On Men's Humanity and Women's Liberation

[this politically brilliant image was found here, and there is a more complete explanation of it at that site]

For me, the above image speaks to the way, contrary to popular opinion and corporate pimps' interests, industry pornography does not open the senses or expand one's experience of sexuality. Rather, it shuts down the senses and any meaningful notion of a free humanity, compressing them and sexual experience into a specific and rote set of fetishised genres, all of which require the destruction of human beings in order to be produced and mass marketed. Whether or not every woman feels exploited or degraded by pornography, and whether or not every woman working as a prostitute experiences gross sexual violence named as such by her, it is nevertheless the case that some women and girls must experience sexual slavery, trafficking, sexual violence including incest, rape, and battery, gross exploitation and callousness to women's dignity and human rights status in order for the pornography industry to exist.

As a pro-humanitarian sexual radical, not a pro-exploitation sexual liberal, I oppose all systems which require such abuses of female human beings. I care more about ending systems of misogynist harm far more than I care about creating ways for men to experience increasingly shallow and harmful, or significantly deeper and richer levels of humanity. This is particularly so when men's efforts to dehumanise or humanise ourselves occurs while women remain the primary targets, victims, and survivors of rape and poverty. To support such internal work by men without making that work contingent on women's liberation from male supremacy and all patriarchal dictates, is, in my view, to do worse than to just sell out women, as non-Jewish class-privileged Germans who knew of the Nazi atrocities did worse than betraying Jews while seeking more economically stable lives during the early 1940s. This sort of "men's movement" is a symptom of patriarchal atrocity, not, in my view, an antidote to it.

Anyone who calls a feminist a feminazi is seriously ignorant about history; anyone who thinks feminists have anything resembling the state, military, and police force of patriarchal states is an idiot.

Womanists and feminists, against the tyrannical forces of white and male supremacy, surviving thousands of years of oppression, fight for a form of dignity and humane integrity for all of humanity. White male (and female) Nazis fought, and continue to fight, for human destruction. Patriarchal activists are, overwhelmingly, pro-gynocide, pro-genocide, and actively ecocidal. Womanists and feminists, as I read, study, and listen to them, believe in the possibility of oppressive men becoming human. Patriarchs hold to the idea that men are naturally or ordained by a male sky-god to rule over and against women. Along with Nazi Holocaust deniers, patriarchs who believe feminists have more power than men as a class prove beyond any doubt that maleness and rationality do not go together intrinsically or genetically. And the rationality that such men use in their argumentation is one appropriately and thoroughly critiqued by writers such as Marimba Ani and Andrea Dworkin.

In my view, men become human as women gain liberation, and not before or until then. My focus, if not my views, vary somewhat from the content of the posts here between two white men, one from the U.S. and one from Australia. I will acknowledge that there is value in men speaking honestly to one another about our struggles to find our way, as women work so diligently and creatively to resist and challenge patriarchal rule. I hope the conversation posted here in many parts bridges a conversational-social gap between men who seek lives less controlling of other beings, and less constrained by the mandates of pornographers and pimps. I hope it calls men to examine and eradicate from our beings those social ways of being that require women to be subordinated to men in order for men to be "ourselves".

That MRAs and other white male jerks think feminists are calling for an end to male human existence, rather than an end to all oppressive manifestations of manhood, is a deliberate or astoundingly dense misunderstanding held to in order to make feminism seem like it is something it has never been as it has functioned in the actual world of social life. There will come a time, let's hope, when being "a man", in whatever language, doesn't mean and require what it has meant and required in the white West: gynocide, genocide, and ecocide.

Sam Berg wrote to me recommending that I link together the posts of the conversation on pornography and other violations. So I have done so, and hope that makes them easier to access and follow. Click here for the whole list. The conversation between USguy and Aussieguy isn't over, and there will be more posts forthcoming.

Thanks, Sam, for that recommendation.
END OF POST.

On Being "Too Feminine": One Gay Man's Perspective

[above is a photograph of Nigel Lythgoe, one of the main judges on the TV show, "So You Think You Can Dance"]

It is clear that the judges over at So You Think You Can Dance aren't going to relent in their quest to make sure male dancers--and only male dancers--keep their level of "femininity" in check. Time and again, from city to city, across the U.S. the judges who determine who is and is not moving on in the show as contestants and competitors remind male dancers just how feminine or masculine they are, as if dance (or is it pronounced donce), couldn't possibly exist beautifully, brilliantly, or brazenly without mandated gender markers and codes of conduct.

