Why does so much revolve around sex, male gratification and the penis?

I'll probably word this badly as it's a concept in my head that I've not shared before so please bear with me!

I wonder about the rise of the "ladett". It seems to me that one of the ways patriarchy has dealt with being called out on sexual coercion, dominance and dependence has been to, subtly, tell women how to feminist. Lots of "yes you've been oppressed for years, throw off the shackles, embrace your sexuality" it sounds so close to feminism it's almost impossible to discern but what I think it means (and what has happened imo) is "stop gate keeping sex, we want it any time with any one and it's easier for us if you believe you want that too" the result is a generation of cool wives and porn apologists etc who think this is how they have to be to smash the patriarchy when, in reality, what they are doing is giving them what they want at the expense of themselves.

Obviously this isn't true for everyone but I've noticed a distinct number of "cool wives" who really aren't comfortable with the things they are condoning and no way to real it back in without seeming less "strong and open and cool". It's almost like frigid is still a word used to control and threaten women but now it's been installed in our heads rather than spoken out loud.

DancelikeEmmaGoldman

Do you think you need to view people as lesser to have social rules or values intended to protect those who are vulnerable in some way?

For example, we have rules about minimum wages, or allowing union activity, and those are necessary because employees are vulnerable to employers, but I think we see those as important because those people are fully human.

Sometimes it seems like we've almost lost the sense that those with more power in society should have a kind of moral code in dealing with people like employees, as if the letter of the law is the only requirement and if you can get around it with a loophole that is ok. Something like chivalry might be a real improvement.

Lone women being vulnerable to men (your words) is the same outcome as men seeing them as abandoned property (my words) in the context of Doobietta's observations that men take sex by force because our weakness means that they can. The places where women are chaperoned everywhere are the places where rape victims are murdered by the same male relatives who chaperone them for dishonouring the family, so it's not that the men actually care about their sisters and daughters as people. The rate of sex-selective abortion of girls also gives you a clue as to what these men think about women. The root cause of the custom we both describe is the idea that women are property who only have value as virgin brides or faithful wives, and if we are left lying around we are free for the taking. Softer words just obfuscate that.

No, I think there are some significant differences to what I said, mainly because I think your approach includes elements not necessary for the explanation to work.

I don't think you need an assumption of women as property to have the kind of situation you are talking about, and you don't even need to value women mainly as virgins and wives. All you need is a group of people, sufficiently large to be a risk, who are sexual threats to a more vulnerable group.

It seems to be the case that there are always a certain number of men who pose a sexual risk, even where women are highly valued as individuals, and it is not always easy to identify them.
If that is the case, the social problem is how to protect the vulnerable members from the risky group. Punishing offenders isn't really solving the problem, especially on an individual level, the damage has been done. Why assume the father or mother is more upset about a violation of property than the actual harm done to someone they love? (Though, often these go together, people whose children are harmed often do have a feeling of violation as well as being directly upset about the harm done, it seems a common human response.) Making it more difficult for such men to have easy access to women alone is a relatively simple solution in many different settings.

I do think this likely tends to create, in a certain type of person, a tendency to see those lacking protection as fair game. That idea could come to be widely believed, but I don't see any necessity that it would be. I don't think it's been universally believed in recent times.

That sounds like potentially a very serious problem you avoided GodDammit. Are they part of a franchise, or on a register, that you can report them to? If there's no other options it might be worth logging it with a local police station - but we all know what worth local police have in the UK.

I often wonder where have all the gentlemen gone? What has happened to chivalry?

Chivalry was the consolation prize for not being considered either a full human being or a proper member of society. Medieval knights were supposed to protect peasants because they owned their means of production.

Medieval honour codes functioned in hierarchical societies as an attempt to protect the “lower” orders from the unfettered power of armed men.

Chivalry towards women attempted to codify civilised behaviour toward women; or at least women of one’s own class.

“Gentlemen” offer chivalry to women to protect them from other men and to drive home the point that women are a special class of inferior beings.

goosefoot I'm not sure how what you said differs in content from what I said. You just used softer words.

