Women’s Inequality

Fourth year, just before classes began in Fall 1987, I was coming out of Clark Hall and passed some scaffolding.  There were a couple of construction guys about 10+ feet up, and another in a pick-up in the turn-around. One of them whistled, another yelled “Hey baby, you wanna sit on my face?”  Without even looking, I yelled back, “Is your tongue bigger than your dick?” and kept walking.

Sexual harassment is a fact of life for all women.  In the The Profound Misogyny of a Popular Sexual Harassment Defense, Amanda Marcotte is correct that Kavinoky’s defense—“If he were hot it wouldn’t be harassment”—is fundamentally misogynistic, but then so are most incidents of harassment, so it would follow that any “defense” would be as well. The Filners of the world aren’t interested in sex; they are interested in exerting control. Ask any counselor or psychiatrist what motivates sexual assault and rape, and that expert will tell you “it’s not about the sex; it’s about control.” The same is true on the smaller scale of sexual harassment. Men don’t harass women because they want sex; they harass women because they want power over them.

Here’s the thing no one says out loud: We women are born with all the power in every relationship. Think about it. Having romantic relationships is about breeding, whether you intend to reproduce or not. It’s a biological urge that has found cultural expression through the formalization of marriages.  Those marital relationships have, in turn, morphed through social contracts and romantic idealism into desirable goals themselves. But all of it stems from the need to breed.

Women literally sit on 100% of the breeding capacity in the world. We OWN it. Breeding is how our species continues, and breeding requires sex. Furthermore, we retain our power after the breeding. Women are still the primary caregivers for approximately 70% of all children and therefore control the results of breeding, as well as the access to it. If one accepts that species continuation is still a primary motivating force at all, women have it locked up. Therefore, many men see the equality scale as already tipped in women’s favor. That attitude is primitive and mildly abhorrent, but it is based on a fundamental biological truth. All of the analysis in the world will not change that dynamic.

It was late November 1990 at Trax, and I was with four of my posse–a mixed group of women and men, none of us obviously coupled up–listening to BTB rock the stage. The troll who had been eyeing me for a while approached as Debbie and I fetched another round from the bar. Instead of introducing himself, he said, “It’s cold outside. Wanna be warmed up by a real man tonight?” I replied, “I couldn’t warm up to you if we were cremated together.”

Take the next step. Sex has become a commodity. In today’s world it is glorified, marketed, and sold on a 24/7 basis. Women control 96% of the sex available to men in the U.S. (deducting the statistical 4% for homosexual orientation). To put that into perspective, imagine if any one corporation controlled 96% of any industry.  It’s why Republicans don’t want to give women work equality or responsibility over their bodies. It’s why fashion and media moguls tear down our image of ourselves and try to mold us into something less than what we are–often literally less. It’s why many rapists don’t consider rape a crime. It’s why soldiers engage in gang-banging overseas. It’s why every man who makes a crude comment about your tits and ass when you walk down a city street thinks he’s entitled to do so. If you are a woman, you aren’t a person. You are a commodity, because you are an empowered, individual shareholder in life’s natural monopoly, and a man is not.

It was a slow sales day in 1995. I was at the front pump—an organ and a keyboard placed side by side at the front of the store—playing pop standards to in order to attract passersby. A work colleague suggested that if I opened up another button on my blouse maybe I could “work it” better. The “it” he was referring to wasn’t the musical instruments. I left the front pump indicating that he should take it over.

Sex is not fair, balanced, or equal, and women have no way of making it so.  Neither do men, for all the legislation and social pressure they try to place on our bodies and our sexual behavior. Like women are, they are stuck with an unbalanced system designed by nature. Unlike women have, they have been inculcated over thousands of years with the belief that they are supposed to dominate nature. But men cannot harass, rape, dominate, or torture their way into reproductive equality.

