Every now and again, in discussions about the gender wage gap, you see some misogynist yipping about how women get paid less because men work the more dangerous jobs. This is pretty absurd, given how many dangerous jobs pay badly (military, police, fire department, in many regions), but it also ignores something the 20th century had a lot of trouble processing: women are especially endangered just by being born into a class that’s considered ideal for victimizing.

While many stay-at-home wives and mothers are never subjected to any kind of abuse, a couple of social factors make this an extremely risky job. First, because employers don’t recognize what SAH partners do as work experience (managing a household, particularly with kids, involves skills that would entitle you to at least a career in middle management, if you’d done it in an office setting), SAH partners don’t have the option of just leaving and getting a job that will allow them to care for themselves and any children in a way that doesn’t invite state interference. Second, employers still think of men as needing jobs to take care of their families, and women as needing to stay home to take care of their families. When a SAH male partner’s situation flops, that’s only to be expected, since it defied gender norms. Employers may scorn a man for having done the domestic thing, but they will perceive themselves as big damn heroes for giving that poor deluded fool a chance to get back on his proper gender track. But a woman with kids and no provider? She must’ve screwed up somewhere. She failed as a woman, by failing as a wife-servant. Why give a failure a job? Additionally, women always face certain prejudices from employers who secretly wonder what they’re not allowed to ask: will she get pregnant and leave? Will she have a widdle emotional upset and go all flaky? Will she just sit around, painting her nails? Will she successfully play the gender card if we try to let her go?

By the way, there are two simple solutions to this problem:

1. Force employers to recognize “household manager” as a real job with real skills, and teach SAH partners how to write a resume detailing those skills. This transforms a lamentable “lengthy gap in employment” into the valuable work experience it really is, and enables SAH partners to divorce without fear they will be lucky to work sixty hours a week at various minimum wage jobs until the state decides their kids aren’t being kept in proper style and returns them to the abusive parent. (This, for those of you who want a SAH partner but think alimony is such unfair punishment for having had one, could also provide a way to eliminate alimony eventually. But by all means, don’t use your brains and encourage your legislators to do this. Just keep whining about how unfair the courts are to men.)
2. Teach kids in school that absolutely anyone can fall for an abuser, because most abusers are great actors and can appear not only nice but even progressive. But no, let’s not – that would shatter our stereotype that abusers are never middle class educated employed white guys.

If you own a television set, you’re probably aware of many of the ways women end up in abusive marriages or partnerships. Some are primed from childhood to believe men abusing women is normal. But if you think a woman coming from a loving, functional family can’t end up in an abusive relationship, you are so very wrong. The only difference is that a loving, functional family won’t let an abusive son-in-law isolate them from their daughter, and that gives her at least one option in escaping the abuse with her kids and some hope of providing for them.

Here’s a typical pattern:

• Young woman marries man who seems wonderful. She believes staying home for the kids is good for them, and plans to. Her unpaid labor helps husband make it through school, or the first years of work with repayment of school loans.
• Meanwhile, husband turns out to be physically, emotionally and/or sexually abusive. Thanks to a social conspiracy of silence, she lacks a framework for the abuse, and assumes the abuse is somehow her fault, and won’t be visited on any kids they have, so she has a child or two with him.
• Then he starts abusing the kids, of course, because abusers will abuse anybody. But she’s only just figuring this out.
• She threatens to leave, and either he gives her the beating of a lifetime, or he threatens to get custody of the kids if she leaves. Maybe by now he’s also turned her family against her, since the predisposition to believe stories that women are crazy often trumps the urge to defend one’s kin, especially when that kin is female, and hey, we all know what they’re like. (This is where the woman from a family that values her has a big advantage. Many families – even arguably functional, loving ones – simply don’t rate daughters as highly as sons, and these women can expect to be blamed by their own family for letting that lovely son-in-law get away.)
• So she waits, doing the best she can to protect her kids and suffering through whatever torture he doles out, until the kids are old enough to leave without him being able to stop them. In the meantime, she may try to get a job or some schooling, but he’ll know what that means and most likely stop it or sabotage it. Or her hours at the job or school may simply give him time alone with the kids, which is a terrifying prospect. (The link is to a series of articles on Dolores Claiborne. If you want a 2+ hour crash course in really understanding how few options women have in protecting both themselves and their kids from domestic violence, I can’t recommend it highly enough.)
• Then she leaves, if he lets her (see the “beating of a lifetime” link: the overwhelming majority of domestic violence happens when you try to leave), and finds herself an “unskilled” forty- or fifty-something woman in a job market that’s firmly entrenched in ageism, sexism and prejudice against workers without traditional employment histories.
• Meanwhile, her ex-husband is well-employed, thanks to all her free labor that helped him pay off college loans and get on with those promotions, so he can afford divorce attorneys and endless court battles, and she cannot.

