Do You Tell a Football What Time the Superbowl Starts?

OK. Bear with me.

I've been sitting on this post for a while, ever since Hugo used one of my favorite words from graduate school. It's one that doesn't come up very often in the feminist blogosphere (or anywhere else, for that matter), so I'm going to do my best to give it an airing.

The reason I decided to trot it out now because of my last post on the Superbowl^TM commercials. I started to write about the offensive beer ad that reminded me so much of my last post on married men acting like children in beer commercials, but I got sidetracked by the abysmal sexism of GoDaddy.com's ad this year.

But it turns out that all three ads have a hell of a lot in common, and that commonality is best summed up by the word "homosociality."

Now, homosociality is one of them 10-cent words that can take an awful long time to explain (I took something like 5 pages in my dissertation), and it's roughly the idea that men's relationships with women are secondary to men's relationships with other men, and that women are used as currency of exchange in male relationships, that women are used by men in various ways in order to negotiate their relationships with other men, etc.

But the other day, Amanda had a pithy take on it that beautifully described one of the more important aspects:

But so long as men are more worried about calling out other men than treating women right, things will stay the same.

That's about the size of it. Given a choice between looking bad in front of other men by treating a woman like a human being vs. looking bad in front of a woman by going along with what sexist guys are doing, guys operating under homosociality will always choose the latter. Hugo used it that way in the post to which I refer above, discussing a boys-only session with the church youth group he leads, in which one of the boys made sexist, objectifying remarks about a girl in the group:

The other boys all laughed and concurred,and then turned towards me with sheepish grins. Yes, their youth minister was with them -- but he was also a man, and they were operating under the homosocial assumption that even in church, it's okay to objectify women and girls as long as only other men are around.

And that captures the aspect of it that I'm thinking about in relationship to the beer commercials. The idea that men can always count on other men to stand with them against women. It defines the male-male relationship as the primary allegiance that men should have, and thereby relegates the male-female relationship to a secondary status. The effect of this is that, as I was bitching about in my previous post on the topic, that men can always be counted on (or so the ideology goes) to conspire with you, and against women. Women become the enemy--even if they're an enemy into whose pants you are trying to get--and they are to be avoided, deceived, manipulated or appeased as necessary.

Now, this is bad enough when it results in married men acting like children. I'm not saying that all men do this, but I am saying that all men are exposed to strong pressure to do this. And in all seriousness, the more beer commercials they watch during sporting events, the more of this pressure they will feel.

Like this year's abomination. It's not as visually repulsive as the GoDaddy.com ad, so I'll include a link to it.*

A guy climbs up to his roof, supposedly cleaning the gutters, but once he gets up there, he pulls out a stashed chair and TV, pulls a brewski out of his toolbox, and announces "Cleaning the gutters" to his neighbor who is likewise sitting on a lawn chair holding a brew. The neighbor replies, "Yup, I'm realigning the satellite dish." Then a third guy comes up and announces, "Fixin' a leak in the roof." He's congratulated on his inventiveness, and replies, "No I'm really fixin'--" but then the roof caves in, and the poor slob ends up in living room with wife, exactly where the other guys don't want to be. After the cut to tell us that it's Bud Light (why would anyone drink that crap anyway? Don't they know what real beer tastes like?) he gets clocked on the head when his own toolbox falls in on him. He's clearly a doofus, and the message is clear--break the pact with men, you get exactly what you deserve: no beer, no TV, just humiliation in front of other men and--worse--the company of women.

This is a milder version of the "Pussy-Whipped" tactic. Calling a man "Pussy-Whipped" tells a man that he must always choose between the esteem of men and the esteem of women. Hugo has a nice piece about how homosociality functions to suppress men's feminist tendencies in exactly that way--you can have women in your life who you treat like human beings, or you can have your cat-calling, ass-grabbing buddies. But you can't have both. In the youth group post, Hugo describes exactly this process:

Roger speaks up: "when you first see a pretty girl, you can't help but look. But you can choose whether or not you keep staring...You don't have to make the girl feel uncomfortable." Several other boys quickly agreed, and Aaron found himself on the defensive: "I don't know dude, I don't know how you can say you really like girls and not be totally distracted by something so fine." I smiled inwardly; Aaron, bless his heart, was trying to bully the other boys by threatening their masculinity if they didn't take his side.

A classic of the genre, emphasis mine. But it just so happens that my favorite example of this kind of boys-against-girls thought is from a piece-of-fluff sitcom.** It really is the best one-sentence description of homosociality. Imagine Del, the manly-but-jilted lover confronting Richard, the very un-manly artist, in the presence of Remo, the manly bar owner:

DEL: How could you set Caroline up with some other guy? Guys aren't supposed to do that to other guys. It's a simple basic understanding among men.

RICHARD: You're not going to report me, are you? I'd hate to have my treehouse privileges revoked.

REMO: When a man breaks up, he is entitled to two or three attempts at reconciliation before things are officially dead.

RICHARD: Uh, does anybody tell the women about these rules?

JOHNNY: Do you tell a football what time the game is? Come on!

