This probably isn’t news to you, but I think it has some really important consequences. One of them, of course, is that there are all sorts of laws regulating things like nudity or topless women in public, even when there’s nothing sexual going on.

I suspect that one reason that a lot of folks freak out about women breastfeeding in public (or in photos on Facebook) is that if you equate uncovered breasts with sex, seeing a mother feeding her child is going to make you think of both infants and sex. If you can’t separate breasts-as-erogenous-zone and breasts-as-food-source, then you can either avoid looking at breastfeeding (hard to do in public), or demand that moms cover up or go away.

But sometimes, it goes the other way. For example, I recently tweeted this picture:

The twitter app I use automatically uses lockerz.com to store photos and adds a link so that my followers could see the image. And within minutes, the photo was removed. If you clicked on the link, this is what you’d see:

You’ll need to click on the picture to see, but the reasons listed are:

1. It was removed by the person who uploaded it
2. The link you clicked was not valid
3. The connection was lost during the file upload
4. The photo contained nudity or SPAM
5. The photo was a copyright violation

I can only assume that their justification for pulling the photo is the idea that it contained nudity. But if you look, you’ll see that a) she’s still got her underwear on (though clearly, not for much longer) and that b) he could be wearing shorts or underwear. You can’t see anyone nipples or genitals, the usual standard for defining nudity. Sure, nudity is implied in this photo, but there’s nothing showing that isn’t showing in plenty of other photos I’ve seen on lockerz.com. In fact, because of the way the photo is cropped, there’s less skin showing than in the average Sports Illustrated swimsuit photo.

What there is more of in this picture is sex, or at least, implied sex. I’m certainly not denying that. But there’s nothing in the list of reasons given that says anything about sexual expression or activity. It says “nudity”.

If these two people were covered in spandex or liquid latex so that no skin was showing, would it have been pulled? It seems to me that if lockerz.com wants to pull photos that are about nudity, they need some clarity around what that means. And if they want to pull photos that are too sexual (whether implicitly or explicitly), they need to make that clear. Nudity doesn’t equal sex and sex doesn’t require nudity.

Just saying.

There have been many times that someone has called me a feminist, even though I’ve never used that word to describe myself. Usually when that happens, I ask them to not do it. Since this has occurred a few times recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about why I resist that label and I’ve decided that there are two main reasons why I don’t want to be called a feminist.

First, I really don’t want to be put on a pedestal. I’ve noticed (and I’ve experienced) how appreciative many women are when they discover a man who’s trying to break out of stereotypical gender roles. And while I’ll admit that there have been times that I’ve enjoyed the ego boost that can result, I’ve also seen how little it takes for a man to be ahead of the pack when it comes to treating women fairly and equitably. You know, like they’re people.

I’ve seen how hungry some women are for examples of men who try to challenge sexism within themselves and the world around them. In a world in which the vast majority of men take their privilege for granted, and in which simply being not-abusive makes a guy far better than many of his peers, many women’s expectations of men are understandably low. In that light, I understand what prompts some women to put the men who are trying to change how they act on a pedestal. From what I’ve seen, that’s especially true for women whose relationship and sexual orientations are focused on cisgender, heterosexual men.

That tends to create the categories of “those annoying men over there” and “these good men over here”, which I find artificial at best. As soon as I start thinking that I’m somehow different or better than “those guys,” it becomes easy to take that for granted and stop working on it, which makes it much more likely to backslide. I think that the best way to challenge my internalized privilege is with humility, and that’s hard to do when I start believing that I’m somehow better than someone else. Arrogance is hardly conducive to living with integrity. One way that I try to avoid the temptation to become arrogant is by not using a label that can make me think that I’m somehow better or different from other men. It also helps me find some fierce compassion for them, which I think is an essential part of challenging and changing our ideas about gender roles, because I don’t see them in a separate category from myself.

Secondly, I think it’s appalling how frequently men get praised to the skies for saying things that women have been saying for years, often much more eloquently. I don’t want to distract from the wisdom of those who have said it before. I would much rather be recognized for being a supportive ally than for taking someone else’s words. That’s why I try to cite my sources, though it can be difficult to recall exactly where I heard or read something. And in those moments when I’m reminded that I’m passing on someone else’s teaching instead of offering an original idea, I hope that the fact that I try to give appropriate credit and my resistance to being made into something bigger than I am will give me the credibility I need when I apologize for forgetting to cite someone.

