Something that Ren – one of the few bloggers I still have time and energy to follow right now – said the other day really stuck with me:

“…I do find it kind of amusing in that asshole grim way of mine, because oh so often, the dudes screaming the loudest about how they would never want to fuck some skanky stripper or porn whore (fap fap fap) or whatever blah blah blah are the ones who, when no one is around, especially the girlfriend, want to/ try to do just that. The ones who are more along the lines of “sure, I think Performer X is attractive, but I am not with her, I am with you, and I think you are attractive” are generally far more likely to be…well, interested in nothing other than looking.”

When the gentleman doth protest too much, you have to wonder.

Seriously speaking, the biggest red flag a man can wave in front of me, whether he’s a friend or something more, is when it comes to labeling a group of women as disgusting skanks he wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot battery operated vibrator. This isn’t to say that men can’t or shouldn’t express disgust with someone on an individual basis. I don’t go tumbling onto the nearest fainting couch when I’m having a beer with someone, and he says, “goddamit, she cheated on my best friend with his UNCLE and then showed up at my party and tried to corner me in the bathroom while waving an honest-to-God crackpipe around – what a skank!” and don’t recommend that you do either.

Yet I don’t have any illusions about how certain words are unevenly applied to men and women, this is why I quite liberally refer to certain men as whores, and when someone does say something along the same lines to me, I usually point out that “oh, and that guy you know who screwed both some girl and then her mother, without either of them knowing, he’s a skank too.” Yet I also think that groups are groups, and individuals are individuals. You shouldn’t generalize about the personal qualities of a group of porn performers, just as you shouldn’t generalize about the personal qualities of a group of dairy farmers or legal secretaries.

Sure enough, I think every man is responsible for his or her own words, but girlfriends, we are also responsible. When we encourage the men in our lives to pull this whole “honey, you are as pure and unique as snowflakes caught on the mittens of Jesus, and that other girl over there is a farm animal with big udders and a tiny brain” stuff, we are making ourselves part of the problem. It’s not that I dislike male approval (let’s face it, it’s nice to be liked and desired), it’s just that I don’t want that approval to come at the expense of someone who probably doesn’t have anything to do with me in the first place. Why would I?

My mother once told me that the way to figure out how a man is going to treat you down the road is just to observe his daily interactions with other people. Is he polite to the waitress even if he has to complain about the lack of cheese on his cheeseburger? Does he casually fire off the worst kinds of rumours about people he hardly knows? Jerks can be fun when they present a challenge, but the minute you’ve made yourself vulnerable to a guy like that and he has fixed his laser-beam of jerkiness on you, the fun ends swiftly. Suddenly, it will be YOU who’s the farm animal, and someone ELSE who’s the special snowflake.

I think everyone is entitled to their own preferences, but when you have men, or people in general, doing a song and dance about porn in particular, it makes me uncomfortable and more than a little angry. Maybe it’s because I think that porn performers get enough criticism as it is, or maybe because what you’re really doing is hinting at a preoccupation that’s probably way darker and more disturbing than half the stuff you might find in the deepest, most unfathomable corner of the internet. And what’s worse, you’re trying to make that preoccupation somebody else’s problem.