Fifty Shades of Grey: lessons for men

Having read Wuthering Heights more than once I can tell you that the scene where Heathcliff grabs Cathy and rips open her dress and feasts his eyes and hands on her breasts before throwing her on the fainting couch and giving her the best sex of her life isn't actually in the book.

It's not that Emily Bronte didn't think it. She and the vast majority of the women who've since read the novel all had the thought.

And it's a very important scene to the book even though, as I say, it's not actually in the book. If that scene weren't in the back of the minds of 99 percent of its readers, well, 99 percent of its readers wouldn't be its readers and Emily Bronte would be mostly forgotten today.

Emily probably didn't put the scene in for a number of reasons. 1. Because she knew that life doesn't work that way. 2. Because she had enough faith in her readers' to know that they'd think it through for themselves. 3. Because the mores of the time wouldn't have allowed her to even vaguely hint that Cathy had imagined having sex with Heathcliff. And more besides.

If you're a man, there are two equally important lessons to take from Wuthering Heights (and yes, I am implying that Fifty Shades of Grey is built on the same mythological foundations as Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice; all of which trace their heritage back to Pamela). The first is that Catherine didn't give Mr. Edgar Linton the best sex of his life—she probably gave him utterly mediocre sex and didn't give him any more of even that than she felt was absolutely required of her—so you don't want to be Mr. Edgar Linton. The second is that Heathcliff is a vile creep and you don't want to be a vile creep either.

Do those two lessons contradict one another? A lot of men would say yes and start whining about nice guys always finishing last.  There is another way of thinking about it however. Ask yourself, rather, who is to blame. Is it your fault for not being more like Heathcliff or for not "manning up" and accepting that you're stuck being Mr. Linton? Or is it a woman's fault if she can only see men in binary terms?

Heathcliff and Christian Grey don't have a lot in common but they do have two things they share and that is that they're both vile creeps and they're both highly attractive to most women at some time in their lives and highly attractive to some women all their lives. You might object that Christian is different in that what's-her-name-oh-never-matter-who-cares succeeds in reforming him in the end. Well, except that he doesn't get reformed until the very end and the millions of women who read the series of novels read it for the 100s of pages in which he is a vile creep and not for the denouement in which he promises to be different or the various short passages along the way in which he promises to be different.

Don't hate women for being this way. Have you ever entertained the notion of having a woman who is less than a fully developed human being because you thought it would be easy and fun or because you were still too immature yourself to see that there is a problem with that? If you can honestly say "no" to that question you're delusional about yourself.

But the lesson remains. If you're at a party and a woman-over-the-age-of-19 tells you that Wuthering Heights is her all time favourite novel or that she really got into Fifty Shades of Grey she is telling you she never matured emotionally such that she divides men into two classes: vile creeps and easily manipulated wimps. You want to keep your distance from such a woman. There are lots of them in the world and they all end up unhappy and they all want to blame you for their unhappiness.

If you like the way she has matured sexually enough that you could ignore the fact that she is an emotional disaster, you could simply treat her as a prospect for short-term sex whom you avoid after you've had her. And, trust me, you wouldn't be the first or the last man to simply use her and move on. I'd recommend against it but, if you go ahead with it, I'd suggest you first tell her in an earnest voice that you've never read Wuthering Heights or Fifty Shades (and tell her this even if you already have read it), that it's something you've always thought of reading but, there are so many novels, could she please tell you why you really ought to read this one. Her answer will tell you everything you need to know about her. What you want to figure out is just how damaged she is because you don't want to get involved with someone who is really, really crazy for reasons that I hope are obvious. A little crazy can translate into some pretty wild sex in the short term, a lot crazy will unfailingly translate into a lot of crazy and pretty much nothing else, and most likely little or no sex. I'd also suggest you take advantage of her long answer to your question to glance over her shoulder just in case there are some better prospects in the room because there almost certainly will be some.

I'd recommend not doing any of that. What I'd recommend is telling her that you don't read many novels but love action movies and that you treat the hero of your favourite action movie as your personal role model. Then sit back and watch her try to think of a way to politely break off the conversation without hurting your feelings.

Fifty Shades of Grey: lessons for women

I can see two lessons, although there are almost certainly more.

The first lesson: "I am Heathcliff."

For those who haven't read Wuthering Heights, Cathy says that. If you take it literally, you have  mature understanding of what the novel is about.

