Cultural Possession Post Script

The Western male presumption of ownership over women is particularly evident in the social treatment of women who dare to deviate from prescribed gender roles and expectations.

As a society, we castigate ambitious women as being cold harpies and equate them managing men in a brusque manner with castration (whereas the same managerial style from a male leader is expected; it's as if subordinate men expect a compassionate mother figure instead of a boss). We traditionally celebrate homemakers as the epitome of woman-hood, and this is wrong. Although I am not suggesting that all homemakers are unhappy, it does seem that it would present a life of social isolation, financial dependence, menial tedium, and absolute boredom. However, with recent modern revolutions, homemaker women have, to a degree, come to be both looked down upon and become a source of envy (because they don't really work, but if it's a stay-at-home father, he's a martyred hero).

But the most glaringly obvious cases arise when men interact with out lesbians. If the man* interacting with them finds them attractive, there are culturally approved denigrating tropes to fall back upon that always involve him getting involved in her sexual life or at least watching. And if that same man finds the lesbian with whom he is interacting unattractive, he will commonly write her off as a misguided woman who just hasn't had the "right man" yet (to put it politely). Both cases invoke explicit assumption of ownership by the man over that woman's sexuality.

Here there is a substantial level of cognitive dissonance. On the individual level, women completely own their sexuality and control when, how, and with whom they choose to have sex. Often, men inappropriately perceive this as women "holding out" or having an undue control over them when in reality it has absolutely nothing to do with them. But on the societal level, men implicitly control women's sexuality. Through cultural invocations of idealized beauty, through cosmetics, through lingerie, clothing, make-up, hair styles, shoes, and pornography. Although cultural conditioning allows individual women to find empowerment in their femininity, the social machine sets and enforces the standards of "beautiful" femininity and is driven entirely by men's desire and lust. Through dissemination of culture in pictoral advertising, men express their idealized desires and women strive to meet what they are told is beautiful. This leads to insecure, depressed women and demanding men in a self-amplifying feedback loop, which furthers neithers' cause nor equity.

To move forward, we need to dissociate our individual images of ourselves from those idealized images we see in the media-driven world around us. It is far more constructive to look to a loved one for a compliment on one's appearance than to try to use a fashion magazine as a mirror. In effect, if we continue to do the latter, unwittingly or not, we are allowing cultural standards to own all of us. Men become owned by the standardized ideal femininity and pursue it to the exclusion of everything else, and this reinforces the male privilege of owning females' sexuality. Women become owned by the same standards and torture themselves trying to meet them because the advertised message that beauty = happiness has been so deeply ingrained by Western media that it is now unavoidable and pervasively subconscious.

Maybe it's time Western ideals were broadened, both to increase the happiness of women as well as to dilute the male sense of cultural ownership over women.

*Singular term used generally, not specifically.

Cultural Possession

Cultural overtones of male possession of women are prevalent throughout Western society. Institutionalized inequalities continue to demonstrate that men are expected to be allowed to own a greater share of society without complaint.

Not only is it completely socially acceptable for a man to name his most prized possession (lawn tractor, mid-age crisis sports car, guitar, boat, computer, etc.) a feminine name and refer to it in the feminine sense, but it is also expected among many men that a man in a committed relationship fulfill a given quorum of complaining about it to retain the status of his manhood[1]. The former creates a sense of entitled ownership of the feminine while the latter represents the opposite side of this in which men must frequently repudiate any claims of ownership from a woman to retain his sense of masculinity. This bizarre dialectic creates and perpetuates the prevailing Western attitude of women being worth less than men, and by proxy male desires being generally worth more than female autonomy.

Granted, things are better now in Western cultures than they used to be. Marriages used to be formed on the basis of dowries[2] and young women maintained hope chests for their future expectations. The culture of my ancestors even has oral traditions that tell of young men literally stealing their wives from neighboring villages and running off with them into the night to evade capture by their angry families. In these traditions, women were more objects to be bought, sold, and haggled over than human beings with whom to develop deep intimacy and strong relationships. Nonetheless, many men still see most women as little more than fleshy collections of orifices for them to use at will or expectation regardless of how the woman in question may feel.

