Dang it all. I'm travelling this weekend and left my power supply at home (something I think I did once before a few years ago.) Which sort of bites, especially after cracking my head on this kind of horrified realization, which I'd really like to discuss a little further.
Oh well, if I can find a substitute I might post more. Otherwise I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.
Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon says
Michael Wolff ... does the nation a favor and shows that yep, The Village is more worried about politician’s sex lives than about what the public cares about, which is policy and leadership.
Politics is now about sex. Not just scandalous sex, not just who is having what kind of sex, but what we think about the sex each politician is having, or not having. Sex (sex, not gender) in politics is as significant a subtext as race.
Which I have to say is unmitigated bullshit. The illustration for the article is of Eliot Spitzer, and that entire scandal is totally about gender. There’s no term for a “call boy” (though a few do exist, servicing men predominantly) for a reason. Prostitution is about gender more than sex, especially in our modern culture that tolerates a lot more sexual freedom to change partners and men can’t reasonably say that they have to pay for it to get laid outside of marriage. (Especially, as I’ve noted before, a famous, wealthy, and not horribly ugly man like Eliot Spitzer.)
The rest of the article proves my point—Wolf longs for a time when middle aged men were protected by a society of men to have affairs with younger women without getting caught. If it was about sex and not gender, he’d have nothing to moan over. Because his notion that cheating has been done to death by disapproving soccer moms enacting a matriarchy (his words—no, really) is not born out by the statistics. Men and women both cheat at robust levels. There’s more than enough adultery going on for Wolf to imagine to keep his dick hard for forever, if this is really about his love of cheating and not about gender.
But it’s about gender. Cheating is not the point. Men getting to sneak around behind their wives’ backs with younger women is the loss he bemoans, and of course, women don’t get equal cheating rights, but that’s because they’re all dried up anyway.
...But women don’t need that kind of sexual freedom in their middle age, because we’re dried up. So that’s how to explain how the sexual-freedom-for-men-but-not-for-women attitude isn’t unfair. But he doesn’t address the other factor that pierced the wall of protection men built around their cruelties and adulteries in the past—the large scale female dependence on men that made fighting back or speaking up financially destructive. The culture he wants back wasn’t just randomly tolerant of men’s proclivities. Women didn’t like it then, but it took having a more equal footing to push back. And how much have we really accomplished, even then? Flip on your TV and witness the ads for “Girls Gone Wild”. Our culture still coddles the belief that humiliating and hurting women is “sex”, even if a few randy feminists demand that sex be defined as naked pleasure for all parties.
Read the quote in context here. (Emphasis in last paragraph mine.)
So! You feeling dried up? I'm always surprised how many people say you are. Over 16 (sez the National Review) or over 25 (said, I believe, Diana Vreeland) and now Michael Wolf in Vanity Fair.
Sort of baffling seeing all these older men "needing" younger women because women their age are "all dried up" while *younger* men daydream about cougars and MILFs.
Amanda's right and Wolf is full of crap. It *is* about gender then. Because how the hell do women "dry out" with age in any way that men don't? Sure *everybody* loses a step at some point but... for one thing it's the *same point,* and I'm not really seeing that much impact "dry up" wise between needing a little more lube at fifty than needing a little more viagra or a cock ring. And I'm not seeing a *real* difference because it's *not there!* Oh, or do you mean wrinkles? Yeah, fifty-year-old men and women have wrinkles and... fifteen-year-old men and women have oily skin and zits. So...
So if there's no difference in *reality* but there's a difference in *perception* then since gender in general is constructed we call that difference a *gender* difference and not a biological one.
I mean...
I mean...
What's *wrong* with us? Us men? Us *anybody* who spins these lines to each other?
%@%*#%!
In the middle of so many hard words it's surprising to discover: Indoctrination aside, sitting side by side people are suspiciously soft. And subversively warm! (25 words)
Photo by Flickr user John Kannenberg. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon says
Oh man, Abstinence Clearinghouse has started a blog, presumably so people can write about all the sex they’re not having. It’s brilliant, like almost like it’s a parody, except it’s not. I loved this post.
Virginity is an asset that holds its value well.
...
And if you hang onto your virginity, unlike other assets, it pretty much is guaranteed to lose its value over time. Though it’s a result of unfair prejudice, the reality is that the older the virgin, the more people tend to classify the virginity as a social awkwardness to outright weirdness. Most virgins over a certain age feel their virginity is an albatross. Even if you’re holding onto it for religious reasons, there’s a point where you choice drifts from “cute example of religious devotion” to “eccentricity bordering on antisocial levels of self-righteousness, perhaps masking deep insecurities”.
Yeah, I sort of have to agree with Marcotte's question and... I'm sort of wondering why the Abstinence Clearinghouse doesn't have a whole section celebrating 30-year-old, 50-year-old, and life-long virgins. Because sort of by (their) definition the longer you hold out the better.
John Ruskin kept his virginity from February 8, 1819 all the way to January 20, 1900 yet a search of Abstinence Clearinghouse yields nothing! Thoreau isn't found either, but maybe that's because he only made it 44 years (before dying, not before having sex.)
Image source: Wikipedia.What stuns me, though, is that they completely ignore John Harvey Kellogg (he of corn flake fame) kept his virginity for *91 years,* including more than *forty years* of marriage! Kellogg was a tireless advocate for abstinence. According to his Wikipedia entry
He warned that many types of sexual activity, including many “excesses” that couples could be guilty of within marriage, were against nature, and therefore, extremely unhealthy. He drew on the warnings of William Acton and expressed support for the work of Anthony Comstock. He appears to have gone beyond his own advice, since though he and his wife were married for over forty years, they never had sexual intercourse and had separate bedrooms all their lives.
I mean, here's a guy who's said to have worked on Plain Facts about Sexual Life, a major, best-selling pro-abstienence tract *on his honeymoon!* If *anyone's* virginity held it's value well then surely it was he!!! And yet they totally turn their backs on him!
Oh wait, all the people I've mentioned were abstinent *men!* Nobody values chastity in men because nobody's willing to *pay* for male virginity.
