Because being a man is a lot of ball ache

So it has apparently been 12 long days since I last put up a blog post, 12 days in which I have achieved little more than consume a shocking number of Laugenbretzels and lay on my sofa testing out my new headphones (which are awesome in case you were wondering). And just to clarify to those of you who may be unsure, a Laugenbretzel is not to be mistaken for an ordinary pretzel. They are distinguished by their trade-mark orange/brown surface and rock salt covering. Bare this in mind on your next trip to the bakery. Diversions aside, there is one thing I achieved during this this period of apparent vegetation– thinking about the ways in which our society is hard on men. Promised you guys a follow up from my last post, so here it is. Sadly no half-naked women for you this week though, my apologies for that, though maybe in the spirit of equality I should post a man in his underwear? Anyway, this is kind of hard for me to write about given my lack of penis and consequential difference in perspective, but I’ll let you in on the main things I have thought about that I imagine are pretty sucky about being a man. Guys, feel free to message back about what you think about this, would be interesting to know! Essentially I think that one of the biggest issues that men face is the fact that they aren’t allowed to be in any way ‘female’ – whatever that means - and if they are, they get A LOT of stick for it. That sounds really vague I know, so I have a couple of examples to illustrate what I mean – the phrase ‘man up’ and issues about custodial and (for want of a better word) foetal rights. What I think is also something to mention is chubby boys, and how it is potentially harder for them than chubby girls…

So I’m going to start off with the ‘man up’ thing. Generally when someone says this to you it essentially means to stay strong despite whatever is happening, or as urban dictionary puts it “don't be a pussy”. Whilst at first it kind of seems that this is only said tongue in cheek and is mostly used to stop people whining, I think it is actually pretty damaging if you really think about it. It has the connotation of a strong man who isn’t emotionally crippled by things going on around him. Consequently, we seem to have this ill-founded notion that men should be emotionally untouchable and that is isn’t okay for them to cave under emotional pressure, which is reproduced by telling boys to man up. Just think about what your reaction might be if you walked down a street and saw a man crying. If you saw a women crying, I don’t think you would be that taken aback, or at least I wouldn’t, but a man might throw you. And it really shouldn’t. And what comes with this idea that being strong and manly is the idea that anything else is not – hence being a pussy – and that therefore, as a man, you shouldn’t be any other way. I’m not even going to get into the issues I have with the phrase being a ‘pussy’, but what it serves to show is that men aren’t really allowed to feel what they want when they want, unlike women (though we are painted as being hysterical because of this, which I also object too).  And I really feel that it is damaging for young boys to be told to man up and shut down their emotions, because often it’s better to let yourself break down every now and then rather than keep it all bottled up. So just a note to my future boyfriend/husband/son/every man I ever encounter, it’s alright to cry, or be keen, or anxious, or whatever it is you are feeling but feel like you shouldn’t. I would rather you just talked about it rather than a) making yourself feel bad keeping it in and b) keeping me guessing and obsessing about all the bad things you could be thinking. It’s really win-win for everyone to just be honest all the time and act on how you feel. Unless you are a serial killer. Maybe save that one for the confines of a counsellor’s office.

Another thing that I guess is really hard about being a guy is the little say you get in pregnancies. Although I like to think that when a girl gets pregnant – whether intentionally or not – that both parties get a say in what happens next, I’m not convinced that this is always the case. Sure it must be difficult for a girl when the man wants the baby to be aborted and she doesn’t, but she can ultimately make that choice to have the child or not. But for men that choice isn’t really there. They can walk away from a pregnancy at will and come back if and when they please, but they can’t have a baby if the girl isn’t willing. And I think it is tragic that there are cases when girls abort children that men want to have. And because it isn’t their body there is ultimately nothing they can do to stop this. I don’t really see that there is any solution to this, but that doesn’t make it any less shit for guys to have to deal with. And I really don’t envy them being in, or having the potential to be in this situation.

