying to attain by sharing these works that could easily function as private, daily exercises in cartooning of no interest to anyone else but the cartoonist?

Why, indeed, is Bell a cartoonist at all? Can you imagine a reviewer asking this existential question of one of the tortured men of autobio?

Mr. Spiegelman, gee, you don’t look so hot. Are you sure about this comics thing? Maybe you should take a break. Adjust your meds. Lie down or something.

Heyyyyyy Ivan. You okay, buddy? Couldn’t help but notice that you constantly draw yourself committing suicide. Have you ever considered keeping those thoughts to yourself?

Justin Green. Dude. I know your penis is about to invent a whole new art form, but are you sure it’s worth THIS?!

These questions seem preposterous because when men share their inner worlds, whether they’re glorified bathroom wall graffiti or something more sophisticated, we automatically see those thoughts and feelings as worthy of being shared. No justification is required. And if those men have to endure some sort of trial or struggle to get that art out into the world, all the better. The comics world loves nothing more than some good old-fashioned MANGST.

Of course, Seven writing about Bell is just one example of how comics culture questions the very existence of a women’s autobio. Lest you think this phenomenon is limited to male critics — or to critiques of Bell — I’m very sorry to report a conversation I once had with a well respected lady cartoonist who spoke to me at length about her distaste for women’s autobio, which she considers frivolous. She singled out, among others, Vanessa Davis, whose charming work she referred to as “teenage twaddle” that “should have not been printed.”

I can’t tell you how irritated I am that they use perfectly good paper and product and marketing and everything else,” she said. “They put money into such egocentric crap.

Women in autobio can’t win, really. If they portray themselves as happy, their stories are too light to be taken seriously. If they explore any sort of negative emotion, they’re perceived as complaining. And women who mix the two approaches run the risk of being deemed uneven, as in this review of Hyperbole and a Half, where Stacie Williams criticizes Allie Brosh for drawing “relatively frivolous narratives” about “unremarkable activity” alongside her devastating accounts of clinical depression.

The inherent worth of women’s autobio is hardly a given. Its authenticity is constantly called into question — and all too often, the work is found to come up short. Meanwhile, many people labor under the delusion that female cartoonists are accorded the same critical treatment as their male counterparts. I’m reminded of those men on the street who are always telling me to smile. Why are Gabrielle Bell’s comics so glum? And what am I so worked up about, anyway? Let’s raise a glass to the latest perk in Bell’s perfect life as a cartoonist: John Seven gave her a good review. :)

Tom Spurgeon Subtweeted Me and All I Got Was This Lousy Long Essay

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Kim O'Connor

I’m a freelance writer who occasionally writes about comics. I’m sort of an outsider to comics criticism and reporting; I came to it two years ago when I wrote a long piece on truth in autobiographical comics for The Awl.

Recently , Pacific Standard ran an interview I did with Hillary Chute, a comics scholar. On Twitter, I couldn’t help but notice when Tom Spurgeon mentioned it:

i admire the work and writing of Hillary Chute, but Lucy Shelton Caswell was writing a/b comics in an academic milieu before Chute was born

writers, please, there’s no reason to shape the past to serve a distillation that reads well in a modern article; i can do better, too

I’d like to explain how I interpreted his words about my work, pausing first to acknowledge the obvious fact that there’s something distasteful about parsing someone’s subtweets (at least in public). It feels undignified. I’m doing it anyway because it’s a near-perfect case study in how comics criticism is systemically closed to women.

Here’s a gloss of what Spurgeon’s subtweets said to me:

Why did I write about THIS woman in an academic milieu? I should have written about THAT one…even though she retired like five years ago.
Tom Spurgeon knows who the real foremost comics scholar is. His ruling on the matter is final and implicitly correct. It is impossible for another writer to have a valid, but different, opinion.
Further, he feels the onus upon him to dispense writing advice to his brethren. “Writers, please…” Everyone gather round so Tom can tell you how to be.
But he disguises his presumption with faux humility: he “can do better, too.” Better, in this case, meaning two pompous subtweets.
He questions my journalistic integrity, saying I “shape the past” to serve an agenda. A nasty little thing to say about a professional writer, even in a subtweet.
That agenda, according to Spurgeon, was “to serve a distillation that reads well in a modern article.” Note the negative value judgment here on distillation, reads well, and modern. Are those things bad?

In summary, he suggested there is only one female comics scholar(-ish person) worth writing about, questioned my integrity, and used my work as an example of what comics critics must never do. And he got to do ALL OF THAT without ever saying my name or directly referencing the piece. I mean, why would he? To him, it wasn’t even real for the simple reason that he disagreed with it.

