Guest post: Spot the double standard
Originally an item for the Miscellany Room from Screechy Monkey.
So, Slate has a really, really shitty sex advice column called How To Do It. It presents a real dilemma for me: from Slate’s point of view, a click is a click, so they can’t tell that I sometimes read it just for the train wreck value as opposed to actually thinking the authors give good advice.
(Why is it shitty? Well, aside from the issue I’m about to complain about, I’m reminded of something Dan Savage once said when asked if he had any advice for young people who want to be sex advice columnists. After noting that he wasn’t interesting in encouraging competition, he said the one mistake that he noticed in most of the college newspaper sex columns was that the authors are constantly making it all about their own sex lives. Everything is about them and their personal sexual history and their kinks etc. and not about helping out readers. Anyway, “How to Do It” is a textbook example of that — the male co-author really wants you to know that he’s had a lot of dick in his life.)
But here’s why I brought it up.
In a column Dated October 10, 2019, a reader wants to know if it’s ok for her to just flat-out ask potential dates their penis size. The author responds by commiserating with her about how men will lie about it, but otherwise just offers advice on how to go about filtering for size, and ends with a you go, girl!:
I want to also encourage you to continue to openly fish for big dick via your profiles. Why not ask guys if they’ve got what you want? If it’s off-putting, great. You’re filtering out the dick not up to your standards from the jump. Saves everyone time. I believe there’s nothing wrong with coming across as slutty or overexperienced, and anybody cool and/or hung will respect you as a woman who knows what she wants. Be proud of that.
Ok, fine, whatever — if something is important to you, sure, put it in your profile and ask about it. Fine. I basically agree with that, whether it’s size or hair color or religion or whatever.
Less than a month later, a reader says that although he’s open to dating trans women, he’s not interested in ones with a penis, and is it ok to ask.
I’m sure you can see where this is likely going. To be fair, the two columnists don’t flat-out call the writer a bigot, and oh-so-graciously acknowledge that it’s ok to have a preference when it comes to type of genitals…. BUUUUUTTTT… maybe she doesn’t need you to touch “her” penis? Shouldn’t you give people a try? Maybe you should grow as a person, and get to KNOW people as human beings instead of being so obsessed with genitals. “[I]nquiring about the contents of prospective sex partners’ underwear will turn a lot of people off. He’d be doing it to filter certain people out, but I think he’d more often be filtering himself out for asking the question in the first place” Etc.
I’m just amazed by the lack of recognition of the double standard.
Trans people are upset that nobody wants to date them. How does it help to run off the rare person open to it if they’re unwilling to accept a big surprise in the genitals department? Probably his takeaway from this is going to be, “never mind, I’ll just steer clear of this scene”.
Perhaps someone should write in and say he likes to date trans women, but only if their penises are very large, and see what the fellow says about that.
Oh that’s easy, it’s exclusionary to trans women with small penises, or no penis at all, and trans people are the only demographic that must not be left out of category ‘woman’.
I do love Slate advice columns of all kinds because they are so utterly foreign. Everyone goes to counselling and therapy where a Brit would get drunk and annoy their friends. And the first-world problems. Someone is utterly devastated that they may have not got the nuances exactly right when explaining to their 9 year olds about those racially different or who say they really are a girl.
The sex columns turn my stomach a little as they are so explicit but as you say, they are notable for their complete out-spokenness, and if your thing involves [actually I don’t want to think about it] you go girl. And if you have highly specialised tastes – amputees missing two fingers on the left hand go for it and announce it in neon. But as soon as a normal desire to have sex with someone who says they are a woman, that they should have the normal womanly equipment it’s yeuch, how can you be so insensitive, it’s the whole person that counts, not their body.
It’s similar to that Guardian twit being a little balked by that Yaniv creature insisting on his meat and two veg be waxed, but thought he had a strong case if the women didn’t also want to touch his legs and thighs, as they suddenly became female.
Also Slate columns show that Americans have very few holidays. A fortnight seems to be the average, and they get used up by long trips to see family at Christmas and Thanksgiving (the worst time of the year to travel).
KBPlayer @4,
Heh — I’m reminded of that line in Crocodile Dundee where the New Yorker tries to explain to Dundee why people go to therapists, and he looks confused and says “what, they don’t have mates?”
