Men's pleasure, women's pain: A dangerous sexual ethic is woven into cultural fabric
Robert Jensen
School of Journalism
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712
work: (512) 471-1990
fax: (512) 471-7979
rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu
copyright Robert Jensen 2002
Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star, September 1, 2002, pp. D-1, 3
by Robert Jensen
It is not surprising that we want to
separate ourselves from those who commit hideous crimes, to believe that the
abominable things some people do are the result of something evil inside of
them.
But most of us also struggle with a
gnawing feeling that however pathological those brutal criminals are, they are
of us -- part of our world, shaped by our culture.
Such is the case of Richard Marc
Evonitz, a “sexually sadistic psychopath,” in the
words of one expert, who abducted, raped and killed girls in Virginia and
elsewhere. What are the characteristics of a sexually sadistic psychopath?
According to a former FBI profiler who has studied serial killers: “A
psychopath has no ability to feel remorse for their crimes. They tend to justify
what they do as being OK for them. They have no appreciation for the humanity of
their victims. They treat them like objects, not human beings.”
Such a person is, without question,
cruel and inhuman. But aspects of that description fit not only sexually
sadistic psychopaths; slightly modified, it also describes much “normal” sex
in our culture.
Look at mass-marketed pornography, with
estimated sales of $10 billion a year in the United States, consumed primarily
by men: It routinely depicts women as sexual objects whose sole function is to
sexually satisfy men and whose own welfare is irrelevant as long as men are
satisfied.
Consider the $52-billion-a-year
worldwide prostitution business: Though illegal in the United States (except
Nevada), that industry is grounded in the presumed right of men to gain sexual
satisfaction with no concern for the physical and emotional costs to women and
children.
Or, simply listen to what heterosexual
women so often say about their male sexual partners: He only seems interested in
his own pleasure; he isn’t emotionally engaged with me as a person; he treats
me like an object.
To point all this out is not to argue
that all men are brutish animals or sexually sadistic
psychopaths. Instead, these observations alert us to how sexual predators are
not mere aberrations in an otherwise healthy sexual culture.
In the contemporary United
States,
men generally are trained in a variety of ways to view sex as the acquisition of
pleasure by the taking of women. Sex is a sphere in which men are trained to see
themselves as naturally dominant and women as naturally passive. Women are
objectified and women’s sexuality is turned into a commodity that can be
bought and sold. Sex becomes sexy because men are dominant and women are
subordinate.
Again, the argument is not that all men
believe this or act this way, but that such ideas are prevalent in the culture,
transmitted from adult men to boys through direct instruction and modeling, by
peer pressure among boys, and in mass media. They were the lessons I learned
growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, and if anything such messages are more
common and intense today.
The predictable result of this state of
affairs is a culture in which sexualized violence, sexual violence and
violence-by-sex is so common that it should be considered normal. Not normal in
the sense of healthy or preferred, but an expression of the sexual norms of the
culture, not violations of those norms. Rape is illegal, but the sexual ethic
that underlies rape is woven into the fabric of the culture.
None of these observations excuse or
justify sexual abuse. Although some have argued that men are naturally sexually
aggressive, feminists have long held that such behaviors are learned, which is
why we need to focus not only on the individual pathologies of those who cross
the legal line and abuse, rape and kill, but on the entire culture.
Those who find this analysis outrageous should consider the results of a study of sexual assault on U.S. college campuses. Researchers found that 47 percent of the men who had raped said they expected to engage in a similar assault in the future, and 88 percent of men who reported an assault that met the legal definition of rape were adamant that they had not raped. That suggests a culture in which many men cannot see forced sex as rape, and many have no moral qualms about engaging in such sexual activity on a regular basis.
The language men use to describe sex, especially when they are outside the company of women, is revealing. In locker rooms one rarely hears men asking about the quality of their emotional and intimate experiences. Instead, the questions are: “Did you get any last night?” “Did you score?” “Did you f--- her?” Men’s discussions about sex often use the language of power -- control, domination, the taking of pleasure.
When I was a teenager, I remember boys
joking that an effective sexual strategy would be to drive a date to a remote
area, turn off the car engine, and say, “OK, f--- or fight.” I would not be
surprised to hear that boys are still regaling each other with that “joke.”
So, yes, violent sexual predators are
monsters, but not monsters from another planet. What we learn from their cases
depends on how willing we are to look not only into the face of men such as
Evonitz, but also to look into the mirror, honestly, and examine the ways we are
not only different but, to some degree, the same.
Such self-reflection, individually and
collectively, does not lead to the conclusion that all men are sexual predators
or that nothing can be done about it. Instead, it should lead us to think about
how to resist and change the system in which we live. This feminist critique is
crucial not only to the liberation of women but for the humanity of men, which
is so often deformed by patriarchy.
Solutions lie not in the
conservatives’ call for returning to some illusory “golden age” of sexual
morality, a system also built on the subordination of women. The task is to
incorporate the insights of feminism into a new sexual ethic that does not
impose traditional, restrictive sexual norms on people but helps creates a world
based on equality not dominance, in which men’s pleasure does not require
women’s subordination.
Robert Jensen, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas
at Austin, is the author of Writing
Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream and
co-author of
Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality . He can be
reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.