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One of those things that girlgeeks have to contend with now and then (or a lot, depending on your exact circumstances in life) is boygeeks. Now, I love boygeeks. They are some of my favorite people. I'm taking one to DragonCon with me in a couple of weeks to liven up the car trip! (Okay, to help pay for hotel room, too.) One of the things I like about boygeeks is that they are normally amazingly nice guys.
However. There's two kinds of nice guys in the world. The kind who are nice because they just relate well to the universe at large -- they're open and curious about people and life, they have a solid ethical system (as a wise man once said, he didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage!) and basically they really enjoy the world, which is the prime component that I believe makes people not suck. Then there's the other kind of nice guy, who thinks that if they play by certain rules of niceness then they're basically motherfucking superheroes and they deserve some payout. They payout they're generally looking for, naturelment, is sex with hot chicks.
This is all probably pointless set-up, because most anyone with any interest in my bloggy thing (which I'm going to start updating more, I swear!) probably already knows this all too well. Regardless, that was the set-up, and here is the link: the best damn explanation I've ever read for why those guys suck, no matter how nice they want to think they are, prompted by some relatively recent brouhaha on Penny Arcade.
Key quotes, for folks who don't want to read the whole thing:
"...that women are at best machines who work like your video game, where you press A Up B Down and suddenly they perform the correct action (just spreading their legs instead of busting a mortal blow on your enemy)..."
and
"...the concept that a woman's will is merely an obstacle between you and her pussy..."
This. This. This. This is where so many geeky males fuck up spectacularly: women are, to them, one more system to game. They want to learn the rules. They want to build the deck that's unstoppable in game play. They want to beat the system. That's what they do; they're *good* at it, and everything in their lives just makes them better at it. They don't get why they can't use their skill set to improve their lives!
It's a great theory, but only as long as you maintain the conceptual model of sex with women as a prize, and women's actual thoughts and feelings as the booby-trapped dungeon level that you have to triumph over first. And that conceptual model, depending on where and how it plays out, runs the gamut from deeply fucking insulting to hugely terrifying -- because, as the Pandagon poster notes, it is also exactly how rapists think.
These guys are mostly not rapists (of all the women I know who've been raped, none were ever attacked at a LAN party). But how comforting is that, honestly? To think that the men around you aren't *actually* rapists, they just mostly agree with the way rapists think about women? If that's the good news, holy shit, you know?
This is what feminism has always been about to me -- not "equality" per se, although I think that follows on as a natural corollary, not "strong, ass-kicking women," because shit, fandom (by which I mean the multigender whole of fandom, not just my little queer feminist corner of it) *loves* those women already and has since at least Ellen Ripley in 1979. "Women are awesome!" can coexist with misogyny with perfect ease, as long as you get to cherrypick what about them you find awesome (and don't we all, really?).
Ultimately, I think feminism has to be founded on the idea that women's use-value to men is irrelevant to who we are. We are contained selves, subjects of our own experience. We have likes and dislikes, and hey, for many of us, things like fucking men and being viewed as attractive by men are among our likes, which is fine and dandy. But there's ZERO REASON to fuck a man, ever, unless the woman in question wants to do it. It's not a reward for men, because you are Batman and therefore you get to sleep with the only woman in Gotham City. It's not a prize for a game well-played. It's not a debt we owe, even to men who've been nice to us. It's not some kind of community service we perform to make men happier or better people. And if we don't want to fuck any particular man or any man at all, too goddamn bad. We were no more put on this earth to be of benefit to them than they were put on this earth to be of benefit to anyone else, and any degree of trying to work around this inconvenient fact or blaming women for it being so -- well, that's both childish and disrespectful, and more than likely the reason those guys don't get laid is that women can tell they are *childish and disrespectful,* which are not traits that get women hot.
Okay, none of that long rant was new information, and really, none of it was as well-said as the Pandagon post I linked to. So read that!
However. There's two kinds of nice guys in the world. The kind who are nice because they just relate well to the universe at large -- they're open and curious about people and life, they have a solid ethical system (as a wise man once said, he didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage!) and basically they really enjoy the world, which is the prime component that I believe makes people not suck. Then there's the other kind of nice guy, who thinks that if they play by certain rules of niceness then they're basically motherfucking superheroes and they deserve some payout. They payout they're generally looking for, naturelment, is sex with hot chicks.
This is all probably pointless set-up, because most anyone with any interest in my bloggy thing (which I'm going to start updating more, I swear!) probably already knows this all too well. Regardless, that was the set-up, and here is the link: the best damn explanation I've ever read for why those guys suck, no matter how nice they want to think they are, prompted by some relatively recent brouhaha on Penny Arcade.
Key quotes, for folks who don't want to read the whole thing:
"...that women are at best machines who work like your video game, where you press A Up B Down and suddenly they perform the correct action (just spreading their legs instead of busting a mortal blow on your enemy)..."
and
"...the concept that a woman's will is merely an obstacle between you and her pussy..."
This. This. This. This is where so many geeky males fuck up spectacularly: women are, to them, one more system to game. They want to learn the rules. They want to build the deck that's unstoppable in game play. They want to beat the system. That's what they do; they're *good* at it, and everything in their lives just makes them better at it. They don't get why they can't use their skill set to improve their lives!
It's a great theory, but only as long as you maintain the conceptual model of sex with women as a prize, and women's actual thoughts and feelings as the booby-trapped dungeon level that you have to triumph over first. And that conceptual model, depending on where and how it plays out, runs the gamut from deeply fucking insulting to hugely terrifying -- because, as the Pandagon poster notes, it is also exactly how rapists think.
These guys are mostly not rapists (of all the women I know who've been raped, none were ever attacked at a LAN party). But how comforting is that, honestly? To think that the men around you aren't *actually* rapists, they just mostly agree with the way rapists think about women? If that's the good news, holy shit, you know?
This is what feminism has always been about to me -- not "equality" per se, although I think that follows on as a natural corollary, not "strong, ass-kicking women," because shit, fandom (by which I mean the multigender whole of fandom, not just my little queer feminist corner of it) *loves* those women already and has since at least Ellen Ripley in 1979. "Women are awesome!" can coexist with misogyny with perfect ease, as long as you get to cherrypick what about them you find awesome (and don't we all, really?).
Ultimately, I think feminism has to be founded on the idea that women's use-value to men is irrelevant to who we are. We are contained selves, subjects of our own experience. We have likes and dislikes, and hey, for many of us, things like fucking men and being viewed as attractive by men are among our likes, which is fine and dandy. But there's ZERO REASON to fuck a man, ever, unless the woman in question wants to do it. It's not a reward for men, because you are Batman and therefore you get to sleep with the only woman in Gotham City. It's not a prize for a game well-played. It's not a debt we owe, even to men who've been nice to us. It's not some kind of community service we perform to make men happier or better people. And if we don't want to fuck any particular man or any man at all, too goddamn bad. We were no more put on this earth to be of benefit to them than they were put on this earth to be of benefit to anyone else, and any degree of trying to work around this inconvenient fact or blaming women for it being so -- well, that's both childish and disrespectful, and more than likely the reason those guys don't get laid is that women can tell they are *childish and disrespectful,* which are not traits that get women hot.
Okay, none of that long rant was new information, and really, none of it was as well-said as the Pandagon post I linked to. So read that!