And heaven forbid the abuse gets bad enough for her to feel she must leave before the kids are adults. He’ll almost surely get custody of the hostages (oops, I mean “kids”) because it’s not true that judges are biased toward women: judges are biased toward narcisissts, like everyone else in this society. Emotionless and conscience-free, narcissists stand there looking sad and wronged, unable to understand the venom coming from their spouse, and portraying him or her as mentally unstable because s/he is exhibiting emotions and self-doubt, like a psychologically healthy person who’s been exhaustively mistreated. Judges, like the rest of us, are taught to mistake functionality for healthy psychology, and no one is more functional than a narcissist who has no attachments or morals to get in the way of his functioning.

By the way, there’s a third solution to help with these problems: educate judges and social services personnel on how to recognize an abuser. This isn’t the place to get into detail about it, but abused kids often develop these skills instinctively. It’s very easy to recognize a narcissist once you’ve been taught what to look for. And sadly, you can safely assume that no narcissist genuinely loves anybody, because the inability to see others as anything but tools is part of the disorder.

So, I’ve stated the problem. I’ve offered three practical solutions to make it better. But by all means, just keep whining about how hard the menz have it.

There’s an article making the rounds right now called To My Someday Daughter. The articles takes the form of a letter from gamer Geordie Tait to a daughter he may someday have, apologizing to her for the ways gaming culture will ostracize her, punish her and just generally treat her like crap – unless some things change between now and then, of course.

Tait zeroes in on a recent incident in the gaming community: Gizmodo recently published an article in which one of their interns, Alyssa Bereznak, discussed feeling duped by a man she met through an online dating service because his profile didn’t mention that he was a hardcore gamer – in fact, a champion gamer with many gamer fans. Bereznak talked about quizzing him to determine that he gamed often and gaming was a big part of his life, and that was when she lost interest. In response, many members of the gaming community called her all manner of gendered slurs, harped on how “shallow” she was, and just generally punished her for suggesting their champion wasn’t a good catch. [ETA: Bareznak did not name him in her article (found here). Gizmodo later edited the article to include his name, for reasons I cannot fathom. Any comments criticizing Bareznak for publicly naming him will be deleted.]

Except Jon Finkel, the gaming champion she briefly dated. According to Tait, he never put her down as a person for deciding he wasn’t her type. I’ll have more to say on this in a minute. [ETA: based on this, Finkel may well be an actual nice guy as opposed to a Nice Guy ™. The article title comes from my feeling that the gamers who punished Bareznak see him as a Nice Guy ™ and therefore one of their own kind, and is not meant to impugn Finkel as a Nice Guy ™.]

Here’s the thing: sexual freedom means you get to choose who you date. If you choose to date only within your race, then even if that’s a racist choice, sexual freedom demands that you be allowed to make that choice. If you refuse to date people who aren’t conventionally gorgeous, that’s your business. And if you don’t want to date gamers because you believe they will put gaming way ahead of you, then even if you’re wrong about that, it’s still your sexual choice. And you know why? Because the only person who stands to lose or gain from your fussiness is you.

In business situations, the law is intended to force bigots to hire qualified, quality workers no matter how they feel about those workers’ races, beliefs, orientations, etc. This is because people need jobs to feed themselves – it’s a matter of survival. It’s also because employment biases tend to be widespread, so it’s not like a worker rejected for his race can just go to another employer and expect a fair shake. Dating, on the other hand, is not a matter of survival. Nobody ever died of not dating. And while one person may refuse to date gamers, chances are someone else will consider your gaming a neutral or even positive factor.

Basically, your right to date is trumped by someone else’s right to pick and choose who they will date. This is really an issue of safety as well as sexual freedom: if someone you’re dating has no boundaries, they might hurt you physically, steal from you, deliberately chip away at your sense of self-worth, isolate you from friends and family, persuade you to make big life choices you’ll later regret (such as moving to a new city or giving up a career opportunity you really wanted), etc. Your dating choices don’t just impact your love life; they can potentially impact your whole future.

Finkel understood this. He may have disagreed philosophically with the way she seems to have painted all gamers with one brushstroke (as do I), but he managed to separate that from her right to pick and choose who she will date. He also managed not to take her rejection personally.

But now let’s look at the other side. I have to say that Bereznak’s article is inflammatory as far as I’m concerned, and had she left something like this snippet as a comment on this site, it would have been deleted by a mod based on the first sentence alone:

Just like you’re obligated to mention you’re divorced or have a kid in your online profile, shouldn’t someone also be required to disclose any indisputably geeky world championship titles?