I was called sissy and other misogynist/homophobic names when I was a wee one because I was not seen as "masculine enough" by my male peers in school. I learned quickly what was expected of me, and almost as quickly rejected my male peers' standards for what it meant to be a male child. (A note to any child: what with boys having cooties and all, it is wise to think at least twice before taking their advice about anything.)

It was beyond clear that the boys who teased and harassed me were terribly insecure about their own masculinity, whatever the fuck THAT is. I was part of enough different cultures to know that what that word, and the other word, femininity, meant had everything to do with the time and place and circumstances in which one lived, and that there was no precise agreement about what those terms meant; the definitions were paradoxically both overtly arbitrary while simultaneously accepted as defining normality. In places I grew up, on one hand being masculine meant being "smart". On the other it meant being "athletic". My only brother was both those things. Yet he too was made fun of occasionally, called things like "sissy" because he was skinny. (The irony of the song title "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother" did not escape me.) In the world of some of my male cousins, being masculine meant being not being too book-smart, and also showing a fetish-like interest in cars. Going to University as a theatre major was, therefore, both a masculinising and feminising activity, depending on which males you consulted.

For children, intersex, female, and male, "weakness" or "vulnerability" or "sensitivity" were seen as detrimental to your social standing and well-being. If a male child, especially, acted or appeared in ways that showed he was not interested in pillaging or maiming others immediately or in the very near future with or without buddies, he was setting himself up, as it were, to be identified and stigmatised as one of the most dreaded things of all: being feminine.

Being feminine meant, variously, being sweet, easily brought to tears, stupid, submissive, appearing to not have self-worth, appearing to care more about what others thought of you and your appearance than you thought of others and their appearance. It meant being in a position, socially and politically, to be judged, assessed, ostracised, humiliated, and/or tormented. It also meant being "the gender most likely to be raped", whether as a child or an adult. It meant being vulnerable, but not in a good way. It meant being (that is, existing) "for" boys in ways no one should exist for anyone, in my opinion. It meant one's heart and mind should be occupied with pleasing males of many ages, not with pleasing oneself and damn what males think.

In a well-organised patriarchal society, such mandates and codes of conduct are so thoroughly soaked into the culture that most children, by the time they are ten years old, know exactly what will and will not get them identified as "being like a girl". Girls who had social ambition and a desire not to be ridiculed and stigmatised as weak often sought to be "like boys" in some regards. I sought to be like girls in what seemed to me were important ways; in girls I saw the possibility of being humane, of being myself, of not being straight-jacketed, of having feelings (and thoughts) and also expressing them. I saw that many girls, relative to well-socialised boys, could and did do this along with also being smart, athletic, and prideful.

There were two options for children when I was young, and, from what I can see, things haven't changed all that much and in some ways have possibly gotten worse for kids. The two options were being girlish or boyish. Boyish girls were called, among other things, tomboys and dykes. Girlish boys were called many things, none of them implying "being a girl" was in the least bit status-worthy.

Low social status, being "too feminine", and being uncool went hand in hand... um, in hand. Being a girl, whether a boyish one, a girlish one, both, or neither, meant being a target for boys' wrath and ridicule. Being a boy who was seen as acting too much like a girl (and here we have to assume they didn't mean a young Venus Williams), meant taking on the stigma and inferior status of all girls. One couldn't be a girl and have the full status and privileges of boys. One could be a boy and achieve that status. Some girls tried, if they weren't already doomed with markers of "femininity" like having noticeable breasts and being termed "pretty", occasionally strove to gain that status reserved for boyish boys. In a white male supremacist society, being "pretty" if female, is like being dark-skinned if Black. It confirms your status as "other" and becomes a strike against you, in some regards. Being pale and being male is where it's at.

I mentioned Venus Williams not only because I appreciate her athleticism and tenacity on a tennis court, as well as her humor and general ways of being, but also because her very existence demonstrates how stupid the whole racist/misogynist/heterosexist system of "gender policing" is. If the Williams sisters' father had liked "his" girls to be dainty and coy, rather than determined and confident, what would have become of Venus and Serena? (And, for that matter, their less famous sisters?) We can thank their parents for allowing Venus and Serena to be the great athletes they are. They were lucky.

In most circumstances, the importance of being masculine if a boy, or feminine if a girl, cannot be understated in its significance to social standing. Body- and esteem-crushing abuse came down especially hard on those who did not behave as dominant society mandated. As has been noted here elsewhere on this blog, being gendered is not so much a willful performance as it is a survival or supremacy strategy in a racist, misogynist, heterosexist society. A society that is deeply ableist, classist, and ageist as well.

