Sadie of Jezebel says
n the last 20 years, household roles have shifted: whereas the supermarket used to be the woman's domain, today "almost one-third of men are now the principal shoppers in the household."
This isn't exactly breaking news to the principal shoppers in households. This is good news though.
The sooner we can get to really, serious equal divisions of labor the sooner we'll get away from that egregious "there's nothing sexier than a man doing [some item of housework]." And towards, oh, say, "there's nothing sexier than having lots of spare time for each other because all domestic tasks done in half the time because we split the work."
If you're an adult you can click here to see a not-very-work-safe housekeeping image.
Historic Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, a recreation of a town founded in 1699 might present itself as family friendly. But they've recreated historic bondage gear as well... in public no less!
I'm tellin' ya, we might like to think kink is new. All that's really new is the word "kink." :-)
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that's me.) Used under a Creative Commons license.
Dodai of Jezebel says
Something Once Regarded As Exotic Has Become Commonplace
"According to the first academic, peer-reviewed studies of vibrator use, it is nearly as common an appliance in American households as the drip coffee maker or toaster oven."
By coincidence at almost the exact moment she posted her piece I was reviewing a photo I'd taken in the Electricity Hall at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History during our recent family vacation in Washington, D.C. The photo was of a bunch of early American home appliances. Among them were now-100-year-old fans, toasters, waffle irons, and mixers from the turn of the 20th Century. But, oddly, no 100-year-old vibrators.
Which might not sound like much of an omission.
Except that, as Rachel Maines meticulously detailed in The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)
The electrification of the home proceeded rapidly after the introduction of electric lights in 1878, and predictably, women were significant consumers of electric appliances. The first home appliance to be electrified was the sewing machine, in 1889, followed in the next ten years by the fan, the teakettle, the toaster, and the vibrator. The last preceded the electric vacuum cleaner by some nine years, the electric iron by ten, and the electric frying pan by more than a decade, possibly reflecting consumer priorities.
...
A one-liner in the June 1908 Review of Reviews ... cautions readers against "imprudence" and "excess in action" when using vibrators...
...
Women were advised [in advertising] that the "American [brand] Vibrator ... can be used by yourself in the privacy of dressing room or boudoir, and furnishes every woman with the very essence of perpetual youth."
Source: Pgs.100-103
Oh yeah, and
During the first two decades of [the 20th Century], the vibrator began to be marketed as a home appliance through advertising in such periodicals as ... Modern Woman, Hearst's McClure's, Woman's Home Companion, and Modern Pricilla. The device was marketed mainly to women as a health and relaxation aid, in ambiguous phrases such as "all the pleasures of yought... will throb within you." When marketed to men, vibrators were recommeded as gifts for women that would benefit the male givers by restoring bright eyes and pink cheeks to their female consorts. ... An especially versatile vibrator line was illustrated in the Sears, Roebuck and Company Electrical Goods catalog for 1918. [An] advertisement headed "Aids That Every Woman Appreciates" shows a vibrator attachment for a home motor that also drove attachments for churning, mixing, beating, grinding, buffing, and operating a fan."
Source: Pgs 19-20
In other words, contrary to Dodai's sources as appliances go the electric toaster predated the vibrator but not the coffee maker.
The slip-up seems natural because just a few years later Freud came along and the 2500 year old practice of treating "hysteria" massaging the vulva to the point of "hysterical paroxysm" was replaced by... talk therapy to treat "frigidity" and "nymphomania," leaving women between roughly 1925 and 1975 largely in the lurch.
Echidne of the Snakes has a lovely, and in this case illuminatingly literal example of the male worthiness fetish
This was how getting married was described in a recent radio program I listened to: The woman shows that she is proud to wear the man's name! He's worthy!
The comment was made by a man...
The worthiness trap is one more necessary outcome of the Two Rules of Desire. Rule #2 says it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. Consequently he can't just have sex with women he has to earn it.
Meanwhile, over here in the real world, I'm... pretty sure that neither the most "good natured girl" nor the most avariciously cold-eyed "golddigger" nor anyone else either proximal or distal to those two poles considers herself, her sexuality, or her reproductive future with a partner as his reward.
---
Aside: Rule #1, by the way, says it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to express sexual desire, is equally critical to the worthiness trap. Since men indoctrinate themselves to believe sex must be earned, a woman who's interested in a man just because being a human being and all she happens to be horny at the moment isn't any fun at all. She's "cheap." "Easy." Not even a whore (who at least had the decency to require payment) but a slut.
Charming little system we've created here.
"He's worthy" my ass.
