Try changing the img tag to say <img width="600" …
Is it ok that the author of this comic is a man? Is he entitled to get upset on behalf of women?
Thanks, Carl! And men are definitely entitled to get upset on behalf of women. The more the merrier.
If it were an issue of equal pay or some other obvious evil, I would not only agree that men can get upset on behalf of women, I would say they should get upset!
In this case, however, I feel much more hesitant. How do I know that there aren’t some women who want porn without the sex? Obviously the suggestion that no women want sex in their porn is absurd, but isn’t the opposite suggestion, that all women want sex in their porn, also absurd? Because of these problems, I am hesitant to offer much more than the observation that calling something “porn for women” creates a monolithic group where none actually exists. Beyond that, I will defer to others who are in a better position to know.
Yeah, but each individual woman is in only a slightly better position to generalise than you are. She has introspection about the situation, which you don’t. But other than that? Well, she can talk to a few other women. But you can do that too.
that’s fabulous.
Thanks! That Porn for Women stuff bothers me so much for what it says about women’s desires.
Haha, yes! I have spluttered incoherently about why I thought the book was stupid before. (In fairness to me, I was not the one who brought it up in the conversation.)
For those women who prefer their porn without sex, I recommend this. (Not exactly safe for work, but I don’t think it contains any traumatizing depictions of housework either.)
Carl: well, Randall Munroe (the author) also coined Rule 34, so he is certainly aware that someone must get off on it.
The idea that the pictures in the book are porn is a joke, isn’t it?
I hate to think about laundry, cleaning and so on, and I do find the idea of a man doing that stuff pretty attractive.
Apparently, men who work in homes doing repairs, rennovations and so on can find their work turns a lot of women on. (I once saw Oprah remark about those tool belts, which are pretty erotic, her audience seemed to agree.)
I think the little exchange between Carl and Jender above is really instructive. It is fascinating how often people assume that individual women somehow have substantially more exposure to or insight into ‘all women’ than do individual men, even in the midst of critiquing universalizing assumptions about monolithic groups.
And for the record, I like my porn to include fucking and can’t imagine finding someone doing housework any kind of turn-on in any form. (Except for cooking, maybe…) So there, all y’all, regardless of your own gender, just increased your inductive base by one. :-)
I don’t think that individual women have access to what all women think (and I don’t think I was implying they did), but I do think there’s something to be said for having first hand knowledge of your own feelings. Maybe this is a bad case, because it’s pretty obvious that many women want sex in their porn, but I’m thinking of things like the Supreme Court case where the male judge ruled that strip searching a teenage girl wouldn’t necessarily be so humiliating as to violate her rights. In a case like that we can agree not all teenage girls will have the same reaction, but at the same time, it seems like a female judge may have a better sense for whether or not the strip search crosses a constitutional line because she has a better inductive basis to start with.
Hmm. So if a female judge feels, first-personally, like she wouldn’t find it humiliating, would that be a good basis for a decision? I don’t think so. One would need to take a broader view of the social meaning of the search, past precedents, the context in which it is occurring, etc – all things a man could do too. Not trying to reject all versions of standpoint epistemology or the value of a woman’s perspective on women’s issues by any means, but I don’t think generalizing from one’s own first-person feelings is the way to go here either.
For those who aren’t familiar with xkcd.com, the source of this strip, the author always puts a follow-up comment in the ALT text. You can see it by holding your mouse pointer above the strip on the original page.
In this case, the comment is:
“Yes, there are a lot of longing looks across the bridge of Galactica first, but that’s beside the point!”
…which changes the tone of the thing somewhat, though the basic point still stands.
Hilarious, J-Bro! Thanks for the tip.
Yes, I’m sure it is hilarious. Could someone explain why? :(
Let me point another point more strongly than I did before: I don’t think the book is meant to be porn. It’s title is a gross exaggeration that makes fun with (and not at) the idea that a lot of women find helpfulness in men sexy.
