men

Our September Round-Up

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, photo by 5oulscape Flickr/creative commons

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, photo by 5oulscape
Flickr/creative commons

This is our September round-up in case you missed some of our posts. If you like our unique mix of news and opinions, follow us on Twitter/VenusPlusX, and like our page, Facebook/VenusPlusX.

We kept up with many of our key issues with a discussion of how and why police bias is the chief cause of criminality in Culturally Inept Policing Schools Criminals; the psychology behind domestic violence in A Women’s Problem is a Men’s Issue; and the underlying ecology of progress in Everyone Needs Examples, Including Bad Examples. These followed our extensive take on the real legacy of the Michael Brown shooting.

We continued to monitor the Federal Communication Commission’s impending ruling which would destroy the inherent democracy built into the Internet by urging our visitors to participate in the Internet Slowdown Action earlier this month with Take Action On Wednesday For Net Neutrality, and outlined other things people can do in Today: Actions You Can Take To Assure Net Neutrality.

We asked you participate in the Fast Food Walkout with Support Tomorrow’s Walkouts To Raise Wages, and then cataloged the results in StrikeFastFood Protesters Walk Out, Get Arrested, Succeed.

We published Income Inequality Dampens Economic Growth for Rich and Poor Alike, a follow up to The Wealthy and Powerful Aid Social and Powerful Social and Economic Justice Activists and List of Organizations Working on Income Equality. And, we couldn’t overlook the Billions Wasted By Right-Wingnuts.

We covered the People’s Climate March, the next day’s Flood Wall Street sit-in, and the Climate Summit at the United Nations, with Climate March This Sunday Be Counted and Salutes and More Salutes and Stop, Hey, What’s That Sound?

The Global Poverty Project with aims to eradicate world poverty by 2030 and their Global Citizens Festival made a deep impression, We Are Here, We Are Here.

We commended actress and United Nations Ambassador Emma Watson’s succinct but bulls-eye redefinition of feminism for a new generation, in Salutes!

We riffed on lots of stories in the news, such as how recent research by Credit Suisse showed that profits go up in relation to the number of women in management and operations, in The Liberation of Women Will Change the World.

And, we continued to feature videos as part of our Sexual Freedom Project. Send us your video, write a poem, song, or an essay — or even create an original work of art — and express your thoughts. If we feature your contribution on the site, we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt to thank you. This month: Gender Neutrality in Public Restrooms and Don’t Yuck Somebody’s Yum. (More videos.)

So stay tuned!

 

Women Like Sex (a lot)

 

Photo of central panel of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights by Will Flicker/creative commons

Photo of central panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights by Will
Flicker/creative commons

“Women like sex. Stop making ‘health’ excuses for why we use birth control”

—  Jessica Valenti, author, Guardian columnist, and founder of Feministing.com (@JessicaValenti)

Once again, Valenti has focused her laser-sharp analysis to challenge popular arguments on behalf of free access to reproductive health. She urges everyone to stop saying that birth control is necessary for the small percentage of women who use it for medical health reasons, and deal with the reality that 99% of women use birth control, mostly because they like sex, and shouldn’t have to make excuses for it.

It’s amazing that in 2014 conservatives (men mostly but some of their womenfolk too) are pressing the idea that any sex beyond purposeful reproductive sex is dirty, bad, and slutty. A recent study in the Journal of Sexual Behavior, highlighted today at Think Progress, exposes the underlying conservative myths that drive bad outcomes, such as the US Supreme Court’s devastating Hobby Lobby decision last month.

First, if women don’t have “paternity certainty,” they will not know who they need to rely on to support them and their future child, a notion from last century that disqualifies women as masters of their own destiny.

Second, conservatives believe that the very availability of birth control leads to promiscuity, a notion completely dispelled by actual research. Women are no more likely to have multiple partners with free access to birth control.

It’s important to recognize that the fear of women’s promiscuity in many countries causes their murders, and activism to stop this behavior should be of paramount importance. In the US, these conservative theocrats just want to curtail women by keeping alive the idea that women are meant to home and in their place, wholly dependent on men.

Women like sex (a lot) just as much as men do is a fact that modern society must deal with in order to progress out of the 1800s by embracing this reality and the forever changed moral landscape.

