Okay, that’s sort of funny, but also troublesome.  Most obviously, of course, there’s a fine line between being “the wrong guy” and being a criminal, as Roger Ebert points out.  But it’s also troubling for what it communicates about the sexual desirability of young men – that they’re so undesirable as to only hope for sex from young women smashed out of their minds.

Feminists often decry “pick up artist” culture – men “on the prowl” and so on – and suggest a more honest, egalitarian sexuality.  The problem is, an egalitarian sexual culture is impossible so long as young men are taught, as Christopher Hitchens once said, that they are “spectacularly unattractive” and have to throw a Hail Mary and prove “high value” in a desperate bid to engage the attention of women.  This message does not, generally speaking, help adolescent boys grow into emotionally aware, compassionate, and confident young men – quite the opposite.  It’s emotionally stultifying and breeds infantile resentment of women’s sexual power.  Consider, for example, this comment left on a “men’s rights” blog, the Spearhead, by “Keyster” on the subject of this past year’s Slutwalks:

They’re high functioning children with sexual power and they don’t want you to forget it…
…Remember this: She didn’t bother to get dressed up for the likes of YOU. Her hope was a worthy athelete (sic) or Hollywood star might notice her and talk to her; not some weak, pathetic loser …
“We’ve got the sexual power, the power of consent…
… See our bouncing propped up cleavage, our long legs and glorious ass protruding from those heels? You want it don’t you?
….ha, ha, ha…you can’t have it because I SAY SO! Because I have THIS power over you, lowly little man. Bow down to me and beg me a little, I might even let the others see me talking to you, without calling the cops.” 

Immature?  Yeah, it is.  But it’s worth a minute to think about why a young man like “Keyster” – I’m guessing he’s about 19  – would get so triggered at the sight of young women dressing up like “sluts”.  The answer, I think, is that Keyster can’t dress up like a slut.  Or at least he doesn’t think that he can – dress up in all sexy, that is – and thereby make himself desirable to women.  What he thinks, what he’s been told all his life, is that any attraction he can generate is contingent on whatever status and power he can acquire.  In lieu of that, the best he thinks he can hope for is to “be that mistake”.  And that belief is hardly going to generate a healthy attitude toward women.

Obnoxious displays of masculine sexuality are everywhere, of course, so at first blush it may not seem as though men are so constrained.  Yet while men are allowed to be crass, it seems universality understood that women have the moral authority in sexual matters.  Consider this passage from Tracy Clark-Flory’s essay about her sexual coming of age:

I lost my virginity at 16 with my first love and best friend; it was all champagne and roses. It was also as-porn-ational sex: I enthusiastically guided us into nearly every position I’d long marveled at online. At one point, midcoital, I actually pinched my chin and asked aloud, “What positions are left?” Afterward, he observed: “That wasn’t what I’d imagined, exactly.” He had imagined: 1) the missionary position and 2) ceremonial crying.

If this passage were written by a man, it would likely sound something like this:

I lost my virginity at 16 with a girl I was in love with.  At the time, I’d been looking at a lot of porn, and when we tried lovemaking I actually tried twisting her into all the positions I’d seen on the internet.  I was so caught up in porn back then, and so emotionally detached, that at one point I actually stopped, midcoital, and asked “What positions are left?”  Afterward, she observed, “That wasn’t what I’d imagined, exactly.”

Men write about sex either to confess (as above) or to play the fool.  It’s quite possible, of course, for a sixteen year old boy to have a first sexual experience similar to what Tracy Clark-Flory experienced – all champagne and roses.  But he’d be loathe to write about it in Clark-Flory’s sex-positive style, for fear of being seen as a selfish porn-addled sleaze.  For her part, Clark-Flory is going to be seen as lighthearted and innocent, and she knows this, so she can write about her coming of age with gusto.  (And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Tracy’s ride on the sex carousel, by the way.  Her essay is worth a read.)

Another example of a woman talking about sex is Amanda Marcotte, this time in a post about a common sexually transmitted infection, the human papillomavirus:

Personally, I’ve had HPV at least twice, which is incredibly common for a woman my age. … [B]oth times I had bad Pap smears that showed positive for it, I was in monogamous relationships.  I could have gotten it from them, or they from me.  Or from a former monogamous partner or a hook-up.  Who knows?  More importantly, who cares?  It’s the sinus infection of STDs.

What Amanda is saying here is that women ought to be able to explore their sexuality, have a few hook-ups along the way, and not get too bent out of shape about the occasional STD.  She knows that nobody is going to think any less of her because of it.  At least, nobody about whose opinion she gives a flying fuck.  Yet it’s different for men.  A man would be reluctant to talk about getting an STD unless he was either confessing to being irresponsible or making a joke.  Unlike Amanda, a progressive feminist man might avoid mentioning an STD he “could have gotten from a hook-up” for fear of losing respect from people about whose opinion he does give a flying fuck.  Because for men, there’s a presumption of irresponsibility.

Of course, it’s difficult to prove a broad proposition such as “women are granted more moral authority than men in sexual matters”, but men’s silence speaks volumes.  Feminist thinker Thomas Millar says that men have “ceded the field” in talking about male sexuality, and says this is because men are a prisoner of privilege.  But how privileged is a man who continually and strategically keeps his mouth shut?

Okay, with that out of the way, on re-reading I found a very troubling idea in Why Women Aren’t Funny, expressed in this passage:

Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. …
Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift.

Alessandra Stanley wrote a rebuttal, Who Says Women Aren’t Funny, to which Hitchen’s replied in a video with 5 minutes of Marcotte-bait…

… in which he reiterated men’s desperate need to impress women:

There is no question that for women the need or ability to be funny is tremendously less than it is among men.  Nobody has been found to deny that.  Alessandra  doesn’t even try to deny that. … She even, at one point, echoes what I think is my strongest point.  Namely, that women don’t need to be funny.  That for most men, if they can’t make women laugh they are out of the evolutionary contest.  They are never going to get laid.  Most men are fantastically unattractive.  What women see in them is mysterious to most men as well as most women.

