Not too long ago, a friend of a friend joking-aggressively asked me while we were out and about what the difference between misogyny and sex is. Mind you---we were sober. So I kind of blinked at him and was like, “Come again?” I know the game Bait The Feminist, but this one didn’t even make a lot of sense. He tried to clarify, but it wasn’t helping. I kept thinking he was trying to imply that feminists think straight male sexual desire itself is somehow anti-woman, but he knows that I can’t possibly think that, so I was confused. Later I thought about it and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt---maybe there are men out there who really do struggle to find a way to desire women that doesn’t have a backlog of misogyny and resentment towards women. God knows that our culture doesn’t do much to help men out in this regard, and in fact encourages men to resent women for being desireable, and to rectify the dissonance between feeling vulnerable towards women because you desire them and feeling superior to women because of your social station by making the act of intercourse a symbolic conquering of the female body. In case that sort of heady language is confusing, a good deal of porn simplifies things by making women choke on cocks, look generally uncomfortable, get double-pronged in painful-looking ways, get spat upon, and get called names like “slut” and “whore”.
Still, I find myself confused. In my experience, men are not complete fools and are fully capable of choosing to define sexual desire for themselves in ways that aren’t dominating and cruel towards women. There’s even porn out there that’s not that bad. But I couldn’t help but be concerned---is it that hard to tell the difference between straight male desire and misogyny? What do feminist men think of this issue? Lucky for me, Shira Tarrant put together a wonderful anthology of men’s views of feminism called Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex, and Power, and you’ll be gratified to know that not only do the men in this volume understand the distinctions very easily, some of them taught me a thing or two that I hadn’t thought about in this regard. For women guessing at what men are thinking, the issue of lechery is always confusing---what percentage is hate/resentment/power play and what percentage is genuine lust when a man looks at you like you’re meat, grabs at you, or hollers at you from a car? From the men in this anthology who have the privilege of not only having male brains themselves, but access to male-only spaces where men are a little more open about these things, the answer becomes clear: It’s 100% about power. Genuine lust is something you feel on the inside and is idiosyncratic and under your control. Men aren’t so different than women after all. But expressing your sexuality in a way that establishes your power is something done to feel strong, to dominate, to show off to other men, and to satisfy insecurities. And that is why lecherous gazes, wolf whistles, and calling someone a “cunt” from a moving vehicle is not, contrary to the claims of anti-feminists, a “compliment”. It’s an expression of dominance, a way for men to signal to themselves, to women, and especially to other men that they are ranked higher than women.