Seriously, I grew up in the south where there were (and are!) still "dry" counties where the sale of all beverages containing alcohol. Consequently those counties also have "moonshiners," who make money (sometimes *huge* money) smuggling and selling alcohol into those dry counties. And ya wanna know a secret? If those counties dropped their own private prohibitions then moonshiners would be off the gravy train and so... they make darn sure the most abolitionist ministers in those counties get the biggest donations, with little notes saying "keep up the good work, Reverend."
And that's what folks like the Abstinence Clearinghouse are really up to as well -- trying to keep a tradition from previous centuries alive in order to reward one set of people (men) with access to an artificial scarcity (one-time-deal sex with women.) And for people who are into that it's a *seriously* good deal -- men who buy in get something of (artificial) value, women who buy into it get "bonus" economic points, *everybody* who buys into it gets to claim virtue points. And, of course, women who don't conform and therefore undercut the "market" get to be sluts and (tellingly) *cheap* whores!
What bitter, cynical expectations of human beings -- women and men -- they have. What bitter, cynical expectations of women and men they *create!*
%#!@$%!
Photo by Flickr user Tierecke. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Via Louise Livesey of The F-Word Blog comes word of women's "gatekeeper role" in action... because, you know, MRAs are just so right about how women hold all the power when it comes to sex...
[T]here comes news of this case from the US in which a woman fought off a sexual assault assailant, only to be punished by a crowd of laughing men with a second sexual assault....
[Melissa] Bruen reported to the crowd that [a man] had just sexually assaulted her to which one man replied "You think that was assault?". He then pulled down her top and forcibly grabbed her breasts. The crowd yelled in pleasure completely ignoring that Bruen was being sexually assault seemingly for their viewing pleasure. Bruen reported the attacks to the Police but the crowds made it impossible for Police to single out her attacker(s) (mind they could just have arrested them all - I'm with Jackie Fleming on this, if men can't be trusted out at night, don't let them onto the streets).
The problem with the myth of (hetero) sexual scarcity isn't "stuff like this wouldn't happen if women just put out more." Because women *do* "put out" more than ever before without much affecting the myth, or it's consequences, one bit.
Instead the problem with the myth of sexual scarcity is that you wind up with a *climate* of wherein men feel not desperate for sex with women but *entitled* to whatever they can get. But it's a funny sort of "entitlement." Entitlement, no question about it, but an astonishingly alienated kind.
Can I just make one perilous little point? In her post Livesey adds
Whether we face up to it or not, sexual violence is still seen as sexy. Think about the Vegas story earlier this week, think about this one, then tell me they aren't essentially about the same thing - male power and the presumption of women's silence and obedience.
It's not sexy. It's something else. You know how in Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape
But here's the deal: men are going to keep doing shit like what they did to Melissa Bruen (without, incidentally, having either particular sexual attraction for her -- the first fallacy -- or grudge against her -- the second fallacy) until we, and they, understand what, exactly, the fuck they think they're rebelling *against.*
And if I can just make everybody's head explode for a moment, can I just suggest that what they're rebelling against is patriarchy?**
And that therefore they're doing a *particularly* shitty job of it?
How can anyone be so stupid! How can *everyone* be so stupid. How can *we all* be so stupid?!?! Arrrgggg it just *pisses me off!*
[** And yes, it makes my head explode too. And yes, I wish I hadn't thought it. And no, obviously that's not what *they're* thinking. And no, even if they realize they're rebelling/tantrum-ing they obviously don't think it's patriarchy they're rebelling against. --fl]
Via DailyMotion (and, in turn, via a link in comments from SugarMag) here's one of those ostensibly "pro-women" ads that on the one hand mocks "food-gasm" ads... but *also* encourages women to stick with traditional male stereotypes.
Pub Yoplait avec Leisha Hailey Uploaded by sarah-michelle-gellar
(And also, yeah, Sara Michelle Gellar? That's how the link came from DailyMotion.)
Photo from 100% Injury Rate's blog.
Yet another point rising out of comments (have I ever mentioned just how inspiring you all are, by the way?) Reacting to my reaction to Anastasia's reaction to the notion of teaching pole dancing to children, Holly (of The Pervocracy, who said)
There are a million forms of exercise that build coordination and self-esteem and the reason pole-dancing was chosen over karate or basketball or gymnastics can't be random.
And the sad part is that it probably doesn't stem from any kind of truly sinister intention, but probably from an honest belief that looking sexy leads to self-esteem. Which it can! But not for children, and not when you don't admit what you're doing.
Denying that spreading your legs around a pole is sexual does two different harms: it puts children into inappropriately sexual situations, and it denies the ability for these same situations to be very sexy among adults.
Yup. It's sort of like teaching children self-defense by taping "kick me" to their backs without letting them know. Teaching children a) to do things that look sexual to *other people* while b) claiming to the actual child there's nothing sexual about it is *exactly* what sexualization is all about.
*On the other hand,* and just to be clear, I wouldn't worry at all about adults promoting pole dancing to each other as a tremendous combination of skill, strength, coordination, and intentional eroticism.
[Quick note: The post by 100% Injury Rate, the source of the version of photo I used, above, mentions that the Australian program teaches girls *and* boys, which is at least one step in a positive direction, although it sounds like it's for kids as early as age seven. --fl]
Still working my way back through older comments I ran into a great one from TLT in response to this post about housework as the traditionally "missing" displacement fetish for women. TLT says
I recently figured out that this is exactly what I find revolting about a TV ad for Betty Crocker Warm Delights.
Yes, even the name sounds sexual. Yet, Warm Delights are these...things that you open, add water to, cook in the microwave for a few minutes, and get what ostensibly is a dessert.
As far as I'm concerned, the only time dessert comes out of the microwave is if you put a slice of cold pie in there for 20 seconds before you put the ice cream on it, but that's something else altogether.
The commercial shows women (and only women) eating these things, often in a bed and/or in pajamas, moaning and sighing, eyes closed. Some even lick the spoons and forks they're eating with. I think one even licks the bowl it's in.
It all seems to suggest that what you (woman with misplaced, confused, repressed sexual desire) will get out of this box is sexual pleasure, not some overpriced combination of chemicals that probably tastes only vaguely of chocolate.(Chocolate being another one of those things that is supposed to drive women just *crazy*)
It's hard to catalog the variations of stereotypes and nonsense that ad perpetuates. Let's see...there's "Women don't really want, need or like sex. They just want dessert...and probably jewelry." Or, how about "You don't really need/want/deserve sex. Just eat this cake and shut up. You'll feel better about spending your nights in bed alone." Or, my favorite "It's just too much work to cook something yummy for yourself, or even to go to a bakery to get it. Just put this in the microwave, it's just as good."