There is some truth to what Hitchens is saying, of course.  A man can’t attract women the way a woman displaying her body can attract men.  Or as Dan Savage once bluntly put it:

Men and women are attracted to different things. Most men — not all — are attracted to fertile, 18-year-old girls. Most women — not all — are attracted to power, i.e. bigger, stronger, richer men. (Anybody wanna marry a multi-millionaire?) An 18-year-old boy taking his clothes off in a strip club is not, by definition, a man with much power, so most women aren’t gonna waste their time in strip clubs…

I’d say Dan Savage is excessively discounting the possibility of women’s physical attraction to men – I still remember how floored I was when I first read that in my twenties – and  Hitchens goes overboard with hyperbole: “out of the evolutionary contest” etcetera.  Looking at sexual relations this way may have been stimulating to Hitch – he seemed amenable to gladiatorial bullshit – but it tends to create a self-defeating, self-fulfilling prophesy of failure for a lot of men.  Take a man longing for connection and desperately overestimating his wit, resolving when his jokes bomb to grease the comedic wheels with still more booze and this will not end well.  And while you might say he shouldn’t be so desperately needy, it’s the constant refrain men hear – that they’re “fantastically unattractive”, their sexuality unwelcome, they’ve got “one outside chance” to impress – that instills the desperation in the first place.

So it would be good for men – especially young men – to challenge the idea that a man is never inherently attractive unless he can perform and impress and demonstrate high value.  This idea is usually presented in jocular form in the popular press, but it poisons young men nonetheless, even if offered up with verve by wits like Hitchens.  In my twenties, it poisoned me.  Yet a lot of feminist thought prevents a challenge to these toxic ideas.  Not because feminists agree with Hitchens, of course.  It’s that they won’t concede that there’s any truth to what he’s saying, and that makes an effective refutation impossible.

*                                *                                *                                *                                *

And if you have 8 minutes to kill, here’s Christopher Hitchens suggesting some revisions to the ten commandments:

I was a professional film critic once upon a time, but had a sharp and unexpected change in my film-watching habits when my first child was born. … I was at home watching TV when I saw that “Goodfellas” was coming on. It had been my favorite film of the year when it was in theaters years earlier, and I was looking forward to the opportunity to watch it again.
I lasted 40 minutes before the violence sickened me so much I could no longer take it.
This was something very new. … Suddenly, I felt it in my bones in a way I had never done. Why? I think it was the simple fatherly act of holding my newborn son close every day, and experiencing how unbelievably fragile human life is. Watching its wanton violation, seeing the terrible abuse of the human body and the graphic murder of human beings, was literally intolerable to me. It wasn’t that I became indignant about it; it was that I literally could not watch it.

What Mr. Dreher is expressing is a variation on a common theme.  Men often say they were insensitive when young – easily holding violence at an ironic distance.  It’s only with marriage or children – so the narrative goes – that they became sensitive and tender and experienced the fragility of human life.  And while I don’t doubt that experiences such as fatherhood can put a man in touch with sensitive feelings, the “insensitive youth” narrative is troublesome because it doesn’t accurately reflect how young men actually feel.  To illustrate why this narrative differs from men’s actual experiences, consider two different studies.

The first deals with memories of September 11, 2001:

Within about a week [of the attack], memory scientists from New York to Michigan to California (now known as the 9/11 Memory Consortium) were querying people on what they remembered.

The resulting set of data contained responses from more than 3,000 people in seven cities. Following up with those same people one year and three years later, the researchers found a decline in flashbulb memory accuracy that gradually leveled off after year one. In the first year, people’s memories were consistent with the initial responses only 63 percent of the time. After that, however, they only lost 4.5 percent of their accuracy per year.

“People began to tell what I would call a canonical story,” said Hirst, who was one of the study researchers. “The error they made at 11 months and the error they made at 35 months was the same.”

Surprisingly, Hirst said, people tend to be particularly bad at remembering their emotions from the time of the attack. It’s hard to look back at an emotional event without coloring it with hindsight, he said.  (Bold mine.)

The second study concerns gender and aggressive behavior.  I read about this study in the popular press several years ago, and found an abstract on a site called “Gender Matters” (scroll down):

Rethinking sex differences in aggression
Aggressive behavior in the absence of social roles
Jenifer Lightdale & Deborah Prentice (1994)

College students were asked to play a video game in which they dropped bombs on an opponent and were bombed in turn. Students were told that they had been matched with someone at another terminal in the room but would never know who that person was. Researchers knew the gender of only half of the study participants. Among those whose identities were known, males dropped significantly more bombs than females. When their identities were not known, females dropped more bombs than males. However, when debriefed after the game-playing session, girls [sic] whose gender was now known to the interviewer, claimed to have dropped far fewer bombs than they actually had dropped.

What’s interesting about this is it indicates men are more aggressive when they think they are being observed, and less aggressive otherwise.  In other words, men who behave aggressively are often performing in a way they think will bring acceptance and validation from society.

So what do these studies have to do with Rod Dreher’s claim that he was ironically detached from movie violence when younger, yet felt it in his bones and was sickened by it when he became a father?  Or, more generally – since I know nothing of Rod Dreher – what might these studies imply about the multitudes of men whose psychological autobiographies follow the same plotline?  Well, the video game study indicates men feel a need to perform aggressive behavior when watched; the corollary to this, I believe, is that men often feel a need to downplay their more sensitive and vulnerable feelings.  Add to this that memory, especially emotional memory, is highly inaccurate and prone to suggestion, and here’s what happens:  Men cultivate an autobiographical narrative that fits how they think they were supposed to have felt.  If a thirty-something father says he’s sickened by television violence while holding his infant son, he’s met with nods of approval.  He’s justified his sensitive feelings.  But if a nineteen year old man says film violence makes him queasy, he’s met with embarrassed silence.  That’s not the way a young single man is supposed to feel.  So the feeling is excluded from the autobiography he constructs for himself.

