SADY: HI. THIS IS NOT A LATENESS THAT IS MY OWN FAULT. IT IS THAT OF MY COMPUTERIZED CHAT SYSTEM.

AMANDA: I'm just going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you were not too busy feeding your Internet pornography surfing addiction to join me here for this very important Internet pornography discussion.

SADY: It's true! I was... not at all indulging in my shameful addiction to Internet pornography! Because if I were (indulging in my Internet pornography addiction) I would be rendered incapable of interacting with you, a woman! “Are you waiting for a pizza to be delivered?" I would ask. "Or, perhaps, for someone to fix your plumbing? That is the only reason I can conceive of for you not to be having titillating adventures at this moment!"

AMANDA: Well that's too bad! For if you truly were suffering from an Internet porn surfing addiction, I could get you a great gig speaking to groups of conservative audiences about your Internet porn surfing addiction in glorious detail. My very favorite part of the "Porn Harms" briefing I attended last month was right after Shelley Lubben—ex-porn performer, current anti-porn activist—finished her spiel, and one of the old white men running the briefing stood up and informed everyone that he was addicted to porn for 25 years.

SADY: These two storylines connect, I am thinking! It is all very LOST!

AMANDA: Everyone clapped!

SADY: Awwwwww. I mean, I have no doubt — NONE NONE NONE — that there are women in the porn industry who are abused, for whom working in porn was sexually traumatic, for whom being an anti-porn activist seems like the best and most necessary course of action, given what they've been through. It's that whole prayer-meeting aspect to it, though, that freaks me out. Like, a lot of these speakers are clearly people who have spent a LOT of time looking for porn, and specifically for the most transgressive porn they can find! And then they describe the porn, in porn-like terms! In order to demonstrate the evils of porn! Like, the "I once was lost but now have found gagfactory.com, AND AM WILLING TO REGISTER MY DISTASTE" aspect is a little weird. Like a ritual purification, rather than a discussion.

AMANDA: Yeah. I mean, one of the most frustrating parts of the debate around porn is how difficult it is to punch through the dichotomy of Porn v. Anti-Porn. It's often framed as a fight between the "Keep Your Fascist Government Off My Boner" camp vs. the "Bring All the Poor Abused Women to Jesus" camp. And if you're someone who is approaching this from a feminist perspective (and there are a LOT of feminist perspectives on porn, pro and anti and in-between) you're sometimes forced to align with one or the other. Boners v. Jesus, if you will.

SADY: Right. And, I mean, I think it's symptomatic of people seeing that institutions are troubled, and then assuming that the institutions THEMSELVES are the problem, which sort of bars off a more nuanced discourse. Or bars you off from encouraging yourself to take a more nuanced standpoint. But I like to think that we're slowly getting past that. I mean, we're maybe getting to a point where people can acknowledge that porn can express pretty vile attitudes toward The Ladies (and anyone else it sets its sights on) and that those vile attitudes can be expressed on set in ways that hurt people, without having to describe ourselves as "anti-all-porn-everywhere-ever."

AMANDA: Right. And also that porn isn't some big monolithic hate-fuck. It can be a lot of things. And as much as the strange explicit purging of the anti-porn activists freaks me out a bit, pro-porn people who aren't interested in dissecting it at all scare me more.

SADY: Yeah, definitely. I mean, a commitment to not looking at the potential problems in porn is probably way worse, in the long run, than TIRELESSLY AND VIGILANTLY WATCHING A TON OF PORN so that you can point out the problems.

AMANDA: Yeah. And the reluctance to engage isn't something I've seen in the more feminist pro-porn circles, but it's definitely something I've seen in the Get-Your-Fascist-Government-Off-My-Boner circles. Any industry that provides boners can't possibly be problematic!

SADY: Boners are our nation's most valued resource! It's just that it seems to me that the people most qualified to write or speak about porn's effect on women are . . . women who've been in porn? Rather than women who've seen some of it, or read what someone else wrote about seeing it?

AMANDA: Yeah.

SADY: But I worry that, with the Defend the Boners league pressing for those stupid sluts to keep their mouths shut when they're not giving blow-jobs, and the Burn the Tapes crew pressing for the elimination of any non-anti-porn discourse, sex workers who express complicated feelings about porn are being sort of shut out. Not that those folks aren't having conversations and building communities of their own.

AMANDA: Right. And then you have Sasha Grey on Tyra talking about her job and life, as Tyra shakes her head slowly and announces on television that she refuses to believe that Sasha Grey is not a victim of childhood abuse.

