Also, per the above, “listen to women” becomes even more important because this stuff is so hard to detect as a man.
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I think a lot of people don’t realize that they don’t know other people well enough to know if they are sexual predators. Like they’d be surprised if someone from their office was a rapist. Well we know a non-negligible fraction of men are rapists to the point that if you work in an office building there are probably several. So that guy you only know to say, “Hello,” who ends up getting arrested for sexual assault or child porn - how is that a surprise? You have no reason to think you would have known.
People think that someone they would see predators. It makes me think of the end of Okkervil River’s Westfall:
“Evil don’t look like anything.”
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I would argue it has a lot to do with how shallow male relationships are expected to be too.
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Yes and no… I’ve had “words” with my younger male family members (20somethings) because they were talking about their one friend Dale. And how Dale, like to pick up very very drunk girls at the end of the night at bars. You know the ones, the ones that have lost their friends and can barely stand. Dale “dates” these girls exclusively see, date being code for one night stands (which is also code I’m sure). And they “jokingly” call him a rapist. And yet… they’re still friends with him. He’s still in the band. He’s still their buddy. They warn their female friends… but girls they don’t know? SOL I guess…
I had to explain that no I don’t think he should confront Dale or talk to him or anything, nothing was going to change him, Dale knows what hes doing and likely won’t change. But… he should really get a better class of friend. Because what happens when you associate with a known rapist… people gonna think you’re a rapist too. I told him to ask his GF and her friend what they thought of Dale. He said “Oh they all hate him.” - so why are you friends with him? No answer for that.
I hope I got through to him? I don’t know if I did, they live in a different province.
But thats what happens when the guys are obvious and blatant and have a “deep” friendship with other men. If they can be upfront about that and face no consequence imagine what they don’t say…
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This, uh, actually happened to me. An executive at the small, local, general contractor I worked for was caught in a hotel room with two underage boys. The guy was kind of a jerk but not someone I had to deal with regularly.
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This always surprises me.
Nope, they certainly can’t.
If there are several in the office, one of them might not be the office weirdo. All of them might be ordinary family men who blend into the scenery.
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I have heard about guys like that, but maybe I had a reputation to not be that way around. I don’t know, the older I get the more I realize that I had atypical friendships with other men.
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And then there’s this gem; I’ve always loved the title, because all the songs are covers!
What a wit Mr. Jones was!
https://divinevarod.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/bowie-pin-ups.jpg
Who’swhatwhohah? I bet the folks were saying when they saw this…
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This thread is great. Really interesting discussion, plus man candy! Could use more man candy though.
I tried writing a longer post but it was shit. Here’s some art I saw today instead.
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Okay, there’s this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qoDJltuRkU
Fembots are objectifying, right? Or “Stepford Wives”, by Ira Levin, which got made…twice (?)
Of course, the male, and preceding, version of Jaime Sommers was Steve Austin, so he got male bad guys for the most part, like John Saxon:
And the big-screen male objects got Yul Brynner:
I guess my point is: Gender objectification of…objects disguised as male or female? I dunno, and how they’re portrayed in film might be a different thread? But in the 1970s, these images and stories were powerful for the young geeks of that era.
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I’m on a roll here, it would so appear…my other favorite man-in-ladies’-style makeup, bending the gendering in the 1970s…see, you ahem younger folks out there mayn’t have been affected as much as us geekzers. (portmanteau, natch, of “geek” and “geezers”, and it’s MINE, lol!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCZDWZFtyWY
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That’s a very topical piece of art. Just an assortment of common household objects!
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If the women in your life don’t like one of your male friends…pay attention.
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Most of my life, I’ve been mistrustful of men, and only really had one close friendship with a guy in my gap years. Once I figure out the crap a guy is hiding from the world, I just can’t go back. And so many people think I’m the asshole for burning bridges.
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Today. After the 1000th time of being ignored and othered and gringoed here in Tijuana, I want you all to know…I get it.
I’m not going to fight it, because I feel it’s not my place. But I get it. I so get it.
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Good call on the Stepford Wives; that’s taking objectification to “a whole 'notha level.”
Double Kudos on posting Frank N Furter; Tim Curry was my first exposure ever to gender-fuck.
And also some more man candy:
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See, and this is an aesthetic preference…I don’t like men with bigger pecs than I. It just doesn’t do anything for me. and I think it has a lot to do with what I saw on TV and in magazines and movies; until “Pumping Iron” came out, the “muscle-y” types/bodybuilder-types weren’t mainstream for women; I’m pretty sure they were popular with gay men, if I remember correctly. (Steve Reeves, et al.)
This guy was popular for a while, though he’s not (to me) developed a bit too much.
In David Niven’s, “Bring on the Empty Horses”, he wrote of Errol Flynn’s Mulholland Farm and Flynn’s yacht, Zaca: " ‘And let me show you the house flag,’ he said as he unfurled a symbolic crowing rooster. ‘A rampant cock, sport, get it? That’s what I am to the world today, goddammit - a phallic symbol.’
“He didn’t smile when he said it.”
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John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing” had a huge impact on me when I first discovered it. It was confirmation of the anxiety and feeling of always being watched that I had experienced since adolescence, as well as my confusion and discomfort with the way women were depicted in art.
Many of you may already be familiar with it, but for those who are not, here is a short article with an excerpt and a video link.
"The female nude in Western painting was there to feed an appetite of male sexual desire. She existed to be looked at, posed in such a way that her body was displayed to the eye of the viewer”
The ideas put forward by Berger and Dibb, which were later published in a best-selling book created with Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, and Richard Hollis, were simple but radical. The female nude in Western painting – hairless, buxom, invariably with skin as white and unblemished as a pearl – was there to feed an appetite of male sexual desire. She did not have desires of her own. She existed to be looked at, posed in such a way that her body was displayed to the eye of the viewer, there only to be consumed. Of course, there was hypocrisy in this, too – “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her,” wrote Berger, “Put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting ‘Vanity,’ thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”
Naturally, the way female bodies were presented culturally as objects to be looked at had an effect on women, on the way they came to see themselves – as a sight, a vision. In the words which opened this article, Berger pins down a feeling which, although perhaps not universal, is familiar to many, many women. It comes with adolescence – maybe the first time a man yells at you from a moving car – and is the sense of living life one step removed, living as your own spectator. You are never yourself, you are yourself as you appear to others. To men, yes, and to the women with whom you are supposed to compete for their attention."
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Also, this!
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