Ick. Just ick.
What seems really troubling about that ad (and, you know, that's sort of a theme in a lot of ads and not just that one) is what an *empty* displacement it is. Once upon a time, maybe, one could have argued there was some sort of overall benefit for women sublimating their sexual expression into nurturing family with food. Or something. But the women in these ads are almost alway depicted as single or, occasionally, partnered but alone (as in you see a darkened sleeping form next to the awake woman who's slurping cookie dough or something.) And so they're taking what might have once been a nominally beneficial sublimation and shifting the "nurturing indulgence" back on the woman herself... which is kind of nuts in the way only sublimation (or, long as we're batting around Freud, the "return of the repressed") can be nuts: she's alone or single and so she's expressing sexuality by... *feeding herself!*
I suppose you can't expect Betty Crocker Corp., which sells only sweets, to try and sell anything else. But... but... but... &%#@#%~!
It's just *so "no-sex" class! Why not "sell" the woman on giving direct pleasure? Or using the spoon to give herself *real* orgasms?** Or if that's too racy or presumptuous how about just eating the flipping dessert?
(For the record they throw different kinds of sublimation at men so I can't comment directly. There was a great Saturday Night Live or Mad sketch doing the YouTube rounds a while ago about a man having a maximal shampoo-ad experience in the shower that I'd like to link to. I think it ends with him asleep against the shower door? Anyone have a link? For that matter, let me know about any other similar uselessly-sublimating ads you've got YouTube links to. Update: From Bunny here's one link: MadTV "Herbal Elements", and from JFPBookworm here's a Will Ferrell/SNL take on the same concept. .)
[** Does anyone do that any more? When I was in high-school a heck of a lot of girls in our informal sex-ed circle swore by masturbating with the backs of soup- or tablespoons. --fl]
Photo by Flickr user richtpt. Used under a Creative Commons license.
So it's taken me a while to work my way through all of your comments (life's quite a bit busier these days) but I finally got 'round to Kochanie's reply to this post about that sort of broken division-of-labor study. One of the problems, for instance, is in their decision to equate "domestic tasks" with "women's work," which meant, among other things, that they disregarded all outdoor chores. (Which therefore stints on the workload of, say, single mothers who move out of apartments to houses or farms.) Another big problem is the 60's-era way they chose to designate the "Head" of the "Family Unit."
The Head of the FU must be at least 16 years old...If this person is female and she has a husband in the FU, then he is designated as Head. If she has a boyfriend with whom she has been living for at least one year, then he is Head. However, if the husband or boyfriend is incapacitated and unable to fulfill the functions of Head, then the FU will have a female Head.
To which Kochanie replied
Morale of the story:
Never trust a governmental body to give Head. It will invariably FU.
Ouch! Just Ouch! Very nice Shaggy Dog ending to an otherwise pretty irksome story.
In the last chapter of Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
Roach points out that the study was somewhat deprecated because half M&J devoted the second half of the book to, um, misguided strategies for helping gay and lesbian people "turn straight." The first half of the book, however, Roach says, is pretty interesting.
One tidbit that I'd think would have been worth the price of the book (Masters and Johnson's I mean, Roach's book is priceless) relates very nicely to the tradition of Osbasso's Half-nekkid Thursday and issues of body consciousness in general. I highlighted the key pieces in the third paragraph.
For five years, Masters and Johnson observed and compared the laboratory sexual encounters of straight, gay and lesbian, and "ambisexual" couples. (The team coined the term to refer to nonmonogamous sexual opportunists who show no preference between men and women throughout their very busy sex lives.)
...
While some of the subjects were having sex with their spouses or long-term partners, others were doing it with a stranger -- not a stranger of their choosing, but one assigned to them by masters and johnson. These latter men and women would show up at the lab, chat with the researchers, and, following a short orientation session, get down to business with a man or woman they had never laid eyes upon. While Masters and Johnson observed.
...
The team did mention that many of the men and women who had been assigned a partner worried that this person wouldn't find them attractive. Oddly, the reverse anxiety never surfaced -- no one seemed concerned about whether they themselves would feel any attraction to the strangers whose genitals they were about to experience in almost every way imaginable: manually, orally, coitionally.
Source: Bonk, pg. 298-299
Pretty wild when you think about it, right? Everyone worries more about how *they* look than how their prospective partners -- even drawn out of a hat partners! -- will look. It's certainly borne out when you look at all the thousands of Thursday photos folks have posted over the last three years -- how the harshest criticism, and the biggest trepidation, has almost invariably been from the poster him or herself... and from the occasional, random, and pretty-obviously-flame-seeking troll.
While it's not actually related, I'm a bit embarrassed by my wrinkly/baggy clothes. Turns out, though, I'd have been even more embarrassed if they were tighter and neatly pressed. :-)
Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)
"If one partner withdraws from sexual contact with the other, is the second partner still bound to a vow of fidelity?"
Boy that's one of the big questions that turned me around on prostitution. I used to have pragmatic beliefs about it (it should be legal so prostitutes can go to the police when they're assaulted or robbed or when they can provide tips and evidence without fear that officers will want "some kind of action" afterwards.) I used to have "libertarian" beliefs about it (between consenting adults and all that.)
But until I started reading other people's blogs, and reading your comments here over the years, I never questioned the basic premise that there will always be prostitutes because men always want more sex than women do.** Talk about eye-opening. Talk about paradigm shifting!
Until I started reading other people's blogs, and reading your comments, and scrolling through comments on "dating sites" for people in relationships, and talking to people in person or through email, I'd have assumed with almost 100% certainty that the sentence in quotes at the top of this post had to have been written by a man.
I'm always amazed how one person -- in this case me -- can be so wrong about so many things at once. Nor is it any comfort knowing it's not *just* me.
And no, I don't exactly have an answer to that pseudonymous but heartfelt question. Just more questions, mostly about a) how we as a society got here and b) what we as a society are still doing here. I haven't even gotten to questions about what c) we as a society can do about it.