Lone women being vulnerable to men (your words) is the same outcome as men seeing them as abandoned property (my words) in the context of Doobietta's observations that men take sex by force because our weakness means that they can. The places where women are chaperoned everywhere are the places where rape victims are murdered by the same male relatives who chaperone them for dishonouring the family, so it's not that the men actually care about their sisters and daughters as people. The rate of sex-selective abortion of girls also gives you a clue as to what these men think about women.

The root cause of the custom we both describe is the idea that women are property who only have value as virgin brides or faithful wives, and if we are left lying around we are free for the taking. Softer words just obfuscate that.

they are insisting that they too are women

Males masquerading as female is a mating strategy that occurs elsewhere in nature:

• cuttlefish core.ac.uk/download/pdf/60066.pdf
• certain birds www.zmescience.com/science/biology/male-ruff-steal-females-0434/
• octopuses evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/news/080501_octopusmating
• scorpion flies www.cracked.com/article_19295_the-7-sleaziest-mating-rituals-in-animal-kingdom.html
• garter snakes www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4010782

I think that the sudden explosion in the numbers of males claiming to be women is men's evolution of mating strategies in response to women's evolution of feminism. We make it harder for them to rape us, they respond by making it easier to gain access to us. I suspect that females claiming to be men may be a further evolution of our rape avoidance, by attempting to resemble the rapist class and so avoid being targetted. Shame it's not terribly reliable.

I often wonder where have all the gentlemen gone? What has happened to chivalry?

Too many men preferred women to be 'in the home' not competing with them for jobs/status so are all too ready to blame feminists (when all feminists want is equal rights with men-not better rights.)

Porn is a huge problem-childrens first encounter of sex will most likely be from porn-and as a society we are allowing that....depressing

I think you're right. This is why some cultures insist that women are chaperoned by male relatives in public, so that rape/sexual access becomes something that other men fight or negotiate (a.k.a. arranged marriage) with said chaperone for.

I don't know that that is the only way to think about that custom, it seems like about the most negative spin. Why not say, in many cultures it's recognised that lone women are vulnerable to men, particularly when there is nothing like a police force or the more complex means to determine who is a criminal. Therefore they have related men or older women as chaperones, in order to protect them. If the strange men have honourable intentions then they can declare themselves to the family, get to know them, make a commitment, in short ensure that the woman will be cared for rather than used and abandoned, probably with a child.

That's really interesting about the 'abandoned property' concept wacademia. It would explain why I had to buy a fake engagement ring when I travelled around India due to constant harassment from men. The fear of other men was the only thing that put them off and even then I had to be convincing that 'my husband was just in the next shop.' India is an incredible country but it is patriarchy on steroids. It's frightening to think a lot of men still see us like that. It's also evidenced in domestic violence, when the abuser stalks and harasses his ex after she leaves even though he'd been cheating on her for years and doesn't actually care about her at all.

Larson, by the way, being a notorious MRA and perpetual failed politician who literally thinks of women as property.

Doobigetta I think you're right. This is why some cultures insist that women are chaperoned by male relatives in public, so that rape/sexual access becomes something that other men fight or negotiate (a.k.a. arranged marriage) with said chaperone for.

This reminds me of Nathan Larson's characterisation of single women as "abandoned property": "Men will often have no qualms about behaving in a sexually aggressive way toward women who are single (also known as unowned or abandoned property, since their fathers have left them to be taken by the first comer), but they will think twice about risking the consequences of trespassing on another man's property."

This links nicely with (I think Lisa Muggeridge's) assessment of the difference between left and right being that leftist men regard woman as public property and rightist men regard woman as private property, but both regard women as the property of men and and will argue all day about the exact placing of men's boots on our necks.

Sex = currency?

If instinctive 'unmoderated' behaviour and power is partly driving these men, are women also behaving instinctively by having sex as a survival mechanism to protect themselves? (disproportionately affecting those with the least).

Sexual gratification isn't just an instinct to reproduce, I do think it need to be seen as escapism from reality too.

