>>12395I notice that you raised no objection to the notion of contamination as applied to wives, lovers, mistresses, prostitutes, or anyone else who in some way and for any reason assented to befoulment by male sexual contact. You instead grasp solely at the non-exemption of victims of crime. In that way you concede the point of male sexual contact being a form of contamination, but take issue with the idea of anyone being degraded by sexual degradation until and unless there is some fiber of consent given it, like a christian theologian contemplating the relationship of sin to damnation. If the horror of contamination should be redoubled by a greater horror of guilt at self-betrayal in all cases then no sympathies are to be given to the greater part of womankind. That position is at least as cruel as mine. It eliminates on one hand the requirement of sympathy for those who consented to intercourse and are therefore guilty of complicity with patriarchal sex, and on the other hand eliminates the possibility of sympathy for those who did not consent and therefore need only have their feelings of contamination dismissed and invalidated as unreal, mere socially constructed neurosis.
If this were a therapy group instead of a general discussion website with a particular focus on telling the generally horrifying truth about male sexuality then I would not speak about the particular sense of horror held by sexual contact with males. But even within therapy the therapeutic position has limits. There has been a great deal of criticism leveled at the social normalization of the therapeutic position from feminists. In particular Andrea Dworkin was opposed to the therapeutic mass gaslighting of women on the male and sexual nature of rape and sexual assault.
And I do agree with Dworkin that rape is a male sexual crime originating from male sexuality and on a gradient of male heterosexual norms that can include violence–particularly if informed by pornography–rather than the late 20th century therapeutic position that it was an act of violence with nothing to do with sex, and that since it was supposedly "about power" or "about control" then pornography could have little to do with integrating it into normal heterosexuality. The therapists were lying to convince women to trust men and enter or re-enter relationships, including romantic relationships, with men, because that was seen as healthiest in the long run for their patients. Since then we have learned that women are generally better off without relationships with men, and therapy is slowly adjusting to this reality. And the pornographers were broadcasting those therapeutic lies across all available media and news periodicals in order to improve public perception of their businesses. At most we can say that perhaps not all male sexuality includes violence, but just as it was completely unreasonable to say that male acts of sexual violence are not male sexual acts, regardless of therapeutic effect, it is also unreasonable to say that male sexual contact is not inherently degrading to people who have been degraded by it.
The male sexual glance is a disturbance and a threat because it is sexual, not just because there may be potential for a violent or nonconsentual component to that sexuality. There is no need for any qualifier for male sexual attention, intentions, or contact to be negative. There are a great deal of qualifiers necessary for it to be positive, or even neutral. Few things are as repulsive to as many psychologically healthy woman as the idea of some miserable worm looking to her as a sexual dommy mommy figure in a position of social, physical, financial, or intellectual superiority. That sort of man is a terrifying threat, because his sexuality carries a threat of a worse degree of contamination than most precisely because of his nonagression and absence of threat of coercion or violence.