Update: And just to be clear, I'm not saying any of that makes prostitution an answer, nor that it makes it irrelevant. It's just one more complication.
[** Or that there are things women will do only for money. Or that, without direct payment, women would never be sexually interested in men who are less "worthy" in terms of age, wealth, height, accomplishment, suavity, etc.) And so on. --fl]
Hugo Schwyzer says
I had a similar conversation recently with an old friend, my age (and Dana’s). Single again after a twelve-year marriage, she’s recently been repeatedly “hit on” by her daughter’s soccer coach — a handsome lad in his late twenties, well over a decade her junior. My friend is flattered and physically attracted, but said essentially the same thing Dana did: she has no desire to be anyone’s mother, teacher, or babysitter. “I’m not here to give anyone experience”, she says.
...
Because I post so often on older men, younger women, I periodically get notes asking me to address the reverse: older women, younger men. There are a number of reasons I don’t post on the subject. ... Bottom line: I don’t see older women pursuing young men at the same rate that I see the reverse.
Not to put too fine a point on it but thanks to long-standing traditions having nothing to do with age one doesn't really see that many women of *any* age pursuing men. So it stands to reason you don't see older women (*especially* older women who'd have grown up even more indoctrinated than younger ones) pursuing younger men.
As for whether Hugo's friend would really have all that much to mother, teach, babysit, or "give anyone experience," to someone in his 20s that's, um, just as incredibly arrogant and "othering" as the older men who imagine they could do likewise to young adult women. So it's just as well that she declined.
And I want to be really clear here. I'm not calling that attitude "reverse sexism," I'm calling it just plain old sexism as in "to discriminate against an individual for their failure to adhere to the attributes, characteristics, and roles tradition designates as appropriate."
Because seriously, it's not enough for men to get over disdaining women who are taller, better educated, more intelligent, funnier, better compensated, more aggressive, and older if women aren't comfortable getting over complementary biases against shorter, less educated, less intelligent, less funny, more poorly paid, less assertive, or younger men.**
And just to be clear, I'm *not* flaming anyone here***. The thing about uncovering previously unexamined reservoirs of bias is that nobody needs to apologize or introspect. Not Hugo's friend and certainly not Hugo. But it does need examination.
[** And while I might be repeating myself, if you're really an exception then I'm obviously not referring you. --fl]
[*** Ok, maybe Maureen Dowd. As I've mentioned elsewhere. But since there are only about five single men older, richer, taller, smarter, and more influential than she is and because she thinks it's *feminism's* fault she can't find a "suitable" partner, I think she's a special case. --fl]
The passionate and erudite I Am Curious Blue seems to reflect the general consensus that this pox on both your houses post about the endless prostitution wars fell flat. Eh, it probably did. Can't win 'em all.
I feel *passionately* that prostitution should be legal, and I think almost all anti-prostitution arguments are fatuous. I just happen to think a lot of pro-prostitution arguments are fatuous as well. And the point of my post --which I obviously didn't communicate well -- was that by hammering obsessively and exclusively at each other's *fatuous* arguments the pro and anti sides are overlooking a surprising amount of common ground.
I probably should have just said that.
Now just for the record, I think those a lot of pro-prostitution arguments, and accompanying attitudes, *damage* prostitution and increase resistance to acceptance, as well as embarrass customers, which brings me to one quibble with a further point in IACB's post. He quotes me and then attempts an interpretation I disagree with.
In my original post I said
Unlike too many other people, though, I *also* have a problem with participation in a system that so directly reinforces the "no-sex" class paradigm that says *all* heterosexual sex is asymmetrical: women want only money, men want only sex, and everything else is just haggling over the price. Which is bullshit, of course, which is why the dominant paradigm itself is bullshit.
IACB takes this to mean
This, to me, is not that far off of the standard anti-porn argument that porn is harmful because it reinforces a harmful paradigm about gender, and may actually predispose men to sexual violence as a result. And, certainly, there are many radical feminists and prostitution abolitionists who extend that argument to say that the mere existence of prostitution does the same thing.
...
The above statement comes damn close to a 'blame the sex industry' argument for men's bad behavior...
If one mean close as in just inside vs. just outside the gate to Fort Knox then yes, my statement would be close to blaming the sex industry for men's behavior. At best I "blame" men's bad behavior for prostitution. More accurately while there are exceptions** to every rule, men are indoctrinated to uncritically accept a set of highly questionable assumptions.
For instance I think it's laughable that men think there are some activities they can only women to do. I'm really not too crazy about the notion that men have to "buy up." And most of all I just *hate* this whole myth of sexual scarcity that leaves men thinking we have to *buy* our way out.
Should prostitution be left illegal while we sorted all that other crap out? No, it should be every bit as legal as dentistry or computer consulting or any other skills-based service profession. Should we sort out all the other crap anyway? Yes, because otherwise it's going to look kind of stupid skulking off to obtain a legal service we believe our spouses and other partners are too angelic to enjoy voluntarily. Will there still be prostitution after we sort all the other crap out? Yes, just like there would still be dentistry after we sorted out completely avoidable tasks they do like treating tooth decay and gum disease. Would there be 1000th the amount of trafficking and targeted rapes, robberies, assaults, and serial murder of street/subsistence prostitutes once customers sorted themselves out? No, there might even be less.
[** If you're really an exception then I'm obviously not referring you. --fl]
Photo by Flickr user splorp. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon says
So, this Ecuadorian politician named Maria Soledad Vela has tried to write women’s right to sexual pleasure into the nation’s constitution. From what I understand, the law is just about laying the groundwork for public policies that acknowledge that women are sexual agents, not just wombs on feet. And everything that would follow—good education, reproductive rights, etc.
...
From my perspective, the approach is an interesting one. Women’s sexual rights are often created through appeals to equality or privacy, but would it be the worst thing in the world to suggest that part of equality is the equal right to really own your sexuality? The right being established here is one men generally have without question, even when they belong to religious traditions that exert some controls on their sexual expression. The right is simply to feel that your body belongs to you, that you can enjoy the sexual pleasure it can provide as pleasure, not as duty or just in a passive, acted-upon sense. The idea that women are sexual agents powerfully undermines rape culture, because sex is viewed as something engaged in by every party involved, instead of acted upon by one party on another. If men found women’s enthusiasm to be the baseline for engaging in sexual activity, instead of just consent, however reluctantly provided, then there’d be a whole lot less situations where men felt they’d obtained consent that women didn’t really give.