JJ, the books seem like an instance of the trope that portrays non-sexual liking in women as sexual liking. (I don’t think the trope shows up as much with men, but correct me if I’m wrong.) It’s also used in TV commercials where women eat chocolate-flavored things and moan ecstatically. This irritates me; if people want to say that somebody likes something nice but sort of pedestrian, like tasty chocolate or men doing chores, why do they have to make it sexual? Especially given that (in the US at least) people can’t have enough of an honest conversation about sex to even educate their kids about it properly.
If the book were actual porn, I wouldn’t buy it, but I wouldn’t have as much of an overriding desire to see it mocked. If it were called “Good-Looking Men Doing Chores” (ignoring the fact that it would sell about two copies with that title), I’d still pass it up for a better coffee table book like “Frogs of the African Rainforest” or “Puppies in Silly Hats”, but I also would feel less of an urge to mock it.
That’s why I found the comic funny: it mocked something I thought was ripe for mocking. Probably this explanation will not cause you to find it funny (I have excellent inductive evidence about explanations of jokes), but maybe it helps other people’s reactions make more sense?
Also: The ALT text refers to the phenomenon of slash fiction, written by science fiction fans (mostly but not exclusively female fans). It uses characters from some science fiction show (traditionally, Kirk and Spock; in this case, some unspecified characters from Battlestar Galactica) and tells an erotic story about them. (OK, I have now satisfies my explaining quota for the entire week.)
I know I’m not the only woman who finds help from men potentially erotic. E.g., ask me over for a philosophy discussion and carefully prepare a nice tea and, other things being equal , his attractiveness goes up [true story, long ago, but possibly why I married a Brit; at least they can make one thing in the kitchen}. This in fact is standard advice in the sorts of things one reads in the dentist’s office (e.g., Ladies Home Companion’s “Can this marriage be saved?”). So when my best woman friend gave me a copy for my birthday, we howled, and agreed that was certainly a good way to one’s heart.
I don’t really want to argue it, but I’m having trouble getting my head around the idea that there are non-sexual things we’re wrongly portrayed as taking sexual pleasure in. A friend of mine once said she has had orgasms to thoughts of chocolate. And there are many contexts in which “ecstasy” is used seriously that are not overtly sexual.
JJ, fair enough. I don’t really think that it’s wrong to enjoy the book, or that everybody ought to enjoy at the comic. The comic resonated with me much more than the book did, but I’m not convinced that the book is sexist or morally bad. Really, it gave me some kind of aesthetic ick response whose reasons I haven’t articulated successfully (but that I’m not rejecting as categorically wrong unless debunking evidence comes in).
You’re right that it’s not the sort of thing to pick a fight about.
A previous post about British sailors discussing the duties they performed to help care for their kids got me pretty hot. NOT those specific *GASP!!* married sailors, but British sailors in the abstract…with the tatoos and the…sigh…cute accent… AND good with kids!! My dream dude doesn’t have to be fucking anybody as long as his biceps are bulging.
Come to think of it, my blognamesake (whose geek-girl fans coined the term ALT fiction–homoerotic stuff for women rather than gay men) looked pretty hot carrying her dead-ungulate-about-to-become-dinner home on her back. The attraction isn’t about sexualizing pedestrian things, it’s about watching somebody using his or her power to help rather than coerce or control. The more powerful the somebody, the sweeter their sincerity.
It looks to me like the author of the book is spoofing the idea that men can become women’s “bitches” with a reinforcement schedule that they think “should” but doesn’t always include sexual favours. Rachael, is that what’s making you feel intuitively icky, but uncertain about whether or not icky is warranted?
Or is the “ick” more like a knee-jerk response to being on the receiving end of one of those nasty dessert-time in a restaurant eye-fucks that happily married women don’t notice? I mean, is it about obnoxious penis creatures (ONLY the obnoxious ones) thinking women are just such a bunch of trollops that they all get off on root canal, so it’s their right and their duty to be creepy and believe they’re sexy while they’re creeping out?
“Penis creatures”?