Emily Bronte is a much better writer than E.L. James. I suspect you already knew that. But you shouldn't imagine that her being a much better writer makes Wuthering Heights any less of a fantasy tale. There is far more wish fulfillment in the book than psychological insight.

Wish fulfillment? Well, yes, because Cathy gets a thrill out of imagining all the sexual passion (which sexual passion is "sublimated" as hate and destruction in the novel) she is capable of. I know, she's dead for a lot of it, but that's the way fantasy works. Think of the five-year-old who, angry at their mother, imagines their own death and "how sorry mommy would be then". Cathy is that five-year-old writ large, which is why it's great to devour the book when you're 17 and not so great to still be passionately reading it at as an adult. (And it should tell just how unfeminist this novel is, despite claims to the contrary, that Emily Bronte and her readers have to project all this passion onto a man before they can believe in it.)

But, here's the thing, in order to have a fantasy, you have to play both parts. Heathcliff isn't the perfect soul mate for Cathy because he doesn't exist. She projects him onto the world. That's what makes Emily Bronte such a great writer. She wasn't such a great human being but she really knew how to write. The same goes for Charlotte. Heathcliff isn't a man and neither is Mr. Rochester. They are both placeholders onto which women's emotions can be projected.

It's okay to do that, provided you know that is what you are doing.

To be really good at relating to men, especially at relating to men sexually, you have to be able to imagine what it's like to be him having sex with you. Okay, you fantasize about a man doing things to you. Now try to put yourself into the head of that man. What's his motivation? What attracts him to you and why does he want to relate to you sexually in this way and how does that fit into the rest of his life? If the only answer you can come up with is "because he's a psycho-creep like Heathcliff or Christian Grey", we have a problem.

The second lesson: is like unto the first

I overheard a man flirting with my wife a couple of years ago. We were at a book reading and she was standing in line to have her copy of the book signed. The man in front of her in line, started a conversation. They talked about the book they were holding for a while (it was about FDR) and then he introduced Fifty Shades into the conversation. He did that because he'd liked the way the conversation had gone so far and was looking for a little risqué fun. Here is how he did it with some comments from me in square brackets.

"I'm rather ashamed of what I'm reading now."

[No, he isn't ashamed at all. When men are really ashamed of something, they try to hide it. He brought it up this way because he's hoping she will be intrigued and her willingness to be intrigued is something he wants to know about. She didn't slam the door shut so he kept going.]

"It has something to do with the colour grey."

[The point of this silly, parabolic way of approaching the subject was to find out how much my wife knew and what she thought of what she knew. If she knows enough about the book to figure out what he is talking about from this vague hint and if she is intrigued enough to encourage a man she doesn't know continue talk about a book that features kinky sex, they both can have some fun with this. She giggled approvingly so he continued but not in the way you'd guess.]

"My wife has me reading it. She says I could learn a lot from it."

[He has just dissed his wife. He is discussing something about her that he should have kept private with another woman and he is doing so in a way that will make this other woman think less of his wife.]

He wasn't actually proposing to my wife that, should he decide to take up the kinky suggestions that his wife meant him to take up, he would rather do it with her than with his wife but that is what he was thinking and he didn't mind the thought that she might figure that out but he did it in a mild enough way that he still had plausible deniability vis-a-vis both my wife and his.

But let's leave that aside. What's the lesson? It's this: if you want to have a more fulfilling and adventurous sex life, you should focus your efforts on being the sort of woman whom an actual man would want to have a wild sexual affair with. But you won't be able to do that if you hate yourself and the problem with Fifty Shades of Grey is that it's aimed at women who don't like themselves very much.

And you can see this in the character of our heroine old what's-her-name-oh-never-matter-who-cares. She's this mousy, boring little thing whom no one but a damaged creep who can't hold himself back from would ever have anything to do with. This isn't an imagined type. I've known several women (and men) who ranged from pretty good looking to quite beautiful who never managed to connect with anyone. In the movie she's actually played by a confident woman who merely acts at being those things and then later acts at being a woman transformed by the experience.

The problem with Cathy saying "I am Heathcliff" is not that she projects her fantasies onto a man but that she impoverishes herself by taking all her passion and drive away from herself and giving it to someone else. She'd be much better off if she developed and nurtured this side of herself but she isn't going to do that because she hates herself. If you pin her down on the subject, she'll say that no one would take her seriously if she did but there are men who would love nothing more than to take her seriously in that role and she may even already be married to one of them but it will never happen because she hates herself and expresses this self-hatred by deciding that no one would ever take her seriously as an exciting lover. (Except maybe some psych creep like Heathcliff or Christian Grey.)

