Friday, May 13, 2005

"Donkey punch"

I was recently forwarded an email message about activists who are protesting Cafe Press, a company who makes T-shirts and things celebrating the "donkey punch," which (for those of you who don't listen to Howard Stern and his ilk) is a maneuver by which a man surprises a woman with a punch to the head during sex when he's about to come so that her vaginal muscles (allegedly) contract or to distract her so that he can sneak in some anal sex. Ha ha, right? (If you don't think this is very funny, please share your views with Cafe Press: Call toll-free at 1-877-809-1659 between 7AM and 7PM PST. Ask for Candice in the Legal Department.  If they won't put you through, her direct number is 510-877-1926. If Candice isn't available, ask for Maureen or Lindsay.  Once you have a live human, explain why you are offended by the 225 "donkey punch" products currently in CafePress stores. Or write an email to: cup@cafepress.com, mjain@cafepress.com, fdurham@cafepress.com, and pr@cafepress.com.)

Now I doubt that many men who haven't spent substantial time in prison out there or who haven't been clinicallly proven to be sociopaths are out there doing this. And few men are going to be convinced by a T-shirt to start doing it. I'd like to think that the men who wear such gear never get laid anyway (and if they do, then their partners, if they are willing, should be asking themselves some hard questions). But that's not the point, of course. These shirts are made, sold, and worn because they allow men to advertise a cavalier attitude toward women and sexuality itself, scoffing at the idea that it is anything but a zero-sum power struggle where you must extort your own pleasure from your partner at his or her expense. Phrases such as these, that commemorate sexual acts that rarely take place (if ever) are capturing a cultural fantasy that no one individual exhibits. Few men, left alone, conceive of this kind of pointless hatred for the women they are intimate with, but culture as a whole conjures this sentiment, which seems to be required for patriarchy, for a commercial consumer culture that revolves around misdirected libido. They reflect and redirect the humilation that society subjects many of its members to giving those some members a vested interest in its perpetuation -- it's funny!

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