I'm currently watching the "cooler" show about dance, the one not called "Dancing With The Stars". For a variety of reasons, that show will never be cool. "So You Think You Can Dance" has an opportunity to be cool because it includes dance styles developed on the streets of urban neighborhoods. Poorer urban youth of color, and adults, have always had a great deal to bring to a society that scorns them, with little means of getting it out unless "discovered" by someone tied to white male systems of power. The same holds true for the cultural contributions of the rural poor, of whatever ethnicity. Once a statused white man says "Wow" then it becomes "cool" in dominant society. This key fact is left out of most accounts of why it is that aspects of African American male cultures become both popular and cool among white boys. It's the appropriation and exploitation of those cultural contributions by the racially privileged and empowered class that makes things cool, without white adoring eyes, African American cultural contributions may well have status among Black people, but so too do the contributions of whites, such as they are. (As has been discussed in many places, "white culture" is a bit of any oxymoron; whiteness takes meaning only when positioned over and against people of color; it takes status only when it controls and co-opts the cultures of the people whites oppress and destroy.)

Non-disabled middle class kids are one "standard" for what it means to be a child. So is lightness and whiteness. So is manliness. And each of these are not at all biological phenomenon, as that is popularly understood. Genes don't create societies in which boys with limp wrists are punched and killed by boys who make sure their arms have firm fists at the end of them.

On SYTYCD, there is a bit of a problem. "Dance" itself is seen as "feminine". "Femininity" isn't cool, apparently. How then do producers create a show to be cool that has primarily to do with being able to dance well ("well" being determined mostly by studio-trained dancers, most of them white). Stigma and status surround every performance on the show. Whether trying out to be one of the finalists, or competing in the last weeks before the season's finale, males and females have to demonstrate particular qualities that are not only steeped in discrimination and oppression, but in the dehumanisation of children across class, race, ability, sexuality, and gender.

This past week, once again, the viewing audience was reminded that males have to be masculine, and ought not be "too feminine". They were told this mostly by one white man, Nigel Lyhtgoe, but also by a white woman, Mary Murphy. Mentioning that Nigel is, in many ways, more feminine than Mary is akin to pointing out naked emperors aren't wearing clothes. And me saying that is not, and I do mean NOT, an insult to either of them. It is an observation made which may partly explain why they have to work so hard to be sure the male dancers on their program don't come across as (pardon the language) faggy and the women as dykey.

That, and the fact that their corporate sponsors are selling the world products designed to enforce the oppressive and dehumanising gender binary.
END OF POST.

Pornography Use and Other Violations: A Conversation Between Two White Men, part nine

Here are the links to the whole conversation:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

CAUTION: What follows is a conversation between two men about their abusive behaviors toward girls, women, and others. Any survivor of child sexual abuse, rape, or other form of sexual violation and objectification may be quite triggered by portions of this exchange. All violative behaviors are named as such by at least one of the two people, critically, with remorse and/or regret. Both people do not currently use pornography.

Correspondence from Aussieguy:

I agree with your approach as you describe it in challenging your friend over his treatment of his wife. I can feel that my desire to objectify women is part of a selfish mood I am in. At the same time, I have an urge for instant gratification of all my other desires as well. I also agree that in choosing to indulge my desire to voyeur and objectify women, I am violating real people, potentially harming them and in any case taking something I have no right to take. I really benefit (and more so, the women I otherwise harm may benefit) from your unflinching and clear statements about what is going on here.

It is also an important point you make about remembering who has the power. I reread my description of what has been going on and I definitely wrote it from the position that these things were 'happening to me', rather than that I was behaving in these ways. I picked up that language from reading about, and supporting my partner in, depression. In that case, it is important to remember that depression happens to people and is not something they are doing themselves. Our case is different and you are right to remind me to always acknowledge that I am behaving in this way and I am making an empowered decision to do so. (Empowered by the very system I profess to be fighting against but that makes no difference.) The emotional issues underlying it are another matter and I would feel justified in using that type of language if I had been talking about an emotion I was experiencing.

I had a very telling insight into my fantasies and what turns me on. I found that in all my voyeuring fantasies, an essential ingredient is that the woman doesn't want to be seen naked and either doesn't know I can see her or is embarrassed when she does know. It horrifies me that I carry that desire around but my behaviour has been an equally horrible indication of what's going on inside me anyway. The fantasies I have about actual sex are entirely consensual but there is still the problem that a woman's sexuality exists for my pleasure.

