Quick thought: 'baby' should only be a stock term of endearment among diaper fetishists. I'm comfortable with terms of endearment referencing love and terms of and terms of endearment involving food are silly at worst, but a good, solid number of man-woman ToEs are infantilizing - and common.
As a straight man, I find it kind of offensive that my girlfriends have all been raised to expect I treat them like my daughter. Even though ritualized pedophilia is so ubiquitous in American relationships that it's barely possible to notice the undercurrent unless you're looking for it, it's yet another way in which the culture demands inequality in treatment of men and women.
I don't want to play daddy for the girl I'm fucking, and I have absolutely no desire to slip it to my future, hypothetical daughters - and unless I've severely misgauged my audience here, neither do you. But that's basically what is expected out of us.
(Oh, and also: because of the way men are acculturated to view sex -- and the fact that boys are strongly discouraged to express distress after being molested not only by the molester but by society at large -- child molesters are pretty overwhelmingly male.
Which makes it reasonable to specifically distrust you and me as men were we to apply to, say, teach kindergarten.)
Being a straight man should just involve loving women, or at the very least wanting to fuck their brains out. Loving someone does not, and fucking someone especially does not, involve pretending they are a child. Don't like it? Don't consent to it.
One thing you can do to help defuse this: refuse to call any woman 'baby' or 'girl' or 'chica' or 'kitten' or any other infantilizing term, and object to being called by any paternalizing term - 'daddy' is the first that comes to mind. Make a note of all this; straight women have no more desire than we do to turn their relationships with us into mother-daughter affairs, but for the most part they aren't consciously aware of it.
If you do use terms like that, switch to more egalitarian ones. Terms of endearment directly involving love are all right, and while terms crossing the love wire and the food wire are a tad silly and kind of surreal when you think about them, they're perfectly okay.
Generally, if either partner is being called something that the other partner wouldn't be comfortable being called, there is an inequality in the relationship and it is dysfunctional.
If we want to do away with the burdens placed on us by ritualized pedophilia - an unwillingness to go dutch, the uncertainty of consent, the predominance of men within the ranks of actual pedophiles, and the Goddamn creepiness of it, to name just a few - we must sacrifice the advantages of it. (Our girlfriends, mistresses, fuck buddies, and spouses ought to have as much a role in decision-making as we do, and if you find yourself winning a lot of arguments on topics you're not the expert on, that's a problem.)
The burdens severely outweigh the advantages. When you get right down to it, the only reason ritualized pedophilia in relationships has become so ubiquitous is the advantage it confers on this misanthropic society - it further segregates us into weak women and strong men, and prevents women and men in similar circumstances from uniting in any meaningful sense - attachment at the hips excluded.
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Somewhat OT, but on the blog topic: I think there's something to be said for the gendering of personality disorders, especially in pop psychology. For instance, we talk about men having a "white knight complex," while women with essentially the same behavioral patterns are "codependent."
There was an excellent post on codependency on Pandagon recently; here it is. The general gist is that codependency is both a stick with which to beat women and blame them for their husbands being abusive bastards, as well as an actual behavior that women are socialized into.
It's the eternal double bind of patriarchy: you're a frigid bitch or a codependent, needy freak. Women are socialized into caring for the needs of others, even to their own expense, and then their learned behavior is pathologized and used to excuse the behavior of men.
Again, this factors into the topic of this blog, because giving a shit is both raised as a feminine ideal and derided as a hysterical, foolish trait of dem broads. As a result, being a man who wants to help others makes you an effeminate creep, a possible homosexual, and maybe a rapist or serial killer.
Why do you think doctors are so universally depicted as super-macho, chain-smoking, crusty old bastards? Why are they all variants of the same character Hugh Laurie plays on House? Because otherwise, devoting their life to helping others would make them big blubbery pussies.
Fuck patriarchy. I love my friends and I want them to be happy, and I'm sick of being considered a freak for it.
What drivel.
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