The Emasculated Men of the Super Bowl

Update Again: Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams ranks the good, the bad, the wtf:

Second, guys, I am really sorry about your penises. You know, the ones we took away from you with our book clubs and our vampire TV shows.

Update: Jezebel has a whole article on the sad superbowl dudes too:

Only a few minutes into the 3rd quarter and it was evident that a theme had already emerged, namely, advertisements aimed at emasculated men and the harpies who have sucked the manhood and life out of them. The pattern kicked off with this Snickers/Betty White ad, and I must admit that I laughed the first time I watched it – who wouldn’t laugh at the former Golden Girl yelling, “That’s not what your girlfriend said!” But as the night went on, it became clear that the Snickers spot was the first of many ads starring emasculated males who need to “man up” via various products.

Buzzfeed has got a compendium of the commercials trying to sell us sad men stuff. My favorite good commercial from the night, “The Green Police:”

Female Werewolves

Latoya Peterson has a fantastic article over at Jezebel discussing monstrous female creatures. With the whole Twilight and True Blood phenomenon, she noticed that though vampires are often equally male/female, werewolves are almost always male only. Why, you may ask?

Student Elizabeth M. Clark may have an answer. In the most authoritative document to be found online about representations of female werewolves in pop culture, her thesis “Hairy Thuggish Women”: Female Werewolves, Gender, and the Hoped-For Monster provides the provocative answer: werewolves are specifically coded as masculine, which directly conflicts with the pop culture narrative surrounding women and femininity. She delves into this idea over the course of more than 300 pages, but most interesting are comments from those directly involved in crafting images of women in fantasy worlds.

I thought for a moment about truly monstrous females and only came up with two examples: She-Hulk and the female creation in Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Interesting stuff to ponder.

Geekettes

From a post on Neatorama about Star Wars Adidas:

Geeks and geekettes rejoice, you can finally buy a sweet pair of styling shoes that pay homage to your favorite sci-fi movie.

The word “geekette” struck me as very weird. I’d never heard it used before. What the hell is a geekette? A female geek? Is the word “geek” even gendered in the first place? Is there a need for the distinction?

Droid from Mars

And the iPhone is from Venus:

In the Droid’s new ad, Motorola gives us an array of candy-colored, bling-enrusted mobile devices and smiling fashion dolls and asks, “Should a phone be pretty? Should it be a tiara wearing, digitally clueless beauty queen?” Hell to the no!

Instead, if should be “racehorse duct taped to a scud missile fast” so it “rips through the web like a circular saw through a ripe banana!” Beware the rampaging Droid! It has GPS but it doesn’t even need it, because directions are for the weak! If the ghost of Steve McQueen had a baby with Captain Kirk, it would be this phone. It would have back hair and chew with its mouth open. This phone may have killed Tupac. As the ad explains, “It’s not a princess. It’s a robot.” It’s not a phone. It’s a dick with rollover minutes.

The whole post is gold. Feminists are funny, you guys.

“Be A Man! You’ll Need A Phone And Pants” Salon:Broadsheet

A Kept Man

Ask yourself this question: What is the masculine form of the word “mistress?”

Can you think of an answer? I couldn’t.

Technically, there isn’t one. A male, extra-marital, long-term lover doesn’t have a specific term. There is, however, a kindred spirit to “mistress” that is more gender adaptable: the kept woman. The “kept” part of the kept woman is that she is largely provided for and supported by her lover, who is by definition of superior wealth. Until very recently the reverse situation was nearly impossible (Catherine the Great and Queen Elizabeth being notable exceptions). The closest male equivalent to a “mistress” would be a “pool boy.” The implicit social and age difference, as well as the extra-marital connotation, is about as close as I can get.

A pool boy, however, does not get much of a benefit besides sexual satisfaction. A kept woman, in addition, by definition receives more material favors, such as an apartment, clothes, an allowance, and/or trips. Not too shabby.*

So what we are confronted with are busy women with disposable income, frustrated with dating needy men, with errands and chores piling up, and no intention of settling down. Sounds like a perfect recipe for a kept man.

A kept man lives somewhere at the intersection of maid, mistress, and husband. The important thing, of course, is that he is supported by his woman (or women). The transition from simple lover to kept woman/man occurs at the moment the relationship moves from one of merely emotional and physical pleasure to one in which material gain and financial stability are added to the mix. For both people involved, the advantages are clear. In fact, the development of a culture in which a “kept man” is acceptable would help to remove the stigma around kept women and mistresses present in puritanical America. For the record, I would like to note that a “kept person” need not be extra-marital nor monogamous. Nor is it for everyone. I’m just saying it sounds like a good idea for some people.