I later found out that Jon infiltrated his way into OKCupid dates with at least two other people I sort of know, including one of my co-workers. Mothers, warn your daughters! This could happen to you. You’ll think you’ve found a normal bearded guy with a job, only to end up sharing goat cheese with a guy who takes you to a one-man show based on Jeffrey Dahmer’s life story.

Let’s break this down. More than likely, Finkel was neglecting to mention this facet of his life because he’s had negative knee-jerk reactions to it before, which are probably based entirely on stereotypes. But Bareznak treats this as a deception rather than a strategy for negotiating your way around stereotyping (the original version of the article said “This is what happens when you lie on your profile” – it has since been edited to “leave things out of your profile). By that logic, if Barenzak has ever been overweight, which means all those fat cells are still there just waiting to balloon up again even if she’s slim now, she should be sure to put that on her profile so that fat-phobic men can avoid her. And for heaven’s sake, if you’re a “feminist”, you should put that on your profile so that people who think “feminist” means “man-hating woman with butch appearance” can be sure to avoid you, even if you don’t hate men at all and look quite feminine. I mean, it’s up to all of us to protect stereotype thinkers from being confronted with the people they stereotype! Won’t someone please think of the stereotypers?

I do think the gaming community had reason to take offense at her thinking on this. The problem was that they conflated her thinking with her rejection of Finkel, and punished her for rejecting him – as if all would have been well if she’d just continued to go out with him, thinking perhaps, “Well, maybe this is an exceptional gamer, even if all the rest of them are immature, socially maladjusted people who aren’t worth knowing.” It’s as if gamers didn’t really care what she thought of them, so long as she puts out, so it was the not putting out that really bothered them. And that’s familiar, sexist territory for women – having men not care what’s in our brains as long as we provide them a sexual outlet.

And then there’s one last little thing, which is undeniably sexist: gamers chatting on about how stupid Bareznak is for not dating Finkel, on the basis that Finkel is in very good financial shape. Right, because what every woman wants is a man who will spend money on her, and when we unwittingly reject rich guys for any reason at all (valid or otherwise), the joke’s on us! Yes, guys, thank you for meeting Bareznak’s stereotyping of gamers (who, as mostly white, educated guys, are really not as disadvantaged a group as they might believe, as Tait points out) with the patriarchy’s 1950’s stereotypes about us.

Glamour Magazine has an interesting article on the popularity of blow jobs, which they put down several factors:

• Bad sex education in the US. We teach kids that coitus can lead to STDs, but don’t explicitly state that oral sex can, too, so some kids go away thinking oral is safe, or at least safer. Adding to this is the idea many evangelical kids have developed in the absence of quality adult guidance: that oral sex isn’t really sex (thanks, Bill Clinton), so they can do that before marriage without Baby Jesus weeping.
• Porn. Porn, the article contends, has created a blase attitude that leads to men asking, “Well, if you don’t feel like having sex, can you at least give me a blow job?” I mean, they’re entitled, right? And women feel that pressure.
• Empowerment. Oh, god, here we go again. Somehow, women have got it worked around in their minds that blow jobs are for their own pleasure and empowerment, not his. And hate is love and freedom is slavery. By the way, these women are talking about the obligatory first-date blow job, not long-term relationship blow jobs.

I’ve got to tackle this empowerment bullshit once and for all, because I just cannot stand it. What these women are saying is this: “When I give someone an orgasm with no consideration for my own pleasure, I find it empowering.” In that case, please immediately PayPal me as much money as you can afford. I’ll be thrilled, you’ll get nothing – won’t that be empowering for you! How lucky you are!

No, no, no and no. [ETA: I later wrote an article explaining clearly what “empowerment” actually means. It’s not just “feeling powerful.”]

If you’re in a relationship where there’s give and take on various levels, giving your partner an orgasm without any expectation of reciprocity can be a nice thing. Not empowering – nice, pleasurable, enjoyable. Not empowering. Outside of an established relationship, in that early dating phase where you’re still trying to work out whether this person has anything to offer you, offering a blow job screams, “Please, take from me! I like being used!” Empowering, my ass. He’s the empowered one, not you. He’s learning from you that he’s entitled to pressure every woman he dates to perform this service for him, no matter how she feels, no matter what she wants, no matter how completely incapable he may be of providing anyone but himself an orgasm to save his life.

I’m not saying oral sex is bad, or that there are no reasons for a woman to enjoy performing it. But seriously? Under no circumstances is it empowering. He’s not grateful. He doesn’t feel he owes you. He’s not bewitched by you, since half the other chicks in the bar would do the same, and tops of heads all look pretty much alike. Where’s the power?