There are, of course, women more interesting and sexier than her. Lots of them and if she goes about looking for such women she'll fund them. Even Dakota Johnson could do that if that is what she set about doing it. But why do that? Wouldn't it be better to have to have enough self compassion to forgive yourself for not being everything you can be and enough discipline to become the woman you are capable of being?

On the other hand, it would be a lot easier to just read the book and go to the movie.

Fifty shades: Because it gets them off. That's why!

There is a basic fact about the book and movie that you have to start with. If you don't start here, everything you say about it will be nonsense. What's that? That the roughly 100 million women who bought this book did so in order to get fantasy material to use when they stimulate themselves sexually, or when someone stimulates them.

And there is, if you'll pardon the expression, the rub. Because roughly 100 million women are turned on enough by the idea of being submissive that they went out and bought this book. Submissive!

100 Million! I'm repeating this over and over again for a reason. Think about that for a while. That's a big, big, big number.

That isn't every woman. It's not even close to it. But it's a lot of women.

If we're going to write about this phenomenon at all, and we don't have to, we need to start with that fact. That's what is important. It's also the fact that most people who write about the movie are doing everything they can to avoid acknowledging. For example, I love Mollie Hemingway, I read her stuff all the time and generally agree with her about seventy percent of the time. But she is spouting pure, undiluted nonsense when she says,"Fifty Shades of Grey is for women frustrated by the consequences of feminism and a sexual revolution that didn't turn out like we expected." Not it's not. It's for women who want to get aroused and have orgasms and it worked for millions upon millions of them.

This isn't a backlash against feminism. This isn't a reaction against all the weak and unsatisfactory young men out there. It's a masturbation thing! It tells us that one heck of a lot of women get their rocks off while imagining that they are being dominated.

And it's not about women not wanting to make the decisions about sex, or men being too proud and having easily bruised egos so that they won't take suggestions about sex.  The hero of this book is a nightmare (albeit a very wealthy nightmare). When looking for helpful material to assist them in fantasizing while masturbating, approximately 100 million women chose this.

Maybe you're thinking that's just because no one has given them any other options. Maybe you're thinking that if someone cranked out a book, it obviously doesn't have to literature, about a sexually dominant woman, that might also sell 100 million copies. Hey, go right ahead. It's your chance to get rich. Go right ahead. We'll see how you do.

So don't waste our time telling us it's badly written, or that it's a poorly made movie, or that it's not realistic. Deep Throat wasn't well-written, well-directed, or realistic either. No porn book or film—either softcore or hardcore—in the history of the world has been good art. You don't read or study porn. You use porn. Just as good soap is the stuff that actually removes dirt, good porn is the stuff that gets the user sexually aroused. No matter what you or I or anybody else wishes were actually the case, Fifty Shades of Grey worked and is working for a lot of women. Deal with it.

Fifty Shades of Grey: Passive aggressive?

I'm thinking of spending a whole week on the theme of Fifty Shades of Grey. Not the actual thing as I haven't and and will not read the book and will not be seeing the film. See if you can figure out the connection here.

My father put up with a lot of crap he shouldn't have put up with. You could read that as criticism of the people who subjected him to the crap he shouldn't put up with or you could read it as criticism of him for putting up with the crap instead of just saying "No!" to it. You could go either way and I leave it up to you to decide.

Here's the thing: because he put up with this stuff he shouldn't have put up with, he'd sometimes explode in rage when he couldn't take it anymore. I'm like that. It's nothing I like about myself. In fact, I hate myself for doing it. But it's a mixed feeling. I feel justified in my anger but I also feel that if I'd stood up for myself much earlier I would have been able to react rationally instead of blowing up.

I hate myself for blowing up. But I keep doing it. 

I used to think that was what passive-aggressive meant: you passively accepted shit you shouldn't accept until one day you just lose it and become aggressive.  That isn't what passive aggressive means. Now I think of passively accepting crap until you can't take it anymore as, "that thing that men do". Because it is. It's not just me.

Passive-aggressive actually means agreeing to something and then quietly undermining it by inaction and subterfuge. You might also call it, "that thing that women do". Not all women and certainly not only women do it but a lot of women do. And it's easy to see why. It makes sense. Historically, women were usually not given much power and being  passive-aggressive was often the only way they had to resist what they didn't like. (That's still true for a lot of young women and children with parents who just don't get it.)