Reproductive inequality is not an excuse for reprehensible behavior. Neither is the premium men have placed on sexuality in general. It is obvious by now that women are humans first, not a natural resource to be exploited, not a commodity to be marketed and traded. In our modern world, the population of breedable human females is not threatened with extinction. There is no compelling reason to treat women like breeding stock beyond the control and domination factors. The control and domination factors are societal and traditional, and therefore can be changed.

In fact, I believe that this one of strongest arguments for why gender equality has to be expressed in our laws. Morals, which define personal character, are often informed by the social and religious culture in which we were raised (or which we adopted at some point, if we rebelled). They are individual and subjective. Ethics, which are codified in our body of law, describe a society’s standards of behavior and the system in which commonly accepted morals are applied. Harassment (and its more violent cousins, sexual assault and rape) is not a moral issue. It is an ethical one.

We, as a society, either believe that women have the right to be treated as humans first and foremost, instead of breeding stock, or we believe that women are a “special subset” of the species and therefore should be subjected to “special treatment.” Ethical, not moral.

As Ian Welsh once wrote in his blog, “The best short definition I’ve heard … is that morals are how you treat people you know.  Ethics are how you treat people you don’t know.”

In 2000, I was managing a couple of political debate sites, covering mostly Constitutional and civil rights issues, including debates on Confederate flag displays, Internet privacy and free speech, public education, abortion, and gun control. An acquaintance “took me to task” on the boards for becoming a “feminazi” because of my strident pro-choice opinion. He didn’t “get how someone so morally correct in most other ways” could get this thing “so wrong.” For some reason, he believed that his opinion of my opinion should matter, but my opinion was not subject to his morality. I expressed my opinion, which was that his position was (and still is) unethical in its morality. I am a person first, not livestock. I do not believe he or anyone else so completely unrelated to my reproductive interests has a right to decide whether or not I can or should have kids. The acquaintance began to troll my boards looking for opportunities to mock, needle, and provoke me, while pretending to “respect” my point of view. This was not respect. This was harassment–sexual harassment–because I refused to accept his judgment on my “place” as a woman. In this case, because there was no non-personal reason for banning him from a public board, I asked my fellow web managers to help police him until he finally stopped posting.

So where am I going with this?  I want to circle back to the individual level, because all sex is ultimately personal. That’s where we make the real decisions that impact our everyday lives and how we treat each other one-on-one influences how we relate to the aggregate. There are legal ways of recognizing equality and they are important if we want human society to progress, but the most important kind of equality is the sense of it you create in your own life.

I believe that, since women already own the sex, we should own the sexuality that goes with it.

And here, again, I am going to speak directly to (and possibly for) the ladies: Most of us spend some period of time (and some of us, our whole lives) defining who we are based on how men perceive us as sexual entities. This infuriates me, because it reduces the wonderfulness of us down to two boobs and a vag, and how they relate to the man standing in judgment. A man’s worth as a human being is not based on his looks or his sexuality. It’s based on the quality of his character, his personality, his mind, and his actions. We should accept no less for ourselves.

In a world where men are allowed to define a woman’s value through her sexuality, attractiveness, amiability, and malleability become more desired traits than intelligence, competence, and creative productivity. Getting married and even having children become goals instead of lifestyle choices. And every time a woman is harassed, sexually assaulted, or raped, it is her fault for somehow taking advantage of her natural monopoly.

More advice for the daughter I’ll never have: A man has the right to define who you are to him in his world; there are some prejudices and attitudes that he may own and changing or overcoming them may not be worth the effort. But you should never let a man define who you are. Not even in the context of a romantic relationship—not at the Madonna/whore stage, not when you run into compatibility issues, not when you are twelve years into a marriage with two kids, not when the relationship is done and you are laying in fetal position wondering what went wrong. You are a woman with a sex drive and a need to belong in an environment that encourages your safety, security, prosperity, happiness, and trust. You are no less entitled to any of those things than the men in your life. So define how much of each you need, and define what percent of them you require from your primary relationships. You have the power to define it, because such relationships exist precisely because you are woman.

