Photography project explores male entitlement and the female experience

boing
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I keep seeing the same ad. I have no idea why. Every time I visit, it’s that Calvin Klein (ugh) ad showing a naked woman having her buttock clenched by a dude. Once in a while it alternates to him being shirtless, not naked.

I’m sorry, but “it’s probably just Google” doesn’t fly. I can’t think of a single thing I’ve visited that would indicate to the Almighty All-Knowing Algorithm that I’m interested in Calvin Klein (ugh) fragrances.

Articulate as always.

I have ill feelings about “Male Tears!” and the traditional role of men, which is that Men Don’t Cry. Yeah, smash the patriarchy…by playing off of traditional gender roles. Well done. Perhaps you’d like to follow it up by asking one of the women who posts here if she’ll fetch you a sandwich, for being such a Nice Guy.

Say, aren’t you the guy who was joking about eating genocide victims on the white privilege thread?

Some people have earned multi-decade bans for less. I see you on every thread being insulting to anyone who dares disagree with your viewpoint, yet you’re still here. How is that?

Honestly, the only reason I find this, and similar things, offensive is because of conversations with my wife.

I’ve asked her before: do you have problems with people catcalling you? Her response: No. Never. It doesn’t happen.

I’ve asked her: have you had problems with people groping you? Her response, again, is no.

And then she said something that struck me like a bolt of lightning: “What does that say about me?”

Meaning, if this is a real phenomenon, she must be hideously unattractive, or otherwise found unworthy, to the kinds of men who treat women like this. And she’s not an unattractive person; if anything, part of the problem is that she just doesn’t notice when someone is mildly hitting on her, something that, going back to college, happened more than once when I was right there next to her.

And it made me wonder: when women say that all women suffer from these things, and we have these photos depicting an thin, attractive woman being groped in highly public situations, including office situations, what are we saying to the women who never experience this?

And for that reason, i feel offended; I know it sounds weird to call people out for excluding unattractive women from the “all women” camp, one of the things our society does is play off of women’s insecurities and try to amplify their insecurities about their physical appearance, but here we are. I’m not even sure I can articulate it properly, something I feel is necessary because there’s definitely a BoingBoing cabal who reads through these and says, “Boy howdy, what ill-worded turn of phrase in this can I take offense to and throw a fit about?”

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While discretion is the better part of valor; brevity, as well as knowing when to cut a punchline off at the knees, a highly-evolved sense of timing, awareness of the audience, consideration of environmental factors, wind direction, humidity, economic indicators, prevailing cross-winds, trending hashtags, the ability to find my mark in what seems like pitch dark to an audience, and a glancing familiarity with 20th-century literary history is the soul of wit.

I think we all learned that from Rosie Geer on our first-pressing of Free to be You and Me.

Nevertheless, I harvest those tears to make my own wine.

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http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html#straw

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[quote=“jangomacinnes, post:21, topic:55268”]
I’ve asked her before: do you have problems with people catcalling you? Her response: No. Never. It doesn’t happen.
[/quote]Have her come to New York anytime and hang out with my wife while they just walk home after work. Really, it’s super fun, she just loves all those compliments. Especially being touched inappropriately on the subway, I hear that’s big fun.

Just because this stuff doesn’t happen to her doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. We don’t have a lot of slavery here in the US so it means we don’t have to try and fix it in, say, Dubai?

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So she says it’s never happened, and you say it’s happened to her a number of times right in front of you.

This means everyone else on the thread is calling her “ugly”? Meanwhile, you’re the one calling her a liar.

All snark aside, women are taught to not even notice such things, or to think of them as “compliments”. That’s how she’s responding to you: not as a brazen liar, but as someone who has been socialized to think and say the right things.

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“Misandry.”

LOLOLOL

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Would it be surprising for you to learn that SEXISM ALSO HARMS MEN and that feminism already addresses that fact?

I’m honestly having a hard time tying your rambling, straw-covered diatribe together, but, yes, in our society, men are seen as weak for crying or showing other emotions (aside from anger or aggression) and that is in fact a concept that co-exists quite neatly with feminism.

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I agree. But I also wonder about how men usually deal with (or are expected to) similar treatment of being groped, etc.

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Quietly and at home alone not telling anyone. It’s not “supposed” to happen to men and any sexual abuse is typically taken as a sign of weakness and shame. The alternative is pride in their virility that they want to be approached, see: any sexual approach by teachers to high school men.

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Men are supposed to love being groped by other women, because men are super horn dogs who always want sexual attention from women, of course! And if you don’t want it, then you’re either a “pussy” or gay or weak.

I hope the sarcasm was obvious.

It sucks for men because they are expected to always want sexual attention from women. That recent statutory rape thread – which I won’t link to because ugh – is a great example.

Also, homophobia is also sexism, but I don’t want to blather on for days.

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unfortunately Boing has really changed over the last 3-5 years

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I’d ask for a refund, if I were you.

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Know what I’m tired of? Caroline’s posts that go out of their way to try to make me feel like being male is something I should be apologising for.

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Soooo… wait. You’re telling us that there is no possible way to understand something, unless you are there and experience it yourself? You do know that people write these things called books, and often those books tell stories about the past, yay? There is a vast literature on women’s history during that era, just FYI.

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I’ve been 'round these parts for about that long. No it hasn’t.

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How old are YOU, I wonder?

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Well, you see… he’s a man. So he just KNOWS things, you know. I mean, I doubt he’s ever read a serious history monograph about gender in the 60s (which I’m sure were INEVITABLY were written by women, because men only write about serious and important stuff, like LBJs nutsack and how MLK was just a philanderer, or how American is the best, most awesome country ever, and the Soviets just SUCKED), but you know, he’s SEEN Mad Men, so he knows it all. /s

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It’s like some bizarre zero-sum game where THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE GENDER WINNER!!!

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