You cannot, as I hope is clear, generalize too much. There are women who specialize in the first and men who specialize in the second.

If you feel like you're strong, you'll tend to use the male option. Imagine Gulliver seeing what the Lilliputians are up to and thinking he'll put up with this and managing to do so until he realizes that his liberty and safety are at risk so he explodes. When he does he either kills or maims Lilliputians. If he'd just stopped them right at the outset, he could have avoided hurting anybody but he cooperates because that's what you're supposed to do. That was how the Romans ended up with an empire. At first, they tried to cooperate and the neighbours just wouldn't stop scheming against  them so the Romans stomped them but good beginning with Carthage. A lot of the reputation the Romans now have for being violent oppressors stems from their having first tried to cooperate and then exploding. If they'd just conquered other peoples in the first place they'd probably be better-remembered today.

If, on the other hand, you feel weak you'll use passive-aggressive strategies in the classic sense. A lot of women use this even against people who haven't done anything in particular to hurt them. I think a lot of women who were repeatedly and unfairly criticized and demeaned by their parents later take it out on their husbands with passive aggressive tactics. Harriet Westbrook being exhibit A in this.

Real classic-aggressive strategies can work, however, and we shouldn't forget that. This was how the Irish finally won something like independence.

All that said, men mostly do the first and women mostly do the second.

More on Fifty Shades tomorrow.

The advice they give: on a Valentine theme

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Anxiety, insecurity and the importance of being studiously uncool

A post under development: This is a blogging experiment. This long post will sit here at the top for a while. I will visit it and make improvements from time to time. If it works, I'll keep blogging this way some or all of the time.

Somewhere, I can remember, I read someone who characterized anxiety as the thing you feel when you don't have the courage to have an actual emotion. I think that's a deep and true observation.

By way of contrast consider resentment. It is one of the lower emotions. No one admires resentment. But it also makes a certain amount of sense. If someone you can't retaliate against, say your boss or your girlfriend, humiliates you, you resent it. It's all you can do. Yes, you have to move on and yes it will only do you harm to nurture and maintain that resentment. The correct response is to get over it and quietly begin looking for a new job or a new girlfriend.

But resentment is often the right emotion to have. It is a rational response to the world in that it identifies the cause of your suffering. You might identify the wrong target—for much of my adolescence I resented my father because I, like most boys, had a hard time being honestly critical of my mother. But resentment, like all emotions, can also be absolutely right and justified. Most times it is. The problem is that we feel resentment rather than anger because we are incapable, or at least feel we are incapable, of challenging the person or persons whom we resent.

Not so with anxiety or insecurity. Those feelings, they don't rise to the level of an emotion, have no target. They are vague, but often intense, fears of we know-not-what.

A few years ago, I had an experience where I got to see into the anxiety of others. I got to see the sort of sexual anxiety that plagues many women. Not surprisingly, the experience left me a little smug. But it also gave me insight into my own anxieties and a sense of how they worked on me. It was a life-changing moment. Like all such moments, I'd been building up to it for years and it took several years after that to put what I'd learned into practice. It would be to credit too much to say that everything changed in a flash. It would be fair to say, however, that a basic truth that I had long been working on was suddenly revealed. It was a moral epiphany.

In those days, we had an unfixed male dog. Unfixed because the breeder had reserved the right to later breed him. There was one other such dog in the neighbourhood and I and the dog were walking up the street on which this other dog lived. We made slow progress. My dog had to find every spot this other dog had marked and then replace that marking with his own urine. This required him to methodically sniff over the entire area pee on the identified spots and then return to sniff again to make sure he had obliterated all trace of his rival.

Going so slowly, I had the time to catch all of an interesting human drama that took place ahead of me. A man was waiting in a parked BMW sports car. The woman he was waiting for came out of a house and down to the car. She was something else. You could tell because she was dressed in her club clothes. She'd put on ankle boots and a light cropped jacket  that were meant to get her from the house to the car and from the car to the club and weren't any good for any more than that. She was beautiful and very fit, you could see that she spent a lot of time in the gym. She was also Japanese. I wouldn't normally bring that up but, as you will see, it's important to the story.

The guy got out of the car and held the door for her. He didn't kiss her. They were going out on a date but they were not yet a couple. There was something charming and innocent about it all.

