Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Ok, so while we're working to eliminate sexual violence can we also spend at least a little time here talking about ending the one thing that makes it even worse. Because sweet mother of pearl, what kind of society and social narratives do we have that victims of sexual violence feel so ashamed they end their own lives?

In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, but this whole "even involuntary sex is shameful for girls" and "if someone's seen you naked that makes you a slut," and, especially, "you should rather die than 'let' someone assault you or 'get' yourself assaulted'" has just got to stop.

In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, but waaaay too often the very culture of shame surrounding "chastity" and all that purity crap is precisely why young women are sexually humiliated as opposed to some other form of bullying.  Because at the end of the day, bullies pretty much drill down on that which their victims fear most... on that which they believe (and their victims believe) will humiliate them most.  And then they do that.

And for teenagers?  Even if for some reason they didn't personally fear being assaulted while passed out, they still might fear having it become known.

Whether it's from the dehumanizing scorn of peers to the equally dehumanizing pity of others, to the insidious calulations of clever perpetrators or the thuggish cunning of stupid ones, the universal message society conspires to crush the prey of predators with is "your life is now over."

With the tragic results that, too often, they end their lives.

I don't know what we as a society can do to prevent all sexual violence.  And I don't know for sure what we can do to end victim blaming, slut shaming, and "fate worse than death-ing."  But I do feel, strongly, that curtailing one requires curtailing both.  That trying to end one without the other will almost certainly end either.

This is killing children, folks.  Most notoriously, at the moment, two young women from Canada and another from California are in the news for ending their lives after receiving unbearable shaming from their nominal friends and communities.  But the same fate befalls so many other victims, of all sexes, genders, and orientations.

We should all be ashamed of ourselves.

Photo by Flickr user hikingartist. Used under a Creative Commons license.

I've said for years that if we judged the end of (hetero) sex as when *she* climaxes instead of when he does then a) we wouldn't be talking about why women "naturally" have a hard time climaxing and worry instead about how 85% of men "naturally" ejaculate "prematurely." Again, as Lisa Wade makes clear, it's waaay more about Point Of View than Penis in Vagina.  it's hard to find one paragraph to quote that's better than the rest. So just go read the rest.

Actually, no, wait, these paragraphs are pretty good by themselves

These are the stories we tell ourselves about the clitoris: that women’s bodies are simply more difficult. The clitoris is hard to find and complicated to operate; it’s shy and persnickety; it disappoints its owner and mocks the efforts of her partner. And perhaps it doesn’t matter anyway, we continue, because women aren’t as interested in orgasm, right? They don’t need them like men do. They’re a more giving sex. Their pleasure is more diffuse and empathic. In any case, they’re really in it for the eye contact and the cuddling.

(Hey, check out her indictment of the lame bogus Rule of Desire #1 inspired excuses in the sentences I italicized above!)

Freudian echoes, anatomical mischaracterizations and gender stereotypes are part of the logic naturalizing the orgasm gap, but there is nothing natural about it. We know this because women who sleep with women have many more orgasms than heterosexual women, almost as many as men who sleep with women. Women also have no problem experiencing orgasm through masturbation and the same women who frequently have orgasms during masturbation report many fewer orgasms when they’re with a partner. Men are also not faster to climax than women; it takes women the same amount of time to orgasm during masturbation as it takes men, on average, to have an orgasm through intercourse: four minutes.

Instead of being driven by biology, women’s rate of orgasm relative to men is a function of social forces. For one, we often bifurcate the sexual experience in line with gender norms: men are sexual (they experience desire) and women are sexy (they inspire desire). The focus on men’s internal wants and sensations also draws our attention to his satisfaction. Thus his orgasm, but not necessarily hers, becomes a critical part of what must happen for a sexual encounter to be successful and fulfilling. This is part of why intercourse – a sexual act that is strongly correlated with orgasm for men – is the only act that almost everyone agrees counts as “real sex,” whereas activities that are more likely to produce orgasm in women are considered optional foreplay.

Source: Alternet

But since that only captures one point, go ahead and read the rest anyway.  It's all good stuff.

Photo by Flickr user The mofoJT. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Now if you only the abstract below you might conclude the only possible explanation for women "evolving" same-sex desire was (what a surprise, *cough*Rule of Desire #1*cough*) for "the kids!"  Since women having sex for any reason other than getting pregnant or getting help raising their kids would be intolerable! Inconceivable!