As a final point, I’d like to say that this idea is not entirely my own. On at least three separate occasions I have had female friends – who are either currently or soon will be far more successful than me (they don’t have to list “blogger” on their resume) – have brought up the appeal of such a relationship. They have nice apartments with too much space and no one to clean them, nice kitchens with no one to cook in them, huge bank accounts with nothing to spend it on, and other more, ahem, personal needs that need to be met without the hassle of dating. A husband is too big a commitment, a boyfriend might have a job of his own, but a kept man is there to do your bidding – for a nominal cost.

Any takers?

*Before anyone gets in a huff, let me state for the record that I am aware that the whole construction of concubine/mistress/kept woman is a result of the severe power imbalance between men and women, be it a result of aristocratic or capitalist wealth. I am aware that it is not always  some sort of idealized situation where the woman gets everything she wants and is still treated well. I’m not babbling about how unfair it is that women get these opportunities and men don’t. That is the opposite of what I’m trying to get at. Also this is just a goofy thought experiment, so chill out on the feminist critique for a second.

**I’m aware I’m assuming the heterosexual (not heteronormative) perspective here. Cut me some slack. GLBT relationships are outside my realm of analysis, cause I have no idea on what the norms are.

Links: Gender & Sexuality

1. Deus Sex Machina. Just ignore that translation, please.
2. Misogynist chick flicks. Six examples. But we all know the very concept of a “chick flick” is part of the problem.
3. Lady Gaga is taking on the homophobic rappers. I guess that means Wale is cool with dudes lovin’ dudes?
4. Exploring masculinity…sort of. I expect this from Cambridge, but not you, Oxford. A better choice.
5. Jezebel’s summary of the Caster Semenya scandal.
6. The Women’s Bioethics Blog picks apart that video of “The Perfect Woman” IEET uncritically put up.
7. Babies with three parents? We need to come up with a new word, parent is becoming too broad.

Gender and Mental Differences

An IEET poll result:

I have a lot of qualms with this poll. I know it was done in good faith, but the IEET’s take on gender has always been slightly, mmm… irksome.  They write an essay on postgenderism on one hand and then, in reference to the poll question “If you could have a personal robot that did just one thing, what would it be?” post an image like this:

I just kind of shake my head at this sort of stuff now; I know it isn’t malicious and it isn’t worth the effort to work myself into the tizzy necessary to really get upset.

This poll on what IEET readers say about gender is really worth some further analysis, mostly because it’s split in such an interesting and, well, even way. If you round the numbers, you get a quarter of respondents going full bio, a quarter going full society, and half saying a mix, even if they don’t know what the mix is. Given the materialist critique underpinning Dvorsky and Hughes white paper Postgenderism, I would have guessed at least half of the poll takers would have gone with “mostly from biology.”

Anywho, the poll seemed as good excuse as any to put my thoughts on the matter out there. I’d love to sit down and just deconstruct the hell out of the question – which begs so many questions of its own I wouldn’t even know where to start – but instead I’ll just take it at face value and address the “spirit” of the question: how closely related are biological sex and performed gender? If one is born female/male, how much does that influence one’s feminine/masculine behavior?

In short: I have no idea. There is almost no way to test this concept empirically and, if there is, it hasn’t been done on a large enough scale or with enough rigor to merit serious scholarly attention. There are simply too many variables and a control sample is damn near impossible. All we have are anthropological comparisons of cultures and those provide tenuous connections at best. My intuition, however, is that all of biological influences combined (from actual genetic code up through average phenotypic expression), account for less than a third of male/female behavior as such.

In particular, the question is focused on mental processes (the specific, redundant mention of “emotions” is odd, given that emotions are a mental process, but I digress) so in that consideration, I would argue less than 5% biological influence. Again, I have zero evidence to back this up, besides lived experience. Then again, that’s better than some crap science you see out there, so I’ll trust my instincts. The thing is, I have met so many people with so many varied ways of behaving, that to say “females generally act X way and males generally act Y way” would actually be more difficult and more confusing. The less influence biological sex one grants over people’s behavior, the more actual, observed behavior makes sense.

Mental processes are so heavily influenced by environment, life experience, and nuanced fluctuations in genetics that even identical twins have very different mental lives and behaviors, despite growing up with similar parents and the same genome. On the other side of the coin, opposite sex siblings, tend to have lots of similar behaviors and personality dispositions that are reflective of their parents’ behavior and personality. In both examples, the influence of genetics, both in general and the possession of an X or Y chromosome, seem to have far less influence than the social and environmental factors in a person’s life.

In that sense, I’d say the answer to the question is that the “apparent mental differences” between males and females are the result of observer error. As much as we are conditioned to perform within social norms, we are conditioned to observe based upon them, hence the tenacity of norms and their powerful influence. Sex is one of so many variables that it becomes largely inconsequential in a survey of genetic influences on conscious personality.