I was reading dear abby today on Yahoo ( http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucda/20090910/lf_ucda/wivesfindmanywaystocooloffhothusbands) and there was a perfect example of this in the letters.

They were response letters to a previous letter about a husband wanting morning sex and the wife always finding something else to do. There were only 2 letters that were on the woman’s side saying that he should spend more time with her to get her in the mood and 3 saying that she was wrong in trying to clean while her husband was waiting.

Maybe I am over sensitive…but it struck clearly that these people were buying into exactly what you spoke about here. She is trying to let her husband know she doesn’t want to, and he is getting mad because she won’t have sex with him.

It also goes deeper in saying that a woman’s place is always to have sex with her husband even if she doesn’t want to (for whatever reason). Like the response that said “There’s a time for cleaning, and it’s not when your husband is waiting with his motor running.”.

Or the one that says, “shows a lack of judgment, compassion and understanding on her part. “.

While we can only guess at the wife’s side of the story…maybe she was trying to put him off, maybe she is just OCD…It pissed me off that soo many were making it the woman’s fault. How about him? Why is it his “right” to have sex in the morning just because he wants to? And why is it wrong for her to tell her husband “no” when she doesn’t want to?

I could go on…but it is bringing back some bad memories and I don’t think I will.

I am one of those women who has been told catcalls are a compliment and to “just ignore it,” and I thought I could let this stuff not affect me. I started living in a neighborhood where I got catcalled on a daily basis.
Then after months of this my loving boyfriend said to me in bed, “Aw, I love your titties.” I immediately felt like I wanted to vomit and lost all interest in having sex. Even hearing a “good guy” use that phrase reminded me of all the times I’d heart it from people I didn’t know who I didn’t feel had the right to sexualize my body. Because all those other times it really wasn’t a compliment when I’d heard it, that now tainted even one potentially good situation I could hear the comment in.

It was really disturbing and sad to realize that. Very upsetting that being harassed by strangers on the street when they didn’t even touch me, could taint something that would happen INSIDE my house between me and a man I love.

Just a comment about vidya’s initial statement, upthread:

Perhaps I’ve just been fortunate, but I’ve never had a verbal harassment situation escalate after engaging the harasser in return on the level of a human being. Also, I’m now able to look back on these incidents as moments in which I can be proud of my own behaviour (the only person whose behaviour I am ethically responsible for, after all), that I stuck to my values and added a small drop of compassion to the world, at least. (I have been teased afterwards by friends for having addressed a harassing person as ‘Sir’, but, hey, it worked and I’ll do it again — it seems to consistently throw them off-guard and makes it clear that I have no intention of responding to them on a sexual level.)

Most of the street harassment I’ve experienced has taken place when the guy(s) involved were in vehicles and I was walking. (My shift at work ends at 11:30 p.m., and I walk to work, so that’s Prime Harassment Time for me.)

There’s not much chance of an edifying dialogue between me and my harassers when I am on foot and they are going past at 40 mph, yelling, “Nice TITS!” “I’D hit that!” “Nice VAGINA!” Usually, these encounters leave me doing a lot of inward fist-shaking and not much else.

I’ve just read the entire comments, and all the points I wanted to make have already been made.

Thanks, thegirlfrommarz, for that quote from The Myth of Mars and Venus, a seriously good book. You know how sometimes you wander into a bookshop just to browse, and chance across something you’d never heard of before but just know you have to buy? That was one of them. (Another was Graham Farmelo’s It Must Be Beautiful: Great equations of modern science, which says something about how much of a geek I am.) I love the way she lays into John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus stuff, which is so often repeated mindlessly. And she does it with linguistic science! Yay!

Thanks also to A Sarah for saying something about homelessness. It wasn’t said for quite a few posts after Regina T’s post, and I was getting worried that I’d have to say it. The phrase god damn fucking homeless man is absolutely disgusting.

Thalia’s post about the rape jokes is … interesting. And slightly disturbing. I’m a semi-out gay guy, but have few gay friends. I’ve never been in that situation, and I’m not at all sure how I’d react. I know I wouldn’t join in, but would I object? Probably not. I’m too passive. (I do strongly believe that absolutely nothing is beyond humour, but …. I’m not sure how to finish that sentence.)

The relationship between feminism and LGBT issues is interesting. On a recent walking tour of the history of gay Dublin, Senator David Norris remarked that women’s groups have been a big help to the cause of gay equality here in Ireland. Other feminist groups have tried to downplay the role of their lesbian members, for understandable reasons.

Getting back to the subject of rape, I’ve thought of something that actually hasn’t been much discussed: rape fantasies. They crop up sometimes in erotic fiction (often without warning, which is nasty: if you’re going to indulge weird fetishes in erotic fiction, warn your readers at the top, please). How prevelent are they in real life? And how do they relate to actual rape? How does someone who has previously enjoyed rape fantasies react to actually being raped? Do I even want to think about this?

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Have a look at this: http://digg.com/comedy/Girls_Rape_A_Guy_On_A_Bike Have a look at the URL. It’s filed under comedy. Hmm.

Read this article from The Register. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/16/devil_girls/ Then read the comments. Particularly, read Steve Roper’s comment.

TRiG.

Oh and Gwenny, good for you homeschooling your kids! I’m definitely going to homeschool mine once I have them. I just don’t like the way mainstream schools operate, and I’ll probably never be able to afford a great private school.

Kids acting in self defense against the big bully types actually got in more trouble than the bullies.