I'm Just a Girl Who Can't Say Yes

In order to procrastinate I'm reading this new book from the library, Hard to Get: Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom by Leslie C. Bell.  I just now looked to see who published it -- University of California Press -- and that surprised me, because Hard to Get reads like something an ordinary commercial publisher would issue.  Bell describes herself as a feminist psychotherapist as well as a sociologist.  The main concession she makes to what I'd consider academic standards is that she provides some details on her research approach, such as how she constructed her sample, the kinds of interview questions she asked, and so on. That's good, but it's not enough.

Hard to Get raises some valuable questions, but Bell seems to be stuck in some basic binaries.  For example:

So what’s a good girl to do? The one form of assertion open to a good girl in relation to men is to say no. But what happens when she starts wanting to say yes? And what if she wants to say yes some of the time and no some of the time? [99].

That last question is scary.  I don't believe there is any "girl," good or bad, who says yes all the time.  Even the baddest girl will turn down some potential partners.  Has anyone tried to count the number of people we reject compared to the number we accept, whether we're talking about one-night stands or potential committed relationships?  And that leaves aside the people we don't pursue from lack of interest in the first place, plus people to whom we might have said yes but who said no to us.  Samuel R. Delany wrote a little about this in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (NYU Press, 1999), noting that in the Times Square porn theaters where he used to cruise, he observed far more rejections than acceptances, and the rejections were almost always made with a minimum of fuss.  Though he wasn't doing a systematic study, a place where men cruise for transient, on-site sex makes the transactions more visible than in a heterosexual dating situation.

It probably is true, alas, that many people don't consider it obvious that someone who says yes at times will say no at other times.  This generalizes, as among anti-abortion propagandists who talk as though a woman who has an abortion will never want to bear a child to term, even though most women who seek abortions in the US are already mothers.  And it's enforced by the socio-legal assumption, common not just in the US but in many societies, that a woman who isn't a virgin can't be raped: having once said yes (even to her husband) she can never again say no to anyone.  But Bell writes as though the concept is new to her as well.  Her rhetorical question shook me up, because it reminds me of the assumptions that underlie a lot of discourse about women's sexuality.

By contrast, it's hard to imagine anyone asking the same question about men who say yes, perhaps because men are still assumed to do the asking, and because men are assumed to be such horndogs that they'll never pass up an opportunity.  From what Bell writes, it is pretty clear that despite all the changes in American sexual mores in the past fifty years, women are still expected to be the gatekeepers of male sexual aggressiveness, and a woman who takes the initiative with males is still suspect.

One thing I do like about Bell is that she recognizes that "good girls" -- young women who postpone sexual activity until their twenties, and who avoid casual involvements in favor of committed relationships -- don't necessarily have it better, or easier, than "bad" ones.  For example, one of her "good girls," who delayed first intercourse until after college, and then only in committed relationships, contracted gonorrhea from one and genital warts from another. But she doesn't like to take that recognition too far.  The "bad" girls she interviews tend to have more experience of committed relationships than she gives them credit for, and her avowed feminism seems poorly informed.  She was born in 1970, so it's not surprising that her impression of Second Wave feminism is based more on mass-media stereotypes than on historical research, let alone personal experience.

Consider "Claudia" (a pseudonym), one of the young women Bell classifies as "bad."  Claudia is "a twenty-eight-year old postdoctoral researcher" (1), a Latina from a poor family who did well in school and decided not to live her mother's life of early marriage and childbearing.  She has had numerous one-night stands as well as several serious relationships, and she first had intercourse in high school with a "long-term boyfriend" (72); as Bell concedes, Claudia "remained a good girl in that she was having sex according to her boyfriend's desires, in the context of a long-term relationship" (73).  After she broke up with that boyfriend, she alternated between serious relationships and more casual (though often ongoing) ones.  Bell concludes that Claudia "did not understand these to be strategies that she was pursuing.  She perceived men as rejecting her, when it was often she who imposed limits on her relationships" (81).  This, I'd say, is a half-truth.  True, Claudia did impose limits on her relationships, but Bell is positing a false equivalence between Claudia's limits and the demands of her boyfriends.

