Public Service Announcement

When a man talks dirty to a woman, it’s sexual harassment.  When a woman talks dirty to a man, it’s $3.95 a minute.  –  Anonymous

Dear Men,

Please stop sending us pictures of your penises; most of us are honestly not interested, and the few who are will ask if they really want them.  No matter what you may think, or what your friends or feminists or dumb magazine articles or stupid TV shows told you, our sexuality really isn’t just like yours with the genders reversed, and most of us find unsolicited “dick pics” rude, insulting, and either unintentionally hilarious or kind of threatening.  If you’re somebody famous and really want to expose yourself (no pun intended) to the possibility of blackmail, please just save us both a lot of trouble and send the money instead of the icky cell-phone photo; it’ll allow you to keep your career intact and spare us both a lot of unwanted media attention.

Love, Women

P.S. – Pictures of your bare chests or flexed arms probably aren’t a good idea either.

I honestly think that the neofeminist propaganda that men and women are psychologically identical except for “social construction of gender” is (from a human relations perspective) probably the most dangerous lie of the past half-century.  All reasonable people used to recognize that men and women are different; everybody understood that, though there was some overlap in certain areas, the sexes were in most aspects as unalike as Mars and Venus.  We don’t look the same, act the same, sound the same or think the same, and when it comes to sex that goes double.  And honestly, why should it be otherwise when it isn’t anywhere else in the animal kingdom?  The notion that humans are an exception to every single rule of mammalian biology is religion, not science; it’s no different from the fundamentalist denial of evolution, and based in the same insecure need to believe that we as humans are even more special than we already are.

This subject comes up often in this column, and with good reason; it’s male-female differences which make prostitution not only possible but sociologically necessary, and the denial of those differences which gave rise to and sustains anti-whore legislation.  The idea that women are just small men with our reproductive organs on the inside rather than the outside is behind the neofeminist agenda of trying to force women to give up all that makes us women and live and work like castrated men, but a different version of it lurks in the minds of many modern men as well.  An awfully large number of guys have bought into this dogma and so truly believe that a woman’s response to male nudity, sexual behavior, dirty talk, etc is going to be EXACTLY THE SAME as a man’s response to female nudity, sexual behavior, etc.  Guys who believe this just can’t fathom that a dude posing in his underwear, socks and shoes is NOT equivalent to a woman doing so in panties, hose and pumps, and they can’t comprehend that for most women unexpected and unsolicited male nudity is threatening rather than seductive.  They just don’t “get” that even if one ignores the whole pursuer/pursued duality, most women simply aren’t all that visual (not to the extent that most men are, anyhow).  But once the doctrine of sexual equivalency has infected a male mind it is nearly impossible to dislodge by any means short of a lobotomy or a major career-destroying scandal, which is why we keep seeing this same ridiculous script being played out in the media over and over and over again.

Last summer, we were subjected to the news that New York Jets football player Brett Favre thought that sending a woman pictures of his cock (on multiple occasions) was a good way to break through her objections to his repeated advances.  The woman, Jenn Sterger, made the mistake of trusting others with the pictures and voicemails while soliciting advice on what to do about the repeated offenses, and one of those sold the material to Deadspin for $12,000, thus exposing Sterger to negative publicity she didn’t want any more than Favre did.  Then in February, we heard about New York congressman Chris Lee sending bare-chested flexing pictures to all sorts of people he was trying to entice into sex, with predictable results.  And now, demonstrating the apparent inability of high-profile New Yorkers to learn from their mistakes, we have yet another entry in the penis picture parade:

[U.S. Representative] Anthony Weiner [a Democrat from New York] insisted he’s staying in office…even as a string of embarrassing new revelations and photos emerged that apparently reveal a hidden, lascivious online life.  At first, Weiner vehemently denied that a photo of an underwear-clad erection, sent via Twitter to a 21-year-old woman, had come from him, insisting he’d been hacked.  But…blogger Andrew Breitbart and his website Big Government rolled out a series of new pictures Monday, including a shirtless shot that appears to depict Weiner flexing and photographing himself.  Breitbart also claimed to have X-rated pictures of Weiner, and other outlets, including Radar Online and ABC News, reported having more damaging information from women Weiner had purportedly communicated with.

“I am deeply ashamed of my terrible actions,” a tearful Weiner told reporters at a remarkable press conference in New York.  “I came here to accept the full responsibility for what I’ve done,” he said, apologizing to his wife of one year, Huma Abedin, and reporters and others he lied to about the initial reports.  He even said he was sorry to Breitbart, who had commandeered the podium for his own impromptu press event before Weiner spoke.  “I’m here to watch myself be vindicated,” said Breitbart, who had faced criticism for his role in the scandal.

“Terrible actions”?  Hardly.  Stupid, embarrassing actions most definitely (especially after the other two high-profile scandals involving nearly-identical behavior in the same state), but hardly “terrible”.  Of course Weiner has already made the obligatory promise to “seek help”, but there is no therapy for poor judgment (which despite what moralists and feminists might claim is his real problem).  I have a rather high opinion of my male readers; I think y’all are a pretty superior bunch and would never do anything as colossally clueless as these celebrated New Yorkers keep doing.  But just in case there are a couple of you out there who get really, really horny and are trying to figure out how best to win a woman’s attention, please learn from Messrs. Favre, Lee and Weiner; you really need to resist the urge to foist unwanted pictures of your sexual anatomy on women you don’t actually know…or even ones you do know, for that matter.