Getting (in the) Sack(ed). Gender Domination and Male Honor

Three years ago an American college girl presented a sort of replica of an academic essay evaluating like a professor would do to his/her students her male sexual partners means and performance (some were commended, others rather not). It got out of hand in no time. With considerable discomfort building up (in the networks she was implicated in), soon she was forced to apologise to everyone involved, namely her sexual partners, and remove her outrageous paper from public sphere. What was so ignominious about her conduct, one might ask. In other words, what contemporary Lebenswelt aspects particularly of manlihood where unsettled by miss Owen’s daring? Was it simply a matter of a diffuse moral economy that censors women whom tell/brag too much about their sexual activities and deeds or the rejection of the “experienced woman”? We, of course, think not. Based on interviews with men and women of different ages, in this paper we’ll be presenting the core idea that unbearable intimidation (or what made miss Owen an unusual troublesome/frightening figure) comes from the special kind of power her classifying assertions conveyed. Partly reversing/disputing the righteous self-evidence that goes along with the categorisation of experienced woman as “sluts” and the like, we shall argue that any woman with a history of multiple sexual partners constitutes a threat to men’s ontological security, unintelligible unless one spotlights the social production of man’s honour as “proven virility”, that is, someone capable of taking possession both physically and symbolically of his partners. That woman might even overturn male’s domination agency. The “mature” woman, who knows the ways of the world through bygone practice, carries a comparative index enabling her to “grade” her lovers manhood. “She can and does tell”, a (discoursive) condition to halt man’s possession and, therefore, a possible tenure-taker of gender relations.