Her first boyfriend, for example, "had had many sexual partners while Claudia remained a virginal good girl.  For several years of the relationship, they did not have intercourse because "he thought I was too young at the time, but [he] also cared about me a lot and liked me, so I think he was saving me for later.  But he also didn't want to coerce me into something I didn't want" (73).  It was later, in high school, that she "gave in" to him, though she didn't really want sex at the time; he continued dating other women, while she stayed faithful to him, and it seems she didn't really enjoy the sex she had with him.  Once she went away to college, "he became increasingly jealous and possessive, so she broke up with him in her senior year of college" (ibid.).

In graduate school she had "a relationship with a man she really loved and with whom sex was great" (74), but after two years he not only wanted to marry her and start a family, he wanted her to transfer to his graduate school.  She wanted to have children with him, but not while she was still in graduate school, so she chose to stay at her "more prestigious and competitive" graduate school, and they broke up; he "quickly dated and married someone else and had kids with her, which indicated to Claudia that she was not the one for him" (ibid.).

Later she got involved with a man she liked.  After about a month, before he left town on business for six weeks, they discussed what was going on between them.  Claudia preferred to leave it open until he returned, and while he was in Europe he met "somebody there who he's still dating" (75.)

It's true, judging from these stories, that Claudia set limits on her relationships, but look at what those limits were.  Her first boyfriend's "traditional" mindset indicates to me that he didn't really support her academic endeavors; he probably wanted a "traditional" wife who'd stay home and raise his babies, while he screwed around.  Claudia could have gone from "good girl" to "good wife" in traditional terms, but it would surely have meant the end of her career.  Ditto for her graduate student: he wanted her to follow him, regardless of the impact on her academic life -- to say nothing of the effects of starting a family while still in school.  He could, after all, have transferred to her school.  Bell doesn't say whether they discussed how they'd run a household, how they'd handle housekeeping and childcare; I suspect his expectations were also "traditional."   Like many women who marry as students, Claudia would have been pressured to abandon her intellectual ambitions for her husband's demands.  The third guy is more ambiguous, but would things have turned out differently had they made some kind of commitment before he went to Europe?  Or would he have become distracted by a new squeeze anyway, and dumped her?  A month of sleeping together on weekends seems to me not enough time to get too serious, or to suppose that they were destined to be soulmates; the actual outcome indicates to me that they weren't.

So Bell seems to believe that Claudia should have subordinated herself to her various boyfriends' demands regardless of the cost to her, which is not what I consider feminism; it sounds like good old-fashioned male chauvinism.  The legal structure of marriage has been changed to make it less of a bad deal for women, but the social expectations are still largely in place.  It's true that Claudia rejected her boyfriends' demands, but I think her rejection was entirely reasonable.  Bell's thesis is that women don't have to choose between a fulfilling career and fulfilling "intimacy" -- "having it all", a stance she derisively attributes to older feminists -- but on her own evidence that assumption is open to serious question.  I know there are young women who find men (or women) who have more egalitarian expectations, but from reading Hard to Get I think it's obvious that young women who fear losing their autonomy in marriage are not being unrealistic.  Certainly Claudia seems to have had good instincts.  Bell's, however, are suspect.

If Europe Is From Venus, Who's From Mars?

I've written before that straight men often find it difficult to distinguish between consensual sex and forced sex, and if you thought I was exaggerating, here's another example.

The Economist is a pro-business newsweekly from the UK, and of course the big news in its latest issue is what the cover calls "The damnation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn". There's an opinion piece on page 12 pleading, "Whatever the man did, do not forsake his ideas: they are more important," because Strauss-Kahn "was the candidate with the greatest chance of bringing the Paleolithic French Socialists into the modern age." If you detect some cognitive dissonance there, worry not, it's just concern trolling. The "modern age" the writer has in mind is the 19th century, the age of the robber barons. A longer article beginning on page 25, "The downfall of DSK", praises him for having "done more than any other recent manager to restore the IMF's reputation. ... His championing of the need to insulate the poor from the effects of fiscal austerity has, many believe, led the fund to become kinder and gentler." Many don't believe that, but I wouldn't expect the Economist to go there.