I wonder if part of the negative reaction some people are having is caused by the feeling that the book is trading on the thought that women don’t like to have sex, or at least aren’t supposed to like to have sex, or something to that effect — so that the “right” fantasy for a “good girl” to have is one in which men do things for her that are non-sexual? In other words, maybe the book’s intended target audience consists of women who supposedly fit that cultural norm? And since the norm is obnoxious, the book is obnoxious somewhat as well? I am betting that is what the author of the comic is reacting to — and hence the way it ends, which is an explicit rejection of it. hope that makes sense.
Did I mix my modifiers again? I was trying to buffer that pejorative with the parenthecized “ONLY the obnoxious ones” meaning that, in my opinion, men who use those things to belittle and control (again, only the obnoxious men, not all men) deserve an appropriate nickname; i.e. d*ck, pri*ck, d*ckwad, and yes, penis creature. Call that my version of the baboon eyebrow flash.
BTW, I’m not one of those women that takes offense at the c-word being used in reference to my own behaviour, if it’s warranted. The word “pussy” on the other hand, is “fightin’ words”.
Get as Freudian, Foucaultean or whatever as you want with that. In the meantime, I’m going to dig some of my old textbooks out of storage so I can start googling and properly sourcing some of the statements you bloggers keep calling me on. My slang-ified “eye-fuck” comment did actually come from a flipped-over spin on a legitimate but half remembered philosopher’s essay about how attraction begins with eye contact.
JJ seems to have some serious experience with mate selection research. Maybe she’ll be so kind as to offer up the philospher’s name before this post “dies”, and I’m here after 3 weeks of unpacking saying “um… I found it… hello? anybody?” to internet silence.
Oops! #23 was an explanation for J-Bro. I was still revising that potentially offensive statement when mm’s comment went up. Funny how I always forget to consider that stereotype of women that mm mentioned, even though I know it’s out there. MAN, do I ever know it’s out there. Don’t get me started AGAIN on the way some people (Penis creatures AND pussies!) react to unmarried women! I find “Queen Bees&Wannabes” / “Harper Valley PTA” politics so much more annoying than the things that obnoxious men do when their Madonna/Whore stereotypes serve as an excuse for petty behaviour.
Mm may be right. The thought that “good girls” are only allowed to enjoy non-sexual things is pretty “icky”.
Xena, I think mm has successfully articulated something about my reaction; I worry that the joke is that these things are what women like instead of liking sex. (At least, that’s what I get by introspection, but you should probably take everybody’s introspection with a grain of salt.)
Incidentally, I agree that helpfulness is an attractive quality in anybody (men included), and I don’t think that’s why the book leaves me cold. It’s more that the helpfulness is aimed at Generic Woman. People who want to sell me crap I don’t need, usually do better with the Generic Geek profile.
I get it now, Rachael. It’s more like my immediate reaction to those obnoxious scorned mop falling in love with the bowling ball in the dark closet commercials. On the surface, it’s kinda cute and funny, but when you really start to peel back all the layers of stereotypes in the series of ads, they’re pretty annoying. We need to anthropomorphize and create fairy tale endings for our tools to create more excuses to throw our commodity fettish objects into landfill to what purpose? Because the ads are cute and “generic woman” will love them? Bah…
I get a little annoyed with spamocracy deciding my preferences too. I’m still trying to convince the student council members that keep sending me surveys that an $8 bowl of fried lettuce with 5 tiny chunks of tofu on white rice is NOT a healthy vegan meal. Give those poor skinny idealists some whole grains, lentils and broccoli for what they’re paying already.
But I see why you said it’s not worth picking a fight. Getting all Orwellian on some misguided advertiser whose original intention was probably satire anyway would make me sound like some Monty Python skit. (if I don’t already ;-)) “Halp! I’m being oppressed…”
[…] people don’t like them at all. On a website called Feminist Philosophers a cartoon depicts a woman saying, “The idea seems to be that my fantasies, like the rest of my […]
[…] people don’t like them at all. On a website called Feminist Philosophers a cartoon depicts a woman saying, “The idea seems to be that my fantasies, like the rest of my […]
Feminist Philosophers 
Try changing the img tag to say <img width="600" …
Is it ok that the author of this comic is a man? Is he entitled to get upset on behalf of women?
