Skip to main content

Pity party for straight dudes

Image
By
Via Sullivan, check out this Dan Savage interview:
...heterosexual male identity — and in America I don’t want to get too pointy-headed about it, but it’s really this package of negatives. You know, to be a straight guy is not to be a woman and not to be a faggot and so it doesn’t really leave you much room to maneuver. If there’s anything about your interests or personality that can be remotely perceived as feminine or faggoty, you have to kill it or people won’t believe you’re straight or you’ll be tormented — you know, questions for the rest of your life. And it’s kind of sad to watch how hemmed-in straight guys are.
That is surely true, but there's another aspect to this as well. Growing up as a straight boy, especially in a liberal environment, you are constantly bombarded by the ways men have treated and continue to treat women like shit. They are all absolutely true. Just the other day I read the most horrifying piece on the daily violent abuse to which female bloggers are subjected.

Especially if you self-identify as a thoughtful type, it's quite easy to get into the habit of bending way, way, backwards in a desperate attempt to avoid being a sexist asshole, which can quickly turn into (as most of my ex-girlfriends can tell you) abject cowardice. We still have a (thankfully decaying fast) cultural expectation that guys are supposed to make the first move. I am really almost incapable of this, and thus end up spending a lot of time alone. I admit it, if I'm single and an interaction with a woman turns even slightly romantic, I usually freeze up like I've been doused with liquid helium:



I think this should be obvious, but just to be clear, I am in no way trying to minimize the ongoing oppression of women, or compare the situation of straight males as being somehow just as bad. I'll take my discomfort over specific, detailed threats to come and rape me with a screwdriver. Rather I'm saying that our history of patriarchy and sexism has done men no real favors. Like Southern whites during Jim Crow, or Apartheid-era Afrikaners, men could only achieve subjugation by doing serious damage to ourselves at the same time.
Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 19, 2014 at 3:28 AM

    I pity str8 guys for another reason: I believe woman equality in capabilities and potential is never debatable. They are humans with every bit of mental strength and creativity just like men. But...in a society that sexualizes the female, it is easier to construct a feminine culture around the fact that women offer sex, and therefore this is their primary quality. Woman are culturally trained to dumb it down, to be weak and fake helplessness - They live in constant fear that if they show some character or strength the guy might lose his boner. It is dehumanizing for them, and it states a lamented state in the state of fragile masculinity, constructed so that men in modern society can get it up. If women were the same as in the days of early human history (they were the same complete woman mind you), few men would still be "men" today.
    How the hell can you feel complete with your other significant half, if that half is a helpless dumb bimbo (even though there is no such thing in a natural reality, it's all a construction), and she expects a man to help her traverse the pedestrian crossing by holding her hand (metaphor for life) ? With such a sex/beauty object in their home,trained to be weak and incomplete in matters of life, no wonder str8 guys need guy time with their friends - their half is an incomplete human (cultural Chinese feet binding, this time applied to the brain).
    As a gay guy, I meet another gay guy - some people wold say that we are half c**ts, and only together we finally make a man. But if we are half c**ts, that means we make a complete man and a complete woman, but the weight is equally spread around. I do not have to indirectly pay or beg for sex, I do not "have to treat him differently and special", and if I do it I chose to, than he appreciates it more, seeing how all other guys around him have to suffer and endure their own constructed gender role, and the loneliness and hardship deriving from this. And all so that all str8 men indiscriminately (even those who in a natural world would be considered ß), may get a boner and cope with women. It is unfair for the men who are strong, and are as much a blessing for women, as women are for them.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

By
So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b
Post a Comment
Read more

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

By
This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s
6 comments
Read more

Varanus albigularis albigularis

By
That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that
4 comments
Read more