Well, I would say this is complicated, because that's the way I roll
Mulling over something yesterday on Twitter about that apparently weird combination of misogyny combined with desire for women - if women are so awful why do these men want them and obsess about them so much? -
My immediate and rather cynical reaction was that the bits these men want, being cis straight men, are, unfortunately, going around attached to women who may very well have opinions about the disposition of same (way back, in a novel by John Braine, might actually have been Room at the Top, one of protag's mates says 'the trouble with that, is that women have all of it', so it's not just about these dreadful modern days).
(Though in spite of the corollary to this, that all men are all insatiably horny all the time, I am not entirely convinced that it is just all about sexual access, though framed in those terms.)
The other thought was that women conforming to a certain conventional standard of attractiveness are regarded as trophies which men may feel they deserve (or that other men are undeserving of), rather like a really great car (in one of Amanda Cross's novels, somebody, probably Kate Fansler, quotes a line from EM Forster about straight men talking about women as if they were cars, if attractive, or 'eye-flies' [???] if not).
We can imagine the howling and raving if cars suddenly started up and saying, I don't care that you have the dough to afford me, I'm not letting you drive off with me, or just autolocking their doors when the guy tried to get in.
On further meditation on this subject, I realise that Melanie Klein's formulation of the paranoid-schizoid position, as usual, quite provoking of thought in this context. There is the Good Object (initially the mother's breast), which fulfills the individual's wants and is warm and comforting, and the Bad Object, which is just not doing that, but is perceived as maliciously withholding gratification and comfort and deliberately persecuting.
So women who are just Not Interested, and not interested in the most general sense rather than any particular individual one, as in, more interested in the conversation they're having with other women or the book they're reading, etc, rather than displaying an overwhelming concern for male attentions, are perceived as not just neutral but evil harridan bitches.
I'm not saying these are complete answers, because IAMC, and my darling Dame Rebecca has some brilliant if dark and depressing things to say about men's hostility towards those who give them pleasure (in particular in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon), but they are thoughts I had. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2183557.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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