By Gorbachev
Since the dawn of writing, men have said that it’s not men who seek power, but women. There’s a major kernel of truth in this, or it wouldn’t be what every man instinctively feels.
“Rape is about patriarchy and is an attempt to maintain power over women” always struck me as obviously false, even as a callow, quasi-Marxist/feminist-college freshman. But if feminists were right about this, then they also had to be right about porn. Porn would objectify women and make rape worse. “Porn is the theory; rape is the practice”.
Their conclusions seemed to defy my experience of what male sexuality was all about. Almost every other man I knew agreed with me; the ones who didn’t had obvious motives for pretending to agree.
There’s a very good reason why Dworkin and Mackinnon were dead wrong about the connections between rape/sex/porn/objectification/power. They weren’t stupid; they were just mistaken. In fact, their analysis was often very clever and well-argued. Their logic followed, once they made the assumptions they did.
Their failure is interesting. But the process that got them to the wrong conclusion is also very illustrative, because it highlights one reason feminism makes mistakes.
The chief mistake was assuming male and female sexuality are identical, and then “Projecting” female motivations onto male motivations. This made it seem to them that Men were using Rape/Sex as a power play to take power from Women. Porn added fuel to the fire and helped men objectify women, and treat them as targets.
Men aren’t primarily after power. They’re after sex. Power and social status are just two of many tools that get you to Sex. On the other hand, women are genuinely interested in power, because power gives women what socially concerns them most: social status. Sex is a useful tool for the acquisition of status, but sex isn’t usually a goal in its own right.
There’s a good reason why these particular feminists missed this completely. They made an ideological error – assuming male and female sexual motivations are the same. They then made a human error- projecting their understanding of their own female sexual motivations onto males.
Rape and Power
Their conclusion, that men used rape as a tool to enforce Patriarchy as a power grab to keep women oppressed, was a natural conclusion and made perfect sense if their assumption was true – that men were primarily using sex to get social status and social power.
If their imagined “Patriarchy” had actually been a Matriarchy, they’d have been spot-on.
But men are simpler creatures, and the Dworkinites were way off base.
Rape isn’t about power. It’s about sex. (hence: prison rape)
Porn is not the “theory”, and Rape the practice. In fact, by supplying sexual gratification, porn seems to dull the urge to acquire sex, and hence, the need to rape.
Naomi Wolf explores this and comes to the frustrating conclusion that porn is putting men off real sex with real women. That’s a pretty damned sharp observation for a feminist to make.
MALE SEXUALITY
We want sex. That’s pretty much the whole point of it. We may use sex to further this or that goal, and some men may love the power they feel, but most days, the goal is pretty much sex. If we do use sex to further a goal, beyond the further goal is usually more sex, often with, say, a more attractive woman. The fact that some men also enjoy dominating, controlling, or demeaning a woman doesn’t change the reasoning.
You have to be a man to appreciate this: Men are interested in sex. Full stop.
More to the point, men often do *other* things mostly as a means of acquiring sex: work hard, make money, be creative, become famous – for sex. Younger girls, hotter girls, more girls. Get more sex. It’s instinctive.
The more men disengage from the quest for access to real females and real sex, the more they tend to drop out of society, stop working hard, stop caring about social status, lose interest and just chill out.
The quest for sex makes men social. It makes them productive and it fosters creativity. Productivity and creativity are the tools they use to acquire social status and access to the females they desire. The desire for sex makes them develop and hone social skills, including the ability to reward (and deceive) women.
As interest in sex drops, so does the tendency to engage in violent behavior and the willingness to take risks among violent men. In all of this, the quest for sex is the primary goal. Everything else is just a means to that end.
Off-topic: The implications for productive economies as this aspect of male psychology plays out is not small. As men fail to find women and shuffle on with life, economies, tax bases and social mechanisms are going to start to decay.
HEALTHY MALE SEXUALITY
Here’s a hard fact about men that women always try to either ignore or use for their own advantage:
Healthy, normal male sexuality physically objectifies women.
As visual-sexual animals, on a fundamental level, men absolutely objectify their women. Women are tools for sexual gratification. This is the very basis of “Maleness”. Porn explores this in all its elemental glory.
If a woman doubts this, all she has to do is have sex with a man for any length of time to see the bald, naked facts for what they are.
Men also like emotional attachment, just as women do. We’re not a separate species. But when you get right down to it, Woman as focus/object of sexual desire is what makes sex interesting to men. “Sensitive Man” is never more than a tactic to get sex by appearing agreeable, or a wallpaper-thin overlay on top of a seething cauldron of sexual objectification. The animal lurks under the skin, and it’s not wearing very much.