What if we approached driver’s ed like this?  Instead of looking at driving as an exciting part of growing up, we’d say, “Well, teenagers are going to drive whether we like it or not.”  Imagine a bunch of adults with control-freak personalities pontificating about what an awesome responsibility driving was, and making a big to-do about whether this or that teenager was “ready” to start driving.  We’d tell teenagers that every time they drove, they risked being killed, disfigured, or paralyzed for life, “but here are some things you can do to make it safer, if you insist on doing it.”  Imagine if the bad-ass teenagers were the ones who drove, and the “good kids” were tacitly discouraged from driving.

As it happens, I learned how to drive in high school and became pretty good at it.  But I never had any kind of sexual relationship in high school.  I was one of the “good kids”.  The result?  In my twenties, I was a competent driver, perfectly comfortable behind the wheel.  But sexually, I was awkward, uncomfortable, and inept in the (relatively few) experiences I had with women.  So I’m irritated at the neurotic version of sexuality we keep pushing on teenagers.  For me, a sexual relationship as a teen would have been emotionally healing, a way to grow interpersonally, develop emotional maturity, and frankly, would have been a hell of a lot of fun.  Yet I kept getting the message that “good” kids didn’t do that.  What a waste.  Life comes with risk, and as we all know, even driving is dangerous if you do it the wrong way:

She had an implement she’d used to spank her son, but I can’t remember what it was.  It may have been a mirror.  Not exactly a belt, nor a paddle.  The business end was material I recall as an ornately crafted piece of leather.  Renee had been fiddling with this as she sat in the circle with us, after she’d gone to the bedroom and we’d heard her smacking her son, who began whining again later in the evening, causing Renee to yell that she’d spank him again.

“I’ve been naughty, spank me too.”

“I’m gonna spank the both of you.”

Renee looked a bit like Janis Joplin, but prettier and with bad teeth.  She looked nice in jeans.  She once told me that in high school she’d fallen while trying to walk seductively and had been laughed at in an unkind way by a group of teenage boys.  I thought this ironic as Renee didn’t seem to have trouble attracting men.  Indeed, one of the men that night, irritated that her flirtations hadn’t been directed to him, muttered that her I’m gonna spank the both of you remark was “bullshit”.

“I don’t care if my son turns out gay”, she’d said once – this almost twenty years ago.  And of course, that evening someone slyly remarked about spanking and sadomasochism.  To this she’d sighed and said, “Well, I just hope I don’t turn him into a serial killer”.

I tell this vignette to convey that most parents who’ve used corporal punishment are not anywhere near monsters.  Not monsters like some say Judge Adams is –referring to the Texas Court-At-Law Judge seen beating his daughter in this violent and graphic video.

“Candlelight vigil mode” seems the universal response to this kind of child abuse.  Reporters furrow their brows and speak in hushed very concerned tones.  Yet “candlelight vigil mode” is compensation for the laissez-faire attitude our society otherwise takes toward hitting children, so long as it isn’t “abuse”.  I first saw the video – which Andrew Sullivan called “sickening” – on Andrew’s blog, the Daily Dish, the same blog in which he’d earlier made this offhand remark about “caning” in school:

In my high school, caning was routine for misbehavior. The cane hung on the wall above the headmaster’s desk. It made even a dressing down seem threatening. But it wasn’t Asian style: and usually on a clothed bottom. One friend stuck a notebook in his underpants and didn’t disguise it too well. So he got it raw. He asked not to sit down when he came back to class. Request denied.

It’s hard to tell what Andrew Sullivan thinks about corporal punishment of children; he doesn’t say.  But the tone – speaking this time of an incident not videotaped – seems to have a mirthful when I was a lad in jolly old England quality to it.  And even if that’s not how he meant it, the media overall often approach what we euphemistically call “spanking” with a tedious air of forced levity – in what I’d call “tongue in cheek mode”.

But the problem with the tongue-in-cheek/candlelight-vigil dichotomy is that it’s based on the assumptions that “minor” corporal punishment of children is harmless in itself, and that it’s unrelated to the kind of abuse meted out to the daughter of Judge Adams.  Both assumptions are false.  Consider, for example, this exchange between Anderson Cooper and Hillary Adams:

Anderson Cooper:  This tape is extraordinarily difficult to watch.  Is it…  Did this kind of thing happen a lot to you?

Hillary Adams:  A lot of people are asking that and, uh, well, the corporal punishment was just corporal punishment when I was younger and… but then it escalated and got worse and worse over time until, when I was a teenager it started turning into full-blown abuse like… similar to what you see in the video…

I have a couple of thoughts about this.  First, it’s common for abuse to start out as “just” corporal punishment.  As Murray Strauss has noted, “Clinical work with abusive parents has shown that much physical abuse starts as an attempt to correct and control through corporal punishment.”  (Beating the Devil Out Of Them, Murray A. Straus, Lexington Books, 1994, p. 85)  As was discovered after Sweden enacted a ban in 1979, banning corporal punishment outright can nip abuse in the bud:

[R]ates of child abuse appear to have declined; the number of referrals to St. Göan’s Hospital in Stockholm, which receives all child maltreatment cases, had declined by 1989 to one-sixth of the 1970 rate. By the mid-1980s, Swedish rates of physical discipline and child abuse were half those found in the U.S., and the Swedish rate of child death due to abuse was less than one-third the American rate.

