Every week, I answer a question from Monday's Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the Feb. 26 chat here and submit...
| |  | | | | Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics | | | | | | (iStock) | Every week, I answer a question from Monday’s Act Four Live chat in the Wednesday edition of this newsletter. You can read the transcript of the Feb. 26 chat here and submit questions for the March 5 chat here. This week, a reader grapples with an unexpected challenge of the #MeToo moment. | | I personally (as a straight guy) have found the media narrative around sex and gender that followed the Aziz Ansari revelations to not really match my personal experiences around sex. All this talk about entitled men who push for what they want, ignore signals, refuse to communicate, and act selfishly is just alienating because I seem to have had a very different socialization that featured a lot more exposure to feminism than it seems others have. I used to have the opposite set of problems, like being nervous to initiate anything, being timid and passive sexually, being hesitant to ask for what I want, spending a distracting amount of time communicating, and being too focused on my partner and not myself. I also know a number of men in my personal life who seem similar. I believe that many men are entitled and bad at communication, but I also know that many are not. Is the media being too reductive here? Is there a way to write about issues like this that acknowledge the real variation in the population, even if it detracts from clean narratives? | | I think in general, you’ve identified a major difficulty in writing about sexual norms: the fact that something can be described as a widespread problem, that said phenomenon can bear no relationship to your own experience, and that both your experience and other people’s experiences can both be true. You’re not necessarily alone in feeling like the sort of exchange described in the Babe.net story or captured in the New Yorker’s “Cat Person” short story is alien to your socialization and experience. I do, too! My colleague Christine Emba and I had a discussion earlier this year that I think captured at least some of what you’re feeling: Our talk was a way for me to work through some of my own surprise that such encounters seem to be so widespread. | | | I’d suggest that the solution both to your problem, and to the plight of young women who are meeting with sexual entitlement and indifference, is actually to widen the conversation, rather than to freight it with endless caveats. If we can agree that American sexual culture is broadly not working for a lot of people, both male and female, in that it hasn’t produced a way for both partners to communicate their needs and get them met, then we can shake up the conversation a bit. | | It sounds like you feel like you spent a lot of your life in the same position as a lot of the women who have reported unsatisfying sexual encounters with indifferent partners they felt obliged to accommodate. Maybe the key to both media coverage and to the way you approach this debate is to think of the interests men like you share with women who are speaking up about the parts of sexual culture that don’t work for them. In this conversation, your primary point of identification doesn’t have to be as a guy: It can be as someone who has a lot to gain from a better set of norms. The point of a sexual revolution isn’t to replicate the dynamics of the bad old days, just with a different set of people in the position of power. It’s to change the way things work for everyone, you included. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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