I know I link to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ pieces a lot on here.. but this is another good one that I somehow previously missed until I saw it referenced in a nice article by Jessica Valenti at The Nation about how rape culture makes women responsible for men’s sexuality. Coates’ piece is about the origins of misogyny lying in male vulnerability.
Marlowe is forever slapping some woman, or seducing somebody’s wife within minutes of meeting her, or declaring his sexual invulnerability to still another woman, or berating some man for being gay—and thus being a woman. At all events, Marlowe triumphs with his unhurtable manhood intact:
She looked at me under her long lashes. This was the look that was supposed to make me roll over on my back.
If she’s as beautiful as you claim, Marlowe, and if you are the man you claim, then you dream of her rolling you over on your back. It’s not up to you.
I’ve consumed art like this all my life–men claiming invulnerability, against all I know of maleness and human attraction. Misogyny is not merely a moral problem, but a problem of art. It takes half the world and caricatures it. And then it caricatures the other half by proscribing the exploration of weakness.
I don’t recognize a single one of these dudes. It’s a kind of pornography, a humiliated boy’s idea of what manhood must be. I wish more of the art I loved, the art rendered by dudes, did not take sexual vulnerability as something to be defeated, but as an actual fact. You do not get the girl. More directly, you have no actual right to get the girl. Most times, she just don’t want you. And when she does, your reply is, very often, to pine after some other “her.”
Some of us really do go there—Ricky Gervais’s David Brent does it in the extreme. But I’m hunting for more. In the end, we don’t just hate women. We hate ourselves. There’s a lot of juice in confronting not women, not the object, but the subject; in honing in on that part of our makeup which seems bent on our humiliation.
Ugh. I have never been so disappointed in a piece by Coates. He goes on and on about boys’ erections, and how they are so pervasive and compelling, and “must” be obeyed – and that being a real man means mastering that drive. “What about the men?” he cries, here: “In the end, we don’t just hate women. We hate ourselves.”
Guess what, Mr. Coates: Girls and women have throbbing, aching, incessant sexual desire. We become so distracted that the need for release drives us mad. We fantasize, masturbate, wish, ache, and need.
If we’re lucky, that is.
But most of us have been shamed from birth about those feelings. I once saw a little girl with her hand in her underpants. Maybe even inside her diaper, she was so young. Her mother grabbed that little hand and slapped it, hard, three times. That was 34 years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it.
We’ve also been abused, exploited, made to feel dirty, our bodies jeered at or spoken about euphemistically – blue liquid in “feminine hygiene” ads, anyone? – until the only message we can hear is that we are shameful, embarrassing Jezebels who cause boys at school dances to have erections! Or even have an orgasm!
Coates, along with most of us mired in patriarchy, cannot even conceptualize a world in which female sexual desire and need even exists, much less defines the way the rest of the entire world lives. No, the problem, he mansplains well-meaningly, is boys and men and their nearly irresistable sexual desires. Make men control them, he thinks, and rape culture will abate. Teach men they are not entitled to women, he implores. “You dream of her rolling you on your back” is his solution, framed as usual in terms of what female behavior will sexually excite a man.
I do appreciate Coates’s sincere campaign against misogyny and sexism. I just believe he completely missed the mark here: writing from a male-centric view of sexuality to solve the “problems” of sexuality for all of us.
I’m so glad you said that, Tinfoil Hattie. I failed to make sense of an article about repressing or controlling male sexual desire that didn’t even mention the near-universal refusal to acknowledge female sexual desire. Talk about an elephant in the room!
Thanks, maruja. I wanted to comment over at The Atlantic, but comments on the article are closed.
I also thought about this some more, and all the “controlling our manly urges in the face of unspeakable female temptation” rhetoric in the world doesn’t address the elephant’s cage, if you will: the systematic oppression of women under patriarchy. Until women are viewed as complete human beings in our own right, objectification, pandemic violence, and commodification of women’s sexuality will not abate, much less cease.
Furthermore, Coates puts having sexual desire for and wanting to rape women on the same continuum. I view rape as violence manifested via a sexual vehicle, but it is not “sex” any more than punching someone in the face is like giving them a neck massage.
I have a very different reading of this article but I’m fascinated by how you’ve both interpreted it. Will come back later today after grocery shopping etc to write about my own ideas.
I disagree with the previous commentators about this article. I strongly agree that the denial/shaming of female desire is a major issue and an ongoing problem but there are countless blog posts and articles discussing that issue and its multiple impacts. This is the first article I’ve seen that is so specific and honest about male desire vs masculine identity. In the comments Coates states that he wants to write about the effect of oppression on the slaveowner as well as the slave, in order to more effectively break down that oppression. I think this is a useful attempt at applying that, not an assertion that men’s struggles with desire and identity are worse or negate women’s struggles.
Female desire and its repression are essential to a discussion of heterosexual male desire and identity, because, well, we’re talking about people wanting to have sex and pretending that they don’t. So, it makes no sense to dismiss its absence in the article by saying that it’s already been discussed elsewhere, by other people, somewhere on the internet.
The slave-slaveowner analogy only serves to accentuate the problem: it’s like discussing the effect of slavery on the slave owner without mentioning or challenging the (then) widely-held assumption that no black person has any desire to make decisions for themselves.