I don't know what to do about that desire. Did you find a way to address it? I have an idea that it is so much a learned fantasy that if I manage not to indulge it and reinforce it, it will fade away on its own. (I don't expect that to be a quick result.) Do you have any experience with this one?

On power again, it occurred to me that sometimes the important issue isn't that men are empowered by pornorgaphy or objectification of women, it is that we are empowered by the unwritten rules of society to make and view pornography and to join in the objectification of women.

(This is a slightly random collection of paragraphs but there are a few different things I wanted to chuck in here.)

I had a sudden insight a year or two ago about 'the gaze'. I remember when I was smaller, when I walked past some older kids and they just sat and looked at me without acknowledging me in any way, it was very threatening. Still now, I feel threatened if I'm in that situation with someone that I think is capable of doing me serious harm. I don't necessarily think they're going to attack me but I'm on the defensive in case. I think it's an instinctive thing. When you're in a space with someone else, if you're not being friendly and sharing the space, then it's presumed that you're in competition in some way and not to be trusted.

When I perve at women, I don't acknowledge them at all or engage in communication with them as people and I realised that I am doing exactly the same to them. It's a rare, self-assured woman who feels secure against attack from a full-grown man and I was forced to realise that just the act of voyeuring a woman is threatening her. In addition to the political implications of men's access to women's bodies - which is the context in which it takes place and provides the fuel for women's nervousness - the act itself is an aggressive one in a really basic, physiological way.

That goes unnoticed a lot of the time because we spend so much time sharing space with strangers and not communicating with them so we're in that threatened, competitive mindset already. It would be good for society if we were to act to berak down that separation in general. But I think actively watching someone takes it a step further. Of course, I can imagine women not wanting to be talked to by every man they meet and 'unwanted attention' is rightly part of the definition of sexual harassment. I don't mean we should engage women in conversation while we stare at them. I have started a habit with all people of meeting their eyes, giving some minimal kind of smile, nod or other acknowledgement and looking away. I do that with people I walk past in the street, people on the bus etc. To be genuinely respectful, it needs to be accompanied by minding my own business after that and not ogling women, otherwise it's pretty fake.

I didn't quite get the part where you said:
But at some point the fact of paying for access to dehumanising images of people, or of images of dehumanised people--whichever most applied, was a main reason for not seeking out Internet pornography, or any other pornography. I considered that a more humane reason, one in greater consistency with more of my professed and deeply held values, than "just" not looking at it because I didn't want to pay for it.

I think I probably know what you mean but maybe you could say it again. For me, not paying for porn has also never been a matter of boycotting the industry. I have paid for magazines and once I even subscribed to a website so I could look at the hardcore stuff and archives they had. Giving my own money to those companies felt pretty nasty but my political brain tells me that I'm giving just as much support by looking at the free stuff because it's all funded by ads and sponsors who pay when I look at it or follow their links. Try as I might, I can't imagine that I'm not supporting the industry (financially, as well as philosophically) by looking at free porn sites.

Sometimes I think the problems all stem from the fact that boys don't play with dolls. That's a bit glib but it comes from this train of thoughts:
- Men's sexual abuse of women is selfish. All levels of abuse and violation have a common thread of men satisfying a desire regardless of whether the woman we use wants to take part or not.
- Environmental destruction also takes place for selfish reasons.
- Selfishness is about seeing oneself as the only real being and everyone else as objects in one's world.
- Playing role plays with dolls is training in imagining someone else's perspective the world and understanding what they would do in their position
- GI Joe doesn't really cut it

I am not in denial in a general sense about the fact that
"When you or I choose or have chosen to objectify someone, we are being oppressive jerks. We may feel "weak" but we are behaving in ways that strengthen male supremacy."

I don't always have it in mind as I walk around and look at women in the world though. It is a real training to go through and keeping on bringing myself back to these facts seems like the way to do it.

It's not only training in the empathy that I failed to learn as a kid, but also unlearning lots of bullshit I was taught - and finding ways to deal with the fact that most men still hold onto the bullshit.

Thanks again for all your correspondence

Pornography Use and Other Violations: A Conversation Between Two White Men, part eight

Here are the links to the whole conversation:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

CAUTION: What follows is a conversation between two men about their abusive behaviors toward girls, women, and others. Any survivor of child sexual abuse, rape, or other form of sexual violation and objectification may be quite triggered by portions of this exchange. All violative behaviors are named as such by at least one of the two people, critically, with remorse and/or regret. Both people do not currently use pornography.

Correspondence from USguy:

Thanks for that honest update.