All critics should try to seek out opinions that are different than their own, but with vaunted experts like Spurgeon, the stakes are even higher. As one of the foremost figures in comics writing, he has a professional responsibility to think twice before trashing new perspectives and alternative approaches to his field. He seems like a vocal advocate for diversity, but how does he expect his insular world to open up if he isn’t willing to entertain the possibility that someone who doesn’t share his view isn’t just a hack?

I’m lucky to be old enough and confident enough in my talent that Tom Spurgeon’s opinion doesn’t impact my sense of self-worth. But I suspect his lack of regard might have been deeply discouraging to a younger woman, especially one who hoped to seriously pursue writing about comics. When I think about that, and about how he broadcast his ridiculous proclamations on what a critic should be to his 14k followers—who, again, give his opinion on these matters special weight—I feel mad as hell and perversely amused. I have read the same tone in other women’s comments when they write about sexism in comics.

Which brings me to another tweet of Spurgeon’s I saw earlier in the week.

dear professional friends that happen to be women — please stop writing me and start posting

He wasn’t talking to me, of course, and I know he meant well, but boy, did that stick in my craw. This sort of “encouragement” has seemed to me a common refrain from male critics as the conversation about The Comic Journal’s woman problem has revived itself over the last few weeks. Stop complaining and start writing. Be the change you want to see! This sentiment is, in itself, deeply shitty because it suggests that women themselves are the root of the problem (for not writing enough) and they themselves should fix it (by just writing more). Quit whining and get to work! It’s a line of thinking that conveniently ignores the environment that prevents so many women from writing comics criticism for outlets like TCJ in the first place.

I strongly believe that Spurgeon and Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler at TCJ (and many other guys) really would love to see more criticism from women writers. But the time has come to shift the focus from listening to what people SAY to analyzing what they DO.

It is perhaps worth noting that my Chute piece criticized The Comics Journal for having a homepage where every single piece was authored by a man. This is nothing that people in the comics community don’t already know. I received a (friendly, complimentary) message from TCJ explaining that one of the interviews on their homepage was actually written by a woman. When I pointed out that it hadn’t been there at the time I was writing, they said “No worries.” I had not apologized.

What kind of mindset does it take to read “yeah, but your site was all male critics literally four days ago” (to paraphrase) and interpret it as an apology? Were they proud of that one piece written by a woman, I wonder? Why mention it at all if they had, as they hastened to add, taken my larger point seriously? (They also said they were working on it. How? Rethinking their commenting policy seem like a step in the right direction, but what else is in the works?) Dan and Tim strike me as likeable, smart, thoughtful people, but sexism is so endemic to the culture of comics criticism that good men often miss the point, even when you plainly lay it out for them, as Heidi MacDonald and Nicole Rudick (at Tom Spurgeon’s site) and many others have before me.

Why do women favor platforms that aren’t dedicated organs of comics criticism? Because those are the places they feel welcome. If TCJ wants more women to start writing for them, they need to apologize for their shameful lack of diversity on their Twitter and their blog and anywhere else where there’s the (admittedly off) chance that someone outside their circle of middle-aged male insiders might hear them. They should create a page on their website that outlines what they’re looking for in a pitch instead of burying the submissions email in a single line in their FAQs. The new submissions page, too, should include a prominent pledge to diversity. They should recruit graduate students or women that have been writing for free at other sites and offer those people choice reviews instead of letting them get claimed by the same five guys who always do them. (I don’t know the exact demographics of TCJ’s regular contributors, but I suspect they’d do well to keep an eye out for gay people and people of color, too.) Offer some of these new voices regular columns. Be proactive! I don’t even think it’d be that hard!

But to return to Spurgeon: subtweeting makes having a critical dialogue near impossible. I would have just replied or sent an email if I hadn’t felt uninvited to do so, but alas here we are. (Even now, some dude who’s reading this thinks I’m a self-obsessed bitch.) Given the closed-off milieu in which he works, if Spurgeon wishes to denigrate a woman’s piece in a public forum, I encourage him to do so in a more direct fashion. But I suggest he come correct instead of offering up his conflicting opinion as though its truth is self-evident like some Grand Poobah of Comics. Deep expertise has its advantages, but so do fresh eyes.

