Comments on: Dick will make you slap somebody

By: laocoon

laocoon — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 18:47:57 +0000

No, D, not ALL men would be promiscuous, even if they could be. And, even the fat, ugly guys at Wal Mart can get laid if they would just hook up with the even fatter, even uglier women they work with. After all, I know some women who are promiscuous — not naming any names or anything — so I’m thinking ALL women would sleep around as long as they thought they could get away with it.
I’ll even give you an example. I have had my share of “luck” with women, so I guess you could say I’ve had the luxury. However, I took the last year “off”. No dates, no partners. It was my choice. It was what I wanted. I’ll also have to say I found it to be a pretty good deal. There was a quiet serenity to my life as a strictly single and celibate man. For another example, I have a couple of male friends who would have no trouble taking the tumble if that was their choice, but instead they choose to be monogamous because they’ve found the woman for them and quite simply don’t want anyone else.
I think all of us fantasize at times about some sexual adventure or another, both male and female have their little daydreams. However, I think most of us, faced with the reality of those behaviors, quail at the prospect.
I understand how you could make that mistake about men, though. You’re so mesmerizingly lovely that almost every man you meet can’t help but make clear his attraction. Logically, however, you’re in the same category as Alexyss K. Tylor, even if you pretty it up with better language.

By: dzaster

dzaster — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 02:22:57 +0000

All men would be promiscous if they COULD be. Fat, ulgy guys that work at Wal Mart do not have that luxury.

And anyway…”I Becca Long and you no make fun of me!”

By: laocoon

laocoon — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 20:45:05 +0000

Dearest Daughter,
If I knew then what I know now, I would have followed the commands of Leviticus and sold you into slavery.
Yours,
Daddy

By: RebL

RebL — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:40:30 +0000

A. PRINCE ALBERT, snicker.

And 2. You do realize I’m married to an anthropologist and have to help grade papers on this kind of crap.

Finally D. You poor, poor, trod upon, powerless, stereotyped, equivalent to the historically tarred and feathered, lynched black man. I just don’t know how you’ve made it so far in life.

Signed, your former daughter, current chattel in the Ballenger family. Thanks for the dowry.

By: laocoon

laocoon — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 04:56:42 +0000

Although it gets a little more sophisticated as we grow older, the part that’s really sticking in my craw goes back to the grade school thing of “sugar ‘n spice” vs. “puppy dog tails” girls are good and guys are bad stuff.
Whether we are talking about racist stereotypes or sexist, it’s the gross overgeneralization and the mixing of correlations with causation that just flat makes my ass chapped.
Likely that has something to do with being the only brother with three sisters.
And, here’s part of how things go…
For 3.5 million years or so, women naturally selected (Darwin? Anyone? Beuller?) men who were fast, strong, smart, and ruthlessly violent to be good predators and protectors. It was survival of the species. Similarly, men naturally selected women with wide child bearing hips and ample breasts so they could have large families and not die in childbirth and feed the kids when the hunting was sparse. (Nina, here’s your guys who like bunny girls and RebL you might think about seeing your future spouse lifting weights in the front yard and driving around the block for a flirt.) All us homosapiens types got hard wired.
Then, about 100,000 years or so ago, we went beyond mere hunting and gathering into agriculture and started civilizations. As things go, civilization reached the point where the civil society gave women protections and not an individual man and similarly provided the means for nuturing families with organized medicine and domesticated animal milk that obviated the advantages of the hourglass figure.
But our DNA didn’t know all that. Our DNA doesn’t know there’s hospitals and jury systems, so there’s a kind of natural selection hangover and some of that hangover has become twisted into the culture of our post industrial lives here in the 1st World (different chops for men and women still living in the 3d world, where there might still be warring tribes and tigers in the jungle).
So far, so good, nobody’s the good one and neither is anyone the bad one.
But somehow, value judgments started to get attached to some of this. A man can hardly talk to you for looking at your cleavage and you find this irritating? Sorry. Put on a burka and be judged for your high spiritual value and the wealth of your father — at least that’s one alternative. Another alternative is to continue to wear your tube top and simply understand that most men are hard wired that way and don’t let it get to you. Or, maybe just enjoy the attention. But if you whine because you don’t get the attention, my objection is with the implication that we are somehow lesser creatures with lower moral values, blahblahblah, because we are who we are.
And, how do you make your choices, ladies?
A whole bunch of women are still picking the muscled up vicious predators. Some of you have transferred to ruthless financial predators regardless of their physicality.
(Guys who bitch about women who choose men with lots of cash and hot cars are roughly equal to the women who complain about men who stare at their tits in my book. Let those boys lift weights to take their minds off it, I say.)
So can I call all you women gold-diggers and get away with such a stupid generalization?
No.
So, why should you be able to get away with it?
So, all of us are to some extent captured by thousands of generations of our ancestors making perfectly reasonable decisions.
It’s when this new and civil society gets involved with sex and mating that things start to really go awry, in my opinion.
About 5,000 years ago, we get the so-called 10 Commandments (did you know that there are several versions in the bible?) and the admonition against adultery. In my view, this is not about sex being bad in any way, it’s about keeping the peace between hairy legged men in a civil society.
Then, about 1,000 years ago, we get the idea of romantic love. You know, that soulmate thing you see in the movies. that’s when sex started to be really naughty.
It wasn’t until 150 years ago, though, with Queen Victoria of England, that sex in civil society went completely whacko and we had to even have skirts on chairs so that we couldn’t see the legs. As a Hemmingway fan friend of mine is fond of saying: “What rot!”
Then, about 60 years ago, birth control devices became widely available and widely used and 30 years ago we had the birth of the feminist movement.
That really really really messed up post industrial society’s relationships between the sexes.
However, the worst of the worst of all that is here in America.
Lots and lots of places around the world seem to me to have much more enlightened and sensible ideas about sex than Americans.
Of course those of us Americans who are dating and mating are screwed up! No one knows the rules anymore. No one knows their history or their evolutionary biology. We are all winging it.
And, we’re doing a bad job of it.
As I’ve often discussed online via the blogs with Nina, for example, and in posts and elsewhere with others, most of our problems between men and women in this country are over nothing that has any reality to it except our own attitudes.
This post (and comments) is about what I see as the worst of the attitudes and the most messed up of all the stuff. The worst for me is when we have attitudes that can’t hold up under any kind of logical scrutiny.
Most of the women I know realize that it’s all but impossible to make any kind of generalization about 3.25 billion men in the world, and the same for generalizations about 150 million American men.
Humans are just too diverse in their behaviors.
Yet, I hear women make bald statements about all men being promiscuous, knowing that this is simply not true.
Even if it were true, as inconvenient as that may be for some women, it would not make it bad in any way except in our own minds, drawing upon the same kind of magical thinking that Alexyss K. Tylor demonstrates. Conversely, does anyone want to try to support the proposition that women are better because no women are promiscuous? Absurd on its face, but it’s an attitude that underlies part of the conversations we have about sex.
My attorney friend was raging at all men and their small minded backwardness because all men are offended by her ability to make her own living and her willingness to pick up her own dinner check. Manure, I demurred, and she jumped all over me. When I told her I knew many men not offended by such a thing, she called me a liar. “I flat don’t believe you. I’ve never met a guy like that,” she said. “Maybe somewhere, but not in Oklahoma City.”
This chaps my ass. I don’t like being called a liar and she’s way too smart to make that kind of generalization.
I’ve just reached the end of my rope with overbroad generalizations, bloated rhetoric, and broadsided disapprobrium, ladies.
The jokes stopped being funny to me because you never meant them as jokes.
And this is my declaration of independence.
I won’t put up with it any more.
No more being quiet while someone lets slip the word “nigger” and no more minding my own business and letting it pass when men are described inappropriately based on stereotypes.
If I have to be the Erica Jong of men, then so be it, you common scolds and bitches.