It’s interesting to go further back into our history to understand the true genesis of these ideas, as we did a few years ago, and ask the question: When will men, women, and everyone in between, recognize they are enslaved by women-hating ideas and instead embrace true liberation through the wholehearted the embrace of erotic freedom?

To answer this question we start by making the distinction between anarchy, a legitimate and proven approach to governmental organization, and terrorism, a deliberate technique of chaotic social disorganization. We’re not talking about anarchism which is by its nature is chaotic and destructive. Anarchy is something different, used to connote simply a world comprised of humane and entirely voluntary associations without the need for interference by governments, religious hierarchies, and corporations.

A chief tool of hierarchical governmental violence directed against its citizens is sexual repression through false religions, failed ideas of government, and corrupt concepts of commerce. Every aspect of organized human endeavor is corrupted at its origin by the universal practice of sexual and erotic repression, worthless superstition reinforced by ignorance and compelled by violence.

In From Why Privileged Elites Cynically Oppose Erotic Freedom we pointed out that erotophobia is real, a deeply seated, invisible but all-pervading, blind, screaming, and insanely raging fear to embrace the one thing in your material life that can actually save you from meaninglessness and give power and value to your life experience.

Erotic engagement is the first real step from the purely material-physical-sensory into the domain of spirit. The joy one experiences is indeed a gift from the cosmic source that leads us onward to higher levels of inspiration. By denying the legitimacy of this first step on the “highway to heaven” the historic oppressors of society would make it virtually impossible for most people to ever engage the path of love and truth, the path of light, their own personal pursuit of happiness, which is unacceptable to the oppressors because it this is the only true path to personal and societal freedom which necessarily dilutes the power of the elite. By trapping humanity in such darkness, religions, governments, and commerce have conspired to destroy all human hope of progress by harnessing human effort for the advantage of a greedy few.

Thus we see that erotic freedom, the foundation of all freedoms, is also the most direct entry for modern humans to the pathways of love, truth, goodness, and beauty. Free love, pan-eroticism, and collective social reversion—the continuing experience of comprehensive personal joy, apart from social and economic duty—are keys to human activity celebrating truth, the active gift of love. And this unity of experience eventuates in the emergence of the brotherhood of all people, and leads to the kind of social network that eventually stabilizes the most desirable form of anarchy.

 

Erotic experience is the simplest inspiration of awareness of transcendent love that erases all conscious objection. Personal and shared erotic experience demands trust and rejects violence. Anarchy requires that there exist no need for government violence against citizens. The balance required for successful and stable anarchy can only be maintained when society is pervaded by the atmosphere of mutual love and trust between all people.

So the question remains: When will men, women, and everyone in between, recognize they are enslaved by women-hating ideas and instead embrace true liberation through the wholehearted the embrace of erotic freedom? 

MSNBC’s Toure: Can a man be a feminist, too?

We were so happy to hear Toure, one of the anchors of MSNBC’s The Cycle, talk about a favorite topic of ours: men can and should ascribe to feminism.

The battle for any identity group’s liberation cannot and should not proceed solely with members of that group, and it never does.

MSNBC's Toure, on The Cycle (video below)

MSNBC’s Toure, on The Cycle
(video below)

Not only is feminism the most modern expression of progressivism, men’s direct involvement is crucial to its continued success in setting aside old, useless, coercive, and harmful systems imposed on society in favor of preserving that which is old and also good, and melding that with new, more humane and voluntary associations. You can read more about the process of true progress in our Manifesto for a New Age of Sexual Freedom.

Toure echoes several feminist memes we wrote about  a couple of weeks ago, including our promotion of Zaron Burnett’s’ wonderful essay, A Gentlemen’s Guide to Rape Culture, a piece of work that is both fun to read and highly instructional, a must read for every man, young or old.

I came of age with the birth of modern feminism over 50 years ago. The men I chose to surround myself with, in college and since, were all feminists, ascribing to this renewed vision of how to make the world a better place. We had words to describe men who fought feminism, degraded or ignored it. Luddites, Knuckle-draggers, Unenlightened, and, oh yeah, just Stupid. Because, as Toure has reinforced, the oppression of some contributes to the oppression of many.

