Tag Archives: manhood

Guy Talk: How Professional Women Can Objectify Men (And Why Waitresses Don’t)

Fact: women are too often judged solely on their appearance, and treated differently based on how they measure up to men’s ideas of what they should look like. This much is obvious, and I’m sure the majority of us here applaud the women who stood up and continue to stand up to this offensive treatment that reduces women to just one aspect of who they are, while ignoring their many other strengths. But—there had to be a “but”—women should acknowledge that they often do the same thing to men—not based on looks as much as on our jobs, careers, and success. Keep reading »

You’ve Got An STD, Bro? That’s So Cool!

Possibly ruining my appreciation for the noble Swedes and their fine IKEA meatballs, a recent study has found that Swedish men with STDs think their infection is an affirmation of their manliness.

University of Skovde researcher Kina Hammarlund interviewed an unknown group of 16- to 30-year-old men and women for her dissertation and discovered it was only male participants who put on rose-colored glasses, seeing STDs like genital warts or gonorrhea as a rite of passage to manhood. It’s a telling statement about sexuality that men viewed STDs as something positive about their manhood, while women didn’t think it said anything about their womanhood. STDs could imply, even erroneously, that a guy is kind of a stud. But it’s hard to believe anyone would be proud of an STD. Could this study be bulls**t? [The Local via Feministing] Keep reading »