I always weep on the day of my shot. Typically, I jab myself in the early a.m. and trot off to school like a good little trannyboy. Wednesday is the day of manly reckoning; it is also, perversely, my Women’s Studies class.
Studying the history of an oppressed people is often not an uplifting experience. This natural downer is compounded, frequently, by the frustrating nature of this particular class, which often seems to perpetuate the very shibboleths it claims to expose. Today, me and my sore tranny sperm-shot thigh gimped into a class about violence against women. Damn me for a sensitive pirate, but aaaargh! This be a subject near’n’dear to me grizzled heart. No sooner did the instructor recite the requisite statistics (50% of college men would rape if they thought they could get away with it) than I was forced to pretend a splinter got ‘neath me eye-patch. Shit makes me sad, is what I’m saying to you, makes me tear up. Whatever they put in that vial of T comes supplemented with vitamin Waaah.
We were also given a sheet entitled “10 Things Men Can Do To Prevent Gender Violence.” Number 9 says “Refuse to purchase any magazine, rent any video, subscribe to any web site that portrays girls or women in a sexually degrading or abusive manner.” Well then we started chatting, like you do in class, about pornography, and the instructor makes a rather sweeping indictment of an entire class of erotica by announcing she “doesn’t understand how someone could be turned on by images of rape.”
So I’m stuck here.
I look at some porn. Okay, I look at A LOT of porn. For Jesus’ sake I shoot testosterone ‘kay!? My friend Almira says if women understood the true nature of T they would all don burqas. Now, I don’t like a lot of what I see; in fact, I really like very little of it. Quite a bit of it is seriously offensive to me. But I have to report, images of rape are not. Rather, let me clarify: fantasy imagery of rape does not offend me in the least. What offends me is men sticking their penises in a woman’s vagina, right after they’ve rear-ended her. What offends me is women putting that in their mouths after same. That’s just disgusting. That looks like real rape to me.
I asked a spectacularly repulsive specimen of the grosser male, a man I painted houses with, side-by-side, and shared incredibly graphic stories of, well, consensual acts not e.coli inclusive, “Why do guys think that a chick sucking the dick that’s been in her butt is hot?” Me, I’m always thinking like a scientist. Him: “It’s like, it’s like, it’s like that chick’ll do anything. She’s really freaky!” Wow. Because for me, I’m like “I don’t want that chick to do anything near me.” That it is so revolting to me nearly obscures its inherent rapery, the humiliation of making this woman suffer something so gross because it makes some man feel like a conqueror.
I get the ass-to-vag thing, although I can’t watch that either. The knowledge of the impending “fiberglass in my urethra” sensation I imagine the “actress” will suffer shortly thereafter, renders that bestial act also not-sexy. It’s humiliating too, in a rapist way – I so much don’t care about this human, I so value my orgasm over this piece of nothing’s health I will ass-to-vag fuck her. This I kind of understand. I get that it’s frustrating for guys getting their fuck on, to have to pay attention to something other than getting their fuck on. The fantasy is a woman who will let you go wherever you want, whenever.
This is male privilege at its finest: most men come so easily they cannot appreciate what many women go through for a simple orgasm. Any little noise is a distraction. You changing the rhythm totally threw me off. I just remembered I forgot to cancel my gym subscription. That touch was perfect; why did you stop; oh there it is again; never mind, it’s gone. Men are outrageous in their demands for something they’re going to get anyway, no matter what. It’s just like at the workplace, what with women making 70 cents to men’s dollar. Same with the freakin orgasm but worse maybe.
Oh, but I was talking about rape. What kind of man am I, that I enjoy scenes of (non-intestinally infected) humiliation and dominance? Does it make it okay that I understand I’ve been acculturated to find violation sexy, acceptable that I appreciate that I’ve sexualized my own trauma, my own history of sexual trespass? Can I watch porn with a clear conscience because I “get” why it does what it does for me, because I’m a feminist, and a “man” who was brought up a “woman?” How can I participate in something I also find not a little shameful?
I don’t have any answers and I can tell you truthfully I’m going to keep watching porn.* But it will continue to present challenges. I want to be a more evolved type of guy. That’s part of the point, I think, why the universe is making women who are men and men who are women, so we can evolve out of stupid ideas around gender and sex.
This sheet we were given also says “Have the courage to look inward. Question your own attitudes. Try hard to understand how your own attitudes and actions might inadvertently perpetuate sexism and violence, and work toward changing them.”
That, I can promise to uphold. But where else, except free internet porn, am I going to find things like “Elegant Lady Interracial Gang Bang?” and other delicacies too enticing, too hilarious, too stupidly human, not to savor? It’s a journey and a destination.
*like right after I post this.
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