Born Both Ways: The Alloparenting Hypothesis for Sexual Fluidity in Women

Barry X. Kuhle, Department of Psychology, University of Scranton; Sarah Radtke, Department of Psychology, Ryerson University

Abstract

Given the primacy of reproduction, same-sex sexual behavior poses an evolutionary puzzle. Why would selection fashion motivational mechanisms to engage in sexual behaviors with members of the same sex? We propose the alloparenting hypothesis, which posits that sexual fluidity in women is a contingent adaptation that increased ancestral women’s ability to form pair bonds with female alloparents who helped them rear children to reproductive age. Ancestral women recurrently faced the adaptive problems of securing resources and care for their offspring, but were frequently confronted with either a dearth of paternal resources due to their mates’ death, an absence of paternal investment due to rape, or a divestment of paternal resources due to their mates’ extra-pair mating efforts. A fluid sexuality would have helped ancestral women secure resources and care for their offspring by promoting the acquisition of allomothering investment from unrelated women. Under this view, most heterosexual women are born with the capacity to form romantic bonds with both sexes. Sexual fluidity is a conditional reproductive strategy with pursuit of men as the default strategy and same-sex sexual responsiveness triggered when inadequate paternal investment occurs or when women with alloparenting capabilities are encountered. Discussion focuses on (a) evidence for alloparenting and sexual fluidity in humans and other primates; (b) alternative explanations for sexual fluidity in women; and(c) fourteen circumstances predicted to promote same-sex sexual behavior in women.

Sign!

And reading just the abstract you might conclude that they conclude there could be no other possible mechanism whereby women would form sexual attachments with other women there's therefore absolute certainty that heterosexual women have "sexual fluidity." It's all about the conditional reproductive strategies, see.

But if you read the actual paper (PDF here) you'd realize that, no, they qualify their assertions to such a bizarre degree that... you kind of wonder why they bothered in the first place.

The sentence to watch while reading the thing seems to be this "Under this view, most heterosexual women are born with the capacity to form romantic bonds with both sexes." Really, rather than trying to justify their assertion that nominally hetero women form same-sex sexual relationships to facilitate childrearing (a.k.a. alloparenting) they mostly seem to be speculating about why, let alone how, women "evolved" to have hawt girl-on-girl action.

Did I say "sigh" already? I guess I already did.

Did you know that, based on research lesbians report enjoying sex with men less? Did you know, further, that women who've been abused and/or been victims of sexual violence seem to have more difficulty forming same-sex relationships with men? Did you know that heterosexual women in isolation from opposite-sex partners are more likely to form same-sex relationships when confined (as in a harem or... I dunno... jail) with only other women? Yes, yes, and yes! Because, for the kids, see? It's gotta be! Because...

More interestingly, did you know that out of the 14 "testable hypotheses" they propose only the first four seem to have been studied? Or that out of some of those you really, really have to scratch deep to find something that sort of resembles confirmation? Son of a gun! What a whacky way to practice science!

Oh well, at least baseless, experiment-free "research" papers beats getting college coeds to give you unprotected blowjobs to "confirm" whether your semen is an antidepressant.

What's so $%!#% frustrating for me is that I actually believe humans evolve certain psychological tendencies and behaviors! I even believe it's likely that some of our behaviors are sexually selected for! But empty owl whiz like this stuff just makes anything else anyone tries do do less credible. And therefore discourages people who might someday turn out to be competent scientists from giving it a whirl.

Note: in the end notes the article was apparently rejected and then resubmitted. It may first have been rejected by Penthouse Letters. :-P

Over at my other blog, The Bad Men Project I wrote

Click for larger image

In remarks both here and on my other blog I've made snarky references to what I've been calling "The Goldberg Spectrum of Sexual Violence Denial."  I'd like to explain what I mean with this chart.

In a nutshell the chart shows that what constitutes most people's people's notion of "sexual violence" rattles somewhere between Todd Aikin's so-violent-organ-failure-shuts-that-thing-down "legitimate rape" standard and Whoopi Goldberg's egregious Roman Polanski didn't commit "rape-rape" standard.  Anywhere to the right of Goldberg's standard on the spectrum and denial first creeps in and then roars.

First there's the infamous "gray area" of denial. Further over even if people concede the "gray area" isn't so gray they may still deny that catcalls or "stolen" kisses count. Then there's denial about whether boys or men can be victims. By the the time you get to still-on-the-spectrum epithets and slurs ("flat chested," "bad in the sack," "cocksucker," "fuck you," it's almost all denials because the violence is basically completely emotional rather than physical. And we're all still coming to grips with the idea that emotional bullying constitutes violence at all.

