hierarchies

Why Do Men "Do It?"

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Women and men have to ask themselves a creepy question: WHY  do men like Louis CK and Harvey Weinstein force women to watch them while they masturbate? It isn't just powerful men who do this.  When I was an A&W carhop decades ago, we had a weasly old man do the same when we girls delivered his tray of food and a mug of root beer. There isn't a woman alive who hasn't encountered or had a friend who encountered bizarre sexual threats.

Sex therapist Alexandra Katehakis, told Angelina Chapin at The Cut (NY Magazine), it's "sexualized hostility," or "eroticized rage." Call it a need to frighten women to put them in their place. Most tellingly she claims, "They sexualize their emotions, because they don't know any other way of comporting themselves." Really? Why is that?

David Brooks, the conservative columnist that PBS newsie Charlie Rose called on for expertise on this question (thanks, Charlie! We noticed the white rapper you featured on that show too) says Louis CK, Weinstein, Trump and Moore are the result of the country's "siege mentality. " Such men don't feel empathy. They cannot put themselves in the victim's shoes and understand their feelings.

Sexual predation happens to men too—as Kevin Spacey of House of Cards fame showed us. But it is women most often viewed as sexualized objects. All this penis-flouting is a way of keeping hierarchies in place via "mounting," symbolically or literally, something historian Robert McElvaine talks about in his groundbreaking book Eve's Seed. Who's on top?

An even bigger question encircles us: aren't more pleasurable positions possible for all of us?

Read Angelina Chapin's article here:  https://tinyurl.com/ybjvbfe2

See David Brooks comments here: https://charlierose.com/videos/31163 and in this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/opinion/sexual-harassment-predators.html