The difference between gay and lesbian public culture shows this even more clearly.
women actually like it.
Feminists complain about it, but the fact of the matter is that most women instinctively know this truth about men. Not only do they know it, they’re sexually stimulated by it. They may not want men looking at porn, but a woman wants her man to look at her that way.
This is cross-cultural. Even when it’s considered “indecent”, being objectified by (attractive) men reinforces a woman’s sense of her own sexual power. An attractive woman who deals with men understands how powerful she is.
All of this is a result of the hard reality of male sexual objectification.
FEMALE SEXUALITY
Women can have sex for its own sake. They share the basic human sex drive with men. Women most definitely objectify men, sexually and otherwise.
However, by and large, women have a different distribution of priorities. They also use sex as a social tool and to further other goals.
Power
Obviously, women use sex to acquire power over and resources from men. This is the core social element of female sexuality: Men want it; women got it.
Men without access, or who don’t have the access they want, suffer. But providing men with alternative access to females usually solves the problem in a way it doesn’t for women. (Hello, prostitution).
Women also use sex to negotiate difficulties and smooth over social issues. That’s something we share to a limited degree with other primates.
Many feminists rightly point out that relying on sexual power / using sexual power basically makes women dependent on men for validation or power. Worse, this power is transitory. Men like youth. Beauty fades: “she’s old / ugly / a slut”. But this is an old script, a script that is likely burned deep into our brains.
Women want power over the sexuality of the males in their lives.
This is the reason women dislike porn. Some hate it for ideological reasons, but most women dislike it because it disentangles men from females’ perceived power. They also dislike prostitutes for the same reason. Most women are hypocrites. They hate prostitution, even when their own men don’t pay for it, not because it demeans women, but because it threatens them. It reduces their personal sense of sexual power over men, especially the men in their lives, if men have options.
BAD ASSUMPTION
Some brands of feminism assumed, for ideological reasons, that with male and female sexuality, “Equal” meant “Identical”. Some brands of feminism didn’t. Some radical feminists saw male sexuality as inherently different and dangerous; others saw female sexuality as different, but complementary.
Rarely did any feminists seek to ask men what their experience of sexuality really was.
Some thought that male sexuality could be changed. A whole generation of men were raised to be sensitive and meek and understanding. And women have since gravitated wholesale to bad boys, because as we discover at some point, women aren’t sexually attracted to the Nice, Sensitive Guy. They want Men.
The big mistake the Dworkinites made was to project their own experience (as females), using sex for power, onto their interpretation of Male motivations.
Men don’t use sex to get power over others.
They use power over others to get sex.
If “patriarchy” exists, it exists largely for the purpose of regulating the sexuality of other men and their access to women– not of women. It’s easy for women to miss this, especially feminists, because feminists only view men as objects, as oppressors or agents. They don’t view them as both subjects and agents.
Men don’t miss it. They know when other men are trying to control them, even if other men are using women to do it.
PROJECTION
Humans are always trying to work out why others do what they do, so we can predict their behavior. We see other people as tools to manipulate/use/be afraid of/ally with/ally against. A classic study of this in another species is Frans de Wal’s book about the Arnhem Zoo chimp colony. Our “psychosocial processing modules” spend huge energy working out why others do what they do and what they’re likely to do next.
As social primates, this occupies a truly vast portion of our brains. We are literally political animals. We’re “natural psychologists”, because most of the opportunities/obstacles in life involve other members of our own species.
A shorthand to figuring out what others do is to compare it to what you want/ need/ think, and then evaluate others based on your perception of yourself or your own desires. This “projection” works pretty well most of the time, because, by and large, humans are all very similar in their motivations. They’re not identical, though, and the differences between individuals stick out. We notice them. Some of these differences are individual-level, others are in-group-level.
This clique of radical feminists just did what comes naturally to humans. They projected their own sexual natures onto men, and followed through with their analysis.
But it’s women who seek power through sex, not men.
WHY RAPE?
When Mackinnon looked at male rapists, she engaged in projection of female sexual desire. Men want power over women! That’s why they rape!
If this were true, why is prison rape so common?
All men, men with male sexuality, know why rape happens. It’s this:
1) Remove inhibitions, remove future-time-orientation, remove respect for other people (including the male relatives of a woman), decrease self-control, maybe add in some sociopathy/psychopathy and a tendency to like violence, take away the social reasons to avoid assault (“she’s a slut, I’m a Victim, I’m the son of a famous politician, I’m your boss”) …
2) Throw in desire to have sex.
That’s pretty much the whole explanation for rape.
There’s no need for complex, elaborate Patriarchies Oppressing Women to explain it. Occam’s Razor does quite nicely.