SADY: Haha, yeah. Or the cases in which porn stars DO (like a lot of women) have incidences of being sexually abused or assaulted, and everyone is like, "don't you SEEEE? Don't you see that this has clearly driven you MAD? And any of your feelings about the job you do are now INVALID?????" Whereas no-one is saying that to the accountant who was sexually abused growing up. Clearly no-one is like, "the pain and shame of your assault warped you so that you had no other choice but to fall into a life of TAX FORMS!"

AMANDA: Yeah, I mean what sexual assault victims really need is for more people to take away their agency and reduce their options in life, and then to shame them based on their sexual expression, right?

SADY: EXACTLY! I mean, I think a lot of porn discourse—and people who are fervent watchers of porn, and would fight to the death your right to take away their cinema boners, are just as willing to say that people (particularly women) who do porn are sad and deluded and damaged—depends on the assumption that, if it looks gross and un-sexy to me, it must be gross and un-sexy. And anyone who does it has to be stopped or "saved." See: BDSM, and the vast misunderstandings around that. Whereas, if I look at the kink conference you covered, well, I will be honest with you: There were a lot of videos you posted that I was just like, "nope! Not gonna open that one!" There were a lot of things that I consider gross and un-sexy going on there, such as: homemade Harry Potter erotica.

AMANDA: Haha. Right? But crusading to wipe it clean of this Earth, citing The Children, is another position entirely.

SADY: But who am I to come between you and the turgid purple manhood of Severus Snape?

AMANDA: Gah.

SADY: You know? Like: I can say, "I will not jack off to this, and would prefer not to discuss the levels of arousal it produces in you," without singlehandedly trying to ban it.

AMANDA: Yeah. Dan Savage gives some pretty good advice in his column this week to a guy who has been indulging his wife in her daddy fetish. The husband writes in wondering if the fetish is a sign that his wife was abused as a child, and Savage basically says: Maybe, and that's something you should talk about, but it doesn't mean that she now has to deny her safe exploration of that fetish because her sex life has been informed in the past by horrible experiences. It's your sex life. And past abuse doesn't make your safe and consensual adult sex life invalid.

SADY: Right. I mean, I guess the other side, the argument against mainstream porn is that (a) it influences expectations of what sex "should be like," or what good sex is supposed to look like, and (b) it has to use real bodies in order to do so. Which, I feel like we've dealt with (b). Terrible things happen in porn, but that's a reason to look at the terrible things, not ban porn. Terrible things happen in houses, but that's a reason to look at the terrible things, not to ban houses. But (a) still does trouble me, I'll admit. It is a fact that stuff that happens in porn—your anal sex, your spitting on crotches, your facial shots or bald vaginas, what have you—can be kind of uncomfortably enthused over by people who watch a lot of porn. And have picked up, can I tell you, just the WRONG MOVES for accomplishing it.

AMANDA: Right. Like, I've heard a lot written about how younger men and women absolutely expect hairless vaginas. But again, what are we supposed to do about that? (a) Ban porn; (b) talk about how expectations in porn do and don’t translate into real life; (c) make more diverse porn, maybe? Because (a), beyond being dumb, is also impossible. So we have to start thinking about how to accomplish (b) and (c).

SADY: Yeah. I mean, I think the option is actually to become a little more relaxed and less shameful about porn. Rather than, like, watching it on your own, and then expecting your sex life to match up to it, and then responding to efforts to talk about your porn feelings with "lalala, can't hear you, it's DIRTY!" There are a lot of people who are absolutely cool with sex for the 20 minutes they spend doing it, and then feel weirded out and shameful about it immediately after the fact. And I think porn takes a lot of the bullets, when it comes to those folks and their freaked-out feelings. But, if they're talking AGAINST porn, they can be as graphic as they please! I think, is the message here. That all of us should express our desires to our sex partners in terms of lengthy, Old-Testament-style inveighing against sexual acts we were ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTED BY when we saw them last.

AMANDA: I think if Ayn Rand taught us anything, it's that absolutely no thought or discussion needs to go into our darkest dominant sexual fantasies. Just Do It!

SADY: And/or build an entire social order around it!

AMANDA: Right. Or people could just, like, talk about it. What porn needs is more dialogue!

SADY: Can you imagine how much easier porn would be to deal with if it actually included scenes of the date and well-adjusted people undergoing sexual negotiation with each other in a kind and realistic way? "I consent to this," Miranda panted, erotically, "but not the other thing which you mentioned earlier this evening, which is never as much fun as you'd think."

AMANDA: You are seriously crushing some dude's boner right now. But possibly arousing some other dude! So: Even.