Cultural Evidence[3]:

1) The Wage Gap.
Per the last statistics on the issue that I have read, women continue to make, on average, just $0.77 for every $1.00 that men earn. This implies that the work men do is ~30% more worthy than equivalent work and work-hours produced by women. This is patronizing bullshit, and when it's combined with hostile and sexist workplaces that continue to exist despite anti-sexual harassment policies it becomes indicative of a subtly expressed but pervasively held belief that men own the economy, and therefore the world, more than women because they "do more"[4]. That the leaders of top companies and political bodies are overwhelmingly male just makes that attitude all the more visible.

Believing that men should earn more[5] because they "do more" makes women into second-class workers. This, in turn, leads all too easily to believing that women are second class people, period, and can be used as such. This is very apparent in the stud vs. slut paradox that Ktbug Ladydid has aptly dissected here.

2) Protectionism
Many men conflate the societal expectation that they protect the women around them with a naive assumption that they, by extension, also know what is best for those women (mentioned in a post below). And all too often and far too easily men confuse their own immediate desires and gratification with what they think would be best for the women around them. This also represents an inaccurate conflation of (comparatively) diminutive physique with assumed mental prowess.

3) Dating
In a typical Western date[6], the guy takes the woman out for dinner and a movie and pays for both. If it was a nice place for dinner the guy can wind up spending a rather large amount of cash. The problem here is that the more money a guy spends on the date, the more he expects that she reciprocate his investment in the night by putting out. In effect, this reduces the date to the guy paying an entry fee to his desires being met, regardless of her desires. This is the milieu in which date rape flourishes.

The key difference here is expectation vs. hope. When a guy goes out on a date expecting that she follow up by allowing physical intimacy to proceed to some vaguely defined "base"[7], it is wrong because it reduces the woman's boundaries, desires, and autonomy to mere conditions, confounding factors, of the the guy's expectations. At the same time, it is perfectly OK for a man to go out on the same date hoping that the relationship will get to the next "base" because simple hope is couched in his respect for the woman and does not in any way conflict with her autonomy.

Nonetheless, the current[6] culture of dating seems to thrive much more on expectation than hope. Expectations also create entitlement in that the societal expectation of reciprocation from the woman creates the popular illusion that that (very uneven) reciprocation is the way things should be, and it is from this narrow vantage point that guys try to justify date rape. If the woman isn't meeting their expectations, they become the victim and once they believe themselves oppressed or treated unfairly it becomes all too easy for them to transmute that into coercive or violent behavior. The entitlement that stems from expectation also serves to diminish the woman's voice and reinforces her standing as a second-class party.

/Cultural Evidence

Date rape and sexual coercion[8] continue to exist because men are socially allowed to view women, and women's autonomy, as less than their own. By feminizing owned things (symptom) and attempting to own women (pathology), men do both genders a gross disservice by deepening the too-wide gap in understanding and social valuation between sexes. In my cohort of 20somethings and younger, the extant traditions mentioned above are slowly eroding and as such I do hope that the next generation will come up even more equitable in general, although unfortunately there're always a couple of jackasses in any given population. Hopefully their behavior will come to be increasingly stigmatized.

[1]E.g., "pussy whipped", "grow a pair and go out tonight", "where does your wife keep your balls?"
[2]Additional evidence that Western culture thinks less of women than men, because the males' families literally had to be paid to accept the bride in the first place.
[3]If you know of additional evidence that I have missed, please add it in comments.
[4]Today's doubty quotation marks generously provided by Büllshyte Incorporated, LLC.
[5]Silence here amounts to tacit endorsement.
[6]So far as Toaster's field research has yet been able to determine. The data are, however, inconsistent.
[7]In lieu of a more elegant term that must exist somewhere.
[8]Infantile posturing, pouting, guilt trips, put-downs, pleading, begging, pestering, insinuations, and innuendo.

Ambiguity in Flirting

Stephanie Zvan of Almost Diamonds has called me out in the mini-series going on below for having not aptly noted that I have not yet discussed how women socially condition men. I have discussed how men are failing their brothers and sons and how men acting in society perpetuate, unwilling or not, gender inequality. She's quite correct in that I have so far left out a very important part of the dialectic, but honestly I haven't yet done so because how men and women interact and shape each other in society is even more complex than the differentiation pathways of dendritic cells, and I still don't feel like I know enough about the latter in the first place, let alone the former.