Then we have "Decoding DSK" on page 62 and online, by a columnist who calls himself Charlemagne.

When “DSK” moved to Washington, DC, in 2007 to take up his duties as the boss of the IMF, Mr Sarkozy is said to have told him to check his passions: he was going to a country that had come close to hounding Bill Clinton out of office for having an affair with a White House intern.

In matters of sex, as of war, Europeans are from Venus. They mock Americans’ puritanism about the sex lives of public figures. For a politician to cheat on his wife in America is a sign of dishonesty. Witness the opprobrium heaped on Arnold Schwarzenegger over the new revelation that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. In much of Europe, affairs can be a badge of virility. That is the insinuation of an interview given by none other than Mr Strauss-Kahn’s wife, Anne Sinclair. Asked in 2006 whether she minded her husband’s reputation, she replied: “No, I’m rather proud of it! It’s important for a politician to seduce. As long as he seduces me and I seduce him, that’s enough for me.”

... Americans (and, it is true, many Europeans) are mystified by Mr Berlusconi’s ability to survive the tales of his lurid “bunga-bunga” parties. Europeans are bemused by the uptightness of American public life, in which a blow job in the White House can lead to the impeachment of a president. But the case of Mr Strauss-Kahn is about more than sex. Dig deeper and you uncover a number of telling differences in transatlantic attitudes.

And so on. Never mind that the case of Mr Clinton was also "about more than sex", that the Republicans wanted to destroy him and used the only charge they could find that they thought would stick; payback for the impeachment of Richard Nixon was also probably a factor. Never mind that the impeachment failed to remove him from office, and that it was not "the country" but a cabal of hypocritically Puritanical (mostly) Republican politicians and corporate media that minded, or pretended to mind, about that "blow job in the White House." Never mind that politicians and other celebrities got away with a lot of illicit sex in the US, shielded by a corporate media that collaborated in keeping their escapades secret. John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Lyndon B. Johnson, and many others were able to romp freely and almost openly, secure in the knowledge that they wouldn't make the headlines. There's an old American political joke about the damage to a politician's career if he's caught in bed with a live man or a dead woman, but until the tabloid mentality took over the media completely, being caught in bed with a live woman was only likely to damage the career of an evangelist.

If Strauss-Kahn had limited himself to willing partners, chances are he could have cavorted to his heart's content in the US as he did in France. But it seems that he preferred not to, and in the wake of his arrest renewed attention has been paid, even in France, to evidence that he had forced his attentions on women all along. Sarkozy's warning was dishonest, unless he knew that Strauss-Kahn was a rapist, which quite possibly he did. But the warning would still have been dishonest, just like the bulk of Charlemagne's column, for pretending that mere consensual "affairs" would get Strauss-Kahn in trouble.

At the very end of his column Charlemagne gets pious:

Beyond such differences in legal cultures, one fact is inescapable. In America a modest African immigrant has obtained a swift response from the police to her complaint of sexual assault. Mr Strauss-Kahn’s innocence or guilt will be determined in court. But New York’s authorities have not shirked from arresting the head of one of the world’s leading international bodies, nor from demanding that he be kept in jail on remand. It is worth asking: would this have happened in Paris or Rome?

That's very nice, but it feels more like a swerve for an upbeat, pro-American closing rather than a real glimmer of sympathy for the victim of a crime, especially after the columnist's determination to confuse the central issue through most of the piece.

A Christian Mind

I meant to include this in the earlier post on "sexualized" children, but it slipped my mind.