I’ll admit that there’s some practicality to that, as well. There’s a lot of resentment and anger about the fact that men can say things and have an audience, when women who say the same things are ignored. This isn’t limited to gender, of course. George Lucas can talk about the lack of funding for movies featuring Black casts without being seen as radical or scaring white people, but Spike Lee can’t.

resistance

The resulting frustration makes a lot of sense to me and I definitely don’t want to fuel it. Given that one of the hot spots when it comes to feminism is what role men have to play in challenging sexism and whether it’s possible for a man to be feminist, I don’t see any need to add to that fight. I know plenty of men who call themselves feminists and I’m not going to tell them not to. But I’ve also noticed that the ones who do either subscribe to forms of feminism that don’t appeal to me, or they get a lot of pushback. I think it’s totally reasonable to have different expectations of feminists who are men, if only because their experiences of gender are different from those of women. But I don’t find any value in debating whether I’m feminist or not, given my views on sex work, porn, kink, and other hot topics.

There are lots of women feminists who share my perspectives and they also get a certain amount of pushback, but there’s a different flavor to it when a male feminist offers those views because the additional question of whether men can be feminists adds to the complexity. I simply don’t feel the need to argue or justify my right to use a label. I’d rather let my actions speak for themselves than adopt an identity that doesn’t really fit me anyway.

Even with these two general reasons why I don’t call myself a feminist, I’m still flattered when someone says that I’ve written or said something that’s in alignment with the feminist goals of ending gender inequity, sexual shame, rape, abuse, and sexual violence (among others). I do take it as a compliment, assuming that it’s meant as one. However, while I’m pleased when I’m told that my actions or words are aligned with feminism, please don’t call me a feminist. After all, one of the goals of many feminists is to allow people to choose the labels and identities that work for them. That means making room for people to not choose them, too.

Call for Submissions: New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law, 2 Volumes
Edited by Lynn Comella, PhD and Shira Tarrant, PhD
Deadline: July 30, 2012

Co-editors Lynn Comella (University of Las Vegas, Nevada) and Shira Tarrant (California State University, Long Beach) are seeking submissions for a two-volume edited collection under contract with Praeger.

Description: New Views on Pornography is a two-volume collection of the most current scholarship on pornography. This edited series presents empirical research on a range of contemporary issues regarding pornography’s politics, psychology, cultural and legal debates, providing a comprehensive and multidisciplinary overview of the field of porn studies in one convenient location for students, researchers, and professors across related fields. Our goal as editors is to showcase new and innovative research that examines the culture and politics of pornography in a global context, including but not limited to, questions of production, audiences, market niches, technological innovations, political debates and controversies, obscenity, free speech, public policy and the law. The editors seek well-researched facts and data in order to provide readers with a comprehensive overview of issues on the subject.

Author Guidelines: For consideration, please submit full chapters (5,000-7,000 words), a brief abstract, bio (75-100 words), and complete contact information. Submissions must include endnotes and bibliography, and adhere to Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. Send submissions in .doc or .docx format to both contact emails below. Submissions not conforming to these guidelines will not be considered.

The Editors are specifically interested in submissions on the following:

• Foundations and Controversies in Pornography
• Defining Pornography
• The History of Pornography
• Pornography and the Law: Historical Highlights
• Cultural Trends and Changing Ideas about Pornography
• Key Resources in Media and Cultural Studies of Pornography
• Consumption Practices: Who Is Using Porn?
• Global Porn Production: Practices and Revenue
• Sources of Porn: The Marketplace and Changing Supply Patterns
• The Porn Wars in Historical and Contemporary Perspective
• The Politics of Porn Literacy and Social Control
• Issues of Race, Ethnicity, and Pornography
• Impacts of the Industry: Interviews with Porn Actors and Industry Workers
• Studying Pornography: Research Methods and Methodologies
• Impacts and Effects of Pornography
• Defining the Terms: Problems with Content Analysis and Ideological Bias
• Women Watching Porn: Issues in Data Collection and Self-Reporting
• Pornography and Global Sex Trafficking: Separating Myths from the Facts
• Pathologizing Porn: Questions about Addiction
• The Impacts of Pornography on Intimate Relationships
• Technology and Porn
• Obscenity, Surveillance and Free Speech: Current Issues in the Law
• Varieties and Genres of Pornography
• How the Adult Industry is Organized: Issues of Production and Revenue
• Masculinity, Violence, and Pornography: Correcting the Data
• Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Queer Porn
• Porn Studies in Global Context
• Porn Use and Sexual Satisfaction

Deadline: July 30, 2012

Send To: Please send cc’d submissions to Lynn Comella at lynn.comella@unlv.edu and Shira Tarrant at Shira_Tarrant@yahoo.com. Include Praeger NVOP Submission in the subject line. Submission queries should be directed to the above.