For example, I was walking home from the lab the other day, still in my lab clothes (dress shirt tucked into Dickies with sneakers and a jacket), lost in the depths of my head as I often am. I noted that there were 2 casually dressed women approaching me from the opposite direct walking side by side, so I politely stepped to the edge of the sidewalk so they could pass and fixed my gaze somewhere oblique. Then, as they approached, one said loudly to the other "That's a GREAT IDEA, NAME!" and then she turned to me as they passed and told me so as well. I stammered back "Good, I'm glad to hear it!" and turned away to walk away and hide my blushing. I still have no fucking clue what any of that was about.

But the thing is, is I immediately wondered if they'd been playing a joke on me because my nerdness is apparent from 50m distance or if it was some odd form of flirting. I suspect that the ambiguity of flirting shapes a lot of how men perceive women's cues and accordingly react. Men grow up exposed to women in films and other popular media who very often say the opposite of what they really want, who are coy, or who are fufilled by a the acquisition of a strong protective man. This, in turn, leads men to believe that in order to possess win over a woman they must be strong and protective, and this is all too frequently transmuted into a smothering sense of entitled control and possession.

Although, in rational terms, it seems a wide and ridiculous leap from a protective attitude to a possessive attitude, the emotional space is actually rather small. It is all too easy for one to go "I protect them when they need it" to "I protect them therefore I know what is best for them". This kind of thing perpetuates the patriarchal attitudes of society just by itself and was especially evident in the historical argument against women's suffrage that they'd just vote how their husbands told them to.

Nonetheless, men believing that they must be strong, aloof*, and shallow to gain access to a relationship with a woman hurts both men and women in the long run. Men hide their emotions from women, and then from themselves, and as such carry around a knot of confusion that too easily erupts into rage and violence. And when many men may perceive the women in their lives (or lack thereof) as the source of their stress (which is a socially encouraged scapegoat**), they lash out at them, emotionally conflating their own misunderstood hurt with the "fight" response of flight-or-fight.

That society tells men they must be strong for women and to get women creates a strong impetus for men to not show weakness around women, especially those they are in relationships with. A woman may push very hard on the man in her life to open up to her emotionally, but when he does so she may very well never be able to see him as she used to want to perceive him, and at some level many men know this and as such it is an additional incentive to remain closed off. Perhaps women could help men here by signaling that they will not judge them poorly if they open up, as this clarity could help a lot of men to become more confident simply with feeling their emotions and not dangerously bottling them up.

I know I'd sure appreciate it if flirting were clearer.


(UPDATE: I just noticed that it doesn't say so anywhere here, but this video is "Closer" by Suffrajett. Citation citations!)

*Toaster has frequently been described as aloof. This is inaccurate. Toaster is simply oblivious.
**Bachelor Pad vs. Ball and Chain.

On Weakness

Western* men are not to be weak; we are expected to always be strong. A moment of public weakness is considered humiliating, and an inability to deeply cage one's less acceptable emotions (sadness, hurt, depression, fear, anxiety) is an inexorable mark of heavy shame. As noted in my previous post, we're allowed jocularity, enthusiasm (for sports, money, and women), and stoicism. Deviation from these acceptable expressions is socially punished by labeling an offending man as effeminate or weak and successively isolating him from the in group.

Consider the case of an uncontrollably sobbing man vs. that of an uncontrollably sobbing woman. In the woman's case most everyone's first instinct, regardless of whether it is expressed or not, is empathy and compassion. But if we see a man on the sidewalk sobbing uncontrollably with his head and shoulders bent to his chest in defeat, we first look away and walk by pretending not to notice, wondering if it would wound the man even more if we were to offer a word of kindness (because to recognize his pain is also to recognize his weakness).

It's a simple rule: those who play by the rules may continue playing while those who do not are cast aside and marked as other.

Some societal circles are substantially more insulated from the consequences of not exactly following that rule. Academia is considerably more tolerant of expressional deviation in men than, say, construction. Even so, in academia we are apt to write off a man who is expressing his emotions outside of prescribed means as either eccentric or poorly socialized. Over time, it seems that these men take those labels unto themselves and perpetuate themselves as cover for their (subconscious?) rebellion against the rule. Perhaps it eases their cognitive dissonance.