So banning corporal punishment reduces the amount of full-blown child abuse.  That’s an important point, and one for which proponents of corporal punishment don’t have a good answer.  But most corporal punishment doesn’t escalate into full-blown abuse, and that brings me to my second point.

In the interview, Hillary Adams said the corporal punishment was just corporal punishment when I was younger.  For a moment, imagine what actually happened when Hillary Adams was younger – when the corporal punishment was “just” corporal punishment.  Now, contrast that with what feminist blogger Jill Filipovich (who is against corporal punishment, by the way) said about her own experiences with “spanking” as a child:

I was spanked very occasionally as a child, although I use the term “spanked” loosely… I was definitely never hit hard enough to hurt and I was never hit on any other part of my body, and I would guess that the “spanking” happened fewer than five times in the course of my childhood.  “Go sit on the stairs” was a much more common punishment.

On a moment’s reflection, it’s obvious that Hillary Adams’ experience of so-called “non-abusive” corporal punishment was worlds apart from Jill’s.  For Jill, being “swatted” a few times was an utterly trivial thing.  And if that’s all we were talking about, I’d just shrug and say, “Well, who cares?”  The problem is, the sanitized version offered by proponents of corporal punishment – “a few taps, never done in anger” – is a Trojan horse.  Once you accept that parents have a right to hit their children, you open the floodgates.  And by that, I’m not talking about the progression to full-blown “abuse”.  That’s a terrible problem, but set that aside for a moment.  Corporal punishment – the infliction of pain but not injury – is harmful in itself.

When I was growing up, my dad hit me until I was fifteen.  (Not unusual; nearly half of adults were hit as adolescents).  There was apparently an incident the neighbors saw and thought was abusive, but I’ve no idea what that was.  For me, it was a matter of being smacked from time to time.  I recall no horrific scenes of abuse; nothing like the Adams video.  Yet from my own experience, I can say that there was no positive side to it.  I learned nothing from it, and it brought a sense of unease and a feeling of not being whole.  Did it hurt me?  Physically, no, not really.  Psychologically, yes, it did.

Now, you might say that hitting a child to age fifteen goes beyond what proponents of corporal punishment “recommend”.  Yet it’s peculiar that there is such a large divergence between, on the one hand, what is ostensibly being defended and, on the other hand, the real life, practical effects of legalized corporal punishment of children.

The reality of corporal punishment is greater than the “two taps never done in anger” canard, because that’s not anywhere near where the law actually stands on the issue of corporal punishment.  For example, the Texas Penal Code, with which Judge Adams is presumably familiar, says this:

Sec. 9.61.  PARENT-CHILD.  (a)  The use of force, but not deadly force, against a child younger than 18 years is justified:
(1)  if the actor is the child’s parent or stepparent or is acting in loco parentis to the child;  and
(2)  when and to the degree the actor reasonably believes the force is necessary to discipline the child or to safeguard or promote his welfare.

The limits are that the force can’t be “deadly”.  It says nothing about hitting in anger.  I can’t help wonder if Judge Adams might have restrained himself a bit if the law in Texas looked more like this:

Children are entitled to care, security and a good upbringing.  They shall be treated with respect for their person and their distinctive character and may not be subject to corporal punishment or any other humiliating treatment.
- Swedish Children and Parents Code, ch. 6, 1 (tr. Swedish Ministry of Justice)

Of note, there’s nothing in the Swedish law about hitting in anger either.  Hitting is categorically prohibited, because “hit, but don’t overdo it” isn’t an effective way to protect children from psychologically damaging corporal punishment.

There’s also another peculiarity I’ve seen in the way corporal punishment is defended.  Imagined harms from a ban are often hinted at, rather than fully articulated.  For example, someone will say:

“If a child is trying to put his hand into an open flame, and his mother smacks his hand away, I wouldn’t call that child abuse.”

That’s not a fully developed argument against a ban.  Rather, it’s a description of a behavior that “shouldn’t be called child abuse”.  Now, if you consider why the speaker wouldn’t call that child abuse, it’s easy to imagine the arguments being hinted at in the previous statement:

(1)  Children would harm themselves, because parents would no longer be able to prevent dangerous behavior.

(2)  Good parents would be prosecuted, lose custody of their children, and face criminal penalties.

What’s interesting about the fully articulated argument is that it’s testable.  Corporal punishment of children has been fully banned in:

Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Kenya, Latvia, Moldova, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Tunisia, Ukraine, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Some of the countries listed above have banned corporal punishment relatively recently.  But Sweden has banned this practice since 1979.  It’s been 32 years.  If hitting children were vital to maintaining a good society, we would expect that in Sweden the rot would have set in long ago.  So here are some questions:  (1)  Have Swedish children harmed themselves because their parents couldn’t prevent dangerous behavior?  (2)  In Sweden, have well meaning parents like Renee been thrown into prison and lost custody of their children?

These questions need to be asked and answered if we’re going to continue to allow children to be hit with impunity.  Vague discomfort with the idea of a ban on corporal punishment ought not be sufficient to deny children a non-violent upbringing.

A final vignette:  I had teacher in junior high, a man in his thirties.  One day he told us that his father would be coming to visit our class in a few minutes.  “My dad’s a good guy,” he said to the class, “a little rough with me sometimes when I was a kid, but…”  And then the teacher stopped in mid-sentence, glancing upward toward the ceiling, as though in self-rebuke, as though thinking I’m not sure I should have let that last part slip out.

On one occasion, I was hanging out with David and some friends at an old football field that had a running track.  David’s older brother was with us, and he expressed doubts about the five-minute-mile claim.  Yet David continued to insist he could indeed run a mile in five minutes, at which point David’s brother reached into his pocket and pulled out a stopwatch.