And then it all went wrong. The guy got back behind the wheel and promptly got stuck in the snow bank. I think he knew better than to do what he tried to do but he felt so much anxiety because he was taking this amazing woman out on a date and now this car, this expensive car, which he saw as an extension of his manhood, was stuck in the snow. He pinned the gas pedal, down, put the steering wheel way over and polished up the ice real good.

My dog and I meandered towards them. I could see this guy getting more and more frustrated. It was sort of funny only I knew how he felt. I'd never been in exactly his situation but I knew, I imagine most guys do, what it felt like to go from everything going well in a situation where you feel lots of anxiety and insecurity to having it all fall apart.

Seeing him losing it, the woman got out and went back to push the car. She was strong enough, I suspect stronger than most petite women but she was still petite. And she wasn't dressed for it. So I tied my dog to a post and suggested that she let me do the pushing and spare her clothes. I went around the side and, as gently as I could, suggested the guy straighten out the front wheels. I felt for him; I could see that flash of self-hatred we all get when someone has to remind us of something we already knew and stupidly forgot. I braced my self between the car and the snowbank and pushed it out.

The woman had that gift that some, but not all, women have of being able to turn her smile onto full wattage and she bathed me in that warmth and thanked me in polite but formal terms. She was speaking to a man 25 years older then her and she addressed me the way school kids used to talk to teachers and, I suspect, the way a lot of Japanese children still do. English was clearly her second language but she spoke it well, albeit in that very formal way that second-language speakers do. It was very pleasant to be on the receiving end of. I would have enjoyed prolonging it, and her politeness wouldn't allow her to just turn and run but I could see her looking nervously behind her and could tell she was concerned for the feelings of the man who was not a stranger old enough to be her father but her date so I did my best to match her politeness and formality and let her go her way.

And they drove off.

Now you might well think that no one present could have been more unhappy than this young man. You'd be wrong about that.

At some point my liberal, feminist fried S had come along with her dog and she had stood watching the last part of this play out while the two dogs sniffed one another over. When I turned to  talk to her, she was a blustering mass of insecurity. She kept repeating things the woman had said over and over again in a mocking tone. She seemed to feel that I should be deeply embarrassed to have received this few seconds of positive attention from a young woman.

I walked home and promptly forgot about it.

The next afternoon I went to the dog park and S was there along with a number of other dog walkers. The second she saw me, she was again reduced to a blustering mass of insecurities. She immediately launched into the tale of what had happened in the same mocking tone she'd used the night before as if I had something to be ashamed of. That I wasn't ashamed clearly made it worse.

And then S added a detail to the story that only existed in her imagination. She reported in mocking tones to all the other women present that the woman, whom neither of us had identified as Japanese, had supposedly said, "You certainly are strong sir." Sometime since the night before, S had transformed an articulate, well-spoken and poised young woman into a crude, racist stereotype.

It gets worse.

All the other women, who'd been listening somewhat dubiously up until then, started to join S in laughing and mocking this woman. As long as she was only, as S had made very clear to them, a hot college girl dressed up to go out, they'd had no problems with her. There are plenty such women in this neighbourhood as we are located near a campus. The second she was identified as oriental, and so identified by crude caricature, they all got threatened.

I understand the fear. Some, but not all or even the majority, young Japanese women put a lot of effort into being women. Some, but not all, Western women don't and consider it a point of pride that they don't. Right up to the moment they encounter a very fit and attractive young Oriental woman who puts a lot of effort into being neat and feminine. Then they, like the young man whose car is stuck in the snow, they are reduced to helpless rage. The problem is that their feminism, like the sports car, is an outward expression of a sense of self worth they don't really believe in.

What they feel is anxiety and insecurity and it cannot rise to the level of an emotion because it can't be directed at a specific target. Emotions have to be targeted or else they cannot exist. To be in love is to love someone. Love cannot not exist otherwise. Likewise to be jealous is to be jealous of some person or situation and so on through every real emotion. To suffer anxiety or insecurity is just to have a feeling of foreboding that some undefined threat is out there somewhere; you don't know what, you don't know where from, but you just feel it.

What prevented S from seeing that she was insecure was her feminism and liberalism. She couldn't blame the woman directly for failing to be sisterly and be as uncaring about being feminine as S was because feminists never blame the woman. That was amplified  by the fact that the woman was of another race. S tried to transfer her shame to me, it was her only choice, but she could hardly make that stick as all I had done was to silently enjoy some polite attention I had received. I'd had my back to S throughout the encounter, in any case, so anything she thought she saw was her own projection and it was that projection that was full of anxiety and insecurity.

