FROM TIME TO time deeply problematic articles are written and published about sex or more precisely how to get it. These are largely but not exclusively penned by young authors and largely but not exclusively published on student and youth platforms. The latest article around which there is considerable discussion is an article published in the College Times on August 6 entitled, ‘One Night Stand Guide: For Him’.
These articles are characterised by an assumption that sexual activity amongst young people in our society is largely generated by men’s insatiable appetite for ‘no strings’ sex and these men’s capacity to trick women into ‘giving it up.’ Women are targets, men the predators.
While it is wearying and perhaps disrespectful to readers’ intelligence to point out the litany of misogyny in these articles and the clearly troubling and dangerous unrelenting assault on any concept of consent, what is less obvious and noted is the misandry that underpins every argument.
Throughout these articles men are assigned a sexual straightjacket. They are encouraged to be opportunistic and manipulative towards fulfilling that narrow sexual objective, ejaculation inside a vagina. From the smorgasbord of sexual experience men are supposed to snatch the dry cracker and reject all other delights, with men being instructed to avoid intimacies such as ‘kissing’ and ‘look[ing] her in the eye’.
Secondly men are expected to be contradictory and duplicitous; sincere yet masters of manipulation, show kindness and compassion while being remorselessly detached and cruel, have honesty and integrity but lie flawlessly. In other words in the battleground of love, relationships and sexual activity men of otherwise sound, decent and good character are understood to operate with an altogether different set of rules. A set of rules that dehumanises and brutalises everyone involved.
When sexual activity and relationships, aspects of the human experience with so much potential for joy and fun, are reduced to a combat zone where the best that can be hoped for is to come out the murderer rather than the prey, there is little left for either sexes to be proud of or hopeful for.
The principal skills men must learn in these how-to guides are about identifying women’s existing vulnerabilities, creating and increasing those vulnerabilities and then exploring the means to use those vulnerabilities to manipulate, pressure and coerce them into unwanted sexual activity. The icing on the cake is how to then humiliate and denigrate the women who have been victimised by these tactics.
The tenuous negotiation of consent described here occurs when the man is instructed to invade a woman’s body space in seemingly innocuous ways, a hand placed on the small of her back, and if the woman does not react with aggression then she is understood to have given the green light.
The women are name called and belittled throughout. In this latest article the author cranks up the misogyny with each paragraph first likening women to dogs, then horses, fish, ducklings, baby gazelles and finally simply as ‘prey’. These dehumanisations underscored by an accompanying cartoon from a popular tv show of a couple in bed with the female depicted as a rhinoceros.
However, much more sinister is the fact that in the final utterance of the article women are humanised again by virtue of the ‘successful’ male ‘hero’ of the piece being likened to a ‘murderer’. Murder being, by definition, something only one human being can do to another.
Clíona Saidléar is the policy and communications director for the Rape Crisis Network Ireland.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say