Healthy Male Sexuality?

Jaclyn Friedman, co-editor of Yes Means Yes, is writing a new book, and is doing a workshop related to the book, and she's asking for folks who want to participate to contact her:

When it comes to sex, should I always avoid the things that make me uncomfortable? How do I know if the person I’m flirting with is safe to date? Is hooking up always damaging? What do I say to a friend who’s making sexual choices I think might be bad for her? What if that friend is questioning my choices? How do I encourage others to be safe and sane about sex without teaching them shame?
...[b]ut before the book can reach the page, Jaclyn is looking for a dozen volunteers to be the very first people to ever read the book, engage with the exercises, discuss the process with each other and with Jaclyn, and help shape the finished book.

The books sounds fantastic. I contacted her just to verify that the book, and workshop, is about/for women- or female-identified folks, and she quickly responded that, yes, it is. No problem there: All books have to have some sort of scope, and a book about healthy female sexuality framed in the way she's framing it is a pretty wide scope already.

At the same time, male-identified folks need a book like this as well--many of the resources I find when I search "healthy male sexuality" revolve more around viagra than around complex male sexuality.

Please share any good resources all y'all know about!

I'll start. This book seems to have a gender analysis at the beginning (though it starts with a discussion of Viagra), touching on at least some of the intricacies of male sexuality: The New Male Sexuality

Tim Wise on Guilt and Responsibility

Great video on Sociological Images from Time Wise (transcript below, courtesy of SI):


The clip is great, as far as it goes. I would have loved for him to have linked responsibility to privilege more explicitly, however. For instance, regarding the analogy to environmental pollution, it’s the folks who have benefited most from past corporate policies who have the most responsibility to change things now, just as the folks who have benefited/are benefiting from gender and race injustice historically who have the most responsibility to make changes now. That doesn't mean we don't all have work to do, of course, but some of us should take more responsibility than others.

I'd also like to point out that guilt and responsibility aren't mutually exclusive, though it might be helpful to sometimes think of them as such--guilt that drives one to action is useful. Guilt that drives one to shame and inaction is selfish.


Transcript:

Transcript for those who need/want it:

Questioner (off-camera): Um, as a white male, should I feel guilty for the sins of my fathers. I affirm that they exist, but should I feel guilty for them?

Tim Wise: No. You should feel angry. And you should feel committed to doing something to address that legacy. It’s like, for instance, with pollution, right? We think about the issue of pollution. Now none of us in this room, to my knowledge, are individually responsible for having belched any toxic waste into the air, or injecting toxic waste into the soil, or done any of the things… we didn’t put lead paint into the housing, you know?

Individually we’re innocent of that. But someone did that stuff, and we’re living with the legacy of it right now, or in this case might be dying with the legacy of it, getting ill, right?.

So it isn’t about feeling guilty about what someone did, even if you were the direct heir of the chemical company that did the pollution, but it is about saying, all of us in the society have to take responsibility for what we find in front of us. There’s a big difference between guilt and responsibility.

Guilt is what you feel for what you’ve done. Responsibility is what you take because of the kind of person you are, right? And so if I see a set of social conditions that have been handed to you, and which not only did wrong by othrs but elevated me and give me advantage that I did not earn, it’s not about beating myself up, I’m not responsible for that having happened, I’m not to blame for it, so guilt is totally unproductive

But in order to live an ethical life, to live ethically and responsibly, I have to take some responsibility for the unearned advantage, which means working to change the society that bestows that advantage. It’s not guilt, but it is responsiblity. It’s no different than looking at the issue of pollution or if you became the CFO of the company, you wouldn’t be able to come in and say, “I intend to use the assets of this company, and I insend to put them to greater use, and I intend to use the revenue stream we’ve got going, but that whole debt side of the ledger? No, I’m not paying any of that because I wasn’t here when the other person ran all that debt up. You should’ve gotten them to pay it before you gave me the job. Now I’m here, and I’m innocent.” We would realize that made no sense.

So isn’t about innocence and it isn’t about guilt, it’s about responsibility, that’s something we all have to take. White folks have to take it, people of color have to take it, uh, men and women have to take… everybody has got to take it, because we’re living with… if we don’t do it, no one does it, and it doesnt’ get done. We’re the only hope we have.

The Straight Guy Box

Thinking a lot about the lack of positive male sexualities, especially for straight-identified men, in part because of a recent post by Hugo.And then, I run into this funny-yet-poignant piece from Dan Savage (who I often agree with and who is often wrong) that sums up a lot of what I've been pondering:

Men's Stories

New men's stories in November during two nights of performance of the Men's Story Project. Anybody who lives in the SF Bay Area, we'd love to see you there. Even more info at the Men's Story Project site, and on Facebook.

