TRiG.

I spent a solid two hours having this sort of discussion with my brother last night. (Holiday time is debate time! At least chez Starling.) It is exhausting. On the other hand, I gave the guy I’m dating the url for the Schrödinger’s Rapist essay a few weeks back, and he read it and said, “Yeah, of course.” I nearly wept on his shoulder in gratitude that I didn’t have to hold his hand and walk him through it.

I mean, I want to bless this man for trying in his own imbecilic way to promote a non standard beauty ideal, given how many men are out there posting shit like, “I hate this celebrity because she’s so fake or trying to hard or gained 2 pounds and now her anorexia isn’t as pronouced as I like” or calling women sluts, so at least he’s trying to say the right things. But yet as someone said up comment, this is really about, “you can stop being such a fusspot about beauty if you are naturally beautiful, and so whorish in your seductions if you figure out how to be sexy and yet non predatory, and chill the fuck out with being mental, by meeting my paradoxical requirement that you be confident but not overpowering, self sufficient but not autonomous, because that stuff totally stresses me out.”

Recently I had a great chat with one of my besties and her fiance, about the very different experiences and assumptions that men and women have about safety during travel. We were talking about traveling in couples and how women get much less easy much faster, and how even though he’s a generally very feminist guy, and men I travel with tend to be as well, he found himself being annoyed by how stressed she was in certain areas, and they had one or two minor fights about it. As we were sitting there talking about it, when it came up because I was telling a story about the exact same issue between myself and an ex in foreign lands you could see the lightbulb dawning for him, that this issue wasn’t just about her as a nervous personality restricting his travel, but rather about how all women have to engage in a complex juggling act between range of movement and comfort level as they travel.

I bring it up because at least the author of this stupid article is the sort of guy I’d be hopeful about being able to engage in dialogue provided he had to sit with a group made up of my wildly varied and individually funny, beautiful, friendly clever female friends and really listen to us talk about oppression. I do have to believe that this article sort of reads like, “I’m trying to get how to be good to a woman, and make her feel safe and secure…and isn’t that done by reassuring her she has my permission to be herself ?” I don’t think he’s inherently hateful of women- it reads like he’s nearly located the enemy of false expectations and pressure, but hasn’t made it all the way there to, “Fake women exist because patriarchy has created them to please me, and keep me and my power and wealth unchallenged”, he’s only got as far as, “wow! Lots of things in the media are unreal! But you can STILL PLEASE ME, even if you aren’t laboring every minute to be perfect, because I like women.”

This issue has been running through my head a lot lately, about how to gracefully challenge guys who are sweet or well intentioned but indoctrinated, how to say to someone, “look sometimes you say bad things which are hurtful to women, even as you mean well”, without that then shutting down the conversation in that dead-end white man guilt avenue. I struggle with that kind of issue on a daily basis.

Back on topic, this kind of article turns up regularly. I see it as a slightly poignant fail. He’s just so close to getting it, and then he fails. You are fine just as you are… oh, lovely … but only because I say so – damn, missed!

Ha.

My neighbor heard that the clitoris and penis were homologous structures, and for years thought that women urinated through their clitoris.

I learned this tidbit from Visionquest! Thank you, Matthew Modine!