How to be a real man OR The joys of In-ur-endo

Okay Meester Jensen, you are now a toolbag.

Do not, I repeat do not write these words just before presuming to tell women what they can and cannot do:

The problem with privilege, I said, is that it so often leads to incredible arrogance

...Because Irony will be along shortly with a huge bill.

Also, this is very stupid line indeed under any circumstances:

Lest we float too far away from the real world of pornography

Yes folks, the Real World of pornography, where several random whacky strangers from a variety of ethnic and class backgrounds (who are all very telegenic, and not fat in any sense of the word) take pictures of each other naked, or something. IF this is evidence of your wit, I suggest that you keep it locked in a cellar and abuse it regularly with a poked bear, lest it continue to have ideas above its station.

To put no too fine a point on the whole thing, the essay leaves me feeling deeply squikced out basically because you read it, and you start to realise that this guy has basically just spent several days of his free time purchasing porn and watching it, and that his SO possibily caught him at it so he had to write up this utterly shambolic essay.

Another thing is this passage as well:

I don’t remember exactly how I answered the question that evening, but I remember clearly what I wanted to say to him. I wanted to suggest to this privileged young man at one of the United States’ most elite universities that we conduct an experiment. I wanted to ask him to come to the front of the room and take off all his clothes in front of the group, lie down on his back, put his legs up, and make his anus as open and available as possible. Then we would ask other men could volunteer to do a double anal on him, and he could then report back to us about whether that experience felt degrading.

It would have been inappropriate for me as an older man with a professor’s status to be so harsh to a student, and I was more measured in my response. But that’s what I wanted to say to him: Why don’t you come up here and we’ll let two of the biggest guys in the room fuck you in the ass at the same time so that you can tell us from direct experience whether a double anal is inherently degrading.

Now this highlights what Jensen's fundamental problem is: Jensen finds sex to be inherently about degradation. Not DPs specifically you understand, but sex in general, sex is, to him, a method by which dominance is inherently asserted by men, over whoever they need to assert it over.

What is the distinction between double anal and someone anally penetrating themselves with some sort of wide girthed dildo exactly? Aside from Extra Testicles I mean.

None really, it's an orifice Jensen, it is not a magical penis reactive hole into nevernever land, if you stick one huge dick in there or two medium to small sized ones, the difference is only how wide it has to get to accomadate the size, it will not explode if it comes into contact with multiple penises.

But that's not the point, the point is that Jensen is married, quite monogamously to the notion that sex is degrading to women, and rather than trying to figure out something productive, like how men might have sex with women without degrading women (psst, try actively asking women about this stuff rather than only speaking to men who you can safely degrade with sexualised mental imagery), he's just trying to find further evidence to support his conjecture that sex is inherently degrading to women so as to evangelise his position that sex is, basically, Teh Icky.

The problem with privilege, I said, is that it so often leads to incredible arrogance

See Digby, Jane Hamsher, Trex, Amanda, Marc, Lindsay and others on this stuff, you are no less privelaged and therefore no less prone to thoughtless arrogance just because now you are on the supposed side of Truth, Justice and American Express Air Lingus (or something), what being on the side of Truth and Justice Means, fundamentally, is that you are no longer allowed to get away with being thoughtless arrogant.

Because you are now obligated to not be thoughtless arrogant.

Hence your first, entirely reactionary, relationship to sex within a patriarchy is completely wrong, let me give you a little Sex positivist secret Jensen: Sex is not inherently icky, it is inherently deeply amusing.

This means that, instead of holding porn up as "inherently degrading", as nasty, as evidence for "men's" inhumanity to women, porn needs to be held up for what it is: Crap, utter and complete shite being peddled as something dark and forbbiden and raw and real.

There is no "real world of pornograph", there is nothing of hte kind, it is a sham hidden behind a facade of representative media, and a sham that deconstructions such as your peice Jensen end up enabling by repeating.

And when you talk of "men" in that generalised way, you are basically talking about yourself aren't you, your own lack of empathy, your own basic arousal at seeing women being degraded because you cannot think of sex outside of the very straight jacket of patriarchy's conception of sex as inherently degrading.

Degradation is sex, that's what patriarchy tells you, and, Oh lookie here! That's what you still believe and tell people, even though you're a so called feminist.