“Alright David, you’ve been talking a lot, let’s see you do it.”

As it happened, David was wearing shorts and running shoes that day.  And there we were next to a track.  With a stopwatch.  All eyes were on David.  He had talked himself into a corner and would now have to prove himself.  So when his brother set the stopwatch and gave him the signal, he was off, sprinting around the track as fast as his pudgy legs would take him.

In thirty seconds, he’d made it nearly halfway around the track.  “Wow,” said David’s brother, “He’s really bookin’ it.”  And then he stopped.

We walked across the field to where David was, sitting on the track untying his laces.  David grimaced.  “I got a rock in my shoe!”  He held up his shoe, shook it, and an imaginary rock fell out.

And at that point, it seemed as though we all cut an unspoken deal with David.  We wouldn’t razz him about quitting (apart from a few remarks by his brother), and in exchange he would permanently retire his five-minute-mile boast.  It was a deal we all stuck to.  A bit of successful childhood diplomacy on everyone’s part.

These days, I think of my childhood friend David whenever I hear someone brag about working a sixty or eighty hour week.  In the past I always wondered whether I was incredibly lazy or whether everyone else was lying.  Now I know, thanks to time-use studies by the Bureau or Labor Statistics, that I’m not so lazy after all.  Turns out everyone else was lying.  As reporter Laura Vanderkam explained a few years back:

Time-diary studies are laborious, but in general they are more accurate. Aggregated, they paint a different picture of life than the quick-response surveys featured in the bulk of America’s press releases. For instance, the National Sleep Foundation claims that Americans sleep 6.7 hours (weekdays) to 7.1 hours (weekends) per night. The ATUS puts the average at 8.6 hours. The first number suggests rampant sleep deprivation. The latter? Happy campers.

The numbers are equally striking with work. Back in the 1990s, using 1985 data, researchers John Robinson and his colleagues compared people’s estimated workweeks with time-diary hours. They found that, on average, people claiming to work 40 to 44 hours per week were working 36.2 hours — not far off. But then, as estimated work hours rose, reality and perception diverged more sharply. You can guess in which direction. Those claiming to work 60- to 64-hour weeks actually averaged 44.2 hours. Those claiming 65- to 74-hour workweeks logged 52.8 hours, and those claiming workweeks of 75 hours or more worked, on average, 54.9 hours. I contacted Prof. Robinson recently to ask for an update. His 2006-07 comparisons were tighter — but, still, people claiming to work 60 to 69 hours per week clocked, on average, 52.6 hours, while those claiming 70-, 80-hour or greater weeks logged 58.8. As Mr. Robinson and co-author Geoffrey Godbey wrote in their 1997 book “Time for Life,” “only rare individuals put in more than a 55-60 hour workweek.”

I thought I was one of them. So I kept a time diary. Alas, even during a week that left me feeling wrecked, an honest accounting of my hours didn’t top 50.

So the question isn’t whether people exaggerate the hours they work – they do – the question is why people feel the need to exaggerate.  Like David’s five-minute-mile boast, when someone says “I work eighty hours a week” it always strikes me as somewhat childish.  David’s five-minute-mile claim was childish but also understandable – he was a child, desperately seeking validation from his peers.  Why is it that grown-ups feel such a need to exaggerate their work hours?

On this subject, nearly seventy years ago, Bertrand Russell wrote an essay about work and culture, In Praise of Idleness.  Despite a few dated references, it’s still worth a read today.

*                *                *                *                *

And on the subject of running – also as an antidote to “Rambo” – here’s the final scene in the film “Gallipoli”:

I’ll begin with Amanda’s essay.  Her post over at Pandagon critiques the dysfunctional “market mentality” of sex, summarized as:  1)  women are providing sex for men at a “price”, and 2)  a man gets sex by meeting a woman’s asking price (“displaying high value”), or convincing her that the asking price is too high.

This, says Amanda, creates a transactional environment in which women have the sexual “goods” and men have the right to “haggle” – pester an unwilling seller to give it up for a lower “price.”  What’s more, says Amanda, thoughts of sex as a marketplace go hand in hand with the idea that men are entitled to partnered sex so long as they can “display high value” and thus earn the right to a woman’s sexual favors.

Is this dynamic toxic?  Yes.  But the problem with Amanda’s analysis is she sees this driven almost entirely by men’s sexual privilege: entitlement as both a product of the buyer/seller mentality, and also a cause of the same.  Granted, she also says that women are often seen as having little desire or agency of their own, and that this feeds the idea of women doing men a favor sexually, rather than enjoying the sexual connection for the pleasure of it.  That’s an important point.  Yet the weight of her argument seems directed toward men’s sexual entitlement, and she misses entirely the perverse social incentives that encourage men to act like “buyers” rather than emotionally aware human beings.

These perverse social incentives and their effects on men are explored very thoughtfully by Julia Serano in her essay Why Nice Guys Finish Last, in the anthology Yes Means Yes by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti.  Julia’s piece focuses on the predator/prey mindset, but her analysis is relevant to Amanda’s post because “predator/prey” and “buyer/seller” are both metaphors describing very similar mindsets.  In both cases the idea is that women are sexual objects from whom men try to “get” sex.  But Julia’s analysis of the origins of predator/prey differs from Amanda’s take on buyer/seller.  Notably, Amanda buys into the concept of unilateral sexism; Julia does not.  Consider, for example, Amanda’s explanation for how men become pushy, entitled “buyers” in the sexual marketplace:

… Pick-up artist books and websites aren’t interested in teaching men how to improve the product so more women want to buy.  Seriously, PUA guides read like guides on buying a car – show up looking like money, demonstrate to the salesman that you fill out the checklist of requirements to get a car, talk down the price (which PUA guides suggest you do by insulting women, hoping the loss of esteem in their product will cause them to sell at a lower price), and you’re done.  Actual improvement of one’s self is as strange an idea as suggesting that you have to have good character and a tight waistline to get a car.  You just need to have the cash, the credit rating, and a solid ability to bargain.

