response to callie on the good men project

Callie said:

“women are made to feel guilty and slutty for their sexuality. When that stops, women will make men feelmtheirmdesire. Desire for women is judged as being slutty. The Patriarchal archetype of who’re and Madonna had led to this . Women are just people, not your mom or your prostitute.”

I replied:

“As I explained in another comment on this thread, the reason that women are slut shamed is essentially because men are socially weak due to their lack of sexual value. The guy “gets” the girl, right? He’s put through some ordeal, slays a dragon, some bad guy, overcomes this or that obstacle, resolves the conflict in the narrative and successfully wins the girl’s love. That’s the familiar archetype which appears everywhere in our culture and has going back as far as you want to look. Well, break it down. The fact that the guy has to get the girl in the first place means what? What if he can’t slay the dragon? Of what use is he? None. He’s invisible, a failure, a loser, etc., and women will regard him as such, if they even notice him at all.

Women by contrast are the ones being saved. Their value is not tied to conditions. They aren’t asked to slay any dragon or climb some mountain, all men ask of them is that they love and need him.  What the guy spends the duration of the narrative attempting to achieve at great risk and cost to himself is already hers by default. She is already needed and wanted, and probably by plenty of other aspiring heroes. See the difference?

So why would men want women to be chaste on the one hand and then complain about the barren, sexual and emotional wasteland that most women create for men on the other? It’s because women have sexual value whereas he does not. If she dumps or divorces him, he is far more easily replaced than he can replace her. She has no dragon to slay, she need only sit at a bar alone and rack up phone numbers. She can go make an okcupid profile and screen potential applicants like an employer at the height of the great depression. And him? What does he do? He’s right back to slaying dragons, if he’s able to at all.

For women, they need only let sex happen.  Attention is hers to give and the more scarce it is, the more she can extract from men in exchange for it.  Men, by contrast, have to battle to make sex, intimacy, and relationships happen. Attention is theirs to win or fail to win.  Her sexuality is so valuable that men will pay for it.  His is so worthless that he literally has to pay to give it away.

So the problem doesn’t begin with men, but with women. So long as women consciously or unconsciously think of their sexuality as a bargaining chip or a tool of manipulation which compels men to qualify for female intimacy, so long as men are forced to shoulder the burden and risk of attempting to qualify for that intimacy, women will be slut shamed and resented by men who are rightfully insecure that the prize they’ve ostensibly won after their ordeal can easily be snatched away by a more powerful hero.

Men are just people. They aren’t monsters, villains, heroes, workhorses, or all powerful wizards who control everything and are therefore solely responsible for our gender norms as well as everything else under the sun.  In other words, they aren’t your dad.”

Men Must Be Needed Because We Can’t Be Wanted