Why? Because appearance really matters to S. You can be sure of that even if you don't know her as well as I do because study after study has shown that, from age nine up, women of all cultures evaluate their self worth in terms of appearance. Not surprisingly, this can be a tremendous burden. Burden or not, it's unavoidable. We could wish it otherwise but all women evaluate themselves in these terms. If it was just in the west, we could dismiss it as a perversity of the culture but it's everywhere.

But there is something that is peculiar  to the west and that is the desire to solve the problem by being cool about it: that is the desire to make the problem go away by putting some ironic distance between yourself and the thing that defines you. That is what stops us from being able to cultivate a proper emotional response to the things that challenge us.

The most pronounced form of this irony is the desire to deny our sexuality by reducing it to "gender". Faced with the challenge of being good at being a woman or being good at being a man, we prefer to act as if we have infinite variety of choices to be what we want. We don't. You are a woman or you are a man or , extremely unlikely, you might be a hermaphrodite. (Ironically, while many in the west have tried to blur or minimize basic genetic differences between men and women, the definition of what it is to be hermaphrodite has gotten more and more specific and exclusive in recent years.) Whichever genetic group you fall into, your only real choice is to be as good at being a woman or a man as you can. We can have an argument about what makes a good woman or what makes a good man and there is a wide variety of possibilities within those two categories, but there are no real choices outside them.

Faced with the issue, many women like S have chosen to be feminine on their own terms and when they feel like it instead of making it a life-long moral project to become the best woman they can be. That sounds daunting, and it is, but it shouldn't be threatening. To be the best woman you can be is to judge yourself against yourself and that is liberating. To refuse to do so, is to surrender to the opinions of others and to live a life where you are always subject to the judgments others are making of you or, worse, the ones you imagine they might be making. All the brave bluster of the independence S imagines she has from what she believes to be merely cultural norms of womanhood vanished when she saw that beautiful Japanese woman.

A big part of that fear was that the woman was not only fit, well-dressed and feminine but also petite and exotic. S is a normal sized white woman. She has no trouble with her weight and she is more attractive physically than most. She is not petite however and she is not exotic, although she would be if she moved to Japan. If she did that, she'd make Japanese women feel insecure because they could not match this tall, blonde woman. Other people will always be different from us and will always have different strengths and weaknesses. None of that, however, explains why S and the other women had the extreme, almost paranoid, reaction they did have.

What does explain it is that, in the name of freedom, people in the west have given up the only variable we actually have control of. We can disguise other weaknesses, and a huge amount of money is made by selling women clothing and make up that will, they believe, hide their flaws. And that works. To a point. But the most basic choice—to be a good woman or to be a good man—we deny ourselves by refusing to be women and men in the first place. Driven by anxiety and insecurity, we spend our entire life running from fears we are unwilling to be honest enough to label instead of running towards virtues we could be developing.

"Working out to look great may be shallow, but so is wearing makeup, taking selfies, and grooming of any sort. Pick your shallow." Dani Shugart

As a man ...

I've been easy on the guy at the wheel of the car for the simple reason that I know too well what it feels like to be him. Too often, I've gone from feeling masterful to failure and responding by pushing the the accelerator, volume pedal or whatever is hand all the way to the floor even though this only can reduce me to an impotent child.  That happens because the feeling of being masterful was a fraud right from the beginning.

That BMW sports car was a crazy choice for the Canadian winter. It would make a limited kind of sense to have such a car and put it away in storage for the winter, assuming you could afford such a thing, but, otherwise, grow up and drive the sort of sensible car an adult man would drive. If you need a sports car to be a man, you aren't. And yes, I know, it works: there are lots of women who will be fooled by the sports car. But here's the thing, you'll only be getting them by fooling them; you'll always be a fraud and you'll know you're a fraud.

Being masterful, and a man should be masterful, means knowing how to deal with failures and setbacks. To think that nothing should go wrong and that life owes it to you to never go wrong is to act like a child and not a man. That's why the pedal goes down and the feeling of helplessness goes up. If we spend all our time both denying and dreading failure, we will be utterly unable to deal with it when it comes, as it always will.

What he should have done, was to laugh at himself, apologize for the inconvenience and that asked the woman if she would mind getting behind the wheel while he pushes the car out. Any man of my father's generation who wasn't a pimp would have known that without thinking about it. Pushing cars out of snowbanks is a manly responsibility. Men are supposed to be strong. (In this case, it may have been that she was nearly as strong as him but that only shows what a poor job he had been doing of being a man all along.)