One consequence of leaving things up to Goldberg and Aikin is that over at that end of the spectrum victims really are overwhelmingly female and perpetrators overwhelmingly male. Unfortunately while the reality blurs the further one gets from the extreme edge of denial (see above) the stereotype is already set.

By the time you get to epithets, for instance, targets and recipients so varied it's basically impossible to characterize them.

Meanwhile if like too many people you're still rattling back and forth between Aikin's and Goldberg's standards you're still denying almost the entire range!  Much hilarity does not ensue. :-P

One of the things I've been realizing over the last year, something that's shaken me up quite a bit, has been the way my nominally normal if somewhat libidinous upbringing was overlaid with wide, thick layer of third-hand, second-hand, and sometimes, in retrospect, first-hand abusive culture.*

Because I grew up in the extremely disrupted culture of the 1970s with it's hippie and sexual revolution rejection of unquestionably socially repressive, conservative barriers it's taken me a very long time to realize that thrown into that mix was indoctrinated... and in retrospect sometimes actively groomed rejection of boundaries.

I suspect that of my generation I am not alone.

For this reason I've really got a soft spot for recovering fundamentalist-cult survivor Elisabeth Esther, who today shared a wonderful list. Check it out. If you find it recognizable share it with your friends and loved ones. (I've numbered the list so I can refer to specific items in the rest of my post.)

I had a total epiphany moment when I read “Signs of Unhealthy Boundaries” on page 171 of Take Back Your Life. Here is an abbreviated list:

1. Telling all
2. Being sexual for others, not yourself
3. Being nonsexual for others, not yourself
4. Going against personal values or rights in order to please others
5. Not noticing or disregarding when someone else displays inappropriate boundaries
6. Not noticing or disregarding when someone invades your boundaries
7. Giving as much as you can for the sake of giving
8. Taking as much as you can for the sake of getting
9. Letting others define you
10. Letting others describe your reality
11. Believing others can anticipate your needs
12. Believing you must anticipate others’ needs
13. Practicing self-abuse (cutting yourself)
14. Being deprived of food or sleep
15. Being unable to separate your needs from those of others

It was pretty eye-opening for me to realize I could check off almost all of these signs.

Source: Elisabeth Esther

I've been there for a lot of that too. Sometimes even when I thought I wasn't! Fairly often I'd even impose some of those things on myself. (This being classic sign of what the 12-step people call co-dependence: imposing on yourself conditions you only believe to be required to be with someone else, for instance.)

For instance tolerating anger or even violence from an early partner on the assumption that a) she needed to express herself, b) I could "take it," and c) love requires "give and take" (itself of course a perfectly true thing) that I turned into "if I couldn't 'take it' I wasn't cut out to be in a relationship in the first place." Call that fallout from items #7, 9, 10, 12, and 15.

For instance the older youth "leader" who in "rap sessions" would make the perfectly valid point that most people are at least a little bisexual... while regularly "demonstrating" his point with egregiously inappropriate touching of young men in the group and often leading to "private sessions" with them to help them "work out their inhibitions." And to the extent the rest of us wondered if it was ok we were all desperately afraid of appearing too "uncool" or "sexually hung up" to mention it. See items #4, 5, and 6, above, topping that chart with a bullet. And see, worse, that coming away of those sessions we tended to question only the degree of the leader's behavior, believing "it's ok to do that, you just shouldn't go so far." Maybe with a little bit of #2 and/or #3 depending on whether you felt you could or couldn't be "cool" and participate in what pop culture was referring to at the time as "bisexual chic."

Others were imposed or assumed by others.

Throw in turmoil and shame if a woman wanted to fellate her partner (let alone if he asked her to), or if in those pre-g-spot days she preferred penetration to clitoral stimulation, or if a man wasn't "respectful" during sex, a.k.a. was anything but slow and basically worshipful, or if a woman (perhaps impatient with the neo-victorian pace) wanted to be active, or... or... or... etc. #6 and/or 7, numbers 12 and 11, numbers 2 and 6 and 15, and pretty much all the rest except maybe #13 and 14 (with maybe a mashup of choosing to "altering your reality" on your own by depriving yourself of sleep while staying up sometimes for days to travel or "rap" with each other.