The term "rape culture," used repeatedly by the Hathor Legacy blogger, is misleading if it suggests that there is a "rape culture" distinct from the culture as a whole. As Joanna Russ wrote in 1985 (Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts, The Crossing Press, page 92):

I’ve always thought that patriarchal male sexuality must be a rather difficult business. To over-simplify: A partner’s hostility or boredom is ordinarily a real turn-off – and yet this is exactly the situation under patriarchy, where so many women are not interested, not excited, not participants, and not happy. Yet men must penetrate and ejaculate if there are to be any babies – and so the problem for patriarchy (whether you think of this as a one-time invention or a constant process) is to construct a male sexuality that can function in the face of a woman’s non-cooperation or outright fear and hostility.

Most women, whether they think of themselves as feminists or not, recognize this; it's part of the folklore. But it's so extreme, it's like saying that all men are rapists, isn't it? Well, no, it isn't. It's to say that our official culture structures sexual expression this way, even though not all men or women conform to the role they are supposed to play. I suspect it's because most people do not live up to official erotic and gender values that human life is at all bearable -- to the extent that it is bearable.

If you doubt that this is the case, let me present a revealing passage from a highly respectable male writer who calls for a return to traditional Christian values, Harry Blamires. Blamires is, according to Wikipedia, an Anglican theologian, literary critic, novelist, and a protege of C. S. Lewis. He's the author of a mainstream academic work on James Joyce's Ulysses. In his book The Post-Christian Mind: Exposing Its Destructive Agenda (Ann Arbor MI: Servant Publications, 1999), Blamires complained that "the need for living harmoniously in society along with people of other faiths has encouraged a pluralism that saps confidence in the imperatives of the Christian revelation" (14):

Current secularist humanism -- a mishmash of relativistic notions negating traditional values and absolutes -- infects the intellectual air we breathe. There is a campaign to undermine all human acknowledgement of the transcendent, to whittle away all human respect for objective restraints on the individualistic self. The hold of this campaign on the media is such that the masses are being brainwashed as they read the press, listen to the radio or watch TV [9].

And so on. Most of the book is just this overheated. Someday I may quote and discuss more of it. But for now I want to single out one fascinating bit -- fascinating in the same sense as a car wreck: you can't look at it and you can't look away.

... The size of Victorian families indicates an uninhibited level of sexual activity. [As does the number of children sired by Victorian papas and sons on the maidservants.] It could be argued that the Victorians were much more conscious of the power of sex than we are. That could be why women were distanced from men by complex etiquettes of contact in social life. There was a time when female employees in certain respectable institutions were required to lower their eyes when conversing with male colleagues. The ethos between this distancing must surely have been based on a recognition of the compulsive force of the sexual appetite. On those grounds the Victorians would never have been so rash as to put both sexes together in comparable stations, say, on a warship. We, who have seen what doing so had led to, may perhaps concede their prudence. The Victorians seem to have believed in the need to tame sexuality and domesticate it. We find in Victorian literature the image of the virginal young woman who seems chastely remote from contact with the earthiness of procreation. She is someone in whose presence animal appetite is chilled into awe. This image, the angel in the house [!? – the angel in the house was the mother, not a virgin], was surely not the product of male minds castrated by dwelling in the world of top hats that had to be decorously lifted at the sight of a skirt. It was the product of male minds alert to the bubbling cauldron of sexuality that seethed beneath the surface of interchange between the sexes [152-153].

Let me try to tease out some of the remarkable assumptions embedded in this incoherent rant. The most obvious, I suppose, is that for Blamires "the sexual appetite" is exclusively male, and it is always a hairsbreadth away from aggression. A woman who meets a man's eyes -- in "certain respectable institutions," at least, and I wonder which ones he has in mind -- instead of lowering them modestly, risks setting off his hair-trigger lust. The Victorians were not the only ones who believed in the need to tame sexuality and domesticate it; so did the pagan Greeks. The early Christians agreed, but they mostly seem to have thought that the best way to tame male sexuality was total abstinence, with marriage a licit outlet for those who couldn't cut the mustard. But the Victorians seem also to have had little hope of taming the brute beast in the human male, and settled for supplying many outlets, commercial and amateur ("bad girls" of one type or another), for a man's "bubbling cauldron", so that the chaste respectable virgin may be spared his rutting violence if her icy remoteness fails to chill his animal appetite into awe.