A little taste of a previous MSP:

Talking with Men

I've had some interesting opportunities recently to talk to men in contexts that invited me to explicitly involve a feminist lens. While waiting for a "to go" order last night, I struck up a conversation with a guy who was waiting for his food. We were both standing outside the restaurant--I was standing next to my bike, which wasn't locked up, and he was waiting with his dog. I asked him if I could pet his dog (who was super-cute, named "Jack", and very happy to get some pets) and he mentioned that he could bring the dog to the school where he taught 3rd grade, and the kids loved him. Asking some more questions, I found out he's been teaching for over a decade, teaches at a private school in Oakland, has also taught kindergarten, and loves his job. I have a close friend who teaches, and we've talked some about how there is a gendered skew for grade school teachers, most of whom are women, and about how men are sometimes looked at askance for even wanting to teach children. I asked my new acquaintance what it was like for him, being in a profession that has many more women than men.

He had an interesting response that sort of surprised me in its sexism: He said that it was hard to get things done sometimes, because women teachers are more emotional than he was (being a man), and less pragmatic. I was sort of taken aback--I wanted to acknowledge his experience (after all, I had kind of asked a relatively personal question of a stranger), but felt a need to know more, and to respond. Unfortunately, his food was ready at that point, and I didn't get to talk to him further. I didn't get to ask him, for instance, if perhaps the teachers at his school felt "more emotional" than he felt, making it about personal traits, rather than about so-called gendered traits. I didn't get to ask him what "pragmatic" meant to him (did it mean ignoring passionate stances?). I applaud anybody who becomes a teacher, mostly because it's such a tough job, and I'm glad that there are men who want to teach kids, but I found the overly simplified sexism a little disheartening. Perhaps if I had talked to him more about why he felt that way, I would have gained a better understanding of where he was coming from.

Do We Dare?

A new blog for male feminists, written by a feminist man in his 20s: What Men Dare Do

One day, a friend of mine, a girl, who was then and still is one of my best friends, and I were hanging out. I couldn't tell you where or what we were doing, but I think we were perhaps on our way back from a party, or maybe going to one. She mentioned to me, very casually, "You know, Jeff, sometimes you make these sexist jokes, and they're hurtful."

It was in a very casual situation, and perhaps my remembrance of it gives it more weight than it really had, but that was my "click" moment. Somehow, that casual comment, even though I'd already read about and believed all these things about feminism, hammered home the fact that I was not living by the principles I purported to stand by. How I was living was hurting my friends, and not unlike other young people, my friends meant everything to me.

(By the way, this "Jeff" is not me...though I may like his blog more in part because he has such a great name.)

Gender Policing for Moms!

Homophobia Used to Keep Boys and Men In Line

Hat tip to Sociological Images:
This is what it’s like to be a man under patriarchy: moments of inhumanity in which men accept and reproduce hatred against others and moments of victimization when other men aim that hatred at you.



Apparently, this happened years ago, and the Yankees have addressed it, but it's hard for me to imagine that this doesn't still go on during games, sometimes.

I wonder: What possible options did the young men who were being verbally harassed here have? Against that kind of mob mentality, just sitting there and taking it might have been their best option--various kinds of "fighting back" would be buying into the confrontational nature of the whole thing (and invited a higher chance of physical violence). Simply getting up and walking away seems plausible, but then, that would have made the harassers pretty happy (and those tickets can be expensive!). I wonder how those yahoos would respond to, "Hey, my sexuality has nothing to do with my loving the Mets." I'm guessing that wouldn't have helped much.

Confidence Without Jerkiness

UPDATE: The following post assumes that we're all on the same page about Nice Gusy(tm) vs. nice guys, a la Feminism 101's definitions. Now, back to the post...


I'm really glad that Dating (and/or Fucking) While Feminist has become an popular topic. Whatever you think about love and romance, and wherever you are in your love life, chances are that if you're a feminist, you've had to struggle with some of the things that other folks are struggling with. From Jaclyn Friedman's Fucking While Feminist interview to Jill Filipovic's wonderful rant Single White Female Seeks Passive-Agressive Misogynist over on Feministe, there is a lot to think about, and, since this is the internet, lots of folks have strong opinions about it all.

I think there are a lot of things a feminist (or pro-feminist) man can say about all of this (after all, some of us are dating/fucking while feminist as well), but I don't want to take that head on just yet. Instead, I'd like to talk about a tangent of the discussions dealing with the idea that it's sometimes difficult to grow into a confident and/or assertive man who is also on board with feminist ideas and actions.

Over on Jill's post, commentor Bagelsan responds to a guy who is taking the oh-so-boring-and-common line of thought that women (all of them!) like jerks. The guy says:

“Girls really do like jerks, though. I mean they don’t like jerks but they like certain qualities that come with being a jerk. Like the confidence and ambition and assertiveness.”

And Bagelsan responds with a hilarious bit of wordplay about dolphins-with-Hitler-mustaches:

Some girls like certain qualities that “come with” being, say, a dolphin too, though. Like swimming ability? Or qualities that “come with” being Hitler — like being a compelling public speaker, or getting along okay with (certain) children. Doesn’t mean guys should all start cultivating wee mustaches over their bottlenoses though.*

More to the point, qualities like “confidence” exist independent of jerkishness. (Just like there are kid-loving swimmers who aren’t Nazi porpoises.) So why in the world do Nice Guys think they have to be jerks to be confident, etc?

