Installment 7. If Men Have All the Power How Come Women Make the Rules?
Share this compelling intro to the Men's Movement with your skeptical friends.
Women’s “High-Volume Sexual Harassment”
If a person brings a boom box to a public street corner and plays a CD of carefully selected dance music at high volume, could he rightfully say, “Hey, stop dancing. I’m not playing this for you”?
If a businessperson advertises under “Sex” in the Yellow Pages and prints the phrase “Sexy! Sexy! Sexy!” on her business cards, should she be surprised or upset when customers call her with sex on their minds?
“If we want society to stop equating our worth with our beauty, we need to make sure that we stop it ourselves.”
— Karen Lehrman in her 1997 book The Lipstick Proviso
Women need to admit their disingenuousness when they read magazines that tell them how to be sexy, buy the products that promise them they’ll be sexy, use those products as directed, and then object to “unwanted” male attention by saying, “I’m not doing anything. It’s your problem if you can’t keep your eyes to yourself.”
A product whose sole purpose is to create the illusion of erect nipples on the woman who is wearing them markets itself with a painfully phony alibi. It supposedly allows women to be “playful and perky.” The product’s website, however, boasts that when he first saw a woman wearing the product “a handsome Argentine stranger purred, ‘For you, my paycheck… for the rest of my life.’”
Criticizing women’s high-volume sexual harassment does not mean women should stop being alluring to their lovers. The key issue is who else is around.
If, as they claim, women dress to impress other women, not to attract men, are we supposed to believe they get breast implants to impress other women too?
To the extent that some women really do dress sexily to impress other women, the selfishness and thoughtlessness are only worse. The acid test for a heterosexual woman’s sexiness—the power she is supposedly demonstrating to impress other women—is how many men she can attract or turn the heads of. Men are mere baubles, mere tally marks on a scorecard, much like the notches on the bedpost of the insincere and manipulative man whose exploitive behavior we readily see and rightly condemn, especially when his primary goal is to boast of his sexual prowess to his friends in the locker room.
It’s funny we don’t talk much about the Female Ego, isn’t it?
Women say they wear jewelry and makeup to “please” men. Yeah, and a fisherman puts a spinner on his hook to “please” the fish.
“The mating game is powerful and primitive. There’s a great deal that both sexes need to learn about that. But unfortunately right now all the blame is on men. Sexual harassment is an issue that has been controlled by women.”
— Helen Fisher, Ph.D., anthropologist and author of Anatomy of Love in Good Will Toward Men by Jack Kammer
Sexual harassment forces people to deal with questions of sex when they don’t want to. The distraction caused by women’s high-volume sexual harassment is usually at least as great as that caused by men whose sexual harassment is typically directed toward only one person.
Men’s typical style of sexual harassment is like a pushy salesman who won’t take no for an answer. Women’s high-volume sexual harassment is like a junk mailer who gives you no way to get off the mailing list.
Do you ever hear a muffler-pulsing muscle car throbbing up the street and think to yourself “I’m not even going to look at that car. I don’t want to encourage that rude, self-centered look-at-me noise by giving the driver the attention he so obviously wants”? I do. And I often think very much the same thing when I see a loudly decked-out, sexed-up, cleavage-popping woman walking my way. Her noise isn’t the kind that you hear; it’s the kind that you feel. And that only makes it worse. What would happen if millions of men and boys made a point of yawning when aggressively sex-pot women and girls walked their way?
We know food that is appealing but not good for us is aptly called Junk Food. We need to develop a concept of Junk Women.