Now, a culture based on assumptions like these will be a rape culture. Rape will be the norm, because women's own wishes and desires are not taken into account, or even noticed. The culture will represent men as ravening beasts whose lust is barely kept in check and can be set off by nothing more provocative than making eye contact. On the other hand, the lowered eyes of modesty are wonderfully stimulating: a modest woman knows she's enflaming a man, she's just being coy to entice him; she really Wants It, as all women do. If a man assaults a woman, it's because he lost the war within himself to tame his sexuality; but it also must have been something she did, probably deliberately, so she must have Wanted It. If too many men are losing control, then women should be confined to their homes after dark; any who go out after curfew will know that whatever happens to them is their own fault, so they must Want It too. A fortiori, if you dress up your daughter like a harlot you can hardly pretend to be surprised if some poor man decides she's signaling her sexual availability and takes her up on her offer, even she's only six years old. But even if you lock her in a barrel until she's eighteen and feed her though the bunghole, even if you cover her from head to foot in the name of "modesty," her mere femaleness makes her what the Catholics call an occasion of sin. There will be men trying to break the barrel open to take her, there will be men who will go nuts and attack her because her chador didn't conceal her enough, her sensual body language shines through like X-rays. That's just how men are.

It's worthwhile to compare Blamires's take on male sexuality with Michael Ruse's. Being a post- or at least non-Christian, Ruse lamented that women don't go into heat, because "then even if we had the same moral principles -- treat others fairly, etc. -- it would simply not make sense to condemn someone for fucking the female if he got the chance." Like Blamires, though, Ruse took for granted that men are always on a hair-trigger, ready to be set off at the mere sight of a pretty girl passing by; about women's desires he had nothing to say, apparently being ignorant of their existence and not interested in finding out.

Blamires, remember, is not a Larry Flynt or a Hugh Hefner; he's a reactionary Christian of impeccably respectable credentials. The crazy things he says do come close to normative Victorian (and pre-Victorian, as you can see by reading Shakespeare or Jane Austen; or post-Victorian, if you read Norman Mailer or John Gray) attitudes to male sexuality. Women aren't people in his Christian mind, they're symbols -- either virgins or whores. It's revealing that what he considers the Christian alternative to pervasive secular relativism looks like a scenario out of Victorian pornography.

Little Women on the Verge

[Note: I've corrected a factual error below. I wrote that a commenter had said that "if boys of the same age were taught to be 'little Chippendales', the shit would hit the fan." In fact, it was the blogger herself who brought up "little Chippendales." I quote her words below, and added one more quotation and some more discussion later on.]

A writer at The Hathor Legacy linked to a post of mine, so I’ve been looking in over there from time to time. Today I read a post and the comments thereto, inspired by a now-removed video at YouTube, which showed a bunch of pre-pubescent girls in their dance class, being taught to dance like pole dancers, hiphop hoochies, and other sluts.

I shared the writer’s displeasure and distaste, but the more I read the post and the comments it inspired, the more I found that something else was bothering me. I’m not a woman, I’m not the parent of a daughter, so of course I don’t understand from the gut the way the writer feels. But I’m also not a pedophile, so I was a bit shaken by the writer’s claim that these girls, and others like them in the gender meatgrinder, were being costumed and taught to dance so as to signal their “sexual availability.”

Well, no. An eight-year-old can’t signal her sexual availability, no matter how she’s dressed or how she moves. The writer and some of the commenters seemed unclear about the gap between how straight males might respond to the children’s moves and what those moves actually signified, let alone offered. To repeat: an eight-year-old cannot signal her sexual availability. It’s hard for me to understand how an adult male could look at such a performance and conclude that a child is offering herself for his penetration.