See you there!

Sex Positive Discussion Panel
Lisser Theater, Mills College, Oakland, CA
January 27, 7-10 pm, $7.50
Purchase tickets and find location info here
The Mills College Community Health Resource Center is proud to present our second annual Sex Positive Discussion Panel! This year, our speakers are:

Charlie Glickman
Krista Smith
Dossie Easton
Shilo Mccabe
Jiz Lee
with more to come

This year’s theme is consent. How do we give and get consent? What does this mean in terms of BDSM? How do we enact consent when dealing with sexual assault? How can consent be eroticized?

I suppose I should explain what I mean. As I’ve written in other posts, I’ve always been rather dainty. And in my struggles with the Act Like a Man Box, there were several years where, rather than rejecting the either/or dynamic of the Box, I tried to reject everything in the Box. This started when I was in college and many of the folks I was spending my time with were some flavor of feminist/dyke/lesbian. I got a lot of encouragement to reject masculinity, rather than the construct of the Box.

Looking back at it, I can see that this was partly because of the enthusiasms of youth (my own and my friends), and the rather either/or mentality that people tend to hold in their late teens and early 20′s, if not longer. It was also affected by the fact that lots of the women I knew were beginning to heal the many different wounds that girls and young women often experience. Sexual assault, parental neglect and abuse, harassment, date rape- these were all among the stories that some of my friends shared with me. And while many boys and men have also been targets of sexual and physical violence, there isn’t the same widespread cultural reinforcement and justification of these patterns.

I remember the day that a friend of mine finally got me to understand that part of why I didn’t see the harassment she faced every day is that men would change their behavior when another guy was around. To prove it, she had me walk about 20 feet behind her down the sidewalk. My job was to watch the reactions of the men she passed. I saw more catcalls, comments, and eyes glued to her butt than I would have imagined, and it literally opened my eyes with surprise. If you don’t believe me, ask a woman if she’ll do this experiment and see for yourself.

So I decided that if men were causing so much pain to so many people, the ethical response would be for me to become the opposite of that. I didn’t have any idea that I could do anything else. I didn’t have any role models for holding on to the aspects of masculinity that served me. None of the people I knew or whose work I read suggested it, and the only man I had ever seen discuss this was John Stoltenberg. He spoke at my university when we was on tour for his book Refusing To Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice, and while I wasn’t satisfied with what he had to say, I never heard anyone offering any alternatives.

with a friend during my senior year in college

So I became a SNAG. I started looking like a hippie, with forays into faerie once I came out as queer. I rejected everything that felt masculine to me. And something interesting happened. I started getting a lot of praise from women. I lost track of how many times someone told me that if it hadn’t been for me, she’d have lost faith in the possibility that men could be different. I’ll admit that it was a huge ego boost to hear that. After all, what could be more validating for a SNAG than to hear that he was the first example that someone had ever seen that gave her reason to hope. And, quite frankly, it got me a lot of sex. I sometimes joke that what I really majored in was getting laid.

After I graduated from college and grew up a bit more, I realized that I needed to shed being a SNAG and eventually, I learned how to honor the aspects of masculinity that serve me instead of rejecting them wholesale. But my experiences back then give me a different perspective on Meghan Murphy’s recent post,“Chill out, dear”: An open letter to the New Age Dude.

I should make it clear that I’m 100% with her that New Age Dudes who talk about respecting women in order to get into their pants are manipulative and sexist. If you’re parroting gender equality in order to get someone’s clothes off, you’re making life harder for everyone who wants to make the world a better place for people of all genders. So I’m not arguing with Meghan’s central premise. But I do think there’s an element that I’d like to add to her analysis: it takes so very little for a man to look like he’s more respectful towards women that it’s easy for NADs to front.

I know this from personal experience. While my motivations as a SNAG were different from those of the NADs that Meghan talks about, I can most assuredly say that all it takes is acting with a little kindness and willingness to listen to a woman to stand out from the rest of the pack. Actually, all a man needs to do is not be emotionally, physically, sexually, or verbally abusive and he’s already ahead of the curve. How sad is that?

