Epiphany

Thanks to being nearly done with A Feast for Crows and watching Cersei Lannister do her worst, I think I've just figured out one of the reasons I tend to have issues communicating/getting along with many other women: I'm not passive-aggressive enough.

Women are often taught that being direct equals being aggressive and confrontational (and unattractively masculine), so instead of bringing up a concern with the person causing it, they go about trying to solve it via stealth and subterfuge. And when they do get into direct conflicts, they default to personal attacks and derailing, instead of dealing with the issue head-on.

Me? I generally don't do that. Occasionally, my directness borders on overly blunt and tactless, but I simply don't believe in bullshitting or talking around something/someone. It's a waste of time, and causes far more problems than it solves. But because people don't expect that from a woman, it ends up seeming far more harsh and confrontational than it would coming from a man. Add in the other issues that brings up, with violating gender roles, etc., and it's not surprising that a lot of women would find me infuriating. I don't play by the rules of engagement they're familiar with, and it throws them off their game.

There's a lot of (legitimate) concern about how men are taught to solve conflicts with violence. This is clearly a bad thing, and should stop. However, there is one advantage to that kind of problem-solving: It's direct, it's quick, and there's never any question about who's on which side. A single punch in the mouth will heal pretty fast. Six months of rumor spreading and other catty social aggression takes far, far longer. If a man doesn't like you or has a problem with you, he tells you. If a woman doesn't like you, you may never know until she's taken you down behind the scenes. She may even be downright friendly with you to your face while she's savaging you socially in other ways. A man will kill you. A woman will kill everything you love. And that? Is horrid.

Fortunately, I'm lucky enough to have found quite a few women friends who don't play that game. I've even had disagreements with some, and yet we're still friends, because we got it out in the open well before it could fester and rot. Problem is that it's so hard to tell on the surface whether a given woman will be like that, or whether she's a backstabbing coward. Which makes me really wary of making new female friends. I have to spend enough time on the periphery of them to be sure that they're not like that before I feel comfortable trusting them.

In some cases, that caution has been misinterpreted as being cold or snobby or selfish. My lack of interest in pursuing instant sisterhood with any woman I meet bothers a lot of them. Then again, the ones who are bothered by it are probably the ones I'd rather not be around anyway. Because if a woman expects me to engage in the initial friendship dance the same way other women do, she's probably going to expect me to do everything else the traditional way, too. And the first conflict we have? When I say what's wrong in so many words? Will earn me the social death penalty from her.

So, yeah. This is probably why I tend to have a lot more male than female friends. Just not interested in the mean girls' art of war. Call me Brienne, I guess. ;)

Random rant

(Inspired by some ongoing discussions about slutty Halloween costumes for little girls)

So tired of people assuming that being anti-objectified-sexuality means being anti-sex.

I wish there were an easier way to explain the fact that hardcore specialty porn is actually less damaging to women's sexual autonomy than dressing six-year-olds as sexy vampires.

90% of the women (and men) involved in niche porn are there because they enjoy the activities in question, have an exhibitionist streak, and like getting a bit of money to do something they'd be doing already.

90% of the women doing swimsuit calendars do them because they've been taught from birth that being a brainless, non-autonomous object is not just the primary thing they're good for and the only way they're going to make much money, but the ultimate expression of female sexuality.

And as someone who likes actual sex, and thinks every consenting adult ought to have as much of it as they'd like, that pisses me off.

I'm not against depicting women in sexual situations. I'm against a cultural definition of female sexuality that takes all the fun out of it for the women in question. If your primary experience of sex is laying there like a mindless mollusk while some guy uses your body as a sex toy with a heartbeat, you're missing out. And yet that's exactly what we keep training our girls to believe women's sexuality is all about.

I am not one of the conservative harpy brigade who wants to lock up girls in chastity belts until their wedding nights. I am not interested in "protecting" kids from the very idea of sex. I am interested in a model of sexuality that encourages autonomy, and a holistic sexual self-definition, because that's the only thing that allows for truly good sex.

Sue me, but I mourn for the millions of women who have had very little good sex in their lives because they've never known there was something else out there. I mourn for the millions of women who think the only way to get laid at all is to tart up, catch some drunk guy in a club, and get exactly 30 seconds of aimless humping before he rolls over and snores. Oh, ye woeful women. Stop dressing up in a way that only attracts such useless lackwits. And for the love of fuck (literally) stop dressing your daughters that way, too.

Side note: Really also tired of the people complaining about these slutty costumes only b/c of the idea that they're just attracting pedos. Um, hai? Sexual predators don't need their victims to be dressed like that. Burqas don't protect women from rape, and slutty costumes aren't putting your kid on a platter for the nearest creep in a van (or, more likely, "kindly" Uncle Charlie.) What BOTH do, however, is rob the women/girls in question of a chance to have a good sex life on their own terms, because such practices teach them that their sexuality exists for someone else's control and pleasure, rather than their own.