SADY: "Your consent gives me such a boner," cried Hans, "which is made but firmer and more sexy by my respect for your stated boundaries!"

Worried that tomorrow's Capital Pride Parade won't be enough sex-and-gender related activity for one day? Pass the time before and after with an ad-hoc sexuality conference by day, and gay balloon dinos on stilts by night:

BEFORE: Kink-For-All Washington D.C. 2, an "unconference" "about the intersection of sexuality with the rest of life." The first D.C. Kink-For-All sailed on Nov. 21, 2009 (you can watch videos of some of the sessions here); the next iteration will be held throughout the day tomorrow. The conference is free for all to attend, but there are rules. Oh: and RSVP here.

Kink-For-All Washington D.C. 2
Saturday, June 12, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The DC Center
1810 14th Street NW
Free

AFTER:

"Homo Erectus: The Evolution of Pride," a BYT-sponsored, caveperson-themed, Capital-Pride-ending party featuring an eight-foot T-Rex Ice Luge. Need I say more? OK: There's also a balloon dinosaur outfit on stilts. And an erupting DJ volcano booth. 21+ RSVP here.

Homo Erectus: The Evolution of Pride
Saturday, June 12 at 9 p.m. to 2 a.m.
Washington Hilton
1919 Connecticut Ave. NW
$25 (pre-sale)

* This weekend, kick off the D.C. Capital Pride festivities with a leather lesson:

''People might think this is corny or not as serious, but providing an educational day on safe play is primary to the weekend as well,'' says Michael Sessa, founder of the event and president of The Center. ''A lot of people think it's funny, cool or kinky to be in the leather community, but they don't know what the hell they're doing, and that can be dangerous."

* Via Violet Blue: Finally, all your erotic pretentious bicycling fantasies have come true: It's fixed-gear porn.

* I love Lynsey G.'s McSweeney's column, "The Conflicted Existence of a Female Porn Reviewer." Recently:

But ah, there's the rub, that one little word: good. Alas, despite the prettiness of the sex being had by porn "lesbians," very little of it looks remotely good to me. As a woman who knows what she wants from sex, it's easy for me to tell that in most of these scenes, the so-called "lesbians" are not feeling very good at all. Because they're doing it all wrong! For instance: a little pat down there with one finger wouldn't get much of a reaction from the women I know, yet these ladies seem to need little else to get them going. Sucking on a fake phallus, as these women so eagerly do in most scenes, would likewise not do much to get most lesbians going: the only exciting thing about giving head (to a man or a woman) is the other person's response to it—the knowledge that you're turning that person on. The physical act of fellating is pretty neutral. But these girls sucking on a glass dildo and moaning in ecstasy? No. It makes me roll my eyes and fast forward because it's neither convincing nor arousing.

* Nerve trolls for sex advice from fans of professional wrestling:

What wrestling moves could you bring into the bedroom?

The Lou Thesz press — which, according to Mick Foley, could just as well be called the "dick to the face" — is a candidate, but you probably have to make sure it's okay before you bust that one out. Although wrestling often hilariously resembles intercourse, most of the moves are either mundane or "don't try this at home."

* Brightest Young Things'  high-school interns write about their proms. Prom update, for those juuuust a few years out of high school: They still have chocolate fountains there, but now the limos are stretch hummer. Kids these days.

Photo via boothekolt, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

* s.e. smith has an excellent discussion of how the "Smile, Baby" phenomenon intersects with both feminism and disability:

My baby mouth was turned down, exactly like my fourth grade mouth, exactly like my mouth right now. That’s because that’s the neutral position for my mouth. . . . People have hassled me about this for pretty much my entire life and it got worse after I incurred some facial nerve damage. . . . And I’m constantly told to smile. By complete strangers in the street. By ‘friends.’ When I worked in retail, by customers.

* Heartless Doll's Kiara Kazebee spies a Boy Scouts Merit Badge for gaming, and she wants girls to have one too.

* Rediscover Sassy with Tavi of Style Rookie, who is reading the magazine for the first time. Rejoice at the Hilary Clinton = Courtney Love item. Recoil at the presence of Uggs in a fashion magazine from the early 90s. Take an unnatural interest in Thurston Moore's dating advice for tween girls.

* Important announcement: Cara at the Curvature is so fucking good at what she does.

* Susannah Breslin gets the weirdest fan mail. This one ends: "So, to make a long story short... I think you are great as you do get to speak Susannah's voice out of its silence. Woman... you are the man!!!"