Thanks, Carl! And men are definitely entitled to get upset on behalf of women. The more the merrier.
If it were an issue of equal pay or some other obvious evil, I would not only agree that men can get upset on behalf of women, I would say they should get upset!
In this case, however, I feel much more hesitant. How do I know that there aren’t some women who want porn without the sex? Obviously the suggestion that no women want sex in their porn is absurd, but isn’t the opposite suggestion, that all women want sex in their porn, also absurd? Because of these problems, I am hesitant to offer much more than the observation that calling something “porn for women” creates a monolithic group where none actually exists. Beyond that, I will defer to others who are in a better position to know.
Yeah, but each individual woman is in only a slightly better position to generalise than you are. She has introspection about the situation, which you don’t. But other than that? Well, she can talk to a few other women. But you can do that too.
that’s fabulous.
Thanks! That Porn for Women stuff bothers me so much for what it says about women’s desires.
Haha, yes! I have spluttered incoherently about why I thought the book was stupid before. (In fairness to me, I was not the one who brought it up in the conversation.)
For those women who prefer their porn without sex, I recommend this. (Not exactly safe for work, but I don’t think it contains any traumatizing depictions of housework either.)
Carl: well, Randall Munroe (the author) also coined Rule 34, so he is certainly aware that someone must get off on it.
The idea that the pictures in the book are porn is a joke, isn’t it?
I hate to think about laundry, cleaning and so on, and I do find the idea of a man doing that stuff pretty attractive.
Apparently, men who work in homes doing repairs, rennovations and so on can find their work turns a lot of women on. (I once saw Oprah remark about those tool belts, which are pretty erotic, her audience seemed to agree.)
I think the little exchange between Carl and Jender above is really instructive. It is fascinating how often people assume that individual women somehow have substantially more exposure to or insight into ‘all women’ than do individual men, even in the midst of critiquing universalizing assumptions about monolithic groups.
And for the record, I like my porn to include fucking and can’t imagine finding someone doing housework any kind of turn-on in any form. (Except for cooking, maybe…) So there, all y’all, regardless of your own gender, just increased your inductive base by one. :-)
I don’t think that individual women have access to what all women think (and I don’t think I was implying they did), but I do think there’s something to be said for having first hand knowledge of your own feelings. Maybe this is a bad case, because it’s pretty obvious that many women want sex in their porn, but I’m thinking of things like the Supreme Court case where the male judge ruled that strip searching a teenage girl wouldn’t necessarily be so humiliating as to violate her rights. In a case like that we can agree not all teenage girls will have the same reaction, but at the same time, it seems like a female judge may have a better sense for whether or not the strip search crosses a constitutional line because she has a better inductive basis to start with.
Hmm. So if a female judge feels, first-personally, like she wouldn’t find it humiliating, would that be a good basis for a decision? I don’t think so. One would need to take a broader view of the social meaning of the search, past precedents, the context in which it is occurring, etc – all things a man could do too. Not trying to reject all versions of standpoint epistemology or the value of a woman’s perspective on women’s issues by any means, but I don’t think generalizing from one’s own first-person feelings is the way to go here either.
For those who aren’t familiar with xkcd.com, the source of this strip, the author always puts a follow-up comment in the ALT text. You can see it by holding your mouse pointer above the strip on the original page.
In this case, the comment is:
“Yes, there are a lot of longing looks across the bridge of Galactica first, but that’s beside the point!”
…which changes the tone of the thing somewhat, though the basic point still stands.
Hilarious, J-Bro! Thanks for the tip.
Yes, I’m sure it is hilarious. Could someone explain why? :(
Let me point another point more strongly than I did before: I don’t think the book is meant to be porn. It’s title is a gross exaggeration that makes fun with (and not at) the idea that a lot of women find helpfulness in men sexy.