Matthew Yglesias says (emphasis mine)
It’s precisely because of stances like this that it’s very hard to take the “abortion is murder” crowd seriously when they say abortion is murder. Their revealed behavior indicates that they don’t actually find abortion especially problematic, but just place it on a spectrum containing a general aversion to women controlling their own sexuality
...
Atrios sees this as a reason to mock those who advocate seeking “common ground” with abortion proponents. I think we’re arguably seeing here the real fruits of seeking common ground in good faith—their real views are smoked out.
Atrios is technically correct that seeking compromise never works with ideologues. But Yglesias is absolutely correct that simply making the effort forces those ideologues to show their true colors.
Which, since they're very ugly colors, drives a wedge between them and the vast, vast majority of Americans for whom efforts to prevent unplanned, unwanted pregnancies through contraception, sex education, and empowerment for girls and women, are perfectly acceptable.
Speaking of book-learning vs. experience, via Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, who quotes Dan Savage, who quotes David Klinghoffer who in turn cites the ancient Roman Catullus on exactly how homosexuality is supposed to ruin heterosexual marriage.
The social history behind this piece is clear: once they’ve experienced sex with other men, Catullus tells us, men are unsatisfied with what their new wives provide them. Notice that the poet is unconcerned about the husband’s dallying with other women—it’s the other men around that threaten the marital union.
Is Klinghoffer mental? Yes, sex with one's wife really would be unsatisfactory after homosexual sex if you're homosexual! Otherwise? Not so much.
Seriously! The other year Jon Stewart asked Mike Huckabee when he decided he was heterosexual. Huckabee waived it off and, very unfortunately I think, Stewart didn't pursue it further. Which is really, really unfortunate.
One of the problems with assuming heterosexuality is a baseline, an absolute, an anchor point against which all other is measured (and found wanting) is that it's never itself examined. And so for Huckabee (and perhaps, come to think of it, for Stewart since he didn't press the question) actually inquiring into whether heterosexuality might be a choice doesn't make any sense at all.
Which is a shame because, duh, heterosexuality is no more a choice than homosexuality is. And so it would never occur to Catullus, or Huckabee or, evidently, Klinghoffer to reflect on the equal reality that if you're already straight it's equally true that "once they’ve experienced sex with women, figleaf tells us, men are just as unsatisfied with what other men provide them."
That's why it's such a good idea to let people get married to the gender they actually want to get married to! If you think about it. Which evidently some people never get around to doing.
Sheesh!
Megan Carpentier of Jezebel raises yet another weekly objection to New York Times opinionist-in-residence Ross Douthat's weekly... um... possible hypothesizing about women, feminism, sex, and relationships.
Ross Douthat, he of the thesis that feminism is the root of all women's unhappiness, has a new thesis: it also causes marital unhappiness and infidelity.
...Ok, so, let's make sure I understand this correctly. Feminism (and safe sex) make for boring relationships designed only for upward social mobility, which is good for society and bad for relationships; but sexual freedom has empowered the lower class to make poor decisions about marriage and having a bunch of unsafe sex that Douthat doesn't like in the first place? So, he likes feminism, but he hates it? Is feminism Douthat's mom and does he have an Oedipal complex?
Douthat's got a solution to the problem he's yet to define really well, but which seemingly boils down to the fact that smart, career-oriented women don't have enough wild sex (possibly with Ross Douthat) and dumb sluts have too much.
I'm not exactly sure what Douthat's deal is. Prior to moving to the NYT he blogged conservatively about all sorts of issues. Since landing the gig he seems to be putting way more effort into this one topic.
And...
And...
I'm not sure I can agree with Carpentier's assessment.
I mean, he often sounds the way unmarried people do when speaking authoritatively about marriage, or the way childless women or men talk with assurance about pregnancy and parenting, or... well... the way reluctant virgins or aloof celibates speak with certainty about what sex is like.
So I wanted to ask if anybody knows if the guy's actually spent a lot of time in any kind of relationships with women. Because so much of what he says sounds more like he's read a lot about it. More like he knows what to expect from romance, marriage, or reciprocated lust than he actually knows about it.
Anyway, since it sounds like the guy's not going to stop blathering about it anytime soon it would help me, and maybe others, to know if he's ever had sex. or been in a relationship. Or even had a girlfriend.
Not that there's anything wrong with being better read than experienced. It just wouldn't be very helpful if you planned to continue pPontificating about it on the editorial page of the flipping New York Times.
Update: See also Dana Goldstein's take.
I've been way more out of contact that I thought I'd be. I'll be home and (finally) back online this afternoon.