That's it. The men are "playing the game," and the women in reality aren't even cheerleaders. They're the ball. The token, the trophies, the gambling chips. The objects over which men struggle in order to prove themselves in the eyes of other men. You don't tell women the rules, because what they know, or think, or say, or do is irrelevant to the game.

Which leads us to our more sinister aspects of homosociality. One of the most famous terms associated with homosociality is "The Traffic in Women," and it's pretty much what it sounds like. In patriarchal societies, women have no value as human beings--they exist only as commodities to be traded (and enjoyed) among men.***

And this is where shit gets really nasty. Because when women are not valued as human beings, human beings (i.e., men) don't really care what happens to them--except as it relates to their value as a commodity. So you end up with shit like this, in which five young women are fighting the tribal laws under which they are literally--I mean fucking literally--being traded as currency to resolve a debt:

A village council in Pakistan has decreed that five young women should be abducted, raped or killed for refusing to honor childhood "marriages". The marriages were part of a compensation agreement ordered by the village council and reached at gunpoint after the father of one of the girls shot dead a family rival. The rival families have now called in their "debt", demanding the marriages to the village men are fulfilled.The women have said they will commit suicide if their fathers obey the council.

And mind you, this isn't Iran or Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. This is Pakistan, a country we consider an "ally." Can you imagine if this was about race, instead of gender?

The Richmond observer reports that one Col. Harland Sanders has brought a legal action against his neighbor, a certain Gerald O'Hara, for his refusal to honor the debt of five Negroes which he pledged to settle a dispute over...

Oh, wait. We did that one.

Jesus. If this were about race, would we even touch that country with a ten-foot pole? Fuck it--if it were about men, would we touch that country with a ten-foot pole? Well, maybe we would, since Pakistan is such a staunch ally in the "War on Terror."

Oh. Fucking. Please. You want to talk about terror? You want to talk about unspeakable fucking acts of violence? Yes, 9/11 sucked. No argument here. But can we really say it isn't terror when a gang of young men show up at your house and say something along the lines of:

"Hi. The village elders sent us. We know that you haven't done anything wrong, and it's not like we've got anything against you personally--really we don't--but your brother fucked up and his punishment is that we're going to gang rape you now. Hold still and we won't hurt you too much."

This shit literally makes me sick to my stomach. And it isn't being perpetrated by some fanatical weirdo living in a cave, either. This type of terror (against which we are most explicitly not fighting a war) is completely authorized at the local level, tacitly authorized at the national level, and, were it not for the heroic efforts of the woman in question, completely ignored at the international level.

However, if you were paying attention, you caught the crucial bit in that story that makes it relevant to our lovely Superbowl^TM commercials. She was raped not for anything she did--after all, the football can't get penalized for facemasking, now can it? No, her rape was nothing more than a medium of exchange between men. The village elders decided that this woman could be---should be--sexually tortured as a way of sanctioning the behavior of her male relative. Now, you might say that in the same way that they might demand the payment of 12 goats, they demanded the payment of this woman's dignity, humanity, sexuality, etc. Except I'll bet you dollars to donuts they don't really think of her having dignity, humanity or sexuality. The punishment was that the brother in question be dishonored by having his sister gang raped. The effect on her wasn't even part of the calculation. It was all about him.

Do you tell a football what time the game starts?

Which is what brings us to GoDaddy.com, and their lovely "Window Washer" ad from the NFC playoffs. In this scenario, the woman's sexbot's sexuality is literally a gift from one man to another. I'll spare you the details, but in short two smarmy creative ad company guys are trying to convince a network apparatchnik to let them show their sleezy commercial on TV. He's not budging, and then one of the guys pulls out a radio-control device. He presses a button and the "GoDaddy Girl" descends outside the window on a window-washer's scaffold. She starts doing a bump-and-grind dance for the guy's viewing pleasure, but he sticks to his guns. Finally the smarmy ad guy pushes the button again, and the sexbot ascends out of view. The network apparatchnik gazes after her in blue-balled despair. Then the smarmy ad guy slides the radio-control device across the table to him. He grabs it, jams the button, and grins as the sexbot slides back into view. We assume the gift of her sexuality has changed his mind.

Yeah, it can all be dismissed as silly fantasy. But you know what? You can tell a fuck of a lot about people by their fantasies. Underneath fantasy is desire, and it's desire that drives culture.

"Homosociality." is a powerful word, a concept with a great deal of explanatory power. I wish I saw it more in the feminist blogosphere. It explains why--or rather, the mechanism through which--women are treated like radio-controlled sexbots. It explains why well-intentioned men end up hurting their wives and girlfriends again and again with their childish behavior. And it explains why somewhere in India, or Pakistan, or Bangladesh, a group of men may be deciding how to tell another woman that they've come to rape her--to punish another man.

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*Third from the top, left hand column.
**That's a heavily edited version. You can read the whole scene if you want--it's worth it. Run a search for the words "Hey! What's the matter with you?" on this page. That'll take you to the beginning of the scene in question.
***Obviously, this would only be 100% true in a 100% patriarchy. It is, however, true to the extent that patriarchy has a grip on a society (or segment thereof).