Yeah, the current Dear Prudence, Daniel Mallory Ortberg, basically tells everyone to go to therapy. He also has no clue how to handle workplace problems because apparently he’s never worked in a real office. The previous one, Emily Yoffe, was much better except that she had a real prejudice against even mild amounts of drinking, and was quite to accuse people of drinking problems — she went on to write some articles on how college women should just stop drinking if they want to prevent sexual assault.
Re @5, yep, either you don’t get holidays or you get them but are subtly discouraged from using them. America is the land where magazines run fawning profiles of company presidents who claim that they only sleep 4 hours a night, are working most of the other 20 hours, and haven’t taken a vacation in 20 years, and this is supposed to be admirable (and believable).
I know quite a few couples who basically go to his parents’ town for Thanksgiving, her parents’ town for Christmas (then alternate the following year), and that’s their entire vacation budget of time or money.
And for many Americans, these are unpaid. If you are an hourly employee, the odds are you don’t get paid on the holiday you aren’t allowed to work no matter how much you need the money.
I had to laugh when J. T. was going on about how he wouldn’t patronize places that were open on Christmas Eve because the workers didn’t get a day off, and bolstered that with tales of his own days as a waiter. It only underlined how little he needed to be a waiter; he was far from desperate. When I worked hourly, I dreaded the holiday season, because I was barely making enough most of the time to just keep myself and my son fed, and a roof over our heads. I did not have the money to take off Christmas for two days, Thanksgiving for a day, New Year for a day…and when the place was closed on weekends, it was even worse.
Americans mostly have no idea that their European counterparts get so much better a deal. They have been told life is so bad everywhere else that they take the crap they are given and think it’s cake.
iknklast,
What good are things like a living wage and health care, if you aren’t free to cuddle an AR-15 under your pillow?
@ScreechyMonkey #6 – I did much prefer Emily Yoffe, who is wiser than Ortberg, and less woke, also more amusing.
Holidays are a huge part of British culture. A lot of polite conversation is, have you had your holidays yet, or have you any holidays planned? The bosses will stay in touch via smartphones and conference calls while they sun in the Algarve or ski in the Alps, the more lowly will leave the office altogether when they head to Spain. Of course in a country where it’s grey and rains a good deal, a holiday in the sun is seen as a necessity. And they aren’t that expensive. My colleagues who are on an average wage will have a couple a year involving a flight to somewhere foreign.
A couple of my colleagues (secretaries) were discussing a proposed holiday in Florida. “But they vote for Trump there. It’s unbelievable.” Ah well, foreign travel broadens the mind..
@ScreechyMonkey
Speaking of Daniel Ortberg, I used to read The Toast every day, Daniel (then still Mallory) Ortberg and Nicole Cliffe’s fun, quirky, women-focussed website. I had one of my very first “peak trans” moments over there, reading an article by a trans man, in which he described being teased and bullied as a child for being a gender non-conforming girl, and conceded in hindsight that the bullies were basically right.
Reading that was a real WTF moment. The transman went on, using language to describe their condition that was so stilted and odd and brainwashy and Scientology-like. It was just so obvious that all the jargon about self-discovery and finding their true self was just cladding to mask glaring, blatant internalized lesbophobia and misogyny. This was a woman openly admitting transition was an escape from being called a “fat, ugly lesbian” but recasting it as empowerment. I couldn’t believe it when every single commenter on the article praised the author for their bravery and courage, and nobody said a thing about the gobsmacking amounts of self-hatred the author was clearly suffering from. Didn’t anyone have anything to say about the role societal homophobia and misogyny had in this person’s decision to transition? Didn’t this feel more like a tragedy than a triumph? I remember clearly, that was the exact moment it dawned on me that I had been mingling in a crowd I did not fit in with at all.
(Soon after that was published, Ortberg was suddenly overcome with the trans flu and announced he was Daniel now and had always been a man; Cliffe became an insane trans activist who led a libelous crusade against Jesse Singal for the crime of writing about trans in rational scientific terms instead of magic spiritual self-discovery ones.)