Jill Filipovic at Feministe turned up a seriously creepy, seriously morally-flawed debated between William Saletan of Slate and Steven Waldman of Beliefnet
The whole thing is so infuriating I’m having trouble coming up with a coherent response. Steven Waldman from Beliefnet suggests paying women some amount of money to not have an abortion — not just because women who continue pregnancies often undergo tremendous financial strain, but as an incentive for her to give the baby up for adoption. Nowhere does he suggest that maybe we should provide economic support for allwomen, before and after birth, so that they can choose to maintain their pregnancies and raise a child if they wish; the whole idea is to bribe women into giving birth so that they’ll give the baby to a nice family.
If you want to reduce terminations of unplanned, unwanted pregnancies, and you've got this idea that you're willing to pay women saddled with such pregnancies to carry them to term instead of having abortions, well... fine! Given that over and over and over women list economic hardship as the main reason for seeking termination, if your goal in life was to reduce those terminations then it makes sense to propose financial assistance to women for whom finances are an obstacle.
But if you're going to offer financial assistance the assistance offered ought to be enough so that the woman in question, possibly in combination with her partner the pregnancy, can raise her child herself! Unless she really, really wants to surrender the child for adoption... in fact, unless she proposes it herself, those offering financial assistance should be ethically, morally, and preferably legally forbidden from mentioning it.
There are two reasons: first, if all the anti-abortionists are right about psychological "damage" women face after termination, especially if the reason was (usually temporary) inability to financially support a child then imagine how women feel who've been forced by finances to, effectively, sell their infant son or daughter! Oh wait, you don't have to imagine it at all! Just go ask any modestly financially stable woman who earlier in life had been forced to surrender her child how she feels knowing her son or daughter is alive and being cared for by the strangers who once had money when she did not. (For that matter go ask the male partners from such pregnancies how they feel about it.)
The second reason, perhaps more important reason, though, is that abortion-as-solution is still so heavily tied to the idea that women's worth is based on her own "resale" value to a prospective husband. With the result that adoption is seen as a way "these girls" can start over. (Note: Shulamith Firestone pointed out back in the 1960s, too often the same considerations influence the abortion and contraception debates. There are other reasons for seeking to avoid pregnancy that don't involve preserving women's appearance of minty freshness.)
We notice that very economically stable single women, even those who would never consider terminating an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy, ever "surrender" their children for adoption. Nor, for that matter, do we see them suffering extraordinary approbation or stigma for keeping their "fatherless" children. Nor, for that matter, do we even see them suffering that much for lack of partners.
As Jill points out further on in her post, the pro-choice philosophy focuses on supporting women's choice, not channeling their options in more politically expedient or, especially, more desirable for financially capable childless couples directions.
If Waldman, Saletan and their abortion abatement colleagues were interested in reducing the number of pregnancy terminations then in addition to their (entirely laudable) support for safer, more effective, more easily used, more affordable, and more available contraception they'd also get solidly behind the idea that unplanned, unwanted pregnancy doesn't ruin women's "real" utility as economically dependent "companions" and "helpmeets" for men who don't want "previously owned" wives.
(Signature: composed on a hand-held -- pardon any typos.)
[Still on family vacation till next Tuesday morning. Still next to no time to write even though there's lots to talk about. --fl]
Susie and Aretha Bright have an occasional advice column at Jezebel and cope nicely with a correspondent who's having a first-hand collision with a highly recognizable component of the "no-sex" class paradigm.
Dear Aretha & Susie:
I've been in a relationship for over three years, and for the past year we've been talking about getting married. Since these conversations started, my boyfriend started to expect different things of me sexually. He gets upset if I use "dirty" words like cock, pussy, or fuck. He said, "The mother of my future children doesn't talk like that."
We're having less sex, and the sex we do have is more vanilla. I like vanilla sex, but I would like it more frequently. I'm afraid that he isn't seeing me as a sexual person anymore. If we do get married, I wonder if this will lead him to cheat. One of the things that I liked about our relationship before, was that we had a great sexual connection- and he told me over and over how important sex is to him. So if he can't get it from me, will he look elsewhere? Help!
—Unhappy Angel in the House
The standard narrative has it that women are always the ones who lose interest in sex... typically because her partner "wears her down" with endless solicitations caused by his "naturally higher" libido.
That's the descriptive part of the paradigm -- the one of the expectation setting elements whereby men are indoctrinated to believe that, except maybe for that lusty, anomalous single moon after sex begins where honey flows smoothly, women would just never think about sex if their partners weren't perpetually bringing it up.