So it’s not a surprise to me that there are guys who talk a good game about honoring femininity, or valuing women, or seeing the beauty in all women, just so they can get some action. They’ve discovered that a lot of women experience a deep hunger for this kind of validation and support, and they take advantage of that. Unfortunately, it can be hard to tell whether someone is genuinely committed as an ally and supporter of women or if he’s simply pretending. As Meghan points out, his behavior when you call him on his shit can make it pretty clear. If he’s able to shut up and listen, that’s a sign that he’s more likely to be a real ally. If he tells you to chill out or that you’re being too sensitive, then the odds are either that he’s faking it or he’s got some work to do to let go of the Act Like a Man Box.

Without suggesting that it’s ever a woman’s job to support a man as he struggles with the Box, I do want to acknowledge that a guy can start off with a defensive reaction and then come around. I know because I’ve done it more times than I can count and I’ve seen my friends do it, too. I don’t want to reinforce the common idea that there’s a sharp line between ally and douchebag. The fact is, most people have douchebag moments and men who are learning to navigate this stuff have them pretty often. A key difference, though, is whether we can apologize and make amends when we finally get our heads out of our asses.

But the fact that it takes so little for a guy to be able to appear as if he cares for women in general or the woman he’s with in particular, coupled with the deep hunger that many women have for a connection with a man who’s not going to treat her badly, means that it’s easy for NADs to keep on doing their thing. It makes it easy for them to talk about honoring women, at least until the next morning. And each time it this happens, it adds insult to the many injuries of sexism.

Looking back at my time as a SNAG, I can see how it might have been easy to go down that path. Every time my ego got a thrill for the praise I received for not being like “those guys,” it nudged me towards that rather slippery slope and I’ll admit that there were times that I talked a better game than I was actually playing. I regret that and I know that despite my generally good intentions, I didn’t always act honorably. I’m deeply grateful that I eventually got over myself, and I try to hold on to the lessons of my past in order to avoid repeating them. I’m also still pretty woo, even though I’m atheist these days.. After living in the San Francisco Bay Area for 20 years, it’s sort of soaked in and I find that a lot of the woo language works as useful metaphors. But that’s a topic for another day.

So for my brothers out there who are finding their own paths through all of this, I have a few things to say.

• Don’t let it go to your head. As soon as you think you’re better than anyone else because of your hip, groovy, ally ways, you’ve lost it.
• Be clear in your motivations. If you want to have sex, figure out how to ask for it without pretending, manipulating the person you’re with, or fronting.
• Learn how to apologize and make amends. You’ll make mistakes and the time to learn first aid is before someone is hurt.

And for the guys who are pretending to care about women in order to convince them to have sex- stop it. It’s emotional abuse, it’s making the world a worse place, and it’s really bad karma.

’nuff said.

One of the things that I’ve noticed is how gendered the mechanisms of social control often are. My experience has been that men are more likely to exert this control through violence, while women tend to use shame, although of course, those are simply trends. While men’s violence has gotten much more attention in some circles, the effects of shame are often discounted or minimized even though they can sometimes be even more long-lasting.

I think there are a lot of reasons for these patterns. After all, violence is much easier to see and measure. It doesn’t really require us to ask how the person on the receiving end feels about the experience. And the effects are often pretty visible, whether we’re looking at damage to objects and property or to someone’s body.

On the other hand, shame can be much more subtle. We might observe its effects in the moment if we understand how it works, but all too often, we simply don’t see them or we don’t think they’re as serious as the more obvious results of physical violence. I remember a PSA about child abuse from when I was a kid that pointed out that words can hit as hard as a fist. And I know from talking with some of my therapist colleagues that sometimes, shame can continue to harm people for years. Think of all of the recent discussion about bullying. It’s not just beating someone smaller or weaker up. It also includes mocking, teasing, and humiliating them.

When used in small doses, shame can actually be an effective way to teach boundaries, limits, and values. The problem is that when it’s used too often or not carefully, or when we shame people for things they have no control over, it can have lingering consequences. The challenge we face is how to work with this all-too-human emotion. After all, we often turn around and shame other people when our own shames have been triggered. Brene Brown’s book I Thought It Was Just Me has some of the best advice for how to interrupt that cycle.