In order to follow the rule, Western men have to become accustomed to, or at least numb from, cognitive dissonance between what they actually feel and the means with which they are allowed to express it. This is most evident in father-son relationships, especially after the son has grown and struck out on his own. The son may desperately want his father's approval, to hear that his father is proud of him, but he isn't allowed to come right out and say so because it would expose him as insecure and seeking attention to fill that. Meanwhile, the father may very well be proud of his son, but he is discouraged from expressing that for fear that his son will see him, the role model, as weak.

Within popular culture, this tension is evident in the common, and somewhat true, trope of the a woman battling her boyfriend to open up more and share his feelings with her. Often we try to deflect these uncomfortable requests by claiming to not actually feel nearly so much as women**, and this may be partly true because we're socialized not to really examine our own feelings or consider what they may mean. Once again, the reason is because we have been taught that acknowledging weak emotions, admitting that we have been hurt or that we feel something more than our next goal, is itself weak. In effect, vulnerability itself is weakness, and this perpetuates entire populations of men who don't really know what they're feeling or why. And if we as men cannot understand our own emotional selves, how can we accurately consider those of women?

Here as well, advancement in considerate and respectful treatment of women is contingent upon men coming to better understand themselves. Only when we are able to be truthful with ourselves about what we are really feeling can we hope to begin to understand the casually oppressive world we have been taught to create for women. Only then can we begin to help effect change.

We can start by helping to remove the social stigma attached to perceptions of weakness.

*I qualify this with "Western" because I lack knowledge of male, or even female (although for what it's worth, female behaviors seem to be more universal), behavioral expectations in other cultural milieus and as such I don't claim that what I say here applies to them in any way at all.
**Admittedly, there are some women who seem to feel an amazingly large number of different things in astoundingly short periods of time, but perhaps these few are 1) compulsively emotive or 2) exceptions to prove the rule.

On Male Emotions

I tried to write a letter to my little brother.

I failed.

I started to write about how I couldn't stop puking when he was born. He had a needle feeding an IV into his head and I didn't know what else to do with my worry. I wound up trying to continue typing through tears clouding my eyes because I am so proud of him now and because I am so happy that he doesn't remember most of the things I fought so hard to protect him from growing up. We're brothers, we bear scars inflicted by one another. Thankfully, his adult teeth settled in normally even after I'd managed to knock several of his milk teeth out with a baseball bat (by accident, I swear!), but my toenails have never looked quite the same since he picked up a rock and smashed them off of my right foot when I wasn't paying attention (not an accident, I'm certain!), although his doing so certainly got my attention.

But here's the thing that's interesting: real successful men in the Western world aren't supposed to tear up, let alone cry, for anything ever regardless of everything, except when we are hit in the crotch. Indeed, my first reaction to noting the tears gathering at the corners of my eyes was to stop what I was doing and ensure that no one could see me or, if they could (which would be embarrassing), that they at least hadn't noticed. If they had I would have had no choice but to covertly punch myself in the crotch to give me an excuse.

Western men are, in essence, expected to dissociate themselves from their internal emotional state and relate to general society through a very narrow prescripted set of emotional cues. We're allowed jocularity, enthusiasm (for sports, money, and women), and stoicism. If we have some modicum of power over our fellows, we're also allowed public displays of frustration and/or anger. But to be sad, withdrawn, or quiet is considered weird. Compassion is tolerated from certain professions (e.g., MDs only) but is regarded elsewhere as creepy.

I don't claim to know where these proscribed action sets came from, but I do observe that they are rather inflexibly reinforced through everyday interactions among men. I posit here that these perpetuate the irresponsible man-child phenotype I discussed in the post just below.

To completely assume adulthood and its obligations is to also assume its mores and social rituals, including the restrictive expression of male emotions. As a result, it is far easier for young men to float along expressing nothing but "dude!" and lust than it is to develop the maturity required to really feel anything in the first place and then be caught up in the inherent cognitive dissonance of Western expression.

Consequently, to help change the definition of a real successful man from a cold, stoic automaton to a responsible, considerate, and respectful individual and in doing so help the cause of gender inequality, we need to also broaden the avenues through which men in the West may express themselves. Not only will this allow everyone to better understand each other, it will also allow young men growing into adulthood to better understand themselves.