I could go on and on ... . I know this guy because I've made the same sort of mistakes myself once upon a time.

But there is something else. One of the big reasons we men stay trapped in our unmanly state is that we fear women. We spend too much time seeing them as the gatekeepers for sex, which we have convinced ourselves we cannot live without. We believe a lot of foolish nonsense about women being morally superior to men, especially about sex. We buy into crap about men being afraid to ask for directions instead of acknowledging that we tend to be, on average, better than women are at navigation.

As a consequence, we regard it as unreasonable to want, not expect or demand but merely think such a thing is desirable, a woman to be womanly. Scared of her, we settle for any woman willing to accept us and give us sex. If she is unwilling to value and cultivate her sexuality after we have committed to her, we act as if we have no right to complain. And we keep this up until the day it comes pouring out in a whiny rage. That, however, is not satisfying because we don't feel we have the right to complain and, in any case, we express our dissatisfaction in such a childish way that we completely undermine ourselves.

That is why seeing S and the other feminist women at the dog park react the way they did was so liberating. I'd spent years feeling guilty for wanting women to be womanly. To see that their confidence was all a facade that collapsed instantly when confronted with the slightest challenge was to see that they were no better than me. And to further see that they were challenged not by any real threat but an imagined one based on a racist stereotype that they harboured (a racist stereotype I'd too often heard women accuse men who said aloud that they found an Asian woman attractive of having) was what sealed it. As I said at the top, this epiphany was a long time coming. I'd been feeling it for a while, all I needed was something to sharpen the image such that I couldn't miss it. The liberating thing was to see, after years of feminist berating, that women are just as bad as men are at all the things men are bad at. The solution, therefore, is not and cannot be feminism. The solution is to grow up and face that we are men and that we should be as good as we can be at being manly men while expecting them to be as good as they can be at being womanly women.

Who wants to control your sexuality, who really is controlling it and who should be controlling it

Laws making sex outside of marriage illegal improve the bargaining position of women who want to get married, or stay married, or to maintain a strong bargaining position within marriage. Hence it is rational for women to support such laws.

That strikes me as very clever. Clever in a useful way. It's the mirror image of a cynical comment that was common when I was in college in the early 1980s: "Marriage is nothing but legalized prostitution." When clever people say admittedly shallow things like this, we are forced to think.

It seems to me that both claims are plainly false. Any man or woman who entered marriage in the belief that it was legalized prostitution would soon be far more bitter about their experience than anyone who entered marriage as a starry-eyed idealist expecting to float along on a cloud of romantic bliss. Likewise, while I'm sure that the notion that marriage would be stronger if men didn't have access to prostitution is part of the justification that some anti-prostitution activists make to themselves and others, I don't think it would make an iota of difference to the strength of marriage or marriages if it could be made illegal.

But what about pornography? That's the primary point of two authors Helen Smith calls our attention to. Michael Malcolm and George Naufal merely use the old progressive argument against prostitution as a way to frame a new progressive argument against pornography.

Traditionally, one of the reasons to enter into a marriage was sexual gratification. But as options for sexual gratification outside of marriage have grown, the need for a marriage to serve this function is diminishing. The NIH reports that the fraction of 20 year-olds who have engaged in premarital sex grew by about 50% between the late 1950s and the late 1990s. Besides premarital sex, another option is consumption of pornography, which has become widely more accessible since the proliferation of the Internet. 

The degree to which these extra-marital options for sexual gratification substitute for marriage is an open question. Friedman (2000), among others, has suggested that one of the reasons that prostitution is so socially abhorrent is that it competes with women who seek a stable marriage. While there is a small literature on the relationship between prostitution and marriage, there is almost no empirical work on the substitutability between pornography and marriage. This paper attempts to fill the gap.

Okay, this is delusional from the get-go. Traditionally, one of the reasons to enter into marriage is love. To reduce that to "sexual gratification" is to unconsciously apply a very cynical utilitarian psychology. Notice also that Malcolm and Naufal themselves seem to suspect that the the links are tenuous in the case of prostitution and marriage weakness. They are, nevertheless, willing to plunge forward into researching links between pornography and marriage weakness. And we should further notice the implicit assumption that in doing so they are advancing the interests of women!

This speaks well to the dual purpose of our paper: extra-marital sexual opportunities can reduce marital formation and stability, and this is an important point for policymakers and for society at large since marital formation is generally regarded in a positive light.