Oh fuck right the fuck off. I’m not “put off by genital configuration.” I’m fucking gay. Hey Rich, you like pussy as well as dick? Good for you; you’re bi. I’m not, and don’t you dare call me a bigot for it. And no, you don’t “need to work on” your only minimal attraction to vulvas relative to dicks. (Which I surmise would be more correctly described as no attraction at all, but your aversion can be overrruled by your stronger desire to be seen as openminded and inclusive. Or maybe you’ve just got a ragingly powerful sexdrive.)
Rich is trying to have it both ways. He’s squirming and using weaselly vague language (“maybe”, “it’s plausible”, “not just possible but observable”) to try and reconcile the fact that homosexuality (like heterosexuality) excludes members of one sex with his belief that exclusion is bad and transphobic and something we all have a duty to at least make a strong attempt to overcome within ourselves. The definition of bigot has been updated, and now includes any homosexual who does not put in the requisite amount of effort to retrain their sex drive (“need to work on that”, he literally says) to include members of the opposite sex. Trans people’s desire to be perceived as the opposite sex is just that: their desire; nothing more. I’m not obligated to accommodate anyone else’s desire — and I’m certainly not going to put myself through some kind of vulva-conditioning masturbation therapy — and fuck you, Rich, for saying that I should.
Rich Juzwiak was another person I used to enjoy reading back in the day, when he was at Gawker. (I cherished his hilarioius “The Best Restaurant In New York Is…” series over there with Caity Weaver.) Now I just think, god these people are such hipster poser assholes.
#11
Or you can take the PZ tack on this question: dodge it by saying that you are happily married and no longer dating, making it irrelevant and not worth probing further that he too has a sex preference that excludes dick.
Holms, to be fair to PZ, he did say that Mary’s genital configuration was once relevant, albeit only for producing their offspring. Nice of him, describing his wife as no better than a breeding mare!
This reminds me of the Musical Banks in Erewhon where the depositors pretended to invest their money, but the money didn’t have the purchasing power of real actual money.
“I gathered that they have two distinct currencies, each under the control of its own banks and mercantile codes. One of these (the one with the Musical Banks) was supposed to be the system, and to give out the currency in which all monetary transactions should be carried on; and as far as I could see, all who wished to be considered respectable, kept a larger or smaller balance at these banks. On the other hand, if there is one thing of which I am more sure than another, it is that the amount so kept had no direct commercial value in the outside world; I am sure that the managers and cashiers of the Musical Banks were not paid in their own currency. Mr. Nosnibor used to go to these banks, or rather to the great mother bank of the city, sometimes, but not very often. He was a pillar of one of the other kind of banks, though he appeared to hold some minor office also in the musical ones. “
So though we respectable people pretend that we can be attracted to anyone, their whole person, and never mind the genitalia, in real life we are attracted to secondary sex characteristics of the male and female, and when it comes down to it, (so to speak) their genitalia.
A thousand years or so I did declare something like this, then found after experience, that I would step over the cleverest, nicest woman to get at a fairly mediocre male. Though I never pretended that the cleverest, nicest woman was actually a bloke – that was for later ages to discover.
A popular album of that era was called “Never Mind the Bollocks, We’re the Sex Pistols”. A modern translation, Never Mind the Bollocks, We’re the Gender Fluid.
So true. I have known many a woman who would make a wonderful companion, who shared a number of interests with me, and with whom I had great times. None of these women, all of whom thought the same of me, gave me a second thought as a potential mate. I did not view any of them as a potential mate.
I have also known lesbian women who offered me opportunities to explore same-sex relationships. While they were friends, and were attractive in personality (and often in appearance), I politely declined because I am heterosexual. Contrary to what the woke think, this does not make me boring, vanilla, unhip, or anything else, except, well, heterosexual. My personality is what it is, and my sexuality is what it is. And my attraction to my husband does relate to his personality and our common interests, but had his genitalia been configured differently, the relationship would have been merely that of friends.
The funny thing is once upon a time bisexuals were erased by both straight and gay people alike. Gay people would accuse you of being “in the closet”. Straight people would suggest that you were “experimenting” and would “come around and settle down”. Now the hip thing seems to essentially add up to we’re all bisexuals now. Because having a preference for one set of genitalia over another is discrimination. Everyone should be available to everyone else as a potential sex partner. OK, turns out it’s not that funny after all.