*I may or may not have used this somewhat tortured metaphor entirely in order to describe this image. :p Bagelsan

Bagelsan's (likely rhetorical) question is what got me to thinking: So why in the world do Nice Guys think they have to be jerks to be confident, etc?

The trite answer is something like "Because that's mostly what we see. Examples of confident jerks abound all around us." This is no excuse for bad behavior, of course--just because bad examples abound doesn't mean we have to follow them. But the prevalence of them does supply a partial answer to Bagelsan's question. And even boys who eventually learn to be men who are confident-but-not-jerks have an uphill battle in at least some ways; look at how much Barak Obama gets chastised for what amounts (in my mind) to a quiet confidence.

There is a culture of traditional male masculinity which encourages a particular type of cocky confidence, and that traditional type of masculinity is something that boys and men have to come to terms with as they grow up and grow older. We have to discover other kinds of confidence that are not as often presented as options. I've learned a lot of that confidence from the women in my life--women who have learned that they can be straight-forward without being jerks (though there are problems there, of course, that come with being a confident woman; confident women are seen as "bitches" when confident men are seen as...confident). I've also learned about other forms of confidence from other men. The men involved in the Men's Story Project are an amazing bunch of men who have a lot of confidence, and little jerkitude.

Where did you learn to have confidence without being a jerk? Who are your role models in that regard? How long did it take you to learn the lesson that you can be confident without being a jerk?

Blogroll

Hey. Is this thing on? Anybody there? Bueller?

Sound off if you are lazy about your RSS feed and still subscribe to this blog. And when you sound off, please let me know about a pro-feminist-men blog that you like, because I'm way out of the loop at this point. And I want to be in-loop.

What About the Menz (with Small Penises)?!??

This cartoon from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal sums up how I oftentimes feel about men who respond to explanations about gendered oppression with claims to being oppressed, as men:


I'm not sure who came up with the "what about the menz?!?" meme first, but Shakesville is pretty good at pointing out examples. One of the things that bugs me about this mentality is that it takes the focus off of legitimate concerns about how men are negatively affected by patriarchy by raising bs about how men are "oppressed" as men, by women.

Oh Brother

Sally hints that Charlie Brown needs to man up:


And now it's not even really hinting:


But then Lucy saves the day:

Opposite Day

From Subnormality.(Click to enlarge.)

Men's Story Project: Josie Rocks It On CNN

Tumor on Your Funny Bone?

Great Interview About Men and Feminist Movements

Women have pushed, and continue to push, for gender equality. What about men? What role could and should they play in that struggle? Raewyn Connell describes how gender relations are constructed and identifies what stands in the way of more men and boys signing on to a gender-equal future. She also discusses how male opposition to sexism and male privilege might be expanded.

Bunny Viking

I wish I lived in this world:


A world where there would be nothing wrong with the "manly" horns, but also nothing wrong with the cute bunny ears. Thank you, F-Minus.

Bitch

My favorite part is: "Patriarchy hurts men too!"

Yum

I just love this man:

New V-day Show I'm In

(Click to embiggen.)

Hey y'all. If anybody out there is in the Bay Area, you might come see a great show I'm involved in, details below.

TWO DATES!
MARCH 13 @ 8PM
MARCH 14 @ 9PM
Box office opens 1 hr prior to show time.
Tickets at door only.
$10- $20 sliding scale
VIP Reception to follow performance on Saturday March 14.
$20 admission to performance gets you in for food, drinks, and fun!
INTERSECTION FOR THE ARTS
446 Valencia Street (between 15th & 16th) in San Francisco.
Proceeds benefit SFWAR (www.sfwar.org)


A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant & A Prayer
A groundbreaking collection of monologues by world-renowned authors and playwrights, edited by Eve Ensler and Mollie Doyle and commissioned by V-Day for the first V-Day: UNTIL THE VIOLENCE STOPS festival, which took place June 2006 in New York City.

Beyond the time constraint of five minutes or less and the theme of women and violence, each monologue was for the writer to realize. No constructs, restrictions, or rules. A fantasy of a world where there is no violence. A poem about the physics of a slap. A memory.

These writings are inspired, funny, angry, heartfelt, tragic, and beautiful. Together they create a true and profound portrait of how violence against women affects every one of us. A MEMORY, A MONOLOGUE, A RANT, AND A PRAYER is a call to the world to demand an end to violence against women.

ABOUT V-DAY:
V-Day is a global movement to end violence against women and girls that raises funds and awareness through benefit productions of Playwright/Founder Eve Ensler's award winning play The Vagina Monologues and other artistic works.

In 2008, more than 3400 V-Day events took place in the U.S. and around the world. To date, the V-Day movement has raised over $60 million and educated millions about the issue of violence against women.
www.vday.org