JJ, the books seem like an instance of the trope that portrays non-sexual liking in women as sexual liking. (I don’t think the trope shows up as much with men, but correct me if I’m wrong.) It’s also used in TV commercials where women eat chocolate-flavored things and moan ecstatically. This irritates me; if people want to say that somebody likes something nice but sort of pedestrian, like tasty chocolate or men doing chores, why do they have to make it sexual? Especially given that (in the US at least) people can’t have enough of an honest conversation about sex to even educate their kids about it properly.
If the book were actual porn, I wouldn’t buy it, but I wouldn’t have as much of an overriding desire to see it mocked. If it were called “Good-Looking Men Doing Chores” (ignoring the fact that it would sell about two copies with that title), I’d still pass it up for a better coffee table book like “Frogs of the African Rainforest” or “Puppies in Silly Hats”, but I also would feel less of an urge to mock it.
That’s why I found the comic funny: it mocked something I thought was ripe for mocking. Probably this explanation will not cause you to find it funny (I have excellent inductive evidence about explanations of jokes), but maybe it helps other people’s reactions make more sense?
Also: The ALT text refers to the phenomenon of slash fiction, written by science fiction fans (mostly but not exclusively female fans). It uses characters from some science fiction show (traditionally, Kirk and Spock; in this case, some unspecified characters from Battlestar Galactica) and tells an erotic story about them. (OK, I have now satisfies my explaining quota for the entire week.)
I know I’m not the only woman who finds help from men potentially erotic. E.g., ask me over for a philosophy discussion and carefully prepare a nice tea and, other things being equal , his attractiveness goes up [true story, long ago, but possibly why I married a Brit; at least they can make one thing in the kitchen}. This in fact is standard advice in the sorts of things one reads in the dentist’s office (e.g., Ladies Home Companion’s “Can this marriage be saved?”). So when my best woman friend gave me a copy for my birthday, we howled, and agreed that was certainly a good way to one’s heart.
I don’t really want to argue it, but I’m having trouble getting my head around the idea that there are non-sexual things we’re wrongly portrayed as taking sexual pleasure in. A friend of mine once said she has had orgasms to thoughts of chocolate. And there are many contexts in which “ecstasy” is used seriously that are not overtly sexual.
JJ, fair enough. I don’t really think that it’s wrong to enjoy the book, or that everybody ought to enjoy at the comic. The comic resonated with me much more than the book did, but I’m not convinced that the book is sexist or morally bad. Really, it gave me some kind of aesthetic ick response whose reasons I haven’t articulated successfully (but that I’m not rejecting as categorically wrong unless debunking evidence comes in).
You’re right that it’s not the sort of thing to pick a fight about.
A previous post about British sailors discussing the duties they performed to help care for their kids got me pretty hot. NOT those specific *GASP!!* married sailors, but British sailors in the abstract…with the tatoos and the…sigh…cute accent… AND good with kids!! My dream dude doesn’t have to be fucking anybody as long as his biceps are bulging.
Come to think of it, my blognamesake (whose geek-girl fans coined the term ALT fiction–homoerotic stuff for women rather than gay men) looked pretty hot carrying her dead-ungulate-about-to-become-dinner home on her back. The attraction isn’t about sexualizing pedestrian things, it’s about watching somebody using his or her power to help rather than coerce or control. The more powerful the somebody, the sweeter their sincerity.
It looks to me like the author of the book is spoofing the idea that men can become women’s “bitches” with a reinforcement schedule that they think “should” but doesn’t always include sexual favours. Rachael, is that what’s making you feel intuitively icky, but uncertain about whether or not icky is warranted?
Or is the “ick” more like a knee-jerk response to being on the receiving end of one of those nasty dessert-time in a restaurant eye-fucks that happily married women don’t notice? I mean, is it about obnoxious penis creatures (ONLY the obnoxious ones) thinking women are just such a bunch of trollops that they all get off on root canal, so it’s their right and their duty to be creepy and believe they’re sexy while they’re creeping out?
“Penis creatures”?
