The Purity Myth (26 page)

pian image Americans are so attached to. You’re just whining—things are fine! Look how far women have come!

This is a lot to take in, I know: the idea that most of us—simply by living our lives, by being who we are—are at risk of being held accountable for violence against us. It’s not a pleasant thought, but it’s one we have to face head-on. The continual punishment and blame being heaped on wom- en are unacceptable, and we can’t sit silent as these patterns escalate.

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c h a P ter 8

beyond manliness

“The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.”

g er m a i n e g r e er

in a commercial for
Milwaukee’s Best beer, a group of friends is shown digging a hole in a nondescript back yard;* when a bee begins to buzz around them, one of the men starts waving his hands in fear and squeals in a high- pitched voice. As his friends look on in horror at this oh-so-unmanly display, a giant can of Milwaukee’s Best beer falls from the sky and crushes the fearful man. A deep-voiced narrator says, “Men should act like men.”

Other commercials in the beer company’s “manly” campaign show men being crushed by cans for crying at the movies, talking baby talk to a girlfriend, and using a napkin to soak up grease from a slice of pizza. Mil- waukee’s Best’s website features a similar “Act Like a Man” challenge: Once

* Because what could be more masculine than nonspecific yard work?

again, users are crushed by giant beer cans if they dance (the screen mock- ingly says, “That’s some fancy footwork there, miss”) or cry out in pain while getting a tattoo.

A Snickers commercial takes a slightly different approach (emphasis on “slightly”). An “effeminate” man who is speed walking—with a close-up on his shaking derriere—is quickly taught a lesson when ’80s TV action star Mr. T comes busting out from behind a row of houses in a pickup truck, shoot- ing Snickers bars out of a machine gun at him. All the time he’s screaming, “You’re a disgrace to the man race.” The tagline? “Snickers: Get some nuts.”

The message is clear: In order to be a man, one must avoid being femi- nine at all costs. In fact, the best way to be a man is to simply
not
be a woman. This oppositional definition of masculinity isn’t limited to commercials, of course—it’s everywhere. It’s present in American politics: Male candidates pose in hunting pictures and denigrate their opponents as “girlie men.” It’s in pop culture: Television, movies, music, and, yes, commercials feature “real” men as those who shun femininity, and humiliating males is as simple as putting them in a dress or calling them Bambi. And, perhaps most of all, it’s embedded in the myth of sexual purity, which is based on traditional gender roles in which men are “men,” women are chaste, and a gender-based hierar- chy is essential.

The fear of being feminine—something Stephen J. Ducat, author of
The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Mas- culinity,
calls “femiphobia”—is fundamental to America’s current under- standing of masculinity.

For many men, masculinity is a hard-won, yet precarious and brit tle

psychological achievement that must be constantly proven and defended.

While the
external
factors may appear to be that which is most threaten- ing . . . the actual threat that many men experience is an unconscious,

internal one: the sense that they are not “real ” men.
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Ducat, who is also a psychotherapist, credits femiphobia and male anxi- ety about being appropriately “manly” to both our masculinized political cli- mate and to some men’s inability to sustain intimate relationships, and their preoccupation with dominance therein.

“Theproblem is thepsychologicalcostof developing amaleidentity inacul- ture that disparages the feminine and insists that the boundaries between mas- culine and feminine remain unambiguous and impermeable,” Ducat writes.
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It’s this psychological fear that makes so many men eager to bash the feminine—whether that means making fun of feminine gay men, working hard to prove their manliness, or simply bashing women themselves.

Julia Serano, author of
Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity,
noted that this disdain for the feminine— which, she says, is “regularly assigned negative connotations and meanings in our society”—is far-reaching and deeply embedded in Americans’ under- standing of gender.

An example of this is the way that being in touch with and expressing one’s emotions i s regularly derided in our society. While this trait has

vir tually nothing to do with one’s ability to reason or thinking logically, in the public mind, being “emotional” has become synonymous with be- ing “irrational.” Another example i s that cer tain pursuits and interests

that are considered feminine, such as gossiping or decorating , are of ten characterized as “ frivolous,” while masculine preoccupations— even

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those that serve solely recreational functions, such as sports—generally e scape such tr ivialization.
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In fact, women and femininity are so derided in American culture that it’s not uncommon to see men punished via feminization. A prison in South Carolina, for example, disciplines sexually active inmates by dress- ing them in pink. Another Arizona prison mandates that all inmates wear pink underwear.
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This shaming technique, however, isn’t limited to con- victs: A preschool in central Florida came under fire in 2004 when parents discovered that teachers were reprimanding unruly boys by forcing them to wear dresses, and in 2001, a teen sued his former school for forcing him to cross-dress (complete with wig and bra).
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It seems that as far as punishment goes, nothing is worse than being a woman.*