Oh heck, I might as well quote the rest of her post since that's really what I want to talk about
Perhaps that’s why so many male politicians are throwing first class hissy fits. One claimed that this meant mandatory orgasm provision. (Oh noes!) Another suggested that the legislation is like life in prison. I had an imagine of a man with a woman strapped spread eagle to his face like a feedbag, but that’s the only way I could really see this as a prison.
...
Lest you think the panic on the part of Ecuadorian men is unique to their culture, check out the comments at Salon. The vast majority of them are from men who seem to be brought to full-blown terror at the idea of women really enjoying sex on our own terms. Where these bottom-feeders lurk, I can’t tell you. In my world, most men consider female sexual pleasure a prize highly sought, and getting to witness it regularly doesn’t diminish the appeal at all.
And while we're at it, here are some of those comments to the Salon.com post
Why can't a woman just masturbate?Then she has her sexual satisfaction.
Or are they meaning EVERY MAN IN THE COUNTRY also gets free and easy access to prostitutes who will guarantee the men 'sexual satisfaction'?
The problem with these retarded laws is they begin well meaning (or PRETEND to be well meaning) then their TRUE FANGS come out and they become cudgels with which to beat men (and ONLY MEN) over the head with.
---
Every time, I think Tracy Hyphenated-Lastname has bottomed out. Every time, I think she's surely written the dumbest thing she possibly can.Wrong, every time!
---
What if the woman is frigid? Is that a punishable offense?This is just plain stupid.
Just a couple of not-even-NiceGuys™ seem to be making most of the noise here.
A lot of people on the wrong side of the Krafft-Ebing side of the watershed have this mortal dread of women actually enjoying sex... which I sometimes suspect derives from an even mortal-er dread that *men* might actually enjoy sex. (This is not unlike the old joke that Baptists forbid sex standing up because it might lead to dancing.)
Notice how focused everyone gets on the bit about women's orgasms** compared to what Maria Soledad Vela and Amanda Marcotte (and Twisty) are really talking about?
But let's go with the flow and talk about those pesky orgasms. Can I just be a little contrary here and say that maybe the anti-feminists who are shitting the largest fishhooks over the proposal are, as usual, selling men short? Because, seriously, unless you want to argue that men are just *intrinsically* insensitive, stupid, selfish, slow, untrainable, *and* thumb-finger incompetent (which, admittedly, a stunning number of men-are-the-master-race types hasten to do) then just how big an imposition could mutually satisfying sex possibly be?
Answer: if a stringy-haired, 100 pound, 6'3" geek from East Tennessee with horrible acne and poor social skills could figure it out by age 16 can figure it out then if other men can. Or could if anti-feminists didn't keep objecting that it's just too hard for our poor superior little y-chromosome-blessed brains. Like all human beings men are notorious for rising only to expectation. And if anti-feminists go running around insisting we're just not up to the task? Or that it's not our responsibility ("why can't women just masturbate?!?!?!") Or that it's not part of the "bargain?" That there's something wrong with even *trying?* That it's our partner's fault or, even more comically, *feminism's* fault? Then yeah, we're going to be crap lovers.
---
Incidentally you can see, especially from the Salon comments, that the "no-sex" class paradigm plays a *huge* part of this: the men are saying, in essence, that providing satisfaction for women is reneging on the deal whereby men cough up the dollars women care about and women cough up the pussy men care about. Inside those assumptions women asking for sexual satisfaction as well are effectively double dipping.
[** Even one of Twisty's commenters slips here: "I am SO moving to Ecuador! I am hoping to receive the first state-issued vibrator!" --fl]
Via Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch
If she is normally developed mentally, and well-bred, her sexual desire is small. If this were not so the whole world would become a brothel and marriage and family impossible. It is certain that the man that avoids women and the woman that seeks men are abnormal ... nevertheless the sexual sphere occupies a much larger sphere in the consciousness of women than that of men, and is continual rather than intermittent.
Have fun unpacking *that* particular little bundle of spite.
Another note about Krafft-Ebing. In a post from the other day, also inspired by Greer, I remarked how few women are recorded as having formal sexual-displacement fetishes (e.g. displacing erotic fascination away from people and onto things.) I thought maybe that's because for most of history, as Greer suggests, women's *entire upbringing* amounts to the inculcation of one specific fetish. Turns out that nowhere in any of the 12 editions of his major work, Psychopathia Sexualis, with all its extensive case histories does Krafft-Ebing record a case of fetishism in women.
As the Wikipedia article puts it
Krafft-Ebing saw women as basically sexually passive, and recorded no female sadists or fetishists in his case studies. Behaviour that would be classified as masochism in men was categorized as "sexual bondage" in women, which was not a perversion, again because such behaviour did not interfere with procreation.
Which might not have been so bad if Psychopathia Sexualis wasn't also the *first* major medical/legal text on sexuality.
The thing that gets me is that sort of patriarchal/pre-third-wave assumption that the result of failing to impound women's sexuality would be *more* prostitution ("whole world would become a brothel") rather than quite a bit less.
Siren, catching me by my ears
Bound me to my mast
Her voice ringing my unstopped ears
She sang "Look"
Maddening my eyes
With hers
I'm working my way back through a list of gender-challenging posts that I've found, bookmarked, and the sort of lost in the shuffle. I found this comment, from Sallo in a post about gender, power, roles in BDSM by DevastatingYet of Devastating Yet Inconseqential, and I thought she made a great point about what sometimes seem suspiciously "coincidental" correlations between bold explorations of kink and highly traditional gender roles.
To use a non-bdsm example, when I hear women take a very conservative, traditional sex-role, one-step-removed-from-barefoot-and-pregnant position on marriage or women’s role in society in general, I do blame the patriarchy. It’s not that I doubt that the woman actually does in some sense want that life, but I assume that it is because she has absorbed these views from her (male-dominated) religion, family, or other source. It’s not impossible that this isn’t something that some women would just want for their own reasons, so I am inaccurately lumping them all into some kind of category of the (however mildly) brainwashed. This is quite unfair to those women who have thought things through at a deep level and still want that life, but the alternative is unclear. Taking it at face value that women want what they are willing to say publically that they want, or want the lives that they are living (through some kind of revealed preference thing, as though their choices have not been constrained all along) - that just seems too close to rationalizing and excusing the system.
