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The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido
After weeks of continuously unfolding abuse scandals, men have become, quite literally, unbelievable. ...a man’s stated opinions have next to no relationship to behavior.
Through sheer bulk, the string of revelations about men from Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes to Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K. to Al Franken and, this week, to Charlie Rose and John Lasseter, have forced men to confront what they hate to think about most: the nature of men in general.
This time the accusations aren’t against some freak geography teacher, some frat running amok in a Southern college town. They’re against men of all different varieties, in different industries, with different sensibilities, bound together, solely, by the grotesquerie of their sexuality...
...
Almost all are uninterested or unwilling to grapple with the problem at the heart of all this: the often ugly and dangerous nature of the male libido.
For most of history, we’ve taken for granted the implicit brutality of male sexuality. In 1976, the radical feminist and pornography opponent Andrea Dworkin said that the only sex between a man and a woman that could be undertaken without violence was sex with a flaccid penis: “I think that men will have to give up their precious erections,” she wrote. In the third century A.D., it is widely believed, the great Catholic theologian Origen, working on roughly the same principle, castrated himself.
Fear of the male libido has been the subject of myth and of fairy tale from the beginning of literature:..
... The (very few) prominent men who are speaking up now basically just insist that men need to be better feminists — as if the past few weeks have not amply demonstrated that the ideologies of men are irrelevant.
...How can healthy sexuality ever occur in conditions in which men and women are not equal? How are we supposed to create an equal world when male mechanisms of desire are inherently brutal? We cannot answer these questions unless we face them....
Edit:
A second but balancing read for those who want to read it.
After weeks of continuously unfolding abuse scandals, men have become, quite literally, unbelievable. ...a man’s stated opinions have next to no relationship to behavior.
Through sheer bulk, the string of revelations about men from Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes to Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K. to Al Franken and, this week, to Charlie Rose and John Lasseter, have forced men to confront what they hate to think about most: the nature of men in general.
This time the accusations aren’t against some freak geography teacher, some frat running amok in a Southern college town. They’re against men of all different varieties, in different industries, with different sensibilities, bound together, solely, by the grotesquerie of their sexuality...
...
Almost all are uninterested or unwilling to grapple with the problem at the heart of all this: the often ugly and dangerous nature of the male libido.
For most of history, we’ve taken for granted the implicit brutality of male sexuality. In 1976, the radical feminist and pornography opponent Andrea Dworkin said that the only sex between a man and a woman that could be undertaken without violence was sex with a flaccid penis: “I think that men will have to give up their precious erections,” she wrote. In the third century A.D., it is widely believed, the great Catholic theologian Origen, working on roughly the same principle, castrated himself.
Fear of the male libido has been the subject of myth and of fairy tale from the beginning of literature:..
... The (very few) prominent men who are speaking up now basically just insist that men need to be better feminists — as if the past few weeks have not amply demonstrated that the ideologies of men are irrelevant.
...How can healthy sexuality ever occur in conditions in which men and women are not equal? How are we supposed to create an equal world when male mechanisms of desire are inherently brutal? We cannot answer these questions unless we face them....
Edit:
A second but balancing read for those who want to read it.
Even post-Weinstein, we cannot outsource justice to a mob
The women who report to the media are implicitly asking the public to punish the alleged wrongdoers on their behalf
It is interesting — but no longer surprising — that victims would choose to go directly to the media with their accounts of sexual harassment: it’s darn effective for getting quick results. Yet, for this same reason, the public reporting process is also disconcerting...
The very public nature of sexual harassment reporting is both the best and worst thing about this seemingly bottomless debacle. To change anything, this endemic problem needed to be blown wide open. At the same time, public reporting is not an adequate response to the problem.
Before Weinstein, many men clearly assumed they could get away with predatory, lewd, disrespectful behaviour — particularly in their workplaces...
Widespread, public reporting of the kind we’re now seeing is necessary if men of this ilk are going to adjust their risk calculus. If individuals can no longer bank on a victim’s silence, at least some will refrain from chancing that inappropriate pass.
But the public “naming and shaming” ritual encouraged by this debacle is also unsatisfactory. In effect, the self-identified victims who go to the media are pursuing a form of vigilante justice. They want something — catharsis perhaps, or recognition, or retribution, or revenge — that they think the public can deliver. In a word, they want justice.