And it’s really women who end up being penalized because of these neg- ative practices. This fear of women, this fear of being
like
women—even just a little bit—is at the heart of most misogyny in the United States. By fostering a culture that sees femininity and women as not just less than men, but also less than human, femiphobia is at the heart of enabling social sexism like the sexual double standard, political sexism that relies on paternalism in policy, and even violence against women.

m e n h u r t i n g , h u r t i n g m e n

In 2008, University of Connecticut student Melissa Bruen was sexually

* In my first book,
Full Frontal Feminism,
I opened by asking readers what the worst thing you can call a woman is (slut, bitch, whore, cunt), then what the worst thing you can call a man is (pussy, fag, sissy, girl). In both cases, the answers were some variation of “woman.” I felt this bore repeating.

assaulted on campus while a group of male onlookers cheered. Even more troubling is that the assault was retribution for her fighting back against a man who had attacked her prior to her assault.

Bruen, who wrote about her ordeal in a campus newspaper, was walking home along a campus trail* when a strange man picked her up by her shoul- ders, pinned her up against a nearby pole, and started “dry humping” her. At first Bruen thought perhaps he was playing a joke on her—until she heard him moaning.

When she shoved the man, who was six inches taller than she was, off of her, he responded, “My, aren’t we feisty tonight.”

When he came toward me, I grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed

him down to the ground. I held onto his shoulders and climbed on top to straddle him. He started thrashing side to side, but I was able to hit him with a closed fist, full force, in the face.
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A crowd, mostly men, gathered—shocked that Bruen was fighting back. Her assailant got up and ran off, yelling at her. Bruen screamed at him and to the crowd, “You just assaulted me. . . . He just assaulted me.” But instead of helping her, the group of men gathered in closer.

Another man, around 6’1’’, approached me and said, “You think that

was assault?” and he pulled down my tube top, and grabbed my breasts. More men started to cheer. It didn’ t matter to the drunken mob that my breasts were being shown or fondled against my will. They were happy

to see a topless girl all the same.
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* Not so funnily known as “the rape trail.”

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Eventually, Bruen broke free. What struck me about this story— other than the crowd’s horrific, but not shocking, response—was that it’s a perfect example of how women are punished for transgressing the gen- der norms that are so integral to the purity myth. Bruen, who presumably did what one
should
do when being attacked—fight back—was assault- ed because, as she says, she was “breaking out of the mold” that expects women to be docile victims. Fighting back, after all, isn’t ladylike—it isn’t pure.

The same culture of masculinity that breeds femiphobia and the purity myth enables men to do near unimaginable amounts of violence to wom- en (let’s not forget Chapter 7) or, as in this case, cheer as violence is being committed. When women’s sexuality is imagined to be passive or “dirty,” it also means that men’s sexuality is automatically positioned as aggressive and right—no matter what form it takes. And when one of the conditions of masculinity, a concept that is already so fragile in men’s minds, is that men dissociate from women and prove their manliness through aggression, we’re encouraging a culture of violence and sexuality that’s detrimental to both men and women.

c r a s h i n g t h e g a t e ( K e e P e r s )

If you want to see the purity myth in action, popular men’s magazines and websites are a great place to look. (They’re not always for the faint hearted, however.) For example, AskMen.com, an online men’s magazine that claims to have seven million readers a month, published an article in 2008 titled “Training Your Girlfriend.” It revealed perhaps a little too much about the way in which men are taught to view the women in their lives:

When you first start dating a new girlfriend, you want to be on your best

behavior. Sure, you want to make a good impression, but what you’re really

doing is catering to her to get sex. The problem is, the power base shifts to her right from the outset and she knows it. She’s in charge of access to the zipper and she counts on you bending over backward to gain entry. So she’s got you.
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The piece goes on to “help” men get out from under the sexual thumb of women, using traditional dog-training tricks as a guide.*

The notion that women are the sexual gatekeepers and men the potential crashers is widespread not just in the virginity movement, but in mainstream American culture. The idea is that women are supposed to do all they can to limit men’s access to female sexuality (and women themselves, really), and men are meant to do all they can to convince women otherwise. This sets up