The problem with Amanda’s analysis here is that it doesn’t very well explain why these “pick up artist books and websites” exist in the first place.  Her implied explanation, that it’s all because men feel “entitled”, is unconvincing.  After all, gay men want sex as much as straight men; if feeling entitled to partnered sex is a sin, then gay men are probably just as guilty.  Yet “pick up artistry” is an overwhelmingly heterosexual phenomenon.  Why is this?  Well, I think Julia’s essay points to an answer.  In contrast to Amanda, Julia explores the motivations underlying the darker side of the pick-up-artist – motivations that cannot be ascribed simply to “entitlement”.  In her most salient passage, she describes the change in personality of a young man she knew in college, whom she refers to as “Eric”:

[Point of clarification:  Julia Serano is a transgendered woman and the experiences she relates in the following passage happened prior to her transition, at a time when other people identified her as male.]

… In high school and college, I had several male friends who, apparently concerned with the lack of action I was getting, literally told me that women like it when guys act like “assholes.”  For them, it was just something one did to attract women.  And as much as I hate to admit it, it generally seemed to be true.  During my college years, I watched a number of “nice guys” transform into “assholes.”  And when they did, women suddenly became interested in them.  The most stunning transformation I witnessed was in this guy who lived in my dorm, whom I’ll call Eric.  Freshman and sophomore years, he was a super-sweet and respectful guy.  Despite the fact that he was fairly good-looking, women were not generally interested in him.  Somewhere around his junior year, he suddenly began acting like an “asshole” (around women, at least).  Instead of engaging women in conversations (as he used to), he would instead relentlessly tease them.  The things he would say sounded really dismissive to me, but often the intended recipient would just giggle in response.  Suddenly he was picking up women at parties, and I’d occasionally overhear women who never knew Eric back when he was a “nice guy” discussing how cute they thought he was. 

     The last time I saw Eric was about two years after college.  We had both moved to New York City, and a mutual friend came up to visit and suggested we all go out together.  The bar that we went to was really crowded, and at one point, Eric started talking about how in situations like this, he would sometimes fold his arms across his chest and subtly grope women as they walked by.  Between the fact that the bar was so crowded and the way he held his arms to obscure his hands, women weren’t able to figure out that it was Eric.  Upon hearing this, I walked out of the bar, appalled. 

     The reason I tell this story is that it complicates many of the existing presumptions regarding the origins of rape culture.  Some have suggested that men are biologically programmed to be sexual predators.  The existence of Eric (and others like him) challenges that argument because, after all, he was a “nice guy” for most of his life until about the age of twenty – well after his sex drive kicked in.  Eric challenges the overly simplistic men-are-socialized-to-be-that-way arguments for the same reason:  He made it to early adulthood – well beyond his formative childhood and teenage years – before becoming an “asshole.”  It would be really hard to make the case that Eric became a sexual predator because he was influenced by media imagery or pornography, or because his male peers egged him on.  Like I said, I lived in the same dorm as he did, and I never once saw any guys teasing him for being a “nice guy” or coercing him into being an “asshole.”  I would argue that the primary reason Eric became sexually aggressive was that he was interested in attracting women.  And, as with many men, once Eric began disrespecting women on a regular basis, the lines between flirting and harassment, between sex and violation, between consensual and nonconsensual, became blurred or unimportant to him.

Yes Means Yes:  Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape
by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, p. 234-5, Seal Press 2008

What’s important here is that Eric didn’t just feel pressure to be “confident”.  Rather, he felt he had to amputate the best parts of himself in order to attract women.  And given his experiences – being unable to attract the attention of the opposite sex for the first two years of college – I am particularly interested in a comment Amanda added (#156) to her buyers and sellers post, saying that “men should be treated like women” when it comes to romance and dating.  As it happens, I agree.  Men should be treated more like women when it comes to dating.  But this implies more than Amanda thinks.  Most importantly, if men really were treated like women, young men like Eric wouldn’t be alone for the first two years of college and wouldn’t have to do the “asshole” routine in order to get laid.  After all, how many “super sweet”, “respectful”, and “fairly good looking” nineteen year old women do you know who can’t get a date?  Not too many.

So what would the sexual arena look like if men were really “treated more like women”?  It’s an impossible question to answer conclusively, of course, but one place to look for clues is the sexual culture of gay men, a snapshot of which was recently offered by Andrew Sullivan, who described his first experience visiting a gay bar:

If it were a movie, it would shift from black-and-white into 3D color as I entered the bar. I was staggered and more than a little thrilled at how normal everyone looked, how attractive, diverse and mellow. I edged up to the bar and managed to blurt out, “A gin and tonic please.” The bartender picked up my vibe. “Get that stick out of your ass, honey. This is a gay bar.” And so my first impression of gayness was actually removing something from my butthole rather than violating its tightly-puckered virginity.

23 years of repression unwound in that bar. I am grateful for the kind condescension that must have greeted my spirited spinning to “You Turn Me Round (Like A Record, Baby)” or the latest Whitney. It was there that a man pulled his shirt off in front of me on the dance floor for the first time and I nearly fainted with desire. It was there that I returned Friday night after Friday night to discover who I really was.

One more thing. It reminded me of church. The colored lights; the smoke; the synthesizers; and the legions of men. And I distinctly recall as I watched the scene a premonition that one of my tasks in life would be, in whatever way I could, to convey this benign hidden world to the wider universe beyond it. I believe it was God speaking to me. He appears where Jesus would have. And it is a scene of revelry and hope.