* On Yes Means Yes!, how to bring the BDSM concept of the "safecall" to vanillas.

Photo from Sassy, via iluvrhinestones, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

In this edition of Reader Beatdown, Sexist reader and sex activist Martin Quinones talks about how to come out—to law school admissions officers.

—

I was recently presented with the chance to come out in a way that was risky, honest, and productive. On law school applications, every school asks for a broad personal statement, using a prompt along the lines of "tell us something about yourself." I decided to dump every egg at my disposal into one basket. Since December, the essay below has been read by my parents, most of my friends, and the admissions committees at thirteen top-ranked law schools:

To come out fully, in my case, requires three separate disclosures, each as potentially confusing and alienating as the last. I share them now for reasons that are political as well as personal: I am pansexual. When I say this I mean that I seek physical and emotional partnerships with people of all genders, including men, women, and transgender individuals. I am polyamorous. By this I mean that I see monogamy as one among many stable ways in which people are capable of forming romantic and familial bonds. I mean also that I find joy in my partners’ joy, including when that joy comes through companions and lovers other than myself. Lastly, I am a member of the BDSM community. When I say this I mean that I find fulfillment in consensual relationships and sensations that are not always soft and fuzzy, but can indeed be painful and challenging. Taken together, these three facts mean that I have found love and fulfillment in a wide spectrum of relationships and with a variety of people, and that this diversity of partners figures importantly into my identity.

They mean also that I inhabit a small, overlapping sliver of three poorly understood, largely invisible, and utterly unprotected sexual minorities. I am acutely aware that to share these details about myself represents a risk both personal and professional, and in some cases legal. But one reason I have chosen to out myself is to help legitimize my identity, and the identities of those I care about. It is my great hope that taking this risk openly and often will yield benefits both for me and for all those minorities who seek public recognition.

I am an activist, but I am no partisan, no bloodthirsty separatist. Instead of engaging intolerance and divisiveness, I have invested my energy in positively increasing the visibility of diverse sexual identities and normalizing the discussion of sexuality in my immediate environment. This is why I co-founded the Male Sexuality Workshop at Brown University, and for three years took the lead role in designing its curriculum and organizing its activities, affecting more than two hundred and fifty alumni of the program. It is also why I wrote a weekly sex advice and sexuality column for Brown’s student newspaper, why I currently work at Planned Parenthood, and why I have volunteered with the Boston chapter of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism over the past year. Most importantly, it is why I am applying to law school.

The communities I hope to support are at best underserved, at worst the victims of fierce and unchallenged discrimination. How best to contribute to their advancement, whether through labor or constitutional law, family or criminal law, is not crystal clear, and I will allow exposure and passion to guide as I move further into my career. But the larger society can and will come to a better understanding of the diversity of sexuality and gender expression it contains, and in the slow crawl toward that understanding, the first and most profoundly personal step I can take is to state unabashedly who I am: to come out.

The admissions committees, as expected, responded with months of stony, bureaucratic silence. Every school processed applications on a rolling basis, with the promise to "endeavour to have all admissions decisions returned by late April." As the waiting drew on from December into January into February, existential panic replaced the more reasonable anxiety of the wait, and each day felt like a confirmation that I had made a bad decision. I was sure I had reached too far, I had been too polarizing. I would have to settle for a school that I had no interest in, and that had no resources for someone interested in gender, let alone sexual freedom. My career was poisoned, and I hadn't even found it yet.

Finally, agonizingly, the risk I took paid off, and I was accepted for admission at the UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law. To date, this is the only school I have been admitted to, a fact more reflective of how many reach schools I applied to than how my essay was received. But even if I am rejected everywhere else, a superb legal education is in my future, along with a JD from one of the most respected schools in the country, thanks in part to my choice to come out.

Photo via The Library of Congress

John Hammack has been modeling nude for 15 years, ever since a guy at the gym spied him naked in the locker room and suggested he start disrobing professionally. In the past decade and a half, Hammack has removed his clothing in front of hundreds of people in the D.C. area. Dude has got stories. Hammack, 53—"the same age as Kevin Sorbo"—agreed to talk about 15 years of accidental erections, intentional eroticism, and fathering a budding art student who wonders "why dad keeps a bathrobe in the trunk of his car."

On creative posing:

[One] model—a really good one, actually—couldn't come up with an idea until she finally decided on a Lorena Bobbitt pose.  She held the male model's dick in one hand, and a plastic knife in another.  Wish I'd been him.  The instructor called a halt to that pose, the guy had to lose his erection, and the girl hasn't been called back since. . . . the students bitched because they liked the pose.