Helen Smith, whose blog I found out about the argument from, pretty much nails it,

So, marriage is all about what bargaining power women have and finding ways to get men married off to benefit society, women and children–and maybe get better “trading partners”? Seriously? There is no mention of the benefits to men directly, only how their participation will benefit others. So all men are to be sacrificed to the cause without thought to their rights, needs or desires? It’s no wonder they have turned to porn. Prostitution was made illegal — is porn next?

 But notice something really important about this argument that Helen Smith fails to note. That is that while this argument is being made in the supposed interests of women, it is actually being made by men!

Progressivism from its 19th century efforts to prohibit alcohol to its current efforts to prohibit pornography, fraternities, manspreading, mansplaining and, ultimately, any expression of male sexuality has always presented itself as a movement driven by the interests of women. Indeed, women have always played a significant role in progressivism. But men somehow always seem to end up holding the reins of the progressive movement; not men in general but certain men and we might say a certain kind of elite male who has an interest in controlling the male sexuality, meaning to control other men. These are elite men who want to do this controlling. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, these men tended to be clergymen. Today they tend to be the credentialed elite who dominate, universities, media and the management of government bureaucracies.

They, as I will note below, frame their arguments in utilitarian terms. They say, we should do this for the good of society and they identify the good of society with what women want. As I've said over and over again on this blog, there is a common assumption of the moral superiority of women when it comes to matters of sex. If you weren't paying attention, you might think that it is women in general who are pushing this sort of thinking when it is a small group of elite men and women that is mostly dominated by men at work.

An angry man, young or hold, might read Helen Smith's argument and think, "Nasty women want me to stop using porn because they want to control my sexuality." But that's not her point. She thinks that if men don't get any benefit out of marriage they will reject it in favour of other alternatives. Pornography is only one of these. A wealthy or good-looking man could just as easily pursue serial monogamy or casual sexual partners as an alternative. Or he could enter a monastery or become a Catholic priest. Or he could become a heavy drinker. But her point is not that some alternative is pulling men away from marriage but that marriage is no longer attracting them.

There is a subsidiary point that progressives, vile little puritans as they always are, will, rather than face the fact that they poisoned marriage in the first place, now begin to ban prostitution, pornography, monastic life and alcohol so as to eliminate even the solace that a man might find there. And that's probably true but the problems start with sexuality in marriage and not alternatives to it. (I remind you that the elite men who succeeded in prohibiting alcohol sales mostly continued to drink themselves; it matters a whole lot that Malcolm and Naufel don't seem to believe their own arguments.)

Let's take this back to virtue for this blog is always about virtue. The argument that Malcolm and Naufal is ultimately a utilitarian one. It's a pretty soft utilitarian argument as all they are willing to say about the utility of marriage is that "marital formation is generally regarded in a positive light". They don't really believe what they are saying but they are saying it anyway! The mealy mouthed argument they make anyway takes a utilitarian form we might paraphrase as, "Lot's of people think that marriage formation will make for the greater good of society therefore policy makers should restrict or prohibit extra-marital sexual gratification for men if it can be proven that this extra-marital gratification makes them less likely to marry." What we need is to replace that argument, an argument even its proponents aren't committed to, with a virtue ethics argument.

To do this, we don't need to sell anyone on marriage. The vast majority of young men and women still want to get married. What we need to change is the way we tell them to conduct themselves sexually.

I've done a lot of posts on this blog under the heading of "The advice they give". In these posts I look at advice about sexuality and about sexuality in marriage. I think, and you can judge this against your own experience as this post is already too long, that there are certain commonalities in this advice.

1. Men are generally advised to constrain their sexual desires and focus on the woman. We are told that if we are courteous, supportive, loving and respectful towards women, we can hope to be sexually gratified so long as our desires line up with what the woman wants to do anyway.
2. Women are told that they should always ensure that what they really want should always have priority over doing things merely to please men.
3. Neither approach is working. Women, it turns out, are not much attracted to sensitive, caring guys who suppress their own wants to focus on women's needs. Women who choose to make their own desires a priority, on the other hand, get confused because they soon realize they don't have a clue what they really want or that what they really want doesn't fit very well with the way they want to see themselves or with the way they want others to see them.

Okay, do I have an answer to my own challenge? Do I have a virtue ethics argument for marriage? Not yet but I'm working on it. I've even thought of going back to school to work on it.

I'm sure I'll have more to say on this in the future.