Now, these accusers may have any number of reasons for circumventing traditional legal channels. Perhaps they fear it, or can’t afford it, or don’t have faith that the legal system or their employers will deliver just results, or don’t think they have suffered wrongs that are recognized as such by the system. In some cases, a newspaper’s investigative team may have even solicited their stories (as seems to have occurred with at least parts of The New York Times’ Weinstein investigation). What is clear, though, is that the women who report to the media are implicitly asking the public to punish the alleged wrongdoers on their behalf — without any full airing of the facts.
The idea of justice by public mobbing has traditionally been anathema to a society like ours. Democratic countries are committed to delivering justice (or at least some semblance of it) through formal channels, which include checks and balances, protections for both sides, and all the rest.
...Indeed, the whole premise of the “believe victims” movement is that the public should simply take self-identified victims at their word. ...
...A number of the men who have recently been accused of misconduct have said they don’t recall the impugned incident, or don’t accept the accuser’s recounting of it. Is it really impossible to believe that there may be two sides to these stories?...
...But absent cases where someone accepts full responsibility for the wrongdoing of which they’ve been accused, we’d do well to maintain at least a kernel of skepticism about the claims of both accusers and accused persons. Certainly, Canadians should have learned that much when they saw many of the accusers’ claims against the CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi crumble under judicial scrutiny...
The pre-Weinstein world was obviously no Eden. There’s a reason victims have turned to the media to get their stories out. But the post-Weinstein world is also problematic. It risks replacing one form of injustice with another.
The women who report to the media are implicitly asking the public to punish the alleged wrongdoers on their behalf
It is interesting — but no longer surprising — that victims would choose to go directly to the media with their accounts of sexual harassment: it’s darn effective for getting quick results. Yet, for this same reason, the public reporting process is also disconcerting...
The very public nature of sexual harassment reporting is both the best and worst thing about this seemingly bottomless debacle. To change anything, this endemic problem needed to be blown wide open. At the same time, public reporting is not an adequate response to the problem.
Before Weinstein, many men clearly assumed they could get away with predatory, lewd, disrespectful behaviour — particularly in their workplaces...
Widespread, public reporting of the kind we’re now seeing is necessary if men of this ilk are going to adjust their risk calculus. If individuals can no longer bank on a victim’s silence, at least some will refrain from chancing that inappropriate pass.
But the public “naming and shaming” ritual encouraged by this debacle is also unsatisfactory. In effect, the self-identified victims who go to the media are pursuing a form of vigilante justice. They want something — catharsis perhaps, or recognition, or retribution, or revenge — that they think the public can deliver. In a word, they want justice.
Now, these accusers may have any number of reasons for circumventing traditional legal channels. Perhaps they fear it, or can’t afford it, or don’t have faith that the legal system or their employers will deliver just results, or don’t think they have suffered wrongs that are recognized as such by the system. In some cases, a newspaper’s investigative team may have even solicited their stories (as seems to have occurred with at least parts of The New York Times’ Weinstein investigation). What is clear, though, is that the women who report to the media are implicitly asking the public to punish the alleged wrongdoers on their behalf — without any full airing of the facts.
The idea of justice by public mobbing has traditionally been anathema to a society like ours. Democratic countries are committed to delivering justice (or at least some semblance of it) through formal channels, which include checks and balances, protections for both sides, and all the rest.
...Indeed, the whole premise of the “believe victims” movement is that the public should simply take self-identified victims at their word. ...
...A number of the men who have recently been accused of misconduct have said they don’t recall the impugned incident, or don’t accept the accuser’s recounting of it. Is it really impossible to believe that there may be two sides to these stories?...
...But absent cases where someone accepts full responsibility for the wrongdoing of which they’ve been accused, we’d do well to maintain at least a kernel of skepticism about the claims of both accusers and accused persons. Certainly, Canadians should have learned that much when they saw many of the accusers’ claims against the CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi crumble under judicial scrutiny...
The pre-Weinstein world was obviously no Eden. There’s a reason victims have turned to the media to get their stories out. But the post-Weinstein world is also problematic. It risks replacing one form of injustice with another.
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