I think a lot of those things you mention, community, family, traditions, even things like spirituality, exist in part, or at least part of their effect, is to allow us to shape and reflect on the more animalistic drives we have. Sex might be the most powerful, at least when food is not in short supply, and it has considerable capacity to break down social relations.

I think you are right that in the last 20 years or so, technology has really affected these different elements that help us control anti-social drives. It also seems to be the case though that the whole thrust of liberalism does this to some extent, because it encourages us to think very individualistically about all of them, as if they should be as few as possible it should be possible to opt out of them in many cases. It seems that in noticing the degree to which they can be levers for power, we decided to abolish them where possible to make us more free, without considering what kinds of things they may have been working to contain.

Why does so much revolve around sex, male gratification and the penis?

Because as Bill Hicks pointed out long ago sex sells.

With the sexual revolution and gradual diminishing of religious control we are seeing the outcome of that truth played out with no restraint. It isn't pretty.

(please note, I don't wish to go back to religious control but culturally we have not agreed any other form of restraint on the more base instincts)

Is there also an element of, out of everything in the hierarchy of needs, sex (for heterosexuals) is the only thing that women control access to, and therefore the easiest for men to take? If they want money, power etc, they have to negotiate or fight with other men and therefore might not win. If they want sex, historically it hasn’t been a negotiation. Men just take, either by force or presumption. I haven’t thought that through all that clearly, it could be rubbish.

Agree about the focus on male sexual gratification.

We still don't understand the female sexual response, there's very little good quality research.

Most of the research into female sexual problems are focussed on "get it in" - because, that's what men want.

The clitoris? We barely know anything about it. The penis? We know heaps.

Male sexual gratification primarily though, Bernards. Women are supposed to be 'nice' even when we don't see anything better for ourselves. A lot of it is driven by commercialism imo. Sex sells: the more the better.

Sexual gratification isn't just an instinct to reproduce, I do think it need to be seen as escapism from reality too

That’s really interesting, the idea that damaging focus on sexual gratification could be viewed in the same way as consumption of harmful drugs like heroin, as a form of escapism undertaken by people who don’t see any thing better for themselves

Home video developed at the speed it did and to the extent it did because of the trade in porn videos.

The Internet revolution owed a lot initially to the sharing and distribution of porn.

It's where there was money to be made because of a demand.

We are now seeing a rise in incel culture which is starting to drive politics which is about a demand for sex. Which is partly down to technological change and the growth in extremism in social media echo chambers but also about sex.

It's partly down to sexual gratification but there are definitely elements associated with power over women. And that's to do with status in society and a sense of loss of control and power in other areas of men's lives.

Part of that is due to toxic masculinity and part of it down to economics.

I don't think it's a single factor, but a combination of a few. It's led by sexual gratification but sexual gratification is a distraction from other world concerns too.

You can not ignore the influence of money and commercialisation (you are a man, you need porn even if you never knew it type advertising), the rise in social media extremism (giving ideas and normalising ideas that people would never otherwise have had) and the loss of jobs in certain industries as the economy changes (a loss of power and status), the rise in politics promoting a toxic masculity agenda (and making promises to men in a certain way to compensate for this loss of power) and a formation of a new idea of what it is to be a man (again social media and toxic masculity politics) in a world where there is a sense of a loss of community on a localised level and where individuals feel disconnected from society for various reasons (in part and in some places particularly driven by austerity and economic hardship).

Sexual gratification isn't just an instinct to reproduce, I do think it need to be seen as escapism from reality too.

It's the biological imperative to reproduce. We are just another species of animal, even though we have evolved to enjoy sex for it's own sake it's still there underneath our socialisation.

I haven't watched those programmes, but my guess is that it's less about sex per se, but more about predatory men using the opportunity to degrade and humiliate vulnerable women. They get to assert their authority and power in ways that they can't otherwise. They obviously know the women wouldn't consent to having sex with them if it was a free choice. The gratification comes more from hurting and humiliating another human being, especially a woman because she won't be able to fight back. Men like that are despicable.