Part of the difficulty in calling shame out is that people can feel shamed even when there wasn’t any intention or desire to cause that. Sometimes, we feel it because we’ve internalized criticism or shame from past experiences. Sometimes, it’s because we don’t know how else to respond to someone’s anger. Sometimes, we fall into a shame spiral because we lack resilience when someone calls us out. There’s a difference between “you’re shaming me” and “I’m feeling shame”, and I’ve seen plenty of relationships get stuck as a result. Lots of online discussions get bogged down there, too. But those challenges don’t change the fact that shaming is incredibly common and causes real harm.

As Friedman points out, we also use shame to avoid looking at the real issue at hand. For example, if we judge people who have been raped, it makes it easier to imagine that sexual assault happens to “those folks over there” and that can help us feel like we’re safe over here. But that’s only an illusion of safety since it doesn’t do anything to address the root causes, such as the choices that perpetrators make to assault someone. It rather reminds me of the ways in which we use security theater to create feelings of safety rather than creating actual safety. In her words:

What’s worse, all this finger-wagging about booze doesn’t make even the waggers of said digits any safer. It makes them feel safer, sure, but there’s miles of difference between feeling safer and being safer. Believing that being more virtuous than the next girl will keep you safe from rape actually puts you in greater danger, because you’re less likely to spot warning signs that you’re being targeted if you think you’re at less risk.

If we’re going to start making things better, we need to take a hard look at how violence and shame are woven into our culture, our personal histories, and our actions. We need to be willing to acknowledge how deeply they run, to explore the ways that they work, and to look for better ways to respond to our situations and our fears. We also need to stop pretending that one is worse than the other or making excuses for them- they both have rippling effects that can last for a long time. We need to look within ourselves and ask whether we’ve used shame or violence to win arguments, influence other people’s behavior, or try to get what we want. When we do, we might be surprised at how often we use one or both of them. And ultimately, we need to find ways to talk about these issues with compassion instead of blame, shame, or violence. Until we do, we’re only making things harder for ourselves and the people around us.

So one method for spreading the word was posters. They’d show up in bars and community centers when non-profit organizations took the lead, wheat pasted to walls and bus stops when activists took over, and even on buses, trains and other public places when public health departments and other governmental agencies got involved. Many of these posters were funny, some were challenging, and a few were thought-provoking.

30 years into the AIDS epidemic, Dr. Edward Atwater (a retired doctor) is sharing his poster collection through an online catalog hosted by the University of Rochester. So far, only 1917 of his total collection of over 6200 posters from around the world have been uploaded, but they’re working on it. And this interview at The Atlantic is really worth checking out. Here’s a quote:

The reason it’s…important as social history is because, if you look at a whole lot of the posters, you will see how different countries approached the subject. Here you’re dealing with a new disease, dealing with the closeted subject of sex, and it was really amazing to see the variation from country to country and even from groups within a country. To me, that’s by far the most striking thing about the collection.

Generally speaking, in the United States, the posters were less interesting because they had to be neutral. They had to be careful not to offend some group or some sensibility so the best American posters were usually put up by private organizations. Abroad, that wasn’t quite as true.

Here are a few examples from the collection. Go check the rest of it out. It’s a really amazing project.

This lovely “report” was created by Pat Lynch, a high school guidance counselor and football coach from Wyoming, and given to the football team. It seems that his way of dealing with boys who have been bullied is to shame them into the Act Like a Man Box. Some of the highlights from the “Hurt Feelings Report” include:

• Reasons for the report:
• I am thin skinned
• I am a pussy
• I am a queer
• I am a little bitch
• I want my mommy
• I have woman like hormones
• Name of “Real Man” who hurt your sensitive little feelings
• Name of little sissy filing report
• Girly man signature
• Real-man signature (person being accused)

Since this came to light, Lynch has resigned as football coach and the school board has apologized for his actions. However, he has retained his position as a guidance counselor, under administrative supervision. Lynch has apologized to the school board:

“I would like to apologize for my lack of judgment and the poor choice that I made from my position as head football coach for Buffalo High School. I know that this situation has caused you pain and discomfort, and for that I am truly sorry. As a person and a professional, I believe I will learn and grow from this experience and use it to help others.”

“I appreciate having had the opportunity to coach in this community for the past 22 years. It has been a rewarding experience. I am eager to earn back your trust as I continue to serve in a profession that I truly love.”

But it’s interesting that he didn’t apologize to any of the students he gave the form to. It isn’t the school board who has experienced pain and discomfort around this, though I’m sure they’re worried about lawsuits and have their own concerns. It’s the students who expected that their coach and guidance counselor would be there for them who deserve his apology. So much for being an ally and mentor for teens.