On workplace hazards:

One class I was in I was modeling beside a skeleton that fell on me.  I'm now laying down on the floor with bones on top of me looking like a candidate for necrophilia.

On erections:

One time I was doing private modeling for a woman who is a really good artist.  She talked about a BDSM thing she was into.  Although she is attractive, I never thought of her being a sexual person before.  Of course, I got an erection that just wouldn't go away.  To this day, we never talk about it. I've posed for her several times since, but I avoid this subject—BDSM.

On getting comfortable with genitalia:

One cute story was at a religious school.  The instructor had never worked with a nude model even as a student.  She had me bring in progressively skimpier underwear until she could grow accustomed to the idea.  The last session the students asked her, 'Why not?'  She became confused because she couldn't give a good answer.  While she was stammering, I simply took it all off.  It was funny for everyone, and more than a little enlightening for her. She repeatedly expressed her gratitude at the end of the class and over the phone.

On arousal:

[Intentional arousal] has happened at least three times off the top of my head by female models. They pose sitting on my lap doing a classical pose called "The Kiss" or some other embrace.  They then start to wiggle just enough. They know what they are doing. As long as the pose lasts long enough until I can calm down, it's OK, but it really screws with a guy's mind—and they know this. One time, prior to a class beginning, I was trying to help an instructor—actually, one I'd been really attracted to for years—arrange a ceiling light. She was standing on a chair but couldn't reach it.  She asked me to hop onto the chair with her. I'm naked and I know how much I like her. If the room was otherwise empty, maybe I would have. I told her she needed to get down so I could get onto the chair.  I still ask myself, "What if?"

On penis drawings:

At least twice, once in a drawing class and once in a sculpture class, participants drew my attention to what they'd drawn.  In the drawing, she selected a rather personal part of my anatomy to pay particular attention to.  In the sculpture, a different student kept shaping and reshaping the same body part.  She couldn't seem to get it right, so she walked up for a much closer observation.

On narcissism:

Many times people have opened doors or walked by windows and seen me in my full splendor.  If the blinds are open, I never really notice.  After all, I am where I am suppose to be, doing something legally allowed.  They are the ones who should be uncomfortable. . . .  most art models really don't care.  We are into narcissism.  If we look good and won't offend anyone, we'd do it in the parking lot.  We usually like to be the center of attention.  It fulfills some need beyond the money.  For me, it makes me stay in good shape, and it is a means of expression.  I am horrible at drawing figuratively, so I think this makes up for some of the frustration.

On reactions to "I'm a nude model":

I'm a conservative, [and] I generally don't mention it to [other conservatives]. My liberal friends seem to get it—either that, or they have less morality.

Once I was at a reception at the Museum for Women in Art. I told two extremely sweet, attractive ladies in their 70s how I got invited there was because I was a friend of the hostess of a show. They asked me how I knew her, so I told them. They looked surprised, then pleased, then they smiled, then they giggled like little teenagers. Before the reception was over I made a point of kissing them both on their cheeks and hugging them.

I would never tell coworkers either in law enforcement or my current security-related work about this. Not because of reprisals, I simply don't want them to denigrate what I do. I respect what I do and the students, instructors, and artist I work for—as well as other art models. If someone tries too hard to find out how I spend my time, I tell them I am doing martial arts, because they already know I do this a lot and it fits into their overall picture of me.

. . . Being a member of the Mormon church, I was worried about their opinion when I joined. Since one of the members who encouraged my conversion was the wife of a bishop, and an art teacher I was working for, I didn't see much reason to quit. We both agreed to not discuss the matter around others.

On the misconception that nude modeling is necessarily sexual:

New art models [sometimes have this misconception]. They either quit soon after they start when they realize there are easier ways to get a date on a Saturday night, or they begin to become more professional. New art students have to deal with this, too. Right now my daughter is getting ready for this issue. She is really prudish. I guess it never occurred to her why dad keeps a bathrobe in the trunk of his car. New art students have to be dealt with tenderly until they realize I'm not trying to be their gay lover, and I'm not going to hop off the stage and assault them. They tend to avoid drawing my hands, my face, and my tender parts. The first two because they are hard to get right. I'm not so sure about the last one, though.

Artwork—not of John Hammack—by Keli Anaya.

We most recently revisited the issue yesterday, after a study showed that women who observe public acts of sexism—like sexual harassment against other women—tend to direct more anger at men in general. The study demonstrates (among other things) that when men sexually harass women, they also hurt men who are not harassers. Pointing out ways that sexism affects men can provide men with a valuable access-point to feminist issues. It can also be seen as an invitation to throw a pity party for male victimhood.