The level of struggle you describe, or, rather, the particular "draws" are ones I have had to deal with over the years, both before and after giving up the practice of violating already violated, or at the very least self-objectified, human beings by looking at "home-made" pornography.

This raises a few matters for me. At least one is somewhat tangential, while others are more directly responsive to the emotional-political conflict you're currently facing.

One tangent: Part of my own process for not using pornography was to understand how and to what degree misogyny + racism/white supremacy + capitalism + Western cultural imperialism/genocide = the possibility of, the practice of, and the mass access to pornography as an industry of human destruction. So, for example, decades ago I subscribed to Playgirl magazine. Once my access to pornography was primarily or only online, I never went to sites that required me to pay money. This wasn't done initially as a "grand gesture" at repudiating the financial support of racist, sexism capitalism, but, rather, was more due to the fact that I tend not to pay for things I can rather easily get (legally) for free. In that sense, my motivation was much more in keeping with my "recycle, resuse" and "anti-consumerist" values. (Why purchase cardboard boxes, for example, when book stores and hospitals throw out great boxes every day?)

But at some point the fact of paying for access to dehumanising images of people, or of images of dehumanised people--whichever most applied, was a main reason for not seeking out Internet pornography, or any other pornography. I considered that a more humane reason, one in greater consistency with more of my professed and deeply held values, than "just" not looking at it because I didn't want to pay for it.

The leads to a longer conversation we can have some time, if you wish, about why and how it is that "mass destructive consumption, capitalism, exploitation, greed, and objectification of human beings (turning people into things, or pornographised "genres" of human beings) become valued and necessary in contemporary Western post-industrialised societies, to the demise of humans, non-human beings, and the Earth. (How destruction is seen as "a right worth defending" for example. How "selling sex[ism]" or manufacturing and distributing racist sexxx is turned into a "social good" rather than being seen and felt, en masse, as a social harm. (Note: NOT a social/spiritual SIN; not the way the white Right holds looking at pornography or renting human beings for sex. Harm, as in political, emotional, psychic, economic, environmental harm. Human rights violation-type harm, not a "you're going to hell if you keep doing that" kind of harm.) Enough on that tangent for now.

Back to what you are struggling with. I think, once again, how we frame up and understand our challenges has a lot to do with how effectively we can approach and deal with them. So, note in your language who or what has the power. Often, in white male supremacist societies, the opppressed, in various and absurd ways, are imbued, by oppressors, as "possessing the power" to control the people who are socially-politically-economically dominant, when, in fact, the opposite is the case.

Pornographers and pimps have a kind of power that is real, to harm people in many ways. Procurers of women and others for sex or sexxx also have power to coerce and manipulate, as well as to exploit, abuse, and kill other human beings, usually with impunity, if not also fanclubs.

And you and I have real power, status, privilege, entitlements, and access to harm others at will, including by voyeuring them, by making them objects of our violative attention, by seeking to possess something of them, like a snapshot of a woman in a certain shirt or skirt, for us to "hold" in our minds for our own emotional and/or sexual and/or political gratification.

Psychotherapy, on the whole, and society, on the whole, if not Right-wing, tends to view voyeuristic activity as natural and normal if done by heterosexual males to adult females. It is not generally understood as "political opportunism" or "violative use of power" by those of us who have in the past or still do voyeur others.

A significant part of my shift in stopping voyeurism, including when walking down a street at night and noticing lights on in someone's home, and including when seeing a "cute man" walking or standing somewhere, came about when I would maintain a "he is like me" or "he is not different than me" or, better yet, "I cannot know his history of being violated" consciousness that I didn't chose to pack up when I wanted a quick fix by visually violating others.

Understanding what we're doing is not "a point of weakness" or "a period of slipping" but is more accurately "a willful act backed by powerful entitlements and privileges" shifts, for me, how I understand what I've done in the past, and do very infrequently, if at all, now. Keeping "the other" person real, in other words, not necessarily known, but not projected onto, not turned into my fantasy object, is critical to my profeminist political practice, which is to say, my practice of being a humane human being.

Anyone I choose to gaze at has a personal life and history, with feelings that are not accessible to me and a past that may or may not include experiences of terrifying violation or gross objectification. That not only means that they may be vulnerable and sensitive to being visually violated, but also that they are not "mine" to look at. It means other people don't exist "for me".

For whites and men, especially, and for Westerners generally, we are raised to believe everyone and everything is "for us". The Earth, animals, the air, and oppressed people, allegedly exist for us, for me. I am the center, a "white whole" of consumption, greed, exploitation, and abuse, whereby my actions of harm and destruction, due to my status and entitlements, are seen as ethically ok or good or appropriate. Sometimes our (white men's) actions are actually mandated, enforced, policed, and encoded, meaning that if we don't do them we are ostracised by our social-political peer group.