There are real reasons for both men and women to want a long-term romantic relationship, but the sexuality required to make such a relationship happen can just as easily become a detriment to its longevity. In my previous blog post, I wrote that “[m]en are simple when the issue comes down to sex,” and that is as true for sexual harassment as it is for relationshipping, because in all sexual matters there is a natural imbalance of power. When a man feels like he has no control, he will look for ways to take control and, most often, because it’s there at the basest level of human functioning, his target will be the women he encounters in his life.

But if a woman is in charge of how a man’s treatment of her makes her feel about herself, then she can find emotional and mental equilibrium even when faced with harassment, sexual assault, and rape. Women, own your sexuality; do not let it, or the men with whom you share it, define you.

Say It Like You Mean It

When it comes to relationships, men say exactly what they mean.

I keep telling my younger girlfriends this, but maybe it takes age or several relationships to experience the reality of it. I’m going to say it again, just because women need to hear it from another woman. (Women never seem to believe it from a man.)

When men talk about relationships at all, they are direct. They say exactly what they mean. There is no hidden agenda. If his mouth is moving and he’s telling you what he’s feeling, then he’s being truthful in that moment. Take heed of what is said and what he chooses to not say.

I’m going to use an example from my own life to illustrate the point, because if I use any of my friends’ they might dropkick me into the next blogosphere.

It’s a Friday night and “Frank,” the man I had been seeing for a while, is over the moon about me, which is great because I’m infatuated too. He tells me, “I can see us growing old together; I know I’d never get tired of you. I love you, I love everything about you, and I think I want to marry you. What kind of engagement ring do you want?” Do I believe him? Abso-frickin-lutely!

Fast forward five days to Tuesday around dinner time: Frank has been silent for a while. When he finally communicates, this is what comes out, “I’ve got [list of seven other things, situations, and people] that I’m dealing with right now as best as I can. I’m overwhelmed and I don’t want to deal with you. I don’t think I can handle a woman in my life right now. You should probably just leave.” Do I believe him? Goddamn right I do!

If you have the intelligence of lichen, you will have noticed that Frank’s two statements (made under a week apart) contradict each other. In the first, he’s clearly feeling the joy and wants our relationship to continue until we’re being wiped down by a nurse at the old folks’ home. In the second, he’s clearly feeling the pressure, he can’t focus on any goals or situations that aren’t in front of his face, and he wants out faster than you can say “lockpick.” While in one phase, he never references his opposite state of mind.  He may have had no cognition that these opposing mental attitudes created a roller coaster in our relationship. The roller coaster ran for months. Yes, both statements were perfectly true. Every time he said them.

Here’s the trick: A man may never say as much as a woman wants him to, but that’s ok. All a woman has to do is listen to what he is saying, not what she wants him to say. When she actually hears what he’s saying, she will probably be able to put together the clues and find some of the answers she sought. She may not like the answers, but she will be able to respond to something real, not just in her head.

With Frank, I had a boyfriend who was internally conflicted about what he needed and wanted in his life. It came out clearly in his words. As a free agent with a vested interest in the outcome of his civil war, I could push for one conclusion or another (and at times I pushed for any effing conclusion at all), but the problem was essentially his. It had very little to do with me or the role I played in his life.

Once I accepted that truth, I had only one obligation. I had to let him know that his inability to think past today’s crisis was jeopardizing his tomorrow’s happiness, if he still considered me a part of that happiness. If there was no change or response on his part, then I had two possible actions—wait it out and hope, or leave. I tried the former for a bit, but I have to live a life too, so I ended up doing the latter.

Ladies, let’s take a couple of broad examples now and apply the theory that men say exactly what they mean.

Ex. 1: It’s six months into it, the two of you are in bed, and you curl into him after sex and ask “So where is our relationship heading?” He replies, “I don’t know.” You say, “Well, what do you think?” He says, “I don’t know. I guess I kinda like where we are now.” He’s not being evasive and he’s not in a fuck fugue. He probably didn’t even think about it until you asked, because whatever the two of you have right now fits his comfort zone. If you are looking for more, you can read a lot into such a neutral statement. That would be a mistake, and so would be pursuing the issue at that moment. If he didn’t think about it before you brought it up as pillow talk, then you’re not going to get a different answer until you back off and let him do so.