I wonder if part of the negative reaction some people are having is caused by the feeling that the book is trading on the thought that women don’t like to have sex, or at least aren’t supposed to like to have sex, or something to that effect — so that the “right” fantasy for a “good girl” to have is one in which men do things for her that are non-sexual? In other words, maybe the book’s intended target audience consists of women who supposedly fit that cultural norm? And since the norm is obnoxious, the book is obnoxious somewhat as well? I am betting that is what the author of the comic is reacting to — and hence the way it ends, which is an explicit rejection of it. hope that makes sense.
Did I mix my modifiers again? I was trying to buffer that pejorative with the parenthecized “ONLY the obnoxious ones” meaning that, in my opinion, men who use those things to belittle and control (again, only the obnoxious men, not all men) deserve an appropriate nickname; i.e. d*ck, pri*ck, d*ckwad, and yes, penis creature. Call that my version of the baboon eyebrow flash.
BTW, I’m not one of those women that takes offense at the c-word being used in reference to my own behaviour, if it’s warranted. The word “pussy” on the other hand, is “fightin’ words”.
Get as Freudian, Foucaultean or whatever as you want with that. In the meantime, I’m going to dig some of my old textbooks out of storage so I can start googling and properly sourcing some of the statements you bloggers keep calling me on. My slang-ified “eye-fuck” comment did actually come from a flipped-over spin on a legitimate but half remembered philosopher’s essay about how attraction begins with eye contact.
JJ seems to have some serious experience with mate selection research. Maybe she’ll be so kind as to offer up the philospher’s name before this post “dies”, and I’m here after 3 weeks of unpacking saying “um… I found it… hello? anybody?” to internet silence.
Oops! #23 was an explanation for J-Bro. I was still revising that potentially offensive statement when mm’s comment went up. Funny how I always forget to consider that stereotype of women that mm mentioned, even though I know it’s out there. MAN, do I ever know it’s out there. Don’t get me started AGAIN on the way some people (Penis creatures AND pussies!) react to unmarried women! I find “Queen Bees&Wannabes” / “Harper Valley PTA” politics so much more annoying than the things that obnoxious men do when their Madonna/Whore stereotypes serve as an excuse for petty behaviour.
Mm may be right. The thought that “good girls” are only allowed to enjoy non-sexual things is pretty “icky”.
Xena, I think mm has successfully articulated something about my reaction; I worry that the joke is that these things are what women like instead of liking sex. (At least, that’s what I get by introspection, but you should probably take everybody’s introspection with a grain of salt.)
Incidentally, I agree that helpfulness is an attractive quality in anybody (men included), and I don’t think that’s why the book leaves me cold. It’s more that the helpfulness is aimed at Generic Woman. People who want to sell me crap I don’t need, usually do better with the Generic Geek profile.
I get it now, Rachael. It’s more like my immediate reaction to those obnoxious scorned mop falling in love with the bowling ball in the dark closet commercials. On the surface, it’s kinda cute and funny, but when you really start to peel back all the layers of stereotypes in the series of ads, they’re pretty annoying. We need to anthropomorphize and create fairy tale endings for our tools to create more excuses to throw our commodity fettish objects into landfill to what purpose? Because the ads are cute and “generic woman” will love them? Bah…
I get a little annoyed with spamocracy deciding my preferences too. I’m still trying to convince the student council members that keep sending me surveys that an $8 bowl of fried lettuce with 5 tiny chunks of tofu on white rice is NOT a healthy vegan meal. Give those poor skinny idealists some whole grains, lentils and broccoli for what they’re paying already.
But I see why you said it’s not worth picking a fight. Getting all Orwellian on some misguided advertiser whose original intention was probably satire anyway would make me sound like some Monty Python skit. (if I don’t already ;-)) “Halp! I’m being oppressed…”
[…] people don’t like them at all. On a website called Feminist Philosophers a cartoon depicts a woman saying, “The idea seems to be that my fantasies, like the rest of my […]
[…] people don’t like them at all. On a website called Feminist Philosophers a cartoon depicts a woman saying, “The idea seems to be that my fantasies, like the rest of my […]