Bringing Up Baby

Recently articles about the new masculinity, masculism, and the anti-feminist diatribes of the religious neo-cons have started to grate on my nerves. New masculinity, a buzz term with a nebulous meaning and various interpretations, has been co-opted by organizations like Focus on the Family as a call to men to be more “manly.”

My girlfriend teaches masculinity studies, and sometimes she’ll put things in perspective for me. It’s handy to have a professor around the house. She says the call for manliness is nothing new. Muscular Christianity was a Victorian era movement telling Christian men to embrace physical strength along their devout Christianity.

The current interpretation, however, is a mess of anti-feminist diatribes. Religious neo-cons say feminism has turned men into a society of wimps. They want you to git yer wives back to the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant like they should be.

But it’s not just women’s independence that’s shrinking the collective American phallus; teenage sexuality also makes a mockery of manly dominance. Father-daughter purity balls, formal events almost like anti-debutante balls, want to keep daughters away from the world rather than present them as adults. The balls promote female sexual abstinence; no nookie until marriage. Oddly though, teen boys aren’t subjected to rituals like these. Girls, apparently, carry the burden of saying no and fending off boys. Boys will be boys, after all.

These balls, purity rings, virginity pledges and the like a ritualized ways of containing female sexuality. In other words, a woman’s body is not her own, it belongs to dad until it’s contracted to her husband. It’s more than a little creepy and sexualizes teenage girls unnecessarily. Who says every teen girl wants to go around banging pimply boys? By making her promise not to the movement puts young girls’ sexuality in the spotlight. Why not teach your kids to respect themselves and their sexuality. Instill them with self-esteem but give them the freedom to make their own decisions.

Puritanical American culture, sigh, is so weighed down by obsession with youth and virginity. We’re facing a backlash against female independence that wants you to remain a child forever.

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There’s no escaping the infantilism of female sexuality even once you’re grown and have a sex life. Sex toys marketed at women are always cute and pink. This says, in effect, that it’s OK to be sexual as long as you’re still girly and innocent. You can be as horny as you want if you’re still daddy’s girl.

Kawaii, the culture of cuteness in Japan, has been heavily marketed in the West in the last decade or so. Sanrio, the creators of Hello Kitty and Pikachu rakes in over a billion dollars a year. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not beating up on Hello Kitty, but this aesthetic of cuteness isn’t limited to children’s toys, It’s been heartily embraced by adult women who love Hello Kitty vibrators and lingerie.

OK, I have a Hello Kitty vibrator. I got it off eBay before they were widely available in any sex toy shop. I was never able to use it, though. Hello Kitty’s big round head up in my business turned me right off. Poor Kitty is too disturbing. It’s been collecting dust in a drawer for years. It’s not surprising a San Rio sex toy killed my buzz; Kawaii is more than simple cuteness, it also connotes delicate, small and vulnerable. Not things that make me feel hot.

It’s not surprising we all buy into a cutesy sexuality and spend money on accoutrements that enhance that image; it’s really all that’s available. It’s hard to go against the grain when you don’t have any other choices. But accepting a darling little girl image isn’t doing us any favors. Playing up a barely legal or downright adolescent sexuality requires us to remain passive and vulnerable. Ain’t no way to treat a lady, and hardly a way for a woman to be in charge of her own desire for sex. Not to mention the creepy way this little lost girl image is often interpreted literally. Did you know Lolita, Nabokov’s admittedly awesome novel about a middle-aged man seducing an adolescent girl, was named one of the sexiest novels of all time by Playboy magazine. A story about sex with an adolescent girl is one of the sexiest novels of all time. Let that sink in for a minute.

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At the opposite end on the spectrum is the cougar. What a gross phenomena that isn’t really a phenomena. Throw a buzzword into a tabloid story and the media will pick it up and run with it. So a few Hollywood actresses have younger partners, this does not indicate a cultural trend. It’s grossly negative when it could actually be empowering. Rather than laud women for sexual confidence and take cues from younger men and women who are attracted to an older woman’s self-confidence, the media spun the cougar as predatory and sex-obsessed. Worse yet, though the cougar is an older woman it’s presumed that she is able to get younger lovers because she doesn’t look her age. It’s her youthful appearance that makes her sexually desirable. So women can be mature as long as they don’t look it.

I once worked with a brilliant writer in her fifties who often bemoaned the fact that her sexuality was completely dismissed or even ridiculed once she hit her late forties. She felt that women in middle-age were assumed to be sexless and denied sex in a culture that worshipped youth. Whether you are forty or twenty the focus on remaining forever young and innocent erodes female sexual independence--one of the most important aspects of sexual satisfaction.

There are too many books out there that want to teach you how to have an orgasm. I constantly get letters from women bemoaning the fact that they’ve never had one or can’t figure out how to give one to their lover. But the answer isn’t improving your sexual technique. Learning skills is useful and certainly fun, but until women feel confident enough to take charge of their own sexuality, express their desire and condemn society’s obsession with good little girls, we’re all doomed to sexual disappointment.

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