#genderrelations

I enjoy “going out.” I like dancing, I like music, I like drinking, I like spending time with friends. And I like meeting new people, chatting with them and making friends. I also understand that many people (men and women) go to bars and clubs in hopes of meeting a romantic/sexual partner, and of course, there is nothing wrong with this, in theory.

That’s why, if someone attempts conversation with me, I try not to immediately write them off as a “creep.” I welcome conversation and believe that the more people in my life with whom I can converse, the better off I’ll be.

However (as most women know) there sometimes comes a point in a conversation with a man where it becomes necessary to draw the line and indicate that you are in no way, by any means, at all interested in pursuing anything further. There are also times when it is clear that friendly conversation is not in the cards (i.e., those men who substitute grabbing your hips and attempting to “dance” with you for a polite introduction). This is about those times.

If you do a Google search for “How to avoid being hit on at a bar,” you’ll get several articles with “helpful” tips on skirting conversation with men you are not interested in. The majority of these list pretending to have (or actually having) a boyfriend/fiance/husband as the number one method for avoiding creeps (second to “pretending to be a lesbian” or “pretending to be crazy,” a la Jenna Marbles).

In response to my complaints about men creeping on me at dance clubs in college, an ex-boyfriend of mine used to get cranky that I refused to whip out this cure-all excuse (one of many reasons he is an ex).

Yes, this may be the easiest and quickest way to get someone to leave you alone, but the problems associated with using this excuse far outweigh the benefits. There is a quotation that I’ve seen floating around Tumblr recently (reblogged by many of my amazing feminist Tumblr-friends) that goes as follows:

Male privilege is “I have a boyfriend” being the only thing that can actually stop someone from hitting on you because they respect another male-bodied person more than they respect your rejection/lack of interest.

This amazingly puts into one sentence what I have been attempting to explain to ex-boyfriends and friends (male and female) for years, mostly unsuccessfully. The idea that a woman should only be left alone if she is “taken” or “spoken for” (terms that make my brain twitch) completely removes the level of respect that should be expected toward that woman. It completely removes the agency of the woman, her ability to speak for herself and make her own decisions regarding when and where the conversation begins or ends. It is basically a real-life example of feminist theory at work–women (along with women’s choices, desires, etc.) being considered supplemental to or secondary to men, be it the man with whom she is interacting or the man to whom she “belongs” (see the theory of Simone de Beauvoir, the story of Adam and Eve, etc.).

I am not a chesterfield. I am not somewhere to rest your feet at the end of the day, something you can assume spends its time lying around waiting for your return. I will not remain mute as you try and carve your initials into me, wear me down, tear away at my cracks. I will not sit docile by the fire with a book in hand, waiting for your opinion before forming my own. I will not stand strong and silent as your use wears me into a mold perfectly suits for your own comfort.

I am a human being. Distressed is not a fashion statement. When I am stressed I am liable to reach out, claws first. I may be patient at first, begging (and hating myself for it), begging in some self taught, trial and error way of asking you to go, let me recharge, come back tomorrow, please try again later. I have had my own day with its own pleasures and pains, triumphs and pitfalls. I want to talk about my day. I want to hear what you have to say, even if it doesn’t change what I have to. I want to hear about your day, about lessons learned and laughs shared on street corners with an old friend. I want to hear what makes you tick, what keeps you up at night, what brings the sun back into your eyes.

Most days.

Some days the world will be too much, too loud, too needful, too too. Some days I will, willingly or not, spent my time being a place for people to sit and tell their problems to for hours on end, trying not to flinch as they mindlessly pick away at my frayed edges. Some days I won’t know how to say no to strangers and will not be able to rid myself of this placard reading “open to the public”. Some days I will inadvertently take this out on those I love because I know they will still be there tomorrow and I know this isn’t fair. I do apologize, but I’m human, I make mistakes.

And if this makes me a bitch,

then at least I’m not your worn out sofa. 

Violence & Silence: Jackson Katz, Ph.D at TEDxFiDiWomen

Jackson Katz, Phd: an anti-sexism activist; an expert on violence, media and masculinities. 

Okay, so here is the link to the yahoo article for those who don't follow cycling (I don't, but I do follow jackassery, so I found it anyway):

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/the-turnstile/slovakian-cyclist-pinches-backside-podium-girl-later-apologizes-173711956.html

Short version: winners of cycling races are apparently greeted with "podium women" while on the podium for pictures and such.  At this particular post-race photo op, the runner-up pinched the bum of one of the podium women.  Let's go ahead and politely acknowledge his "I didn't mean to disrespect women" apology, even though it's obviously complete and utter crap because he wouldn't have done it in the first place if he thought of them as people and not very mobile treats.  But sorry that I'm late to the party, but WHY are these human beings offered as literal trophies to begin with?!