This is a story about my personal experience, but it isn’t really about me. I doubt anyone connected Spurgeon’s subtweets to me, and even if they did, no one cares—me least of all. But being aware of the conversation about women and comics criticism that’s ongoing, it was sort of fascinating to receive a critique in which I myself had been so thoroughly erased. My anger comes not from a place of sour grapes, but of imagining how that might feel to a woman who aspires to someday sit at the lunch table with Spurgeon and Gary Groth or smaller dragons like Sean T. Collins and Rob Clough. And by the way, as the community wonders how to encourage women writers, they’d do well to look to Clough, who has been, in my limited experience, a really kind and generous mentor. Please make him your king.

While I do not aspire to expertise, it is my fervent hope that some other woman will. (The dying relevance of TCJ is often overstated; I think it will persist in history in a way that the disparate pieces that people like me write for other markets simply cannot.) I’m sorry to say that I find the prospect very unlikely. Why would someone put herself through it? People in that world behave badly and they don’t even know it, and those are the good guys.

The world—in comics and around it—is changing, but then it always has been. I think life must be hard for men who appoint themselves the docents of something that never existed. I wish Spurgeon the best.
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Editor’s Note: Tom Spurgeon replies in comments below.

Tim Hodler of TCJ also replies in comments.

Men, Women, and Virgins

Posted on June 3, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Much of the discussion around the recent murders at Santa Barbara has centered around the fact that the killer, Elliot Rodger, was a virgin, and wrote a manifesto in which he linked his rage and violence to the fact that he had not had sex. Some media outlets have labeled him as the “virgin killer”, and others have talked about how virginity weighs on men.

As somebody who was a virgin into my late 20s, I agree that virginity can be painful for men. But I think it’s important to realize that it doesn’t just weigh on men. The idea that men, in particular, are diminished when they are virgins, or that men, in particular, are sad and lonely in their teen years, risks falling into Rodger’s warped view of the world, in which women are only important, or only thought of, in relation to male desires — as sexual objects who satisfy men or make men miserable, but don’t have any desires or problems themselves.

The truth is, there are many women, just like there are many men, who are virgins into their late teens and beyond. One of them was my friend, Megan (a pseudonym). She and I talked last week about virginity, gender, and miosygny.

Noah: So, I guess I thought I’d start by asking you why you don’t like the term “virgin”?

Megan: It’s just horribly binaristic. Women are this and men are that, women’s bodies do this and men’s bodies do that. What does “virgin” MEAN, anyway? One who has never had vaginal sex? That’s the common definition. But there are plenty of situations in which a person could be sexually active, sexually FULFILLED even, without vaginal sex being involved.

Basically, I feel like I “lost my virginity” 5 years before I started having vaginal sex.

At about 13-14 years old, I reacted to my first understanding of misogyny, and what it does, and how I didn’t do a fucking thing to deserve it, by thinking that I could slip the noose if I just distanced myself from femininity, as far as I possibly could. I think a lot of girls do that. Some women keep doing it their whole lives. I just tried as hard as I could not to be perceived as female. I remember something that happened when I was about 16–I made a comment about a guy, somebody I thought was cute, and a male friend of mine who was a couple years older was just horrified at the idea that I actually had a sexuality. So I guess I did a pretty good job going full tomboy. The end result was, I didn’t fuck anybody as a teenager, or in college. I went on a couple of dates. I let a guy see my tits once. He didn’t really like me that much.

Then, when I was 22, I went to get my first pap smear, and found out that I had a hymen that was basically made out of Teflon, and would have to be removed surgically, under general anesthesia, if I ever wanted to have vaginal sex.

So it was just as well I’d always been uncomfortable with my femininity and clueless about how to interest guys sexually.

I went ahead and had the surgery, when I was 22, but then–this sounds so stupid–it took me five whole years to actually figure out how vaginal sex worked. How to get it in, you know? I just had no experimentation period whatsoever before that point. I could never even wear a tampon.

So, the way I feel about it is, I stopped being a virgin when I was 22, pre-surgery, and had an orgasm for the first time with somebody else in the room. That’s basically my working definition of virginity. But if that’s the definition, then virgin birth is actually really common.

I mean, obviously we need words to explain our sexual history to each other. But I think “I have no sexual experience” or “I’ve done X but not Y” are perfectly good replacements for “I’m a virgin.”

Noah: Talking about how you feel that the term “virgin” doesn’t fit your experience reminds me of my own struggles with terminology around being a virgin. Specifically, through college, and into my 20s, I would wonder, somewhat idly, if I really counted as heterosexual, or if the term fit. I wasn’t having sex with anyone, it didn’t feel like I was every going to have sex with anyone, did I count as heterosexual? Obviously you look back and say, well that’s ridiculous, but I think it gets at the way that labels, and narratives about how identity works or what you should be can produce lots of anxieties in lots of different ways when you don’t fit into the mold the way you’re supposed to.