By: RebL

RebL — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 02:58:30 +0000

It seems as though somebody read only what he wanted to and not what was actually stated. I wrote that your understanding of women is reflected in your success with them. I made no judgment about a high or low level of success. I’m not saying you failed to attend to my point because you are a man. I’m just pointing out that it happened. As for the “we” voice I used, it was simply to acknowledge that I am in fact a female and not because I speak for anyone.

I’m not sure what this has to do with my gay high school teacher, but okay. And when I say that I don’t mean to imply that all gay men call people “hon”, but I do mean to say that it’s a sad, sad day when the one time in my life you’ve supported any sense of my identity as an individual person who happens to be female occurred 20 years ago in the context of a man who hosted more estrogen than I did.

And now, my vagina hurts, sob, and I’m angry that I only have time to cook for my kids and not chef for the king so I need to go start a war. And I’ll do it too, right after I tell Jesse to take out the trash. Thank God we have fathers because our mothers screwed us up so.

Snark!

By: nina

nina — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 01:32:54 +0000

I love it when you rant about us girls.

As much as I bitch about men, my male friendships have far exceeded my female ones. I would wager in most cases their mamas were their teachers too.

Men and women alike – we all are crazy. The question is, what kind of crazy do you want to deal with?

By: John X

John X — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:47:31 +0000

Around the age of 13 or so, people start to realize there are big differences in the opposite sex, and some of these differences can be ANNOYING.

That goes on for a couple of decades but then, maybe, we begin to think:

1) There are exceptions to the stereotypes, maybe
2) But if not, things get pretty binary pretty fast. Your choices are: live with the sometimes annoying differences, or live alone. Either way, whether you’re with someone or alone, you have to put up with some SHIT.

Or learn to let is slide off.

I just keep thinking of the old story of the man who finally found the perfect woman, after years of searching. Sadly, nothing ever came of it—-seems she was looking for the perfect man.

By: laocoon

laocoon — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 18:22:41 +0000

UHM, daughter … what’s with the “we” stuff? You speak for all women now? Why you and not Alexyss Tylor? And who died and made you the judge of how successful my relationships with women are? From my own perspective, I’ve been more successful than most. Moreover, I wasn’t attempting to explicate my “understanding” (such as it is) of how women think or believe in part because it would be presumptuous to generalize about how ALL women think and especially how ALL women believe. I was reacting to things particular women have said to me in the recent past. The videos were funny to me because they illustrate in a very exaggerated way some of the same thinking I hear as commonplace in the mouths of women whom I expect to know better.
Not all men are promiscuous. Not all men are abusive. Not all men are violent. Not all men prize beauty over brains. As you should know better than most, not all men are indifferent and neglectful parents. What part of that do you have a problem with?
I disliked and spoke up when one of your high school teachers patronized you in a sexist way. Now, unfortunately, I must also dislike and speak up for myself and others when so many women in my life seem to believe that they are right and the men in their life are wrong simply because women have some imaginary moral, ethical or other superiority over men for no reason other than gender. This is not about my insistence on polarity; it is about my insistence on logical consistency and the rejection of illusions of stereotypes about gender.
And, finally, your father did not teach you to begin a discussion with an ad hominem attack. That must have been your mother.

By: RebL

RebL — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:31:33 +0000

Uhummm, Daddy? Clearly your understanding of how we think/believe is indicative in how successful you’ve been in your relationships with us.

By the way, I was holding up a mirror to your blog, so it all bounced back to you – you magical thinking, stereotyping, non sequitur slinging human. As long as people like you, men and women, continue in your insistence on polarity, there will always be hurt feelings.