These "podium women" are objects, favors to be bestowed, in the same way that every male hero of a comic book, action movie, comedy movie, or any other plot is "awarded" the female of his choice.  This is the clearest example of men feeling entitled to women's bodies.  In this scenario, the podium women were awarded to one man (the winner) but the second place finisher felt he did well enough to warrant at least a little access to their bodies.  

This wasn't a devious assault, a rape, or any other kind of significant violence.  This guy seriously didn't think there was anything wrong with grabbing a little ass, because he felt it was his due.  This is the alarmingly common male demand of gratification without even having to ask for consent that is so insidious.  It IS what underlies rape and assault, because it's the first step.  "I get to grab your ass, because I want it... you can't say no, shut up, come back here."

This is the kind of thing that makes my head explode.  I mean, I knew that women filled stupid attention-getting roles as sales representatives and models and cheerleaders, but I had never followed any sport where women literally had the job of "go kiss the winner as his reward".  Geez.  No wonder so many guys think they should be able to cite their Y-chromosome to any random woman and have sex delivered.

...

If, in all sectors of society, women are on the ascent, and if gender parity is actually within reach, this means that a marriage regime based on men’s overwhelming economic dominance may be passing into extinction.  As long as women were denied the financial and educational opportunities of men, it behooved them to “marry up” — how else would they improve their lot?  (As Maureen Dowd memorably put it in her 2005 book, Are Men Necessary?, “Females are still programmed to look for older men with resources, while males are still programmed to look for younger women with adoring gazes.”)  Now that we can pursue our own status and security, and are therefore liberated from needing men the way we once did, we are free to like them more, or at least more idiosyncratically, which is how love ought to be, isn’t it? In 2006, the sociologists Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian published a paper concluding that unlike singles, married couples spend less time keeping in touch with and visiting their friends and extended family, and are less likely to provide them with emotional and practical support.  They call these “greedy marriages.”  I can see how couples today might be driven to form such isolated nations — it’s not easy in this age of dual-career families and hyper-parenting to keep the wheels turning, never mind having to maintain outside relationships as well.  And yet we continue to rank this arrangement above all else!  Now that women are financially independent, and marriage is an option rather than a necessity, we are free to pursue what the British sociologist Anthony Giddens termed the “pure relationship,” in which intimacy is sought in and of itself and not solely for reproduction.  (If I may quote the eminently quotable Gloria Steinem again: “I can’t mate in captivity.”)  Certainly, in a world where women can create their own social standing, concepts like “marrying up” and “marrying down” evaporate — to the point where the importance of conventional criteria such as age and height, Coontz says, has fallen to an all-time low (no pun intended) in the United States. In her new book, Unhitched, Judith Stacey, a sociologist at NYU, surveys a variety of unconventional arrangements, from gay parenthood to polygamy to — in a mesmerizing case study — the Mosuo people of southwest China, who eschew marriage and visit their lovers only under cover of night.  “The sooner and better our society comes to terms with the inescapable variety of intimacy and kinship in the modern world, the fewer unhappy families it will generate,” she writes.  The matrilineal Mosuo are worth pausing on, as a reminder of how complex family systems can be, and how rigid ours are — and also as an example of women’s innate libidinousness, which is routinely squelched by patriarchal systems, as Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá point out in their own analysis of the Mosuo in their 2010 book, Sex at Dawn.  For centuries, the Mosuo have lived in households that revolve around the women:  the mothers preside over their children and grandchildren, and brothers take paternal responsibility for their sisters’ offspring.  Sexual relations are kept separate from family. At night, a Mosuo woman invites her lover to visit her babahuago (flower room); the assignation is called sese (walking). If she’d prefer he not sleep over, he’ll retire to an outer building (never home to his sisters).  She can take another lover that night, or a different one the next, or sleep every single night with the same man for the rest of her life — there are no expectations or rules.  As Cai Hua, a Chinese anthropologist, explains, these relationships, which are known as açia, are founded on each individual’s autonomy, and last only as long as each person is in the other’s company.  Every goodbye is taken to be the end of the açia relationship, even if it resumes the following night.  “There is no concept of açia that applies to the future,” Hua says. “We are not designed, as a species, to raise children in nuclear families,” Christopher Ryan, one of the Sex at Dawn co-authors, told me over the telephone late last summer.  Women who try to be “supermoms,” whether single or married, holding down a career and running a household simultaneously, are “swimming upstream.”  Could we have a modernization of the Mosuo, Ryan mused, with several women and their children living together — perhaps in one of the nation’s many foreclosed and abandoned McMansions — bonding, sharing expenses, having a higher quality of life?  “In every society where women have power — whether humans or primates — the key is female bonding,”  he added.