And while you can put the word "patriarchal" before the word sex, to try and qualify it, but we know what you really mean because you watch porn that is degrading and nasty and misogynistic, and you see The Act, not the way the act is filmed and performed, not the language, oh no, there, right there in black and white:

Is a DP inherently degrading to women and therefore sexist? I don’t know, and I don’t have to know.

Is a DP inherently degrading in the minds of men? That’s a much more important question, and that answer is much more disturbing.

You don't talk about how the act is portrayed in mainstream pornography, you talk about the act it self "is DP inherently degrading" you ask.

Do you not get how important a qualifier it is, after convincing men how degrading porn is to women by pointing out the way porn frames sexuality within a portrayal of sex as something that is, always and evermore, degrading to women? You don't notice how porn always verbally describes women who it wishes to degrade and abuse?

No of course not, the important point of pornography always calling porn actresses "sluts" and "whores" and "bitches" is to degrade them, no further analysis is required there of course!

But what is a "whore", or a "slut"? A woman who has sex (with more than four other men in a single life time, according to the WHO if really you want to be precise about it), so the patriarchy degrades women in porn, by accusing them of sleeping with more than four men, and then some guys fuck them.

Uhm.

Sorry, but did you not understand what is happening there? You're being conditioned, ffs, to think of sex as an act that must, inherently, be degrading to women, so that either you fuck women, but in a crappy way that involves the degradation of women, or that you don't fuck women, because sex is degrading, and as it takes two to do the horizontal mambo... and so you have this bizarrely anti-sex 'tude that is really all about you refusing to be degradated by nasty icky patriarchal sex, and in the mean time women find it that much harder to find someone who isn't a jerk to sleep with.

Let me treat you a bit more genuously than you treated that guy who tried to be a cheeky snook cocking radical conservative at the dinner party you and some friends held for the palestinians, let me explain to you a solution, one that isn't a solition of 2 parts water, one part semen (though to be fair, your sublimated issues with being a closet Bi do need to be worked out at some point) Do you know what is a healthy attitude to this culture of degarding sex? A healthy attitude rests on being able to laugh at the inherent humor of two sweaty bodies locked in mutual squirtiness.

Bascially Professor Jensen, you need to be fucked up the ass.

And that's not as glib a statement as it may first appear either, if you did say to your SO: "Pray tell shall you fuck me up the ass, mayhaps with a strapon?" (faux-Shakespearian dialogue can be an important part of getting the joke inherent to sex, because that funny little bearded man from elizabethan england got the joke of sex, and in fact included it in all (or most) of his plays), and she actually felt like going in for it (femdom buttplay is a good way to explore gender roles within a relationship btw) you would have to go shopping with her for the devices and tools neccesary for the act, and that is where you would get a real education.

Because there is little to no doubt that you would discover a thing that cannot, or should not, exist, for you would discover that greatest of all sacrileges, the strapon designed to be used for the act of penetrating a woman in the ass and the vagina at the same time, a device designed with two phalluses situated one above the other, and with a little bumpy bit on the inside of the harness for added mutuality.

Now mr jensen, I'll let you guess what sort of untermenschen wears such an EVIL and DEGRADING device, and on whom they are used.

Yes! That's right! Lesbians are into DPing each other!

I love that everytime I start to feel like an idiot because I've never got a degree in anything, someone like you or mike adams pops up and showsm e how mindboggling unable to even notice your own cultural and social biases when making wild and barely supported suppositions.

Okay, and about your constant assertion that, "I am not a woman, and so I obviously cannot experience a DP", why then do you then entertain this brief sexual fantasy in which one of your male students is sexually degraded through the act of being double penetrated by the "biggest" guys in the class?

So do you know what Professor Jensen, if I'm ever in austin texas, I'll brave the fierce, and no doubt quietly vibrating, dildo police of Texas and make sure I carry a discrete DP ready strapon about my person at all times on the off chance I see you bending over someplace during my wanderings.

Because what empathy basically boils down to is this: being able to understand what it's like to be in someone else's shoes, and you constant refusal to even try to think what being DPed, or just plain penetrated for that matter, in a non-pornographic, non-degrading or generally patriarchal manner, show that ultimately, the man who can't empathise in your essay is none other than yourself.