Which is not just because I’m gay. The blogger wrote, "And if it’s such an okay idea for girls, where are the little eight-year-old Chippendales? Wouldn’t that be cute? No, people: it would be disturbing." Maybe; I'm not as sure of the sensibilities of other adults as she is. I don’t like big Chippendales either, but a group of eight-year-old boys couldn’t signal sexual availability to me no matter how nekked they got or how they gyrated. Maybe when I was eight years old they would have, but contrary to the current therapy-culture assumption that even an eight-year-old can be a pedophile, I don’t think it’s the same thing.

And this raises another point. An adult pole dancer is not “signaling her sexual availability” either. I’ve never gone to a strip club, gay or straight, but I have read enough, and talked to enough men who do, to have an idea of their etiquette. If an audience member, inflamed by the spectacle and assuming it was for his benefit alone, were to climb up on stage and assault a dancer, not only the bouncers but probably some of the other audience members would stop him, beat him up, and throw him out. The same goes for a streetwalker, though many people, male and female alike, don’t believe that there’s anything wrong with raping or even killing a prostitute. Still, she’s not signaling her sexual availability to all and sundry either: a price has to be negotiated, and limits observed. Any pro-sex feminist knows this, I think, so why is this blogger essentially conceding that “bad” women (or little girls), as defined by their body language and dress, are ‘asking for it’?

A feminist, pro- or anti-sex, ought also to know that rape culture has nothing to do with how a woman is dressed or carries herself. Little girls (and adult women dressed modestly or immodestly, fat women, ugly women, old women) are raped not because they went to dance class and worked up a version of “Let Me Entertain You”, but because rapists won’t take No for an answer; many think that if they’re attracted to a female, it’s because she’s sending out sex rays that mean she really wants it, no matter what her lying mouth may say. That’s rape culture, and dressing up little girls like hookers or strippers has nothing special to do with it.

This reminds me of an issue that is still with us, but which I first encountered in the pages of the student newspaper: Islamic “veiling” (the word in English at least is a euphemism) of women. Back in the 80s, I believe, controversy erupted on campus from time to time over this practice, especially at that time because a few American Christian women were converting and being very pious about it. (The Muslim Hedonist’s blog seems to be defunct, unfortunately, for it comes from one woman who joined that movement and came to regret it.) When non-Muslims said or wrote that the veil oppressed women, some of the converts wrote letters insisting that they were just being modest, and that it was American sexual culture that oppressed women and encouraged them to be immodest. (This is the flip side of women and gay men who say that they embrace makeup and drag because they want to be beautiful, as though you couldn’t be beautiful without those accessories.) I later ran into a young woman who, though I don’t believe she converted, gushed about the “spirituality” of Muslim piety, though she’d never have said such a thing about southern Indiana Pentecostal women who embraced and practiced “modesty” in almost exactly the same terms.

The Muslim women (and their male counterparts) were wrong, of course. It’s veiled women who are immodest; that’s why they need to cover themselves. American women who walk around in short shorts and halter tops with their faces and hair uncovered are not immodest; that’s why they don’t need to cover themselves. As you can tell by the range of coverings in Muslim societies which range from just a headscarf that leaves the face uncovered to the full chador which includes a mesh to keep even a woman’s eyes invisible, there’s no clear line between modesty and immodesty. To a devout chador wearer, a Malaysian woman who wears a scarf, a blouse and trousers, instead of a portable tent that covers her entirely, would be little better than an American pole-dancer. It’s notorious that in Victorian England and America, even a glimpse of a woman’s ankles would drive a man wild with lust; it’s less often acknowledged that if she weren’t middle-class and had no male protector in view, a woman would be assumed to be asking for it if a man’s lust proved to be “uncontrollable.”

There’s another thing about the eight-year-old pole dancers. The writer and commenters talked about the “premature sexualization” of these children. Isn’t it also premature when little girls are encouraged to fantasize about being princesses and having fairy-tale weddings? Or to practice motherhood with dolls? They know as little about the reality they’re miming as the girls in that video. (For that matter, is it premature if girls of the same age are put in charge of younger siblings to take some of the load off their overburdened mothers? That’s a traditional practice, after all, and not many people seem to be bothered by it. Indeed, there’s a sort of shrugged-shoulders fatalism about it – it’s natural after all, girls will be girls, of course they want to be princesses, just like Princess Diana. And we all know how well official adult marriage often works out, fairy-tale weddings and all.)

