Tuesday, June 15, 2010

SEX AND ENTITLEMENT

RightsForMothersFILED IN: PATRIARCHY, SARAH STEFANSON, SEXUAL RELATIONS, ENTITLEMENT

Someone had brought a post to my attention, and it struck a chord with me.  Thinking back, I think my ex-partner’s presumption of “entitlement” to it started the increase of his hostility and this is what started the physical abuse.  I found this segment on a men’s message board (Men Going Their Own Way) a while back sharing some of those manly feelings:

“I was driving back from a meeting this morning, thinking about my wife, and I really wanted to go home, and simply beat the living shit out of her. I have been supporting everyone for years, working my ass off, and my wife has not done one single fucking thing to make my life easier, to encourage me, or to help me with anything that’s bugging me. She’s on the PTA, the board of her preschool, she teaches art at the elementary school, is involved in a book club, and on and on and on. Her calendar is ridiculous. But I am some kind of fucking afterthought. I’m the engine that powers this entire thing, and I haven’t gotten laid in months.

I know I was awful tired taking care of a baby by myself all the time at night.  He would not help….ever.  He said his job was more important so he needed more sleep, yet we worked the same jobs (even had the same degrees, although mine more advanced).  Would it help to try and get joint counseling in this before you get the crap beat out of you?  I don’t know…I tried that and he wasn’t a willing participant.

Now try and look at it from the other point of view…can a guy turn this around and truly blame a woman?  (**Shakes head and rolls eyes**).  No.  Nobody deserved to be abused if they don’t give it up.  Back to the post that caught my attention…the writer (a woman!) on the Fox News story tries to come up with reasons why that woman just won’t put out, and fails miserably.  What follows here is some really good commentary on the Men’s Health post on Fox News:

“Women withhold sex because men let them get away with it”

Published by Jill

Feel like puking? Check out this crusty scab of human hatred from the Fox News website, a men’s advice column entitled “Reasons Women Withhold Sex.”

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “why would I feel like puking?” Or possibly, “why would anyone bother writing a men’s advice column entitled ‘Reasons Women Withhold Sex’ when the answer, so obvious to anyone with half a grip, is ‘because sex with you sucks’?”

But apparently men need to hear something other than the truth. Enter men’s advice-ist Sarah Stefanson. Rarely has so puke-a-riffic an example of the acculturation of sexist male entitlement been seen in this, or any other, galaxy.

I would call Sarah Stefanson a lousy turncoat collaborating suck-up shitbag, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions. There’s always the possibility that she was forced against her will to scrawl this feces-stain on the knickers of human achievement. Forced, perhaps, by some asshole who literally held a gun to her head, threatening to kneecap her 80-year-old grandma and foreclose on her 9-acre dirt farm, send a shipment of tainted vaccines to blind orphans in Bangladesh, and drown a sackful of kittens in a pond of toxic run-off. That has to be the scenario, because otherwise I’d be forced to contemplate that there actually exists a woman so degraded, so corrupt, so sociopathic, or so desperate that she would willingly turn out this kind of unremitting, lobe-scorching dudebro misogyny for the pitiful sum of 10 cents a word.

But I digress.

Sarah Stefanson’s hate speech addresses a dudely audience, and begins, I am sorry to say, like this:

One of the benefits of being in a long-term relationship is that you have someone that you can readily depend on for regular sex.

But uh-oh. Dude’s dependable meatsock may not be feelin’ it. She may even be “withholding” it. This suggests that the benefits of which Sarah Stefanson speaks so glowingly might be experienced by the party of the second part as unpleasantness. Hence her tips on how to manipulate your sex-woman and “get the carnal door open again” (Jaysus, 10 cents a word for that? Kill me now).

Observes Stefanson, “if there’s one area of a relationship women think they have control over, it’s sex.” But don’t buy it, men!

In the wild world of men’s advice columny, “purposefully withholding” sex is universally understood as a wholly nefarious, cruel, and mystifying method of female retribution. That’s because sex is a commodity to which men are entitled by the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women. Women are the sex class. If the flow of access is interrupted, the natural order is out of whack, and your sex-woman needs to be reset. But hey, chillax, bra! Stefanson’s column addresses the painful question “what can a suffering dude do when his receptacle is ‘purposefully withholding’ sex?”

In answering the question, Sarah Stefanson, with whom I begin to grow increasingly annoyed, leaves no tired old war-between-the-sexes cliché unturned. Women who “close up shop” (yes, really) are manipulative, out to prove who’s boss, cheating, or “playing games.” If they’re too tired to fuck, men are urged to poke them with sticks. If none of the tactics listed sufficiently cajoles them, “you might have to wait it out and service yourself until she comes to her senses.” But ultimately, Sarah Stefanson opines, women withhold sex “because men let them get away with it.” So man up, you spineless fairy, and take what’s yours.

Stefanson’s article is a stupid lowbrow clump of oppression-culture condensation, and doesn’t really merit a full-on paragraph-by-paragraph analysis, but it’s worth pointing out that it was filed on a major news website under “Men’s Health,” where it is accepted, uncritically and without analysis, that women are an underclass with so little agency that sexual manipulation is their only recourse.

Puke.

[Thanks, PhioGistic]

Please go to her website and comment on this great piece.

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