I don’t immediately see why moving this into the realm of sex changes the analysis significantly.
Far be it from me to criticize anyone for enjoying home and raising children (barefoot, now that I think about it.) But based on how often people say infuriating shit to my partner like "It must be so nice having him help with the house" I gotta say yeah, a lot of people have kind of absorbed their views about it from their (male-dominated) religion, family, or other source. That *still* doesn't make anyone's turn-on *invalid,* of course since *if it turns you on* then... that's just what does. On the other hand, you'd probably want to consider not taking it personally if other people point out that *public policies* or *conservative traditions* your fantasies are tied to kind of suck.
Update: In comments Christina B suggests an excellent test: " I think a good way to measure 'free' is to ask 'what would happen if one day you change your mind?'" Pretty cool tool, by the way, for all *sorts* of situations.
"Know thy enemy."
When I was in my first year of college, taking a year-long integrated studies course with a heavy emphasis on critical thinking, we endured a cavalcade of some of the most gruesome, egregious, sometimes even murderous character studies in sociopathy and self interest raised by this one particularly grinchy (and brilliant) professor.
Week after week we endured Pol Pot, Mein Kamph, George Wallace, Ayn Rand, and every other kind of self-justifying asshat and asshole you could imagine, with lectures that scrupulously addressed technical details but didn't really address the, um, confrontative underlying horrors. (For instance we learned about former Alabama Governor George Wallace's thoughts on the principles of States Rights but nothing about "in order to preserve Jim Crow laws.")
Eventually people started snapping under the regimen, and then, at a certain point, someone (not me I'm retrospectively ashamed to say) asked WTF. The professor smiled over his reading glasses and delivered a pretty amazing lecture on pseudo-innocence and the importance of the phrase "know thy enemy."
I mention this because infra of Skin::filter() has noticed that the Amazon Ad algorithm in my sidebar, which *generally* has sex, gender, relationship books that tend to lean feminist also... occasionally... cough up links for "seduction community" books like The Layguide: How to Seduce Women More Beautiful Than You Ever Dreamed Possible No Matter What You Look Like or How Much You Make or The Professional Bachelor Dating Guide - How to Exploit Her Inner Psycho
They’re books like this one, and this. Kinda strange seeing them come up in the same list as bell hooks and Naomi Wolf. Surreal, more like.
“Know your enemy,” maybe?
I’m sure he already knows about that, but… the world never ceases to amuse me, what with the small, bizarre things that surface from time to time. Just more proof that the universe has a truly twisted sense of humor, I guess.
I mean, seriously. Those don’t even show up in my recommendations.
Actually I hadn't noticed. It's funny though, and a little frustrating. Every time I try to re-fiddle the keywords for that Amazon ad I get something that's *mostly* what I want with some... interesting stuff thrown in for... I dunno, roughage or something. One set of near-identical keywords and the outliers are books by wingers like Caitlin Flanagan or Ann Coulter. Another near-identical set and it's a bunch of outright misandry like "The Rules" and Mary Daly. So I don't know quite what to do. I actually think it's good to have ads of some sort, but I'd really rather find a source that better reflects my values. (And by the way, I may not be the only one.)
Suggestions are always welcome, but meanwhile, since some (mostly older) sources in my blogroll are of the "know thy enemy" variety I guess it's ok that some of the "recommended" books fall in the know thy enemies category as well.
Photo by Flickr user kristykay22. Used under a Creative Commons license.
The title of this post by Hugo Schwyzer says it all
“A man getting a gender studies major is most likely to be gay”: on the importance of refuting that problematic stereotypeRead his associated post here.
My initial reaction, while colorful, would have sounded highly ironic so I'll just say I agree with Hugo and strongly disagree with the notion that men have to be gay to be interested in gender studies. If nothing else, 10,000 years of unreflectively othering everybody else has tended to leave us straight, locally-dominant-ethnicity males aaaaabout 9,975 years out of date. (Or worse! For instance I don't really see Hammurabi shooting his friends in the face the way Dick Cheney, the current apical bud of patriarchy, did.) And whereas regarding women as if they were real estate or cattle might have seemed logical for a bunch of highly bellicose, pre-literate, barely post-nomadic goat herders with no better social models to work with it's... been a while. So I'm just not seeing where you'd have to be gay, or even have mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, or other female lovers, friends, and acquaintances that you cared about, to take interest in or benefit from gender studies.
(More to the point, a good, non-dependent starting point for gender studies for men might be looking into the *phobia* part, the constant, uncertain fear men, even nominally "manly" men experience, that leads to homophobia in the first place. Because, seriously, minus the phobia part homosexuality is approximately as threatening as, as common as, and as blamelessly uneventful as Presbyterianism.)
So over the weekend Naked City: a Village Voice blog about sex reported that
This past Saturday was Kilt Day, in case you didn't know. The official Kilt Day website has a page full of suggested responses to the inevitable question: "What is worn underneath kilt?"
Read all about it, including a list of possible responses here.
The answer, of course, is...
Mostly a lot of very sometimes funny, sometimes fun, sometimes questionable, and always interesting assumptions.
I hope your annual kilt day weekend was as much fun as mine.
[Note: Click photos to enlarge. From this set on Flickr. --fl]
Google exercises inspired by Anastasia of Sexualité who wonderfully illustrates the difference between sexuality and sexualization in the context of pole-dancing classes for elementary-school-aged girls.
Pole dancing: Personalized Results 1 - 100 of about 1,550,000 for pole-dancing. (0.09 seconds)
Men pole dancing: Personalized Results 1 - 54 of 54 for men-pole-dancing. (0.05 seconds)**
Boys pole dancing: Personalized Results 1 - 18 of 18 for boys-pole-dancing. (0.07 seconds)
Lessons to help *all* children prepare for fully actualized and self-determined physical sexuality would be a little bold but perfectly fine. It's not so hot when they're lessons to a) help only one gender prepare to b) compete with each other for gender-traditional male contact initiation while, especially, c) insisting to the students that it's all about exercise, coordination, and self-esteem and nothing to do with sex. A.k.a sexualization. A.k.a. grooming into the "no-sex" class.