This ties in with custody rights and stay at home dads, which are also areas where women win hands down. When a marriage goes wrong – regardless of what cause – in most cases where there are children involved the mother will get custody. The following graph shows that pretty clearly:

Whilst in some cases there may be clear benefits for children to live with their mother, I am sure that in more than 17% of cases there is good cause to grant to father custody, or at least joint custody. I appreciate that it also isn’t great to ferry kids around between two parents all the time to split their time literally 50/50 between the parents, but it doesn’t seem right that women are more likely to get custody based on the old-fashioned notion of women as childcare and men as bread-winners. This also definitely ties in with the fact that it is much less socially acceptable for men to be stay at home dads. Men get seen as lazy, whipped, or weird for wanting to do this. But maybe they are actually just decent and want to spend time with their children, and I really think we should judge them less for this. When I’m older I want to stay at home with my children and I hope my husband does too. And while yes, we will probably fight horrifically about this, I wouldn’t change this for anything. Maybe I should also mention here that there may still be something to be said against wage differentials making it economically feasible for women to stay at home. But generally I think that if men want to have a fair share of their kids’ time society really shouldn’t put them down for this.

And my last point, which fits in less with the rest but is a point nonetheless is about how it might be harder to be a chubby boy than a chubby girl. Firstly, if you are a girl and are chubby, you’re probably gonna have either boobs or a bum (or both), which is probably a good thing. Secondly, there are some clothes out there designed to be flattering for your slightly-bigger-than-average physique, so you can still go out feeling like you look quite nice. But for the chubby guy, life isn’t that sweet. If you think about the average view of a man, he is somewhere between skinny and toned, and probably plays some kind of sport because he’s a man and does manly things. But the chubby guy probably doesn’t play sport, and unlike the chubby girl, he can’t use his clothing to make his bodily abundance into something attractive. He somehow becomes less of a man, which is ironic given the fact that there is well, more of him. Whilst he can just go to the gym to fix this situation, he will then be laughed at for being the fat guy at the gym (though I feel this is the best place for him). So pretty much it probably sucks to be a chubby boy. But just to note, this isn’t me saying I judge chubby boys – especially as I think what I count as chubby is pretty lenient – it’s just me appreciating that it’s probably pretty shit. Girls are allowed to be squishy (or so I tell myself), guys, not so much.

So yeah, that was just a few things I can imagine being less than optimal about being a guy. Though plus side, some men can grow cool beards and then stroke them when thinking to look like they are all deep and philosophical. And you don’t have to sit on public toilet seats to pee. There are pros and cons to everything I guess. And here’s something to break the silence: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh6Pw9eVAk8

Porn, slut shaming and Robyn Lawley; because being an acceptable girl in the 21st century is bordering on impossible...

It might just be because of Erdbeerwoche, but this week I have literally been experiencing internals torrents of rage because of the way society is reproducing notions of how the female body should look and how women should behave. While I don’t doubt that male self-confidence is ground down through similar processes and that they too experience injustices on a gross scale, I can’t really comment on this as I don’t know what it’s like. So instead I am using this blog post to explain why it’s so hard to be a girl, and why these difficulties are entirely socially constructed and ridiculous. I was going out the other night and having a ‘fat day’ and couldn’t pick what to wear because I decided that everything made me look horrid. And then I was overwhelmed by how ridiculous I was being and how there is actually nothing wrong with me. Not even just nothing wrong, but things that are entirely right. And I only thought I was having a particularly porky day was because every day I am fed images and notions of how I should be, and more importantly how I shouldn’t. So when I say it’s painful to be a girl, I don’t mean this as a way of venting about the ongoing torment of menstrual cramps, which admittedly do suck. I mean the emotional stress that girls of younger and younger ages are experiencing because they fail to fit into the box that society says they should. There are three things that I think really epitomise the issues surrounding female body image and the expectations society makes of women, which are porn, slut shaming (or a general over-attention to women’s sexual activity) and plus size models.

I’m not anti-porn per say, if you want to spend your getting off on watching other people go at it, that’s your business (as long as it’s not done in a peeping Tom sense), I mean the word voyeurism was clearly invented because enough people did this to need to name it. What I do have an issue with though is the kind of porn I think a lot of people are watching, and how this is altering the notion of what kind of sexual activity is to be expected, and the impact it is having on children. I was recently watching a BBC documentary about this exact idea, and unsurprisingly, for a lot of kids porn is the first way they learn about sex. Even if it isn’t sex education in schools isn’t comprehensive enough to provide an actual understanding of sexual activities for children to learn that porn isn’t necessarily the real deal. I remember when I had it in school there was some laughable animation with a man standing up in a bath with a cartoon-like beer belly hanging over his man parts, which in due course did in fact find a vagina after the scientific discussion of the process of arousal had occurred. Other than that we weren’t really told much. So of course kids are going to look to porn for answers. And when they do they are often given a really warped display of what sex is like. I am trying not to generalise all porn, but often it shows girls with modified bodies being dominated by men. And often it seems to me that the aim isn’t the equal sexual gratification of men and women, but rather that the purpose of the encounter is for the women to serve the men. I don’t even know where to begin with how much I disagree with this portrayal of sex, as it should always be a two-sided thing (or if it’s an orgy satisfy all involved parties).  I think this is particularly damaging as girls and boys are growing up and thinking that the things they see in porn are the things that they need to do to satisfy someone sexually, which isn’t always right, and certainly not a good reason to do them.