As one commenter on the story wrote, "Here we go again. The poor menz! They have to experience the suspicion/scrutiny of women who have been put down, kept down, abused emotionally, fiscally, professionally, sometimes physically, yadayadayada." I don't think this is about feeling sorry for men; I think it's about recognizing that men can be valuable allies in working against women being put down, kept down, harassed, and abused. Is it fair that women have to first show men how sexism affects them in order to get them to care about how it affects us? No. But it sure is helpful.

So without any further ado, I'd like to introduce the first installment in a new Sexist feature: Interviews with experts on the subjects that most vex us around here. First up: Thomas MacAulay Millar, my favorite feminist writer who is also a man. Millar, which is not his real name, is a New-York based attorney and feminist writer. You may remember him for his essay condemning the comodification of sexuality, "Toward a Performance Model of Sex," which appeared in the Yes Means Yes! anthology last year, or from his work on the wonderful Yes Means Yes! blog. Below, Millar on the beginnings of a feminist man, how to find feminist access-points for boys, and what it's like to be a feminist with male privilege.

What personal experiences in your life contributed to your identification as a feminist?

TMM: My mom was a feminist, and raised me to understand that the world was unfair in big, structural ways, so I was in large part raised with it. She wasn’t an overtly ideological parent. She just believed in telling me how things really were, and I drew a lot of my own conclusions. I remember her telling me that my cousin (who was an evangelical), terminated two pregnancies. She was a clinic protester. But when it was her life, she thought it was different. Another cousin was molested, and when she wouldn't stop complaining, she was sent away to live in another state. (Eventually, she sued her abuser and got some justice.) My mother would tell me the parts of the stories in real life that people try to hide from children. I can't possibly thank her enough for that. I mean I literally can’t, because she died a decade ago. I thanked her a lot for being a great mom, but never enough.

As I got into high school, I started seeing issues like sex education and reproductive freedom through lenses heavily influenced by my women friends. I took my first women's studies class in high school, read some Steinem and some other feminist writing in high school. My mother had a bunch of feminist writing around the house that I read. And I started to see GLB issues through the prism of my friends' lives, and to see sexuality and sex education as my friends and I developed.

In my teens, too, I began a long process of growing into BDSM and figuring out what that meant for identity, and one of the early things I figured out what that there was a sort of mainstream position that wasn't overtly anti-sex in my area, but that was sort of very pro-partriarchally constrained models of sexuality, and that I was necessarily a dissident to that, and that I was therefore a natural ally to anyone else who didn't feel the official model fit them. So, in my mind, the idea especially around sexuality and gender expression that dissenters and dissidents should be in solidarity with each other developed early. So it was a pretty direct line from there to being active in college on choice and GLBT issues and doing my first minor in women’s studies. And also, people telling me when I said stupid things and learning from that, rinse, repeat.

I think most importantly, I began to hear one story after another about how women — mostly my women friends, and also some relatives — were molested and groped and raped (some men, too, but I didn't become aware of that until later). Women friends told me they had been raped, and not infrequently they had never told anyone else. The thing that stuck with me then and still does is how little space they had to safely process and heal. They felt that they couldn't say what had happened, let alone talk about how they felt, without being judged and shamed. And I think they were right about that, sad to say. They couldn't tell people. The reactions they would have gotten from parents and peers would have done damage. So they stayed silent, which is a very hard way to deal with trauma. Unfortunately, that's not something I see changing. Women I know are still telling me that they were raped, or that something happened that was rape but that they can't label, and that they have not or cannot talk about to anyone else. And I have a daughter and that scares the shit out of me.

How can we get more men and boys interested in the feminist movement?

TMM: Well, we can bullshit them and tell them that it's all upside, and that fighting for their relative privilege in an awful system that's no good for them doesn't have any benefits. But they'll quickly realize that's not true. And we can tell them that there are no downsides to participating in a movement where they have to confront their privilege and change how they do things. But they’d quickly find that that isn’t true.

You can’t sell a movement to cure structural unfairness to the beneficiaries of the unfairness unless there’s already a point of access. That means they have to really have a grievance against the way things are, for themselves or for people they love. But there are a lot of those. There are a lot of guys whose sister has needed an abortion, or whose wife was raped, or whose brother is transitioning, or who feel that the masculinity imposed on them is crushing them. If someone who knows that guy finds that point of access, like a pinhole in the patriarchal curtain, and starts pulling at it, eventually the hole gets so big that they accept that it’s not a matter of stitching the hole, it’s a whole panel or whole curtain that needs to be replaced. (And roman shades would look better in this room. Also, this paint is kinda tired. Let’s see how far I can stretch this metaphor ….*snap* Oops.)

