Assault them till they love you - in films real men don't need consent

I was saying this last night while watching ER.

Abbey constantly turns down the advances of her student and then he goes and finds out her address and phone number from her private data at work, basically stands on her doorstep late at night until she gets home and she ends up snogging him.

Surely this is stalking/sexual harassment?

It's like the Big Bang theory

Leonard continuously pesters Penny until she gives up and says "may as well give him a go"

Cracked often has some insightful articles, I really should stop being surprised about it.

I also like John Cheese's writing on poverty.

Interesting indeed. Never thought about it too much, but I know many girls who would never "chase" boys - i.e. the man has to win them over somehow, convince them or persuade them because women aren't supposed to express sexual desire even though they have it.

That Poledark scene was discussed on the Andrew Marr show last week, and Amanda Patel made some horrible comments about it. Basically wondering what the fuss was about, while Andrew and the other newspaper reviewer looked shocked at her dismissing the idea of consent as debatable. I've not explained it very well.

The ratatouille clip was particularly depressing.

I realised George RR Martin didn't have a clue about writing women when in the space of about three chapters very early on in the books (I only read the first two) he described two different female characters as 'brushing her hair until it shone'. Once would have been cliche enough, but twice? And so close together? Women are just boobs and hair to him.

Interesting article. Particularly the recognition that he never acted out those fantasies only because he didn't think he was cool enough to get away with it, and actually hated himself for not living up to that masculine ideal.

I've just been looking at some of the author's other articles, and come across this, which I think is very insightful:

Right now I'm reading a book from mega-selling fantasy author George R. R. Martin. The following is a passage where he is writing from the point of view of a woman -- always a tough thing for men to do. The girl is on her way to a key confrontation, and the narrator describes it thusly:

"When she went to the stables, she wore faded sandsilk pants and woven grass sandals. Her small breasts moved freely beneath a painted Dothraki vest ..."

That's written from the woman's point of view. Yes, when a male writes a female, he assumes that she spends every moment thinking about the size of her breasts and what they are doing. "Janet walked her boobs across the city square. 'I can see them staring at my boobs,' she thought, boobily." He assumes that women are thinking of themselves the same way we think of them

(And don't even get me started on men writing sex scenes about what they think women want in bed...)

Yup

Great, but very scary article. I've had similar conversations with male friends, about how long it's taken them to "deprogramme" the damage done by this sort of all-pervasive culture. (A male Polish friend of mine said in the context of a discussion about love scenes in movies that there's a Polish saying "her lips say no, but her eyes say yes" - he said it took him years to realise what a crock of shit this was). And it affects women too - I'm interested that he begins his article with that iconic kiss from Star Wars. I was 14 at the time and it was one of the formative fantasies of my burgeoning sexuality (as a female colleague of mine put it recently, "you watch that scene as a kid and think 'oh wow, how hot' - then as an adult and think 'my god the guy's a creep'.") So men are groomed into thinking sexual violence is okay so long as she eventually goes limp ("submits") and women are groomed into thinking that female submission should be part of their sexuality. It's depressing.