I was curious about that too, from your perspective. I’ve talked a bit in my pieces about this about how a lot of anxiety around being a virgin, for me, was less some sort of physical or emotional need per se and more about feeling like I just wasn’t doing things right, like I wasn’t being a man correctly. And I suspect that’s why it’s hard for guys to acknowledge often in these conversations that female virgins even exist. or that girls can’t have sex anytime they want, automatically. Failing to have sex in the right way seems like it’s so tied up with not being a man in the right way, so then, girls don’t have to be men, so how could they have a problem here?

I guess I’m curious what pressures you felt in terms of having sex. It seems sort of complicated, since you were saying that at least for a while you were actively trying to not be a girl by not being sexual, or by being a tomboy. Was there some point where that stopped and you felt like you weren’t performing femininity correctly? Or were you anxious or depressed about not having sex until your twenties?

Megan: Oh God, yeah, so anxious and depressed!

The whole thing about being a tomboy was that maybe it helped me avoid the gaze of some sexual predators in high school–I know they were there, they preyed on my friends–but I was still (mostly) heterosexual, and I wanted male attention, and femininity was all guys seemed to look at. I was invisible, for better or worse.

But I wasn’t completely invisible. There were a couple of guys who did look at me. They weren’t the guys I wanted. I think that’s the case with almost everybody, even the UCSB shooter–there’s probably someone in the world who’ll fuck you. You might not see them, for whatever reason. They might not be up to your standards. You might have completely unrealistic standards, like most misogynists do.

The unrealistic standards that the PUAHate crowd think women hold men to are nothing in comparison to the stringency of their own fantasy standards for women.

It occurs to me that the PUAHate crowd are projecting their own hatred of femininity onto women, by assuming that hypermasculinity is the only thing women desire. They have no idea what women want. How could they know? They can’t even hear us when we talk.

I never wanted an alpha male. I never wanted money or a nice car or great big biceps. I like smart guys who wear glasses and care about art and can make me laugh.

Noah: Ha! I don’t think that’s especially unusual.

I think for me at least it wasn’t just about the wrong standards. There was a woman or two maybe who was interested in me who I wasn’t interested in, but there were also a number of women who were interested, who I thought were attractive and would have been happy to date.

But I just couldn’t figure out the cues. Like, not with great frequency or anything, but a few times, a woman would ask me out, and we’d go out, and we’d have a good time…and that would be the end of it more or less because I was too shy to try to kiss them when I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. You sort of talk about this a little, but at some point the actual physical mechanics, and not knowing how they work, becomes this huge barrier. Which I think has a lot to do with the expectation (self-expectation as much as anything) that you’re supposed to know what you’re doing, and the fear that you don’t and will somehow make a fool of yourself if you give it a try and it doesn’t work.

So was there something of a double bind for you? You felt that if you were feminine, you’d end up getting stalked and treated as a sexual object only, but when you presented as a tomboy you became asexual and unwanted?

Megan: The double bind is a good phrase… I feel like that’s the essential state of being female within patriarchy, you’re always in a double bind.

Noah: Julia Serano in Excluded talks about double binds as the basic way that all prejudice works; you get marked as other, and then no matter what you do, you’re wrong because you’re marked. If you have sex you’re a slut, if you don’t have sex you’re broken or wrong.

I think for men it’s not really a double bind; more a measure against an impossible standard, where you always fail to one extent or another. Less about losing whatever you choose, and more anxiety about hierarchy.

Megan: I think women get a little more leeway in the “knowing what you’re doing” area… We’re allowed, culturally, to let men take the lead, sexually. But that was a moot point when I was invisible.

I don’t know if this is relevant to anything… The first experience I had with a guy who did look at me went pretty badly wrong. It didn’t amount to sexual assault, but he just kept touching me in ways I didn’t want. Even when I bluntly told him I didn’t want them. I wound up fending him off with a chair. He left me alone after that. This was when I was about 15.

He presented as a male feminist. Sometimes he wore skirts. He was Different From The Other Guys. Except not where it really mattered.

Noah: Christ. I think it’s really relevant to a discussion of virginity to think about the fact that for a not insignificant number of women especially, a first sexual experience is of some form of sexual assault. That can happen to guys too, but it seems much less frequent. I could be wrong, but my sense is that guys who are virgins can feel completely desexed and unsexual in a way that doesn’t tend to happen to women in the same way. But the flip side of that of course is that women are never quite desexualized in that way because they’re always objectified and seen as fair game for sexual violence.