. . . Or we can get them young and try to build into them a sense of fairness that is actually fair, and not one based on a set of artificially assigned roles based on two categories. I’m working on that. I’ll let you know how I did in about twenty years.

How does male privilege affect the way you approach feminist issues?

TMM: First, it means I don’t know everything and my personal leanings and experiences are not a trustworthy guide. I just have to accept that I’m going to be wrong and mess things up, and be gracious when people tell me what a schmuck I am. Because I am.

Second, it means forever keeping one eye on the dynamics of speaking for. In some ways it’s easier, as an affluent educated able bodied cis het white man, because I don’t have to think about the relative issues of when I’m privileged and when I’m not. I’m virtually always in the advantaged side of the structural issue, so I can keep the “I have an unfair advantage” light permanently on.

It’s something I talk about with friends a fair amount. In writing, a lot of what I do is talk about what something means for men, how men should read or deal with something, what it means as a parent, etc., where I’m interpreting my own experience and the experiences I have a better handle on, in light of the dynamics I’m talking about.

But I don’t do that with everything. Some of what I write is overarching theorizing, like Toward A Performance Model of Sex. I realize I don’t have any kind of omniscience, and my privilege informs what I write. I think there are three things I can do about it. I can decide that my understanding is so constrained by the limits of my experience and the dictates of my privilege that I should just shut up (some posts have ended their lives in the delete folder for that reason); I can try to learn and educate myself and improve and beat back my own privilege, which I’m forever trying to do and never fast enough; and I can put what I can out there and try to be as humble as I can about the limitations of it and then not get defensive when people move the discussion forward by pointing out the flaws in what I’ve done. I’ve edited a lot of posts to say, “I messed up, see comments.”

Do you think there are some feminist issues that are more readily accessible to men and boys than others?

TMM: There are things that should be feminist issues that are more the province of men and boys. Masculinity and manhood are becoming contested terrain, and that’s important. The most common discourse on masculinity reads to me like this: “I don’t know what it should look like. What we have is terrible in the following ways, and we should fix it. But I don’t know what it looks like when it gets fixed.” I have both so much and so little to say about that. Masculinity isn’t just “what men do,” but it is bound up with manhood. So we need women in that conversation, both those interested in masculinity and those that in some ways perform it. And we need people who reject binary identifications like “man” to weigh in. But mostly, whether cis- or trans-, the folks we need to help define masculinity are the people who perform it most, and that’s people who identify as men.

Also, there are angles and spaces that men have on feminist issues, where their understanding may be deeply limited by privilege, but where their position in the structural distribution of power is such that they can do more to make change. Men can do feminist work, even if they don’t apply the label to it, if they use what’s at their disposal to do the fair thing. Just as one example, George Tiller was a great hero for reproductive self-determination, not because he freed himself from male privilege, but because he was a doctor who would do that work, under the most terrifying circumstances. I know a guy who says the most awful shit, often to wind me up. But he also once physically intervened to prevent several men from raping a woman who was so intoxicated she didn’t know who she was with or what was going on. Security wouldn’t act, so he just started throwing punches. It worked, at significant cost to him which I won’t describe. That’s not a guy who self-identifies as feminist, but it was a deeply feminist act.

Less dramatically, just calling out rape jokes and rape-apology is something where guys’ views can influence other men a great deal. A guy who mentors younger women colleagues and makes sure their work is considered on its merits may not identify as feminist, or may have a very poor ability to check his own privilege, but that guy can to a lot of good with what he has, where he is.

So I guess I’d say that we need men to be situational allies where they can be, even if they are not (yet) able to make broader connections. Getting them to understand and see the unfairness of a specific situation or act is the first stage. If that creates the gateway for that guy to see those kinds of dynamics as pervasive, and pervasively unfair, great. If not, one person doing the right thing in one situation is better than not.

Are men in the position to play any unique roles in the feminist movement?

TMM: Leaving aside doing what we can with what we have where we are, because I don’t think that’s what the question calls for, I think the primary area where men have something specific and important to bring to feminism is in defining men and masculinity.