I think women are so confused about sexuality and their rights to it that they somehow (mistakenly) think blow jobs carry all the benefits of intercourse without the potential unwanted side effects, and performing blow jobs makes them fully sexual not-prudes who are in charge of and comfortable with their own sexuality.

I think you need only look at the behavior of men to see how far off the mark that is. Men don’t derive power from giving women orgasms. Sometimes they derive power from other men based on how many women have given them orgasms, but women having orgasms never enters into any part of the equation. True empowerment would be saying, “Well, if you don’t feel like having sex, could you at least go down on me, lover boy?” Now there’s a sex act that’s “safer” than the ones involving male ejaculation. There’s a sex act that involves whatshisname Mr. Friday Night on his knees, and little worry of repercussions for you.

I think a lot of people just don’t understand what power actually is. Really, the whole idea that sex has anything to do with power is a product of rape culture.

This is going to be a rambling post touching on a lot of related topics. Respond to whatever grabs you in comments, because this stuff needs to be discussed too much to fuss over what’s “on topic.”

A winter issue of Vogue Paris featured some photos of 10 year old girls made up and photographed to look like adults. You can see most of them here, but there was one CNN wasn’t allowed to post, and you can see it here. The first question, of course, is: is this acceptable, or a form of child abuse, or something in between? Sound off in comments.

The second question, however, is: can we learn something from this as a society? Jezebel makes a chilling point:

Here are just a few of the models who began working extensively at the ages of 12, 13, and 14: Tanya Dziahileva. Chanel Iman. Karlie Kloss. Lindsay Wixson. Monika Jagaciak. Current Vogue Paris covergirl Daphne Groeneveld. Going back further: Kate Moss. Brooke Shields. Patti Hansen. Niki Taylor. Kimora Lee Simmons. Bridget Hall. Gisele Bündchen. Karolina Kurkova. Linda Evangelista. Christy Turlington. I could go on.

Bold emphasis mine. Those models you see on covers that look twenty-three are twelve. The ones you see that look thirty are, at most, sixteen. Why? I don’t know. The same thing doesn’t happen with male models. Of course, twelve year old boys can’t be made to look like twenty year olds because their bodies develop at a different pace from girls’. But the fact that a young girl can be made to look like a grown women doesn’t mean that’s how the fashion industry should create photo spreads. It’s not like they don’t still need to touch up the photos of prepubescent girls to make them look good enough for the fashion world. And thanks to airbrushing and now Photoshop, even old hags like Julia Roberts can be made to look, well, at least passable! (That was sarcasm: Roberts is beautiful without Photoshop, but it seems Lancome disagrees.)

There’s more from the Jezebel article, which I strongly recommend reading (you have to click each picture to get another “page” of the article):

Girls who get scouted are thrust into a very adult working environment. Suddenly, they become girls who are signed as independent contractors to agencies that may screw them over. Girls who may be asked to do nude work. Girls who in any case have to change clothes at jobs in full view of perhaps dozens of photographers.

And let’s not forget Corey Feldman’s recent remarks in the wake of Corey Haim’s death. He says Hollywood’s big secret and “#1 problem” is pedophilia, and it’s everywhere, and the casting couch applies to kids, too:

“I was surrounded by [pedophiles] when I was 14 years old. … Didn’t even know it. It wasn’t until I was old enough to realize what they were and what they wanted … till I went, Oh, my God. They were everywhere,” Feldman, 40, said.

The trauma of pedophilia contributed to the 2010 death of his closest friend and “The Lost Boys” co-star, Corey Haim, Feldman said.

“There’s one person to blame in the death of Corey Haim. And that person happens to be a Hollywood mogul. And that person needs to be exposed, but, unfortunately, I can’t be the one to do it,” Feldman said, adding that he, too, had been sexually abused by men in show business.

I strongly suggest reading this article too – it’s a short, disturbing read. The uninformed wonder why pedophilia is so common in the Catholic church, and now they can wonder about Hollywood too. But what do these two groups have in common? Power. Lots of it. If you enjoy abusing people, working in Hollywood behind the scenes is the way to go. You don’t have to work around the industry long to figure that out. If you don’t want to support abuse, working behind the scenes becomes difficult. If you don’t like being abused, working before the cameras becomes nearly impossible.

And into that environment, which has chewed up and spat out adults (mainly adult women), we throw children. The fashion industry is at least as bad. The creep factor is off the scale.

What the hell are we doing? Is our culture just really secretly okay with adults sexually abusing kids? Because people sure aren’t bothering to educate themselves. All the clues are there. You can learn most of it from TV shows these days. No schooling or reading of books (just magazines) is required. And yet, people still just don’t seem to give a damn. It’s inexcusable and unacceptable.

If you’re not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Ignorance is no longer an excuse.