And, for instance, the overwhelming sense that since sex should be "natural" you really shouldn't check in with each other during it, not to see if this felt good ("but the Joy of Sex said it should work!"), not to see if that was what was actually wanted since we were all supposed to be able to read each other's "vibe." Not really having any boundaries about drug or alcohol intoxication. And when it came to young men and boys, while there was (mostly homophobia-driven) understanding that they could say no to men nobody could even comprehend that it was even possible that a boy wouldn't be "ready" if a woman came on to him. (In a most unfortunate, deeply misunderstood, but widely repeated phrases from the era I think it was Susan Brownmiller who said men were so incapable of self-control sexually they would "even" have sex with women who were dead!)

And eh, more numbers in there somewhere.

Sigh. Yes, it was the 1970s. And almost everything about the era that wasn't bitterly tense was almost heedlessly nihilistic. And they really were trying to break down the giant zit of Western Civilization that had come to a (eww) head in the Mad Men era of the 1950s and 1960s. And mostly people were making it up as they went along. And everyone had to make their mistakes while they learned from them.

But here's the thing, and how it relates to Esther's post:

Unlike Elizabeth who escaped from her 1950s-holdover cult, a lot of my peers were more like 2nd-generation cult survivor. My parents were both raised very strictly but I was exposed to their parent's church cultures only through early elementary school.

But I've got to say that being the children of escapees had its own perils. In my own generation, which coincided with the hippies and the nominal sexual revolution, there's a not-even-unnatural possibility of mistaking rejection of oppressive barriers with maintenance of healthy boundaries. And wow am i learning -- sometimes after way too many decades -- what a huge difference there is between the two!

I'm going to order her cult-survivors book, Take Back Your Life. Using her Amazon link instead of mine. The 1970s, from its Viet Nam-era lyrics like "If you can't be with the one you love (honey) love the one your with" to the catastrophically sexually unsafe anonymity of New York and Bay Area bath house culture, to the hellishly triggered first wave of 2nd Wave feminists to their naked-woman-in-a-meat-grinder Hustler-cover antagonists in porn, amounted to a cult of its own. Even if it was only a rebound one after the preceding cult of the 1950s. But I get the impression we could learn a lot from that too.

* Footnote: I don't want to leave the impression I'm now dour or sour on what's become of sexuality after the 1970s. Or at least since the 1980s. Nor do I feel a need to recant much of anything I've said on this blog, although I think some my earlier posts show strong overtones of those unrecognized unhealthy boundaries. It definitely what I've learned or advocated is itself wrong.

Instead I think the way most of my writing stands up well indicates the problem I'm trying to illustrate here. The sexual ideals people were working on were just really different from the often toxically dysfunctional social context I and a lot of other suburban and exurban children of the Silent Majority generation were exposed to. To consider a (only slightly) less volatile example from current events, it's more like the case where you might hear mild advice like "well, it's a good idea for people in remote areas to be able to protect themselves." Only where for most people that just means have a dog, a baseball bat, or (as Joe Biden suggests) a shotgun, for the people you grew up around it meant machine guns, bunkers, explosives, bullet proof clothes and cars, the occasional confederate and nazi flags or white hoods, etc. The basic ideas can make sense even if the implementation and local influences are unhealthy in the extreme. Or look at Elizabeth Esther's example: it can be a good thing to be of religious faith even though it turns out you grew up in an almost insanely violent, repressive, terrified-and-terrifying cult.

Well, same sort of deal with the world of gender, relationships, tolerance, boundaries, and sex in the 1970s. All things considered now I think it might be nice to try on being a survivor. Because wowzie!

Photo of classical disqus discus thrower by Flickr user Happy A. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Going into my 8th year of blogging at Real Adult Sex I've got a gazillion comments on thousands of posts. But for every one real comment I've received over the years either the blog software, my anti-spam software, or I personally have filtered, moderated, and/or bounced on the order of several million spam comments.

So I'm switching to Disqus.

All old comments will remain in place for posterity, but it should actually be easier, probably quicker, definitely more spam-free, and even easier for me to reply to any new comments you care to make in Disqus.

Thanks!

figleaf

Image by figleaf published with a Creative Commons license.

So some evolutionary biologists, Yana G. Kamberov and Pardis C. Sabeti, recently published a paper about a relatively recent (only 35,000 years old) gene mutations in humans that appears almost exclusively in East Asians. The mutated gene, EADR, appears to be responsible for thick hair, distinctively-shaped teeth, small breasts, and extra sweat glands. It's not carried by populations of European or African descent. With me so far? Great! So far we're just talking about regular, everyday genetics research.