[** Women pole dancing: Personalized Results 1 - 100 of about 4,210 for women-pole-dancing. (0.33 seconds)
Pole dancing girls: Personalized Results 1 - 100 of about 8,300 for girls-pole-dancing. (0.14 seconds)
--fl]
Photo by Flickr user bizryter. Used under a Creative Commons license.
This post is about household chores and a long-running study thereof. There is no doubt on earth that worldwide, and here in almost all of "developed countries," women are saddled with far more domestic tasks than men are. There's also no doubt that the balance is substantially, but not completely, reversed in my household. The study makes it look like I do *even more* than my partner, though, and I think that's a problem.
if the study came out only once I'd just ignore it. They publish the same old new results every one or two years. This, however, will be a one-time rant.
So Dana Goldstein of TAPPED draws a reasonable conclusion from the data she's got to work with...
A new study from the University of Michigan finds that among hetero couples, men create for their female partners an extra seven hours per week of housework, while their own chore burden decreases by an hour per week when they live with a partner.
and then concludes, again not necessarily unreasonably from the data she's got to work with...
it's no wonder that more and more women are choosing to raise kids on their own. A male partner can be a real burden! Over a third of all American households are now single-parent families, the vast majority of them headed by a woman.
The data source she relies on sounds pretty impeccable
Conducted since 1968 by the university's Institute for Social Research, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It's a long-term, nationally representative study that collects data on the economic, health and social behavior of the same, nearly 8,000 U.S. families year after year.
"The PSID is the only instrument that lets us look at income mobility, people moving in and out of poverty, across three generations," says Dan Newlon, project manager for NSF. "The data allows us to look at the mid- to long-term socioeconomics of household dynamics."
Woah, three generations! 8,000 families! An "instrument!" Since 1968! It *must* be true!
The problem is the information, which Goldstein and an awful lot of other people have been drawing on for decades is a little weird. One thing you *can't* say about the study is that it was designed by 1968-era radical feminists. They firmly divide household adults into "Head" and "Wife." And according to their FAQ (italics mine.)
How is Head defined in the PSID?
Within each wave of data, each FU (family unit) has one and only one current Head. Originally, if the family contained a husband-wife pair, the husband was arbitrarily designated the Head to conform with Census Bureau definitions in effect at the time the study began.
Eh, if the Census Bureau says so it must be ok. Ok, not, but...
The person designated as Head may change over time as a result of other changes affecting the family. When a new Head must be chosen (see conditions for selecting a new Head below), the following rules apply:
Good, at least they're flexible about this -- no doubt due to years of feminism's influence...
The Head of the FU must be at least 16 years old and the person with the most financial responsibility for the FU. If this person is female and she has a husband in the FU, then he is designated as Head.
Uh, well, that still doesn't sound very egalitarian. And what about households where the woman isn't married?
If she has a boyfriend with whom she has been living for at least one year, then he is Head. However, if the husband or boyfriend is incapacitated and unable to fulfill the functions of Head, then the FU will have a female Head.
Woah! Her boyfriend moves in with all his belongings in two Hefty™ bags and kaboom, if he can keep the couch warm for a year he gets a big promotion!
There is a *little* bit of leeway designed into the study though
Who are the Husbands of Heads?
Husbands of Heads are usually living in the family unit, although they can be living in institutions as well. They are usually disabled, although in a few cases, the female half of the pair insists on being the Head.
"...the female half of the pair insists on being the head." Well that's just mighty progressive of them to humor those liddle ladies like that.
Anyway, I mock the designers of the program so bitterly in large part to immunize critics against the charges it's some kind of Limbaugh-nightmare "feminazi" agendas. They're, um, pretty clearly not.
But does that mean their data is valid? Well, you'd want to define valid. If you mean rigorously gathered and cross-tabulated to be latitudinally and longitudinally consistent then yeah, it's pretty darn valid. Unfortunately if by valid you mean "accurately reflects chores completed around the home by any, let alone all 'Heads' and 'Wives'" then no.
For one thing the study reports on only "core" chores, where "core" is defined as
According to the study, housework was defined as "core chores," or routine housework that people generally do not enjoy doing such as washing dishes, laundry, vacuuming floors and dusting.
"Routine housework, like cooking dinner or making beds, was captured in diaries, the primary tool used for the study of time allocation," says Stafford. Researchers supplemented the diaries with data from questionnaires asking both men and women to recall how much time they spent on basic chores in an average week.
Other activities such as home repairs, mowing the lawn, and shoveling snow were not in the study. "Items such as gardening are usually viewed as more enjoyable; the focus here is on core housework," says Stafford.
Ok, I'm going to extend a tiny amount of good will towards the study-designers way and say that by excluding outdoor activities the study automatically controls for differences between families living in apartments, houses, and farms. But then I'm going to withdraw it because for non-apartment dwellers it badly distorts the data.
- Consider Dana Goldstein's case that women are increasingly choosing single-parent status. By excluding outdoor chores the study would measure no change in hours when a single parent moved her children from an apartment into a house. Yet we know the workload increases substantially. (If she moves instead to a farm where, for instance, she might also have to chop or haul firewood the "off the books" imbalance would become even larger.)
- Furthermore, an unscrupulous MRA might advocate that his fellows could pick up a two-hour shift in *measured* tasks by swapping an hour's worth of weekly mowing and edging (doesn't count) for an hours worth of laundry (does count.)
Both of which I think we can all agree would be bullshit. As is, therefore much of the analytical value of the study itself.** Which, when you think about it, isn't *that* surprising for a program that was designed, by economists rather than anthropologists or feminists, during the Lyndon Johnson administration, and just before the whole myth of the Ozzie and Harriet nuclear family began to collapse.
Anyway, I don't doubt the overall perception that women do more housework. For me personally it's a shame about that study. By their reasoning I do a *huge* amount of the "core chores" and my partner often mows the lawn. Therefore the methodology makes me look like I do... *even more* housework than I do! So too bad for me but its *still* bullshit.