That we can surround ourselves with people, including white men, who do not approve or condone and celebrate white male supremacist use and abuse only means we have chosen to take in another perspective, one rooted, hopefully, in the experiences of the oppressed, not the "generosity of character" of the oppressor. (As long as we, white men, are oppressors, individual acts of kindness and small group decisions to not do as much harm are relatively ineffectual, except in our own personal lives and the lives of those around us.) You and I are agreeing to correspond, and you or I could opt out with little to no consequence, right? And if this conversation stays between us, who benefits, concretely?

I can surround myself with radical feminist and womanist friends, but can also do whatever the fuck I want when they are not around, right? Unless part of my connection to them involves me not hiding practices I know they would rightfully, appropriately challenge and critique.

So the process, for me, involves developing an ethical, political, spiritual center that doesn't place "me" at the center, but, instead, places the pain and degradation of those I am entitled to harm at the center of my emotional/sensible/intellectual world. At the same time it means creating and supporting systems of accountability that mean that my private acts of harming others cannot be privatised.

I do get it that someone, an oppressor, can act in ways that harm others while not feeling particularly empowered, and while not intending to do any oppressive harm. But choosing to look at a woman (or a man) in an objectifying way is a political act, and never is not. It might also reflect or be tangled up with other struggles in one's life.

A few months ago a heterosexual husband told me that he thought the reason he'd been more condescending to his female spouse was that he was "depressed lately". I don't remember all of how I responded to him, but I didn't accept "depression" as a legitimate reason for oppressing his wife. First, he oppresses her when he isn't depressed too. Second, even if being depressed renders him a more obnoxious and oppressive mate, unless he's taking action to alleviate that depression, and to find other ways to manifest it, he's choosing, whether he owns it or not, to be an oppressive jerk.

When you or I choose or have chosen to objectify someone, we are being oppressive jerks. We may feel "weak" but we are behaving in ways that strengthen male supremacy. We cannot or ought not be in denial about that. (Not that you are, necessarily.)

I challenge you to own your entitlements and power when you choose to behave exploitively and violatively around one or more women. To name your behavior as violating, as harmful to her, as misogynistic, and as in service to male supremacist mandates. In some sense we may be behaving cowardly when we turn away from profeminist values and behave patriarchally. But in the actual social world, cowardice kills, or, in this case, violates. You and I and every man have to decide, moment to moment, who we are going to be in a world that supports us having virtually constant visual and other contact with women. We have to estimate to cost to women's humanity of us having that access and entitlement. We have to decide who we are going to be and become. And we have to, in my view, priortise women's safety and freedom above our own fleeting wishes to feel something akin to pleasure by degrading and unethically intruding upon other human beings. Why we feel pleasure when we are violating others is a question worth asking, but not if it means continuing the behavior in search of the answer.

I'll wait to hear back from you about what you do and don't agree with above, before blathering on further.

Pornography Use and Other Violations: A Conversation Between Two White Men, part seven

Here are the links to the whole conversation:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

CAUTION: What follows is a conversation between two men about their abusive behaviors toward girls, women, and others. Any survivor of child sexual abuse, rape, or other form of sexual violation and objectification may be quite triggered by portions of this exchange. All violative behaviors are named as such by at least one of the two people, critically, with remorse and/or regret. Both people do not currently use pornography.

Correspondence from Aussieguy:

I'm having a bit of trouble lately, finding myself looking in lighted windows that I walk past or my eyes following women I see in revealing clothing of any kind. It doesn't even need to be clothing that will actually reveal her body, just something that makes me think it could or may or reminds me of something that would. I have weakened a couple of times just today, sneaking glimpses before looking back at my work.

Not looking at porn has continued to be obvious to me, though, and fairly easy. I have had a few occasions where I have been tempted towards finding a video with a sex scene in it to watch, but I haven't succumbed to it. I had a real clear vision of the seediness of porn the other morning. It was as I was waking up and it just flashed into my head, I don't know why, and then it was gone. Before that, I had only had a kind of political understanding of why it is wrong but I think I had a kind of moment of real empathy and understood properly what I hate about it for a second. Now I can't get that clarity back but it helps just having had that one moment.