The problem arises, as it usually does, in the interpretation of regular, everyday genetics research. Because sooner or later -- usually sooner -- some asshat "evolutionary psychologist" or sociobiologist is going to come along and insist it couldn't be about anything but sex.

Katy Waldman has the scoop.

Joshua Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle, [says] it all comes down to pretty ladyparts.

According to Akey, “thick hair and small breasts are visible sexual signals which, if preferred by men, could quickly become more common as the carriers had more children.” In fact, he claims, “the sexually visible effects of EDAR are likely to have been stronger drivers of natural selection than sweat glands.”

Basically, the genetic mutation flourished because men wanted to do the no-no-cha-cha with women who carried it. Oops, I’d forgotten that science, the world, etc., revolves around what males find attractive. Never mind that this assumes an alarming passivity on the part of the females. Did they have no say in their mating partner? (That’s a rhetorical question: Studies throughout the animal kingdom show that it’s usually the females who decide who gets action and who doesn’t.) And even supposing that the women had no agency, were prehistoric East Asian men really so very picky? Did they typically refuse intercourse with large-breasted or fine-haired women? I am trying to imagine a caveman turning down a willing sexual partner on account of a triviality like insufficiently luxuriant tresses, and not just one caveman but the entire sperm-producing Pleistocene population.  

Source: Slate.com

So let's review. Here we've got a gene mutation that codes for four characteristics.. If one of those characteristics increases the survival prospects of one's descendants the whole mutation will likely be conserved and might even eventually outcompete all other variations on the gene. So it could be better ability to sweat -- but how useful would that have been in the extremely hot, muggy climate of east Asia 35,000 years ago? It could have been the teeth. It could have been the hair. It could even have been the breasts. And even if it was the breasts, it could have been that the particular configuration of smaller breasts were more efficient for nursing, less subject to infection, less likely to interfere with running or other physical activities. And sure, they could even have been more attractive to men, although given how many generations it takes for a characteristic to evolve and how fickle fashionable preferences tend to be in humans, it would have had to have been hella more attractive than all other breast types to have consistently been preferred by mating decision makers (men or, often as not, matchmaking parents) over tens of thousands of years.

But one way or another, if all characteristics are encoded by a single gene and just one of them confers a reproductive advantage then all the rest are just carried along for the ride.

Which, without considerable further research, makes it essentially a value judgement and/or an expression of conscious or unconscious bias to proclaim that one and only one of those characteristics "must" be the important one.

Now. Did the original researchers, Kamberov or Sabeti, make any such claim? No. Did their co-author Daniel Lieberman, another genetics researcher make the claim? Quite the contrary. Instead when Waldman asked him outright he said " “The problem with all selection, but especially sexual selection, is that it’s impossible to test on humans. We were careful not to make assumptions about the selective benefits of the gene.” And did Jerry Coyne, another evolutionary geneticist Waldman spoke to make any such claim? Nope! Once again an actual evolutionary geneticist said the idea was "extremely dubious" and, besides, sexually selected traits tend not to work that way anyway. (They usually arises in one sex only and generally impose that would otherwise be filtered out by increased mortality if the other sex didn't preferentially select it.)

Nope. The only scientist to jump on the titties and hair bandwagon was someone from the David Barash school (literally! Barash and Akey are both at the University of Washington) of just-so storytellers, a.k.a. making shit up to fit your expectations.

And what a story it is! A mutation crops up that affects teeth and chest shape, number of sweat glands, and hair thickness in both men and women. Some of these characteristics -- thick, shiny hair in particular -- are considered attractive in both men and women. And yet, somehow, the only possible advantage a nominally professional geneticist can imagine the mutation might convey is to make women more sexually desirable to men. But not the other way around? Really? No woman might be more attracted to a man with thicker, more luxurious hair? And therefore preferentially want to "mate" with him (a.k.a. jump his bones?)

Oh right. Based on all the evidence the primary purpose of reflex "evolutionary psychology" speculation is to buttress the dominant paradigm: it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire; it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. Therefore it's doubly inconceivable to Mr. Akey and his kind that nicer hair would make any difference to a woman's partner preference. End of story.

Fortunately there are other kinds of scientists.