I don’t know. Does that ring true to you?

Megan: I think there may be women who feel that way, desexed and unsexual, because they can’t get laid… But I may not be understanding you correctly.

I remember having a vague desire during my tomboy phase to have breast reduction surgery, not just because being a D-cup interfered with the way I presented, visually, or because of male reactions to my breasts, but because they didn’t feel appropriate to the state of my soul, in some way. I felt like I was meant to be an A-cup.

I also remember having a feeling that I was going to rot, curdle, go wrong inside, if I stayed a virgin. I wrote bad teenage poems about it.

Noah: The breast reduction surgery for the state of your soul kind of fits with what I was saying, maybe, though I probably went too far in talking about internal states — I’m sure as you say women can feel desexed too. I think it’s true though that femininity is seen as inherently sexual, so it makes sense that people’s reactions to being desexed, or feelings about being desexed, would be affected by their relationship to gender. Which sounds like what you’re talking about; feeling desexed and so wanting to be less stereotypically feminine physically as well.

Megan: Yeah, I guess you could look at that as an indication that the female body is always coded as sexual. Therefore, if I felt desexed, I needed to change my body. Did you ever feel a disconnect between the state of your body and the state of your sexuality?

Noah: That’s a good question. I think the answer is basically “no.” I wasn’t having any sex, and I felt like my body was awkward and hopeless and undesirable, so everything was as it should be, in that sense.

There was this one instance where there was a party (I never went to parties; this one was unavoidable for logistical reasons I won’t go into) and our very drunk female swim team assistant coach looked up at me and said, “you have really nice legs, Noah!” I was completely at a loss; being a sexual object was more or less utterly at variance with my self-image, so I just sort of ignored her. I don’t think she’d ever spoken a full sentence to me before, and I didn’t put myself in a position where she could later.

I’d imagine that that sort of drive by sexual objectification happens to women more frequently, and often in ways that are considerably less pleasant. Not that it was unpleasant; it was just odd, for me. Lord knows what I would have done if anyone ever actually tried to hit on me.

Megan: Oh man, yeah, I’m just thinking about that scene with the genders reversed. I think a lot of women would find a way to flee the scene as soon as possible if a male acquaintance they weren’t interested in suddenly complimented their legs while very drunk.

Noah: Right; she was older too; in her early 20s and I was a sophomore I think.

Megan: It might be useful contextual information for this whole thing that I grew up in a fairly liberated, feminist household. My father never made me feel less-than because I was a girl, not even once. I had a pretty crappy relationship with my mother but she was openly feminist and did manage to inculcate me with a lot of her values. When I was about 12 I even read through her copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves when she wasn’t around. I had plenty of information; I just never knew why the heck I couldn’t insert a tampon.

If nothing else, it illustrates that even openly feminist parents have a really hard time preventing internalized misogyny from developing in their daughters

Noah: In their sons too, I’d imagine.

I was wondering if you were at all affected by the idea of female virginity as valuable? There is some cultural weight there, and it seems like it could provide some sort of counterbalance to the feelings of worthlessness you talk about, but it doesn’t sound like it did?

Meagan: Re: female virginity and value: I never really felt that. I think, being raised feminist, I associated those ideas with the repressive olden days when my whole worth and function was as a vessel for some man’s heirs. It seemed pre-suffrage, pre-modern and I felt like I was beyond that. I definitely didn’t feel like there was any special allure or cachet in my being a virgin at 22.

Noah: What do you think about discussions of virginity related to the shooting?

Megan: I haven’t read very many. What I have read has been partly focused on male nerd culture. The thing about that culture is that a lot of people within it absolutely refuse to understand that there is such a thing as female nerd culture: “There are no girl gamers.” “Girls don’t read comic books.” They can’t imagine a woman who’s had experiences similar to theirs–rejection, persecution, humiliation. They can’t imagine empathizing with a woman. But every single one of my teen girl friends had a deep internalized sense of rejection, which they got from teen boys. Teen boys are vicious to the girls they don’t want.

That’s not exactly an answer to your question, sorry.

Noah: No; I think it’s an answer! You’re saying that virginity can be linked to male nerd culture in a way that excludes women, or that suggests that women can’t experience pain or sadness. So erasing female virginity becomes a way to erase women’s humanity.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Tag Archives: feminism