Pretty much everything from the “report” highlights how deeply the Act Like a Man Box is rooted in many men’s psyches. Whatever it is that prompted Lynch to create and distribute it to the team, I hope he figures it out and deals with it before he goes much further in his career as a guidance counselor.

I have quite a lot to say about his lecture. In fact, there’s so much to untangle that this post is split into multiple pages, which is a first for me. But it isn’t until all of the different threads are teased out that the larger pattern becomes apparent. So stick with me and see how it all fits together.

A Little Background

Jensen’s lecture was hosted by St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA. It’s a Catholic college, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that the name of the lecture series was “Defining You”, rather than something that conveys a message of “helping you define yourself.” Not that that has anything to do with Jensen directly, but it does set the stage for his perspective on porn.

There were about 90-100 people present. Almost all of them looked female, most of them appeared White, and there was quite an age range. Several college students came with their mothers, to judge by conversations I overheard.

I decided to record the lecture because I wanted to be able to quote Jensen accurately. Anything that appears in quotes below is what he said verbatim, although I cleaned up any extraneous ums and such. There weren’t many of those, however, since Jensen is an excellent speaker.

Gender Essentialism

Right at the start, Jensen began by thanking St. Mary’s College and the Women’s Resource Center for giving him an excuse to get out of Texas. Apparently, he thinks it’s important to make it clear that although he teaches at the University of Texas, he’s not a Texan. I’m a little curious about that, especially since he reiterated it at the end, as you’ll see later.

Jensen then explained that he wasn’t going to show any images of the porn that he planned to discuss. I think this was great since it’s important to make sure that the audience knows what it’s getting. But he took that as an opportunity to do something interesting. Here’s what he said:

“First is to let you know that I’m not going to be showing any images, no actual pornography. I get different kinds of reactions. Sometimes, the women in the audience breathe a sigh of relief. And sometimes, the men say ‘oh, too bad. No porn. That’s why I came.’”

He then shared a story of one time that he said the same thing and three “big guys” who had sat in the front row looked at each other and left.

I’ll take him at his word that a few men come to his talks with the expectation of watching porn for free. I don’t think it’s all that common, and I’m willing to bet my house that it doesn’t happen nearly as often as the frequency with which women feel anxiety at the prospect of  seeing explicit images or relief when they hear that they won’t. Leaving aside the possibility that some men might also feel relief or that some women might enjoy the sorts of porn he talks about, this was a pretty slick thing that Jensen did. He managed to imply that men come to his talks in order to see porn as often as women feel relief about not watching porn.

Of course, he didn’t say that in so many words, but to put those two ideas so closely together with the same qualifier (not, for example, saying that “every now and then, a few men say ‘oh, too bad. No porn. That’s why I came.’”), made it sound like those two things are comparably frequent. It’s like the patter of a three card monte dealer, distracting you so you don’t notice the sleight of hand. Since it made some of the women laugh, it looked to me as if he was creating group cohesion among the women at the expense of the men present. It also made me wonder how many of the women in the room were considering whether my motivation for coming to the lecture was to watch free porn, and what effects that has on Jensen’s audiences.

Attacking Men

After a brief disclaimer about why a man is talking about feminism, explaining that he’s using a feminist critique rather than a religious critique (an especially useful distinction to make at a Catholic university), and situating himself in the lineage of Dworkin and Dines, Jensen further built cohesion among the women at the cost of the men’s safety.

“Now it’s late at night and you’ve all had a busy day, so we’re going to have a little audience participation to make sure we’re all in the game. So the first thing I want to do is sort of chart the landscape of pornography with which we’re familiar, to get some sense of where we’re all sitting in the world. So the first thing I want to do to help us with that, is I want all of the men to line up own here and one by one, I want you to come up to the microphone and describe the pornography that you most recently masturbated to.”

lots of laughs, and nobody comes up

“No volunteers for that one? OK, that was a joke. Here’s the reason I said that, is to recognize that when we talk about a subject like pornography, we’re not talking about some abstract subject out there. We’re talking about our own lives. We know that that is the primary use that men put pornography to. I don’t say that standing above. I have my own experiences with that.”

As an educator, I can see how an exercise like this might be really useful, if enough safety has been built into a class. But this was a lecture, without any groundrules, expectations of confidentiality, or anything else that skilled teachers often do when exploring challenging topics. There also wasn’t any information given to the women about how to respond- were they going to tut tut us? Shame us? Laugh at us?