Via Miri at BruteReason there was a bit of a kerfuffle at Jadehawk's Blog over a post about sex work by Jill Filipovic at Feministe called Supporting Sex Workers’ Rights, Opposing the Buying of Sex.

You can follow the links to see who said what. Here's my take on the conflict.

The fact that full-service sex work has declined nearly 90% since the beginning of the post-modern, feminist, "sex-positive" era suggests that Jill has a point about the likely role of sex work in a feminist future: while it won't go away any more than ballroom dance instruction has gone away, it will no longer be considered the necessity (literally the "necessary evil") it once was. The reason being, according to economists, that as legal, social, and economic barriers to women's equality have fallen women have been more able to choose to have sex when they want to, without worrying about ruining their "chances."

That tends to reinforce Jill's point that after feminism sex work as we know it will all but disappear. It already has! It already is! I'll go a step further here and say that for all our tolerance and/or advocacy of sex work (and while I'm a curmudgeon about it I'm still an advocate) I'm... pretty sure nobody thinks we should go back to, say, the 1940s when between one in three and one in four men regularly went to brothels or otherwise hired sex workers.

So if those particular bad old days are gone and if perfectly credible free-agency sex workers are able to advocate for themselves and their professions what's the problem?

The sticking point, I think, with sex work as it continues to be constructed in popular culture (and consequently in much of feminist culture) is that it's seen as one end of a continuum of heterosexual sex as transactional sex where there are women (only women sex workers count in pop culture) who men can marry for sex, and other women men can pay cash for sex, and maybe somewhere in the middle there are women who will or at least are expected to trade sex for dinner and a movie.

Oh, and inside the paradigm of transactional sex there are the reviled-by-pop-culture "sluts" who screw everything up by "giving it away." Them and assault victims who are eternally scrutinized and blamed for somehow "asking for it." Them, and assault victims, and men who "resort to" all those demeaning, deprecating euphemisms for masturbation all screw thing up "for the rest of us." And finally inside that paradigm it's almost impossible to imagine women (it's always women in the popular imagination, remember) doing it of their own free will, without being enslaved, induced, degraded, addicted, abused, broken, or otherwise appearing to themselves and the public as "damaged goods."

Inside the dominant paradigm wherein men may desire sex and women may only be interested in what they can get for sex with men (cough), no matter how interesting, intentional, or freely chosen sex workers and their customers are still going to be part of the problem. In other words, like a lot of the rest of patriarchy the problem isn't individuals, it's the system.

It doesn't have to be that way. And obviously for a lot of individual participants it's nothing like that at all! But for too much of the rest of contemporary civilization (let's not even start talking about "traditional" civilization!) it's still not like that at all!

So here's the metric I've used to think about sex work for about the last five years: sex work will stop being problematic from a feminist/gender-consciousness perspective when as many women hire sex workers as men... and when men's motivation to hire sex workers are the same as women's. To the extent that metric seems impractical, idealistic, outrageous, or ridiculous sex work will continue to be problematic. And further, until we get there I don't necessarily agree that Jill's right... but those who disagree with her won't be right either.

Photo by Flickr user vistavision. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Another way de Botton's claim...

Erections and lubrication simply cannot be effected by willpower and are therefore particularly true and honest indices of interest. In a world in which fake enthusiasms are rife, in which it is often hard to tell whether people really like us or whether they are being kind to us merely out of a sense of duty, the wet vagina and the stiff penis function as unambiguous agents of sincerity.

Source: Psychology Today

...isn't, um, "particularly true and honest," let alone an "unambiguous agent of sincerity" would be that based on 3rd, 2nd, and lately 1st-hand evidence, it can be the case that no erection doesn’t mean not aroused. For some men some of the time, and almost all men as we age, the darn things aren’t up when you really, reallly, really want them to be.

Also, not to put too fine a point on it but not that long ago something like 27% of all email spam was for variations on erectile "dysfunction" remedies!  How can he still make such a ridiculous assertion!?!?!?  How can he not have made that connection?!?!?

Also, as another commenter, Crista, at Emily Nagoski's blog pointed out, vaginal lubrication can persist well after arousal has gone. And, of course, like erectile inconstancy, for some women some of the time, and most women as they age, vaginal lubrication can also "fail" to arrive either before or after orgasms, let alone arousal.

All of which just goes to show it would be an insult to sheep to call this guy de Button a mutton head.