I feel as though porn is really in the past for me. Even though I still get these impulses to look at it, I feel like my change of habit has been thorough enough to mean I will be able to resist them now. I can't say the same for objectifying women in general. I'm still struggling constantly with that and failing enough of the time for it to show in my behaviour sometimes. I think your advice about hearing the stories of women's experience of sexism is a good start and I've followed a few links from Julian's blog and read some stories there. I think I have a new round of work to do in eradicating this behaviour but I think maybe I need to keep reading and working on my empathy and understanding before it will be very effective in the long term. In the meantime, there is no harm in continuing to actively pull myself up when I catch myself at it.

That's enough for now
END OF POST.

So You Think You Can Dance and NOT be heterosexist? Not a chance.

[image is from www.fanpop.com]

I'm a gay man.

One of the things that most means in my life is not that "I have sex with men" (I don't; I don't have sex with anyone) but rather that I stand--with lesbians, Two Spirit people, SGL folks, transgendered and intersex individuals, and other gay men, primarily--in a political-social-cultural place that is steeped in heterosexist violence which is part and parcel of the society in which I live. I have no expectation that this embedded pillar of racist patriarchal culture will be collapsing any time soon. But I also won't turn that lack of expectation into any form of resignation or apathy when encountering overtly heterosexist values and behavior.

While watching the first episode of the new season of So You Think You Can Dance this past week, something occurred which I had been hoping would happen since I first learned about the program existing: a same-sex couple auditioned to win a spot (well, two spots) in the final selection of dancers who will comprise this season's contestants. SYTYCD is a profoundly heterosexist program, as are all programs on TV featuring stage-floor dancing competitions; in the news this week was a story about a junior high school that is using thoroughly heterosexist ballroom dancing to get students more engaged with school, both socially and academically. It appears to be working well for some students, and will likely do additional harm to those of us who are queer youth, who are forced to dance with members of "the opposite sex". Why girls can't dance with girls, and boys with boys, is a question that has no reasonable answer from the dominant society; there are only bigoted answers, and cowardly ones.

About twenty minutes before the first two-hour premiere show ended, two white men came out (no pun intended) to perform as no two men had yet performed before SYTYCD's panel of judges, a panel that would determine their fate in terms of their progress on to the next round. Fox--the network/conglomerate, not the animal--has power. Judges, whether behind a courtroom bench or seated in groups of three or four at a table on television, have power. The kind of power they have is to reinforce social codes and conditions which make liberation for some oppressed people more or less possible, more or less likely. They can, as a part of dominant media, break new ground or fill in any foundational cracks with new concrete making sure the cracks don't deepen.

Two white men, one gay, one not, came onto the stage and performed a well-rehearsed piece, which was presented to three judges in an effort to advance to the next round of preliminary judging. The comments they got back were so outrageously heterosexist, so completely anti-lesbian and anti-gay, so utterly misogynist and masculinist, that I was stunned and furious. I, the gay man who has no expectation that heterosexism will be significantly weakened as a political force, was stunned and furious. (I'm glad that was my response; it means I have still have a political pulse.)

In case you're among the people who don't watch network TV, SYTYCD is the cooler cousin of ABC's "Dancing With The Stars". Unlike DWTS, SYTYCD actually embraces amazing and beautiful forms of dance that come from the street, not just the styles taught and practiced for decades in Western civilisation's studios and dance halls. Current contemporary forms ignored or ridiculed by "[white heterosexist male supremacist] dance purists" are embraced much more on this newer, hipper program. This show's success, in fact, has forced DWTS to loosen up a bit and welcome a more varied palette of dance styles into its own program, but on ABC these forms only show up in special segments, not as part of the general, week-to-week competition.

Same-sex dancing has occurred on SYTYCD in seasons past. But the way that the choreographers and judges portray "two women" dancing together, or "two men" dancing together, is always through a firmly set heterosexual lens. There's never "homosexual" eroticism or overt sexual attraction conveyed in the dances, unless you find two men "battling" sexy, which I do not. So when the show allows, just very occasionally, for two women or two men to pair up and perform, the assumption that they must be heterosexual is unambiguously established in the story of the dance created by the choreographers. What do two women have to express to one another in dance? Most likely a mother-daughter theme, or some sort of asexual sisterly affection. What are two men allowed to express? Feelings of competition and aggression. Girls can get along in dance numbers, and boys can fight. Those are the rules. When Fox appears to go way over the line, it might actually allow two women to show a bit of aggression, and men a bit of tenderness, but never to the point that we can think there might be "something sexual" going on between the two.