And yet here the proscriptive mechanism is pretty clear: side B of the paradigm is that inside it men believe women shouldn't be interested, shouldn't be eager, shouldn't be creative, shouldn't be ready to say "yes."
Rule #1 of my unfortunately non-cynical Two Rules of Desire is that it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable that women should have sexual desire. The descriptive part says it's inconceivable. The proscriptive part says it's intolerable.
I say it's incomprehensible. Not least because it causes so much misery and ill will in both victims and authors of the ideology.
Incidentally, Susie's advice begins pithily: "I wouldn't want him to be the father of my children..." Aretha's conclusion is equally blunt: "Anyone who says "The Mother of My Children Doesn't ..." - Deal breaker."
My advice, for Unhappy Angel in the House, anyone else who's had her experience, and for you for when it happens to you is to confront the issue straight up! Say "You know, story has it that 99% of couples wind up with the man wanting more, more adventurous sex than the woman does. I don't want to be one of those couples but when you say crap like 'the mother of my children, blah, blah, blah' I get the strong feeling you do! We need to talk about that because I don't feel that way, I don't want to feel that way, I don't want you trying to make me feel that way, and guess what? I'm actually pretty sure you don't want me to feel that way."
I'm pretty sure that conversation doesn't happen often. If it does I still don't think it happens often enough.
Why do we assume that we produce so much semen in order to "spread it around?" It seems as likely that "to keep it fresh" would work as well. It's not like it's "expensive" for us to produce, right? So why complicate things with mass-paternity imperatives?
Also, not to sound cranky or anything but why assume men don't naturally want to be complete and not just biological fathers? Is there much evidence that "state of nature" men are any less interested in, say, protoges than women? Any less interested in investing in children?
I mean sure, sufficiently stressed men (and women) exhibit asocial, socially atomized, "militarized," or othewise "selfish" behavior, but why assume that's a default instead of a distorted outcome? By that logic prisoners, addicts, and PTSD victims are "ultimate" examples of men rather than damaged outliers.
(Signature: composed on a hand-held -- pardon any typos.)
Well, while traveling and living in cramped quarters on family vacation it's been pretty hard to post anything, let alone find space for Half-Nekkid Thursday photos. But then while reviewing photos taken by one of the younger family members... who hasn't yet mastered framing... I realized opportunity had already knocked.
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
Echidne of the Snakes takes a look at overlooked assumptions about religious codes of dress or conduct...
So you may have read that Nicolas Sarkozy is proposing a debate about banning the burqa in France, by which he appears to mean banning those Islamic methods of veiling which cover the face (the Afghan burqa with a grille in front of the eyes and the niqab, common in Saudi Arabia, which leaves only the eyes visible). I found reading the comments threads attached to posts on this topic at feministing.com and at feministe very interesting: Intersectionality in practice!
Except that this reveals one problem with intersectionality: by focusing on women and Islam we lose sight of the men and Islam, we lose sight of the long tradition of religious interpretation by men, and we lose sight of the question of women's roles in the three Abrahamic religions. Though intersectionality does help bring into light questions about colonialism and racism or xenophobia.
Later in the post she distinguishes layers of interpretation, the key ones for me being the text of a rule and the decisions about what they should mean in practice.
In Judeo-Christian tradition we read Biblical verses about, say, Sodom or Onan where the text itself is plain... but not necessarily clear... and choose to decide what we should do about it. In those cases we decided the first was about homosexuality instead of impiety and dishonesty or, even more improbably, that the second was about masturbation, about which the Bible is otherwise silent, instead of insuring patrilinearity, about which it's obsessed. (And about Onan -- it's odd 'wingers don't beat on that passage as being about contraception instead. It's possibly a good thing -- better to have them wigging out looking for hairy palms than condoms or the pill. But I digress...)
Anyway, just as Judeo-Christians have our interpretations that are flavored by (non-textual) culture, surely interpretation of texts of Islam must be subject to the culture of those who interpret it.
And if that interpretation is permitted only of one sex in a gender-constructing culture then even if your texts condone oppression of sub-groups such as unbelievers, foreigners, or women there remains a deep, deep risk that the dominant interpreters for their unexamined convenience will unjustly burden those they subjugate.
For instance to oblige women to cover themselves rather than to oblige men to chill with the coveting business.
The conclusion then is that even for "traditional" women-domineering faiths such as Judaism, Christianity,and Islam it is a responsibility of the pious to engage with, absorb, and genuinely practice, say, feminism to the fullest possible extent or risk straying from their faith and sinking into apostasy.
And if even unreconstructed patriarchs ought to incorporate feminism...
(Signature: composed on a hand-held -- pardon any typos.)