I remember being strongly affected when I first read Marge Piercy’s 1976 future-utopia novel Woman on the Edge of Time; among much else there’s a scene where the head of the children’s care center explains to another future character that in the 20th century, toys were used to teach children sex roles. It was so obvious, but at the time it was a new idea to me. One could say the same about teaching little boys to play soldier, or cowboys and Indians, or letting them do so, which also prepares them for the role they’ll play as adults – namely cannon fodder.

Another commenter pointed out that we know nothing about the background of that video. Were the little girls dressed up by their teachers with the full approval of their mothers? Or did they choose their look themselves? Not that it matters, though it would be interesting to know what the adults involved thought. [P.S. At least some of the parents evidently approved -- see the ABC News story linked below -- but were they thinking? Jeez, I'm so glad I'm not a parent.] Even if the girls nagged until they were allowed to dress like hookers and work up a “SuperFreak” routine, the fact remains that they didn’t know what it signified to adults, and in any case, children need to be protected from the self-serving aggression of adults. (That goes for adults of both sexes, including those who would “rescue” them.) As I indicated before, the blogger and some of her commenters conceded far too much to rape culture, by agreeing that the little girls were behaving in such a way as to invite adult male aggression while stopping just short of saying they were asking for it. (Suppose an adult were to respond to a little boy playing soldier by walking up and shooting him with a real gun. Would anyone argue that the adults in the kid’s life were responsible for his death, because they’d taught him to signify that he was a suitable target for a bullet?)

Like it or not, children want to grow up, and in the meantime they imitate adults, whether the ones around them or ones they hear or read about or see in the movies. I don’t much like some of the roles they try on for size either, but with the best will in the world you can’t stop them from needing to do it. What we can try to do is to hammer it into adults’ heads that whatever fantasy children are playing with, it’s a game and not real, and adults shouldn’t mistake the game for reality. That goes not only for obsessed straight men but for adult women.

Much of the blogger’s argument was based on her visceral reaction to the video, to children’s “beauty” contests, and the like.

Tell me when you watch the linked video, honestly: don’t you feel like you’re watching women? Women’s slim thighs, women’s hidden breasts, women’s buttocks? After all, women with curves have been out of style for forty years – little girl bodies have long been the ideal for all of us (which may be a whole other topic). If you’re attracted to women, doesn’t this video give you a creepy little hormonal twitch, probably followed by irrational guilt? Sometimes in reviewing media for Hathor, I try to imagine seeing women through white male eyes – it’s so easy, since I grew up in a culture that taught me to look at my own body to see if I had what men wanted or not. I watch this video, and I see what men want. My brain tells me I’m looking at little girls: my eyes tell me I’m looking at grown women.

As though only "white males" objectified women this way! Seen any hiphop videos lately? The blogger links to an ABC News story that quotes a "clinical psychologist" who says "It's pretty clear that this dance is erotic in a way that would be more appropriate for girls post-puberty." Physician, heal thyself. So much is in the eye of the beholder, you know. Why would it be "appropriate" for post-pubescent girls or women to pander to rape culture? It's also worth noting that many people did object to the video and the performance. But I have to add, from the clips included in the ABC story, that honestly, no: my eyes don't tell me I'm looking at grown women. And if you want to see premature sexualization of little girls, look at a ballet class.

The blogger just wasn’t as far outside of rape culture’s assumptions as she liked to think. I think there’s only one way to address this. A pole dancer isn’t asking for it. Nor is a prostitute. Nor is a college girl who shows her tits in a Girls Gone Wild video. Nor is a woman who walks into a chain bookstore and is greeted by an employee who can't take his eyes off her breasts. (The same blogger, as it happens.) It’s hard enough to get men to grasp this; if women (and especially feminist women) can’t grasp it either, then we might as well give up.