As a post-script here, I would feel remiss in not differentiating true feminism from its mangled 1980s radical feminism. The word mangled is appropriate because of this splintering wave’s angry misdirection in rejecting men, and in particular trans women (and trans men). The very idea of non-inclusive feminism is intellectually self-contradictory, regressive (and decidedly not radical) and has contributed nothing but weakening feminism by confusing its underlying principles. Again, the word Luddite comes to mind.

So young women, study feminism’s history to help you understand why it enfranchises all women, all men, all trans people, and everyone in between.

Related: NYT’s Is it possible to be a male feminists? and How can we help men? By helping women. 

 

 

Best Essay Explains Misogyny and Rape Culture in a Way that Men Can Understand

A Gentleman’s Guide to Rape Culture 

We are so grateful to author and actor Zaron Burnett (@zaron3) and Medium (@medium) for bringing his essay that puts misogyny and rape culture in a feminist perspective. It is a must-read for every young (and old) man, women too. It continues the important conversation that has finally (and thankfully) been thrust onto the front burner due to recent events.

Within just a few paragraphs like this one, Zaron transported me back over 40 years ago when these ideas were rightly assumed by the many men who identified as feminists, the most authentic males in my orbit, including my dear partner and husband, Dan Massey, who went on to higher shores recently. These guys, straight, gay, bisexual, and trans, that were with us from the beginning were the most beautiful creatures to us: Behold, The Man!

When I cross a parking lot at night and see a woman ahead of me, I do whatever I feel is appropriate to make her aware of me so that a) I don’t startle her b) she has time to make herself feel safe/comfortable and c) if it’s possible, I can approach in a way that’s clearly friendly, in order to let her know I’m not a threat. I do this because I’m a man.

This is how men behaved in the early feminist movement, it was about being good men, authentic men, giving comfort and safety to the other half of the population while supporting a movement that explicitly stands for political and social justice. Male feminists wanted (and should want to adopt) this perspective because it replaced the awful predatory, conquering control of women they were taught at their parents’ knee and saw among their male peers. Very unfortunately, as feminism aged and stays lodged in radical feminism which express their hatred of men particularly transwomen, it has failed to keep alive the idea that feminism isn’t just for women.

It was always intentionally co-ed and had to do with your perspective on the world and how you wanted to make it better, how you wanted to destroy coercive systems, such as reproduction legislation, preserve good things about the world, such as hospice started in the 11th century, and create new, more human and voluntary systems, such as abortions that are private between a woman, her doctor, and her family. Feminist issues have no gender boundaries.

Zaron continues .. .

Flickr/Creative Commons

Flickr/Creative Commons

If you are a man, you are part of rape culture. I know … that sounds rough. You’re not a rapist, necessarily. But you do perpetuate the attitudes and behaviors commonly referred to as rape culture.

You may be thinking, “Now, hold up, Zaron! You don’t know me, homey! I’ll be damned if I’m gonna let you say I’m some sorta fan of rape. That’s not me, man!”

I totally know how you feel. That was pretty much exactly my response when someone told me I was a part of rape culture. It sounds horrible. But just imagine moving through the world, always afraid you could be raped. That’s even worse! Rape culture sucks for everyone involved. But don’t get hung up on the terminology. Don’t concentrate on the words that offend you and ignore what they’re pointing to — the words “rape culture” aren’t the problem. The reality they describe is the problem.

Men are the primary agents and sustainers of rape culture.

Rape isn’t exclusively committed by men. Women aren’t the only victims — men rape men, women rape men — but what makes rape a men’s problem, our problem, is the fact that men commit 99% of reported rapes.

How are you part of rape culture? Well, I hate to say it, but it’s because you’re a man.

Zaron Burnett III public domain image

Zaron Burnett III
public domain image

The essay goes on to explain it all in great detail. I’m bringing it to every man (and woman) I know because it is so important and educational. It is guaranteed to make you more of man and more of a human as soon as you finish reading it.

 

See also: An Open Letter to Privileged People Who Play Devil’s Advocate (via Feministing) and Misogyny in the News, At Last.