*Although lately, men have been catcalling me even when the +1 and I are in public together, which is unusual.

Good for you, and that is a good point! If a movie is “boring” once your eyes are opened to the misogynistic humor that pervades it, then maybe, just maybe, that movie is crap. After your feminist critique of the 40 Year Old Virgin, your boyfriend ought to realize that it’s male privilege that he can consider the misogyny a humorous element instead of offensive and disturbing.

Yes, the same kind of thinking produces that reaction both to affirmative action and to feminism. I recall a party once where a straight white man complained about how white men have it soooooooo hard in academia…to me, a queer, Korean-American woman, and to my friend P, an African-American man. It was as if our presence and existence had set his bullshit-motor running at full speed–at a party full of white people, he decided to corner the only woman of color and the only man of color present to pontificate about how white men are the one, true, oppressed group. {headdesk}

Aha. Aha. Ahahaha. C and I had a similar conversation quite early on about whether or not male attitudes of sexual entitlement existed. When I told him what street harassment was like, he responded that I was focusing on the “worst examples” of male behavior, and said that he and his friends didn’t behave that way, and he didn’t think that their behavior was exceptional. I pointed out that being male, he doesn’t see street harassment, because it doesn’t happen to him, and when he hangs out with female friends, he doesn’t see it happening to them because men will leave them alone if he’s present.

I think that was the toughest moment in our relationship thus far, because during that conversation, I thought that I just couldn’t be in a relationship with him if it meant dealing with someone who didn’t believe in male privilege and didn’t understand the ubiquity of misogyny. And that’s in a relationship that’s included a month apart and dealing with an unexpected trigger left over from being raped two years ago–that conversation was the thing that came the closest to making me think, I can’t do this.

Fortunately, that conversation has been a one off so far, and we’ve had conversations about male privilege where he seems to understand it.

However, one part of the movie particularly disgusted me. It was a scene in which the entire point was for the virgin to get laid by going to a club and preying on drunk girls – the drunker the better. I ended up just saying “this scene is blatant rape propoganda”.

Both my boyfriend and I became so bored with the movie that we turned it off halfway. I said, “now can you see what I see when I watch movies like this?” He said, “yeah – but it makes the movies so boring!” I replied, “have you ever considered that these movies just ARE boring?”

He had nothing else to say.