What’s notably absent from Andrew’s account is any expressed need to “display high value” or offer “social proof” or act “cocky funny” to attract a partner.  Surrounded by men who already found him attractive, he didn’t need to pretend to be someone he wasn’t and was able to discover who he really was.  Too bad Eric couldn’t have done the same.  In fact, what’s tragic about Eric’s story is that he couldn’t be true to himself and still be perceived by women – at least not the women he knew at the time – as a fully sexual man.

Okay, since this post is called “My First Heterosexual Bar” I’ll share my own story, which didn’t actually happen in a bar, as I was eighteen at the time.  It was a college party with booze – in a dormitory basement, or some such place – and I remember standing by myself feeling a bit out of place when a stocky guy came up to me.  He stood directly in front of me, then gave me a shove and told me to “lighten up”.

The first time he shoved me, I thought he might have been joking around, horseplay, and that the shove had been harder than intended.  So I tried to respond nonchalantly to his “lighten up” by saying (absurdly in retrospect), “I’m light”.  But then he shoved me again, harder.  I’d held my hands up but he knocked them aside and shoved again with what seemed a single well rehearsed motion, telling me again to “lighten up”.  And at that point I knew I had a problem on my hands.

Now that I’m all the way grown up, I’m a lot less tolerant of people getting in my face like that.  But at eighteen I was, as they say, a deer in headlights.  Fortunately, there was another guy nearby who saw what was happening and, after the third or fourth shove, he sauntered up behind the guy, put him in a wrestling lock, and pulled him away from me.

I tell this story because I suspect a lot of young men have had similar experiences dealing with this kind of low-level aggression.  It’s also a counterpoint to Andrew’s much more welcoming experience in his first gay bar.  And, if it’s true that there’s less aggression and fewer fights in gay bars – as the always delightful Peter Tatchell has argued – then here’s my thought as to why:  The highly toxic buyer/seller and predator/prey dynamics are much less prevalent.  And they are less prevalent because the social incentives are much less perverse.  Here’s Julia Serano:

I have heard many feminists critique men who prefer women that fulfill the sexual object stereotype.  Many of these critiques (rightly, I think) suggest that the man in question must be somewhat shallow or insecure if he’s willing to settle for someone whom he does not view as his intellectual or emotional equal.  What I have seen far less of are critiques of women who are attracted to sexually aggressive men.  Perhaps this stems in part from the belief that such comments might be misinterpreted as blaming women for enabling the sexual abuse they receive at the hands of men.  While I can understand this reluctance, I nevertheless feel that it is a mistake to ignore this issue, given the fact that many men become sexual aggressors primarily, if not solely, to attract the attention of women.  In fact, if heterosexual women suddenly decided en masse that “nice guys” are far sexier than “assholes,” it would create a huge shift in the predator/prey dynamic.  While I wouldn’t suggest that such a change would completely eliminate rape or sexual abuse (because there are clearly other societal forces at work here), I do believe that it would greatly reduce the number of men who harass and disrespect women on a daily basis.

- Yes Means Yes, p. 237-8

To this I would add that a shift in the predator/prey dynamic would also reduce the number of men who are aggressive toward other men.  Once a man adopts an aggressive, contemptuous mindset, his ethical lines vis-à-vis women aren’t the only ones that become blurred or unimportant to him; his dealings with other men become coarser as well.  And this should bother us no less than harassment of women.  Because young men need spaces within the sexual culture where they can let their guard down – where they can discover who they really are.

Bonaparte’s Retreat

by Charles Bukowski

Fred, they called him.
he always sat at the end of the
bar
near the doorway
and he was always there
from opening to
closing.
he was there more than
I was,
which is saying
something.

he never talked to
anybody.
he just sat there
drinking his glasses of
draft beer.
he looked straight ahead
right across the bar
but he never looked at
anybody.

and there’s one other
thing.

he got up
now and then
and went to the
jukebox
and he always played the
same record:
Bonaparte’s Retreat.

he played that song
all day and all night
long.

it was his song,
all right.

he never got tired
of it.

and when his draft beers
really got to him
he’d get up and play
Bonaparte’s Retreat
6 or 7 times
running.

nobody know who he was or
how he made
it,
only that he lived in a
hotel room
across the street
and was the first customer
in the bar
each day
as it
opened.

I protested to Clyde
the bartender:
“listen, he’s driving us
crazy with that
thing.
eventually, all the other
records are
rotated
but
Bonaparte’s Retreat
remains.
what does it
mean?”

“it’s his song,”
said Clyde.

“don’t you have a
song?”

well, I came in about one
p.m. this day
and all the regulars
were there
but Fred wasn’t
there.

I ordered my drink,
then said out loud,
“hey, where’s
Fred?”

“Fred’s dead,”
said Clyde.

I looked down at the end
of the bar.
the sun came through the
blinds
but there was nobody
at the end
stool.

“you’re kidding me,”
I said, “Fred’s back in the
crapper or
something.”

“Fred didn’t come in this
morning,”  said Clyde, “so
I went over to his
hotel room
and there he
was
stiff as a
cigar
box.”

everybody was very
quiet.
those guys never said
much
anyhow.

“well,”  I said, “at least
we won’t have to hear
Bonaparte’s Retreat
anymore.”

nobody said
anything.

“is that record
still in the
juke?”  I
asked.

“yes,”  said
Clyde.

“well,”  I said,
“I’m going to play it
one more time.”

I got up.

“hold it,”
said Clyde.

he came around the bar,
walked to the
juke
box.

he had a little key
in his
hand.

he put the key
in the juke
and opened
it.

he reached in
and pulled
out a
record.

then he took the
record and
broke it over
his
knee.