I think another major problem I have with porn is that it is often relatively violent towards women, or violating to say the least. I have never seen anything hard core, but someone told me that there is porn where girls are knocked out and then men essentially rape them. And people are watching this with the sole purpose of getting some kind of sexual enjoyment out of it. That bothers me. I know that if you imagine any kind of strange sexual fantasy, there are probably either people out there doing it, wanting to do it or porn made of it. But I worry that the instant accessibility of such material might be really damaging to the children who get introduced to sex through it. In the same documentary there was also an interview with a surgeon who said that girls as young as 13 I think it was were going to her to ask to have labiaplasty despite the fact that they were not even fully grown yet. This is medically dangerous, not to mention totally unnecessary.  Porn was just teaching them that apparently their vaginas aren’t aesthetically pleasing enough, which is a ridiculous thing to be worried about. I’m sure that when I was 13 I had better things to think about. Like how beautiful I thought Mikey Way was. And it’s this image of the female body that is really damaging to young girls as boys start to expect it, and girls therefore try and force their bodies into this mould.

The idea of society reproducing ideals feeds into my next issue – slut shaming and the sexual expectation of women. So my issue with slut shaming – other than the fact that it exists – is the fact that it only exists for women. I can think of a fair few words that denote a woman who is sexually promiscuous, with slut just being the most obvious choice. But when I try and do this for men, all I come up with is player, which isn’t necessarily a negative characteristic, whereas being slutty certainly is. And as I get older, I am failing to understand what being slutty actually means. As far as I understand it, it is used for girls who sleep with a lot of people. I just looked it up on urban dictionary and it says “a woman with the morals of a man”. So if this is bad for women, who are only mirroring the behaviour of men, is it not also equally as bad for guys to sleep with a lot of people (because it was their moral in the first place)? I know the answer most people would give to this. It is ridiculous. In my previous blog post about things we shouldn’t have to justify to others I explicitly say I think sexual activity is just entirely up to the free will of the individual and not to be judged. Even in terms of sexual non-activity. It’s pretty shitty that as a girl if you have sex you are a slut, and if you don’t you are a cock tease and/or frigid. Apparently there isn’t really an appropriate way for us to engage in sexual activity. Men simultaneously expect us to give it to them and be virtuous. Go figure.

So my last point is about the idea of plus size models, which is quite frankly a bullshit idea. Robyn Lawley is all the rage at the moment in the plus size model world, and quite rightly so because she is beautiful (and of course because her name is awesome). Her tumbler is also the epitome of food porn and worth checking out. I have a big fat lesbian crush on her and no shame in admitting it. But I don’t understand why she is labelled plus sized. She is only a size 12 and like 6ft or something. So definitely on the slimmer side of slim. Considering that the average dress size for women in the UK is a 16, it seems absurd to have plus size models who are smaller than the average person that they are advertising clothes for. In addition to this, I don’t understand why it made the news that Debenhams were introducing ‘real size mannequins’. Surely mannequins should be a reflection of the customers they are targeting. If I can’t imagine myself wearing it after seeing it on the mannequin capitalism is doing something wrong. Why the accurate reflection of what people look like in clothes is news worthy is beyond my comprehension. It worries me that because of this women and young girls feel the need to constantly obsess about their weight and be thinner. Unless you are damaging your health significantly by being morbidly obese, you’re probably alright as you are.  

Robyn Lawley in all her plus-sized glory. 

And on that note before I just get more angry about all of this I am going to stop. Essentially what the point is is that as a girl nowadays society is probably being fed ideas that you are doing something wrong and these ideas are most likely to be ill-founded and stupid. So we should stop paying so much attention to them.  I’m going to follow this up next time with some things that society does that damages men, so come back later if you like to hear me rant. Or, maybe come back just to check out some good music as I always sign off with a link to a song. Here is one for today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_h0hlCktyA

The original is great, and so is the remix.