Ex. 2: You’re hanging out with a male friend, you’re both drinking, he hits on you, and you ask “Now you want to be more than friends?” He says, “I just want you.” You say, “Well, if you want to sleep with me then you must want something more than friendship.” He replies, “C’mon, don’t you want me too?” That is a classic misdirection. He avoided answering the question, so the answer is “No.” Do not be fooled by his attempt to focus on the sexuality of the moment. He does not want to become your next guy. He wants to get laid and he wants to know if you are horny too. What he is and is not saying tells you volumes but you are not hearing it because you are focused on getting him to admit something that isn’t true for him. Stop doing that.

This example brings me to one of the lines men often draw that women frequently don’t recognize or don’t want to recognize, and how it comes out verbally.

When I was 14, I read Kathleen Winsor’s “Forever Amber,” an epic drama set in the court of Charles II using the tribulations of one woman as a lens for examining the culture and events of those times. One line, spoken early on by the character of Bruce Carlton about the anti-heroine Amber, has stuck with me (and I’ll have to paraphrase because I don’t have the book anymore):  “She’s the kind of woman any man would want as a mistress, but no man wants to marry.”

Men still classify women in Madonna/whore terms—or, in modern parlance, as “marriageable” vs. “fuckable.” You say this doesn’t still happen? Yeah, I’ll call that trope and raise you $20. It happens, even with men who don’t have the sexual dysfunction complex of the same name.

No woman wants to be Amber St. Clare. Her life was miserable. Unfortunately, when it comes to the Madonna/whore, wife/mistress dichotomy, I have usually placed in the second mental category–the Amber category. It took me an ashamedly long time to unravel the subtext, but I ascribe it to being deliberately thickheaded. I simply didn’t want to hear what I was hearing, repeatedly, from some otherwise wonderful men who treated me well and were quite nice in every other aspect. I am not marriage material. I am the anti-Mom.

Men are simple when the issue comes down to sex. It’s basic psychology. The first woman almost any man learned to love and respect was Mom, unless she beat him with a coat hanger or left him with the druggies while she got her fix in the backroom. Mom was not sexy. Whatever her other characteristics and personality, Mom was safe, secure, dependable, and trustworthy. A woman who is seen as primarily sexy—whether it’s just a part of her makeup or because she works it too hard—is already down about four rungs on that ladder toward long-term relationship-dom. Why? Because long-term emotional commitments require that you both feel safe and secure with each other, locked in a relationship based on mutual trust and dependability.  I repeat:  Mom was not sexy. If you are the anti-Mom, then you aren’t associated with the required building blocks a guy needs to make a commitment.

This is great if you don’t want a commitment from him, either. It sucks if you want to be and/or think you are a contender for his heart.

And, in case you missed it, I just related an important piece of translation:  If the guy you are newly dating tells you that you are sexy, he’s already put you in the “fuckable,” not “marriageable” category. I’m not saying you can’t change or broaden his perception over time, but first you’ll have to convince him to treat you like real person in his real world, instead of like the best booty call he’s ever laid. You can try, but he may not be worth the Herculean effort. Good luck with that.

In general, I believe women do men a disservice when it comes to relationships. I take it as given that women analyze such things more than men do–probably more than we should and more than most relationships deserve. It seems to come hard-wired into our gender. But many women also prejudge men as less capable of or willing to express what they feel, what they want, and what they mean.

I don’t believe men are less capable at all. Rather, I believe that women could learn from men how to communicate more succinctly and directly. Respond to what is said, not to what you think it means. If you need clarification, be clear about what and why. When you ask something or say something in return, don’t “lead the witness.” Say it like you mean it.

Actually, that’s true for most communications: Say it like you mean it.