I mean, look.  I'm sure that for a privileged, cis, straight, white, high-income, younger than middle age, educated, non-medication-using, possibly non-sex-abused-or-abusing man from a developed country de Botton was just trying to make a philosophical point about how nice it is that there can be some confidence of certainty when your partner's shows genuine (if also highly typically indicated) arousal for you, as opposed to some other forms of communication that can be confused with, say, rote observances -- for instance anniversary "remembered" in your Outlook calendar, flowers orderd by her secretary, vaseline on the teeth to keep you smiling for in-laws, Lake Woebegone assurances of "no, it's fine, fine, really it's fine."

I already didn't like "philosopher and writer" Alain de Botton before he got is gig at Psychology Today. Now, via I've got a serious problem with him. Here's why I think you should too.

In a post called 12 Rude Revelations about Sex de Botton makes the following startling, and wrong, and very, very dangerous assertion

Involuntary physiological reactions such as the wetness of a vagina and the stiffness of a penis are emotionally so satisfying (which means, simultaneously, so erotic) because they signal a kind of approval that lies utterly beyond rational manipulation. Erections and lubrication simply cannot be effected by willpower and are therefore particularly true and honest indices of interest. In a world in which fake enthusiasms are rife, in which it is often hard to tell whether people really like us or whether they are being kind to us merely out of a sense of duty, the wet vagina and the stiff penis function as unambiguous agents of sincerity.

Source: Psychology Today (naturally)

Emily Nagoski nicely dismantles de Botton's factual, psychological, and sexual claims so I don't have to. (Hint: if he were right then most men have serious sexual attraction to full bladders first thing in the morning.)

That means I can concentrate on de Botton's seriously creepy sexual-violence-supporting implications instead.

Involuntary reactions such as wetness or erections are "satisfying?" "Erotic?!?!" Seriously?

 this is giving direct aid and support to rapists? Because that whole “if you didn’t really want this you wouldn’t be hard/wet” is one of the big guns in abusers and rapist’s bags of psychological tricks. (Tip for de Button: try Googling “arousal during sexual assault.” Asshole!)

One result that pops up early on is from survivor-support site the Pandora Project (my italics.)

A sexual response or orgasm in the course of sexual assault is often the best-kept and most deeply shameful secret of many survivors. If you are such a survivor, it’s essential that you know that sexual response in sexual assault is extremely common, well-documented and nothing for you to be ashamed of.

…

And it isn’t just about you and the way your body responded either. It may also have been one of the repertoire of dirty tricks rapists use to get their victims to feel responsible. Diana Russell writes that “Some rapists think they’re lovers” and tells us:
(These rapists) think that if a woman is stimulated in ‘just the right way’ she will enjoy it. The conquest may seem more important if the rapist believes he has turned the woman on physically, particularly if it is against her will. Getting the victim to respond physically may also alleviate the rapist’s guilt feelings.

Source: Pandora Project: Sexual Arousal & Sexual Assault

Or regarding erections, from Living Well, and Australian site for recovering male victims (my italics)

People who sexually abuse boys and men often use their knowledge about male bodies to deliberately cause an erection and/or ejaculate to occur. They do this because they know it is extremely confusing and embarrassing. They might also do it to try and convince both the person being abused and themselves that what is happening is not really abuse. Whatever the reasons, ultimately they know that if the boy or man was aroused, they might be less likely to tell anyone about the abuse due to feelings of shame and embarrassment.

Source: Living Well: Sexual Assault and Arousal

In that context de Button’s choice of the words “Involuntary physiological reactions such as the wetness of a vagina and the stiffness of a penis are emotionally so satisfying (which means, simultaneously, so erotic)” (my italics) are just beyond horrifying and right up there with encouraging, endorsing, and maybe even celebrating sexual violence.

Maybe he’s too stupid to understand. Maybe he thinks he thinks he’s being “edgy” and contrarian. Maybe he’s trying to rationalize his own prior victimization. Or perpetration! But one way or another it’s not funny either that he said it, that his editors passed on it, or especially that Psychology Today (of all people*!) published it!!!

Sweet Mother of Pearl!

* Not that I expect Psychology Today to be particularly interested in truth, reality, or responsibility -- after all they seem to have picked de Button to replace their previous calculated-to-offend, too-distraced-even-for-them columnist Satoshi Kawazana -- but for a journal purporting to be about, well, psychology, today, I would at least expect them to have some sensitivity to the psychological and emotional well being of survivors of sexual violence.