Lindsay also tackles Big Pharma today in her piece "Human Rights Cause Impotence." This health trend story in the WaPo--impotence epidemic among college boys--is creepy. Her theory is that this is a set up to pave the way for prescribing Viagra to college boys to keep up with those insatiable college women.
Amanda deftly challenges the neanderthal undertones of this piece:
It would seem then that the problem might not be so much women’s equality; it appears the real problem is framing sex as an act of domination in the first place. And luckily, the author speaks to a young man who got over his problems. What worked? Did his girlfriend learn to shut up and start faking orgasms? Did he get to be in a gang bang and have all his friends high five his hard-on ability?
Not quite.
He sat down with his best friend, Josh Rolf, and spilled his guts. Rolf told him no one is a stud every time. Almost immediately, his talents returned.
“The day after I talked to Josh, everything went back to normal,” he says. He also credits his girlfriend. They had been dating a year, and “I didn’t think she’d walk out on me. That was incredibly helpful.”
So he got over thinking that it was a sign of his power to have an erection at will and he put sex into the context of the affection in his relationship. And no one had to give up any rights. Too bad the article didn’t start off telling the truth, that it’s male dominance that psychs men out, not women’s equality.
Don't miss
Scott's deconstruction of this WaPo piece over at
LGM:
The most obvious conclusion to this story, then, is "young men, as they always have, suffer from impotence, which can result from unhealthy habits, and a natural anxiety about pleasing sexual partners. People in caring relationships can generally work through it." But if you can't blame feminism for something, there's no story! And note that the anti-feminist approach is also much more contemptuous of men that the better-defended null hypothesis. Despite the inability of this article to cherry-pick them very effectively, there are certainly men who are threatened by female sexuality and want to dominate their partners. But what we see here for the most part are not young men complaining about women who want to have mutually pleasurable sex--indeed, they seem to like it--but simply have utterly ordinary problems and insecurities. The tendency of style writers to turn such banalities into something that can be blamed on feminism, and doing so in ways that also make the men in question look worse, is just bizarre.
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