“it was his
song,”  said
Clyde.

then he locked
the juke,
took the broken
record
behind the bar
and
trashed
it.

the name of the
bar
was
Jewel’s.
it was at
Crenshaw and
Adams
and it’s not
there
anymore.

from Last Night of the Earth Poems, by Charles Bukowski, p. 295-9, Ecco Press 2002

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I would like to talk more.  Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?”

Rebecca was unimpressed, and on her blog and in a video (starting at 4:30) she discussed how this made her uncomfortable.  Richard Dawkins, among others, argued that the man had done nothing wrong:

The man in the elevator didn’t physically touch her, didn’t attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn’t even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that.

So who is right?  Well, as far as I know, Rebecca is a rational, reasonable, and sane individual.  I don’t have any reason to believe she spoke about this for kicks and giggles or to get attention.  Furthermore, as a woman she is going to experience the world differently than I do.  That means that certain situations that may not be troublesome to me may be rather upsetting to her.  So if Rebecca goes to the trouble of telling us that the elevator incident was upsetting to her – assuming she is rational, reasonable, and sane – then we can make two reasonable inferences:  First, that the elevator incident really was upsetting to her, and second, that other rational, reasonable, and sane women have also become highly uncomfortable in similar situations.

So Rebecca has the winning argument here.  Yet I don’t think it’s sufficient to simply admonish men and call it a day.

Consider a different “pick up” situation, this time not in an elevator, but in another “enclosed space” – a subway exit.  Imagine that I am walking down a flight of stairs to catch a train.  It’s quarter after eleven at night, and I accost a woman – call her “Samantha” – as she is walking up the stairs:

Miguel:  Hey…

Samantha:  (Turns around, surprised.)

Miguel:  I’m Miguel.

Samantha:  (Confused.)  Okay…  Miguel.

Miguel:  Today’s my birthday.

Samantha:  (Smiles incredulously.)

Miguel:  No, it really is my birthday.  At midnight.

Samantha:  (Sarcastic.)  Really?

Miguel:  And believe it or not I don’t have any plans…  Some people took me out after work.

Samantha:  Hmmm.  And that would be at – let me guess – Bank of America or AT&T?

Miguel:  The Great American Insurance Company.

Samantha:  Hmmm.

Miguel:  I’m part of that corporate establishment that – let me guess – you think is responsible for all the evil in the world from Afghanistan to diaper rash.

Samantha:  You have to add “bad breath.”

Miguel:  (Looks surprised.  Covers mouth.)

Samantha:  (Laughs.)  Just kidding.

Miguel:  You’re not going to let me spend my birthday all by myself, are you?

Samantha:  (Sighs.)  Listen Miguel, you’re pretty cute but I don’t date guys who are forty. 

Miguel:  Well then this is my lucky night.

Samantha:  Why is that?

Miguel:  I’m still thirty-nine.  It’s only eleven-fifteen.

Samantha:  (Laughs.)

Miguel:  (Leans in and kisses Samantha.)  Come on.

Samantha:  (Follows Miguel down the stairway.)

Miguel:  What’s your name?

Samantha:  I’m Samantha.  Nice to meet you, Mr. Miguel Insurance Man.

Okay, so in the above exchange, I have (miraculously) managed to pick up a woman in the subway.  But look how I did it.  Within a minute of meeting her, I try to manipulate her feelings of guilt – “You’re not going to let me spend my birthday all by myself, are you?” – and I plow-through and ignore her when she tells me she’s not interested – “I don’t date guys who are forty.”  You could even say, it’s not that I didn’t understand, I just didn’t like the answer.  I doubt most feminists would be impressed with this kind of pick-up.

Now, some of my readers may recognize the dialogue above from one of the opening scenes in the movie “Milk” – worth watching, btw – because I re-wrote the dialogue and substituted “Miguel” for “Harvey Milk” and “Samantha” for his lover, “Scott Smith” (whom he apparently met in the subway).  And I doubt that most feminists who saw “Milk” walked away angry at the way Harvey hit on Scott in the subway.

What’s my point?  Well, my point is not that Rebecca Watson had nothing to complain about and shouldn’t have said anything.  In fact, I’m all in favor of open communication and think that she had every right to speak up if she felt ill at ease.  Yet at the same time, we shouldn’t cling to the annoying pretense that heterosexual men don’t face different challenges than women or gay men when it comes to meeting and attracting a sexual partner.  They do.  I wonder how many people who went to see “Milk”, and who felt a sense of giddiness at all the joys between Harvey and Scott – the heroic kiss in front of Castro Camera, etc. – stopped to consider that Harvey’s pick-up of Scott could have come in for quite a bit of criticism, if he hadn’t successfully pulled it off.

Also, a word about perceptions here:  One thing Rebecca said in her video was, “… I was a single woman in a foreign country at 4 a.m. in a hotel elevator with you, just you, and I… don’t invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner…”

The “you, just you” line is interesting here, because paradoxically, the less macho and aggressive a man’s self-image is, the more difficult it is for him to imagine himself as a potential threat.  As I’ve written before, a man who thinks of himself as having tamed the beast within would have intuitively grasped Rebecca’s discomfort, whereas a man with a more gentle self-image would tend to think, “it’s me, just me.” 

If men are behaving in such a way as to make women feel “cornered,” as Amanda Marcotte has blogged about here and here, then that’s not cool and men shouldn’t do that.  And I’m sure there are men out there who feign cluelessness as cover for predatory behavior.  But I also know that there have been times when I have made women uncomfortable by being overly forward or behaving inappropriately, and yet I’ve never deliberately set out to make a woman feel “cornered” or afraid.  I’d have a tough time living with myself if I did.  And while lack of evil intent doesn’t excuse poor behavior, reading evil intent into that which is merely boorish is neither justified nor helpful nor practical.  If you see predators everywhere, you won’t see them anywhere.