Those issues ripple through a lot. To take a particular class-specific issue, for example, take an opposite-sex couple with the same degree, working, say, as lawyers. They may have met in law school, gotten BigLaw jobs, proceeded on parallel tracks through the associate years, and then … that world is not perfect on treating women equally, but I see the social dynamics as the real hold-back. It’s very difficult for both partners to be driven professionals. They can pay for childcare solutions that leave them both free to work long and irregular hours and to travel, but many folks don’t want to do that for a lot of good reasons. Usually, someone takes a step back in professional responsibilities to parent. It’s almost always the woman. Some folks will tell you it has to do with women’s innate desire to mother, but I’m very skeptical of those explanations. Some people want to parent more than others, but I’m not going to accept anyone’s glib generalization that because it’s true for them, it’s an innate sex difference. Instead, I think it has a great deal to do with men’s unwillingness to take that step back. How men see their selves and role, and how their female partners will see them, and how they think their female partners will see them, is all about masculinity.

Of course, it’s more often the case that by the time a middle-class opposite sex couple decide to have kids, they are already in different careers with different compensation, and whoever makes less money becomes the parent with less professional responsibilities. And that has everything to do with the social construction or gender and work roles, tracking of women, conflation of some work identities with masculinity and femininity, etc.

All that is a narrow and class-bound analysis that leaves a lot out; a full treatment of just that example is a book topic. But that’s just one of many ways that construction of masculinity flows through work and distributional issues and other things that seem far removed from the direct performance of gender. I don’t think we can fully understand how much about masculinity is assumed until men start trying to take it apart, examine it and refashion it. And it’s principally men’s job to do that.

E-mail interview has been condensed. . . . a tiny bit.

Last week on the Sexist:

1. Meghan McCain Schooled, Spanked, Murdered: Political Debate or Snuff Porn?, because Paul Begala BDSM is not what I'd prefer to conjure up with my morning news.

2. 5C Commissioner Gigi Ransom Censured Over "Potential Hate Crime", because local politics can get a little too personal.

3. The Ten Creepiest Paul Rudd Stalking Tweets! because swoon.

4. Bacardi's Massive Internet Fail, because "Get An Ugly Girlfriend" was such a compelling Israeli ad campaign, it made waves over here in the states!

5. Big Penis Dating Site Reveals Inches Before First Date, because you don't want to walk into that shit without knowing the relevant details, amirightladies.

Photo by flirtykitty

In today's Washington Post, Monica Hesse dismissed the news of Nevada Senator John Ensign's affair with a staffer as . . . not scandalous enough. A crisis management rep provided the money quote, characterizing Ensign as "really vanilla."

But despite the decidedly consensual, un-kinky, over-18, non-prostitutional nature of Ensign's affair, the scandal satisfies the one usual requirement for criticism: it's hypocritical. Ensign is a member of the Promise Keepers, a Christian organization devoted to cultivating "men of integrity"—or dudes who wouldn't cheat. He cheated. Perfect!

So, when is hypocrisy not enough?

Earlier this week, I wrote about how razzing politicians for their hypocrisy is often used as a cover for less-valid personal critiques. And so, people who start out criticizing Sarah Palin's support of abstinence end up ridiculing her daughter for having sex. People who start out criticizing Carrie Prejean's opposition to gay marriage end up ridiculing her for disobeying the rules of another patriarchal tradition—the beauty pageant. People who start out criticizing Larry Craig's anti-gay policies end up ridiculing him for being gay.

And yet, people who start out criticizing John Ensign for his own hypocrisy don't really have anywhere to turn. There's no teen pregnancy, a la Bristol Palin. There's no topless photos, a la Prejean. There's no prostitute, a la David Vitter and Eliot Spitzer. There's no closeted homosexuality, a la Larry Craig and Jim McGreevey. There's no cancer-stricken wife, a la John Edwards. And there are no kinky texts, a la Mark Foley.

All there is is sex outside of marriage, and perhaps that particular behavior hits a little bit too close to home for most sex-scandal critics. So while we'd prefer Ensign and his fellow Promise Keepers not act so sanctimonious in public while cheating in private, most Americans won't sustain interest in the story because it won't make them feel better about themselves. Most Americans have cheated. The most infamous of political sex scandals stick because regular Americans can claim superiority over some peculiarity of the sexual encounter—they can protest that they weren't cheating when their partners had cancer; they weren't cheating with a prostitute; they weren't cheating with a gay man; they weren't cheating with kinky sex; they weren't cheating and got her pregnant.

Perhaps we should all take another look at the "hypocrisy" critique we've used on these other politicians as well. Are we criticizing them for being hypocrites? Or are we criticizing them for their sex being too kinky, too gay, too online, too knocked up, or too expensive? Do we really hate hypocrites, or do we mostly hate weirdos?