After the white male couple performed a competent if not spectacular routine, the judges displayed a level of befuddlement and confusion that seemed preposterously staged to me; they were, to put it bluntly, behaving incredibly stupidly. They had on their faces expression akin to those found on G.W. Bush and D. Cheney's face when they contemplate foreign policy that doesn't include bombing people of color. (Huh? You mean there IS foreign policy that isn't genocidal?!)

The judges, two white-appearing women and one distinctly white (and requisitely British) man, "didn't get it" or "couldn't follow it". What is it about two same-sex people dancing together that renders the judges emotionally illiterate? (The same question applies, of course, to the expectation placed on pairs with one woman and one man: why is their performance always presuming the impossibility of sexual interest existing between them?)

I went through a brief phase, when dancing at queer clubs, of refusing to dance with women, unless as part of a larger group. But in any pair situation, I would only dance with men. For most the heterosexist readers who come here, you probably know what I'm talking about: I was employing a similar standard that you do when you dance "only" with someone who is allegedly opposite to you sexually. Well, not the same standards exactly. Yours are socially supported and celebrated, if horrendously oppressive to women, while also compulsory and mandatory. Lesbian and gay standards, if not heterosexual that is, are not supported, and are the opposite of compulsory and mandatory. They are, in other words, forbidden or looked upon with disdain. Many queer-bashers often linger outside queer dance clubs and bars, only partly to get a kind of sex they consciously deny they want. Whether same-sex encounters happen or not, the gay- or lesbian-identified person--before, during, or after a sex act takes place--is too often beaten within an inch of their lives, as soon as the queer-basher remembers what their social function is: to police gender and instill terror in any queer person who doesn't wish to embrace heterosexuality as a normal or natural phenomenon. (And we thought all men just fall asleep after sexual encounters. If only.)

I won't take enough time here to consider the plight of the transgendered, intersex, and asexual dancers and choreographers, and members of the larger society. But suffice it to say there's no room at the Dance Hall Inn for any of "them".

I ended this phase because I realised it was silly: the way two men dance together is often grossly heterosexist (and masculinist) and can mimic, while not exactly replicating, the way many heterosexual men dance with a woman. (I must note that too often these men disregard women's rights of physical integrity by using such occasions to cop feels, overtly grope, and invasively press erections against bodies of uncomfortable females.) I'm not making this up: the women who come from the clubs tell me what they just endured, feeling they have no right to expect that they should actually be able to go out in a mixed gender club and have fun without being fondled and frisked by men who don't care about them as actual human beings.

But watching SYTYCD made me want to re-employ this policy, just as a form of cultural protest. I wanted to boycott watching the program, but know I won't. I really like the show, in many ways. But if the link above works, try and access the first program online, and jump to the last half hour of the two-hour show and watch how the judges mishandle an opportunity to help the viewing largely heterosexist audience understand that two men dancing together can be neither masculine nor feminine, don't have to be masculine or feminine, and write them an email reminding them that telling all male dances to be masculine, and all female dancers to be feminine--as they understand those terms--is profoundly and dangerously racist, misogynist, and heterosexist.
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White people are STILL "discovering" people of color's neighborhoods: and guess who wins in the end?

[image, the rear end of an 1887 medallion found during a rubbish tip excavation in South Australia, is from here]

Let's consider the ways white folks with any middle class or upper class values like me, like any whites folks with any chosen (not forced) states of "mobility", like me, continue to act out what seems to be a viciously political and genocidal cultural imperative: to move into and take over pieces of land upon which people of color live. From the founding of the US, and back to the many imperial conquests rooted in Europe, then forward to the influx of mass weaponry into nations and regions where people of color live, to gentrification, we see this pattern: whites believing and acting as if we have a right to various forms of eminent domain. We have a right to murder, or displace people of color from their homes and homelands.

We have this right (or is it a wrong?) because of what, exactly? The structural and institutional power and support to do just what we want to do, much to the demise of people of color across the globe, and also to poor white people too.

All of this is done, here and there, to make the murder of the people who are not white more efficient, to perpetrate new and old genocides with direct ties to white-dominated countries without owning that this is even happening, to gross cultural appropriation/exploitation/thievery, such as stealing American Indian and First Nation traditions and practices, as well as objects, and those from Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, and South America, to adorn our homes, because we're so "multi-cultural".

The post linked to below calls some of this shit out. And may it be called out again and again, until "genocidally mobile" white folks go back where we came from.

I just read this discussion over at the blog, Having Read The Fine Print. It is what inspired me to take on this subject, yet again, and not for the last time. Here's the link: http://guyaneseterror.blogspot.com/2009/05/white-people-like-to-discover-things.html
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