Telling the men that we’re going to come to the front of the room and make ourselves vulnerable without creating groundrules or group expectations of behavior made the experience even more unsafe. It certainly made the women laugh, which looked to me as if it helped them bond more. Whether that was Jensen’s intention or not, it exacerbated the sense that this was an us versus them experience. Further, creating group cohesion by denigrating or shaming some of the people in the audience is simply not how one creates a space for participants to feel safe enough to explore the edges of their comfort zones.

Some people will point out that men need to learn to lean into their discomfort when talking about sexism and porn, and I would 100% agree with that. But if the goal of an exercise is to show that discussions of porn are about “our own lives,” there are many, many ways to do that and build safety for all participants instead of just most of them. In addition, it’s not clear to me how this joke actually demonstrates the personal nature of porn. I can think of a half-dozen ways to make that point more clearly without demonizing men.

Sweeping Statements

Next, Jensen led a brief exercise during which he asked audience members to finish the sentence “Pornography is…” In order to give people “plausible deniability,” he invited us to respond either with the words that we think of or with words that someone else might use. That would have been fine, except that he specifically said:

“You can complete that sentence in the way that you believe pornography is, or you can complete the sentence as you expect someone you know would. Your brother, your father, your uncle.”

Not your sister, your mother, or your aunt. This creates an expectation of a dichotomy- there’s how you (presumably, a woman) will respond and then there’s how you imagine men will respond. Of course, there are some pretty clear gender-based trends in terms of how folks might answer, but they’re not universal. What message does this send to a young woman who thinks that porn is awesome? And for the men in the audience, why weren’t we invited to complete the sentence as the women in our lives might?

Implicit in these instructions is the clear message that Jensen was addressing the women in the room, rather than including the men. I absolutely understand the value of creating spaces for women to come together to explore these topics, but as far as I saw on the website, the event wasn’t listed as women-only. Further, neither of the two people associated with the university who made announcements (one of whom was a man) nor the person who introduced Jensen said anything about the event being specifically for women. And lastly, Jensen didn’t say anything along those lines, even though he certainly knew that some men were there (he and I chatted briefly about the fact that the time it was supposed to start was listed incorrectly on the website). So there was no reason for me to expect that I was intruding on a women-only space, or that Jensen wasn’t going to be addressing the entire audience.

In that light, the fact that Jensen was talking specifically to the women is especially significant. By doing so, Jensen deepened the split among the audience along gender lines, which exacerbates the sorts of sexism that he’s says he’s fighting. That’s especially ironic, given that he next explained that, in his view, “pornography is what the end of the world looks like” because he thinks that porn shows a world without empathy, without “decent human connection.” It seems to me that doing three activities that widen the chasm between men and women gets in the way of creating empathy and connection. If you want to help people build healthy relationships, shaming and vilifying are not particularly effective. And given that all three exercises were deeply rooted in the notion that men watch porn and women don’t, they reinforced gender essentialism, which I find particularly insulting.

Part of a Larger Pattern

All of this fits into a pattern of behavior that showed up over and over throughout the rest of Jensen’s lecture. It’s unfortunate, because he does have some really valid points to make. By choosing to frame his lecture in ways that reify the idea that “men are like this, and women are like that,” he might as well have done the whole Mars/Venus thing. In my experience as a sex educator, bridges are built when we start seeing the commonalities we share. I’m certainly not suggesting that we’re all the same, but rather, by talking as if the gender split is universal, Jensen did more to hinder the development of the empathy and connection that he says he wants than he did to create it.

On January 26, 2012 in San Francisco, AIC is hosting a benefit and screening of XXXY, a documentary film that takes an “intimate look at the long-term emotional, psychological, and physiological effects of being born “intersex,” or with ambiguous genitalia.” The film focuses on two people who between them have undergone over two dozen surgeries to “correct” their ambiguous sex organs. They speak quite honestly about the ways in which their experiences, including “ a wide array emotional issues, including shame, secrecy, gender identity, depression, intimacy, and the feelings of disempowerment that come from having no role in the decisions made regarding their gender identity.”

Following the screening, there will be Q&A with the filmmakers Porter Gale and Laleh Soomekh, and Anne Tamar-Mattis, Executive Director of AIC. You can purchase tickets here. And here’s the Facebook event page- even if you can’t make it, please help get the word out.