[** Much of the value, that is, but not all. As a note in one of the program's own analysis of their methodology says, while the data collected itself might be suspect the study overall does a good job of measuring relative *changes* in... whatever it is exactly they're measuring. --fl]
So last night I wrote a "Who Knew?" post about using Apple's Text to Voice feature for proofreading. Since I'm a relative newcomer to the Mac I followed the technology blogger's advice and installed "Alex," the newest, most natural-sounding voice and just started using it without fanfare.
In comments though, Zeborah checked out all the available voices and...
I've had my text-to-speech set to Vicki for a long time. Normally it's little use to me -- I read *way* faster than I listen so it drives me batty to have to wait -- but it comes in handy when eg I've got the flu and my eyes are hurting.
So, I go to listen to Alex and get side-tracked into listening to the sample sentences spoken by the various characters. For the novelty ones, the sentence generally has something to do with the kind of voice:
Bad News: "The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of a fast approaching train."
Bahh: "Do not pull the wool over my eyes."
Trinoids: "We cannot communicate with these carbon units."The male voices also have sentences expressing their personality or something about them:
Albert: "I have a frog in my throat. No, I mean a real frog!"
Alex: "Hi. I'm a new voice for Leopard."
Bruce: "I sure like being inside this fancy computer."
Fred: "I sure like being inside this fancy computer."
Junior: "My favourite food is pizza."
Ralph: "The sum of the [...] square of the hypotenuse."And then there's the female ones, which, with the exception of Princess, have no personality and no care for anything except their owner:
Agnes: "Isn't it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?"
Kathy: "Isn't it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?"
Princess: "When I grow up, I'm going to be a scientist."
Vicki: "Isn't it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?"
Victoria: "Isn't it nice to have a computer that will talk to you?"Fascinating.
Being the literalist I sometimes am around technology probably woudn't have tried that experiment, so I can't take credit. And a little quick Googling suggests no one else has noticed either though I'll obviously update the post if it's been mentioned elsewhere. Anyway, till then Zeborah ought to get the nod.
In a follow-up comment to the same post she generously added that
It's probably fair to point out that these voices have been created one or a few at a time over... oh, I can remember some going back ten years at least, I'm sure. Possibly the relevant software engineers have never sat down and played the test files one after another. Even so, someone(s) made some choice(s) at some point(s).
At some point when I have energy back, I might write a polite "did you notice?" email along with a suggested fix (that all voices have the same text - to facilitate comparing intonation etc) and see what happens.
A quick note to Apple is probably a good suggestion. And since problem ins in their *text to speech" feature an update to the relevant text file or files would have an *extremely* small footprint for their test suites and bandwidth.
Ok, so I was reading Rachel Maines' "The Technology of Orgasm," which despite the, um, buzz about it being about the history of vibrators is more subversively about how even before the Ancient Greeks doctors managed to basically medicalize, even pathologize, women's arousal without ever acknowledging it.
And then I started thinking about what Germaine Greer says in "The Female Eunuch" about the intense pressure to be self-denying that girls face growing up. And I started adding to all that the silly-when-you-think-about-it notion that only men have real-life, Freudian-style displacement fetishes (not the kind that really means more like "really turns me on" but means instead "can't even get started without rubbing against blue velvet.")
And it occurs to me that for, oh, at least the last 2500 years women have been under *extraordinary* pressure to engage in classic Freudian-neuroses-style sublimation/deviation/denial, where you transfer natural feelings away from sexuality and into stuff like housecleaning, or childrearing, or shopping for shoes -- a.k.a. pretty much the entire Patriarchal burden -- such that you're expected to have fucking *orgasms* when a man washes your dishes for you.
And exactly how would be different from the orgasms male fetishists get from licking a dominatrix's boots? Uh huh.
Kind of interesting that, as Maines, and Greer, and others point out, our set of social blinders leads us to deny, as Freud and others did, that women have no repression-induced erotic/neurotic fetishes at all when it's pretty clear society is constructed so that all women have the same *one* fetish. And that "pathology" be defined as *not* having that fetish. And that until terribly recently all interventions from FGM to psychotherapy to education to institutionalization to "self-help" programming from the likes of "Doctor" Phil and "Doctor" Laura have been considered a success if and only if they *restore* women to that fetish instead of to health.
And all for what? Because of a perception that men desire relationships with... repressed, unhappy, displacement-fetishizing partners? How's *that* been working out, dudes? Ya think tha problem with our miserable scarcity-oriented sex and love lives isn't that we're repressing our partners but that we're not repressing them *enough?* Sheesh! Anti-feminists have a lot of gall to call *us* kinky!
Kind of weird typing "Palfrey" or "DC Madame" into my newsreader search box and finding only "pornstitution" friendly bloggers with anything to say about her suicide by hanging in the face of a 55-year prison sentence. Sure there's that bit of a black eye about Palfrey being a woman, but you'd think there'd be a bit more celebration over the death of someone found absolutely and, worse, unrepentantly guilty of "prostituting" and "trafficking" army officers, law students, and other professional women. And there's the *other* bit of a black eye about how all her predominantly asshole customers are still alive and, well, at worst drawing six-figure Senate incomes and White House office pensions and at best suffering nothing at all. But still I'd have thought Palfrey's death would have drawn mention from *both* sides.
But that's not what I'm here to talk about, because I actually *am* ambivalent about prostitution. Unlike too many people I think prostitution *as a individual profession* (not as an *industry* as it is in, say, Nevada) should be legal and regulated the way other trades are regulated. Unlike too many other people, though, I *also* have a problem with participation in a system that so directly reinforces the "no-sex" class paradigm that says *all* heterosexual sex is asymmetrical: women want only money, men want only sex, and everything else is just haggling over the price. Which is bullshit, of course, which is why the dominant paradigm itself is bullshit.
I have this feeling that if we had a different dominant paradigm -- one that, say, held to the radical proposition that all people are people with agency and autonomy in all dimensions of life, instead of the current proposition that some people are people and pretty much everyone else is, at best, equal to those people only the same way Caligula's horse was -- then opposition to prostitution wouldn't be so fantastically bitter. Because really, if you're out there killing yourself to convince prospective partners and, hell, random guys in bars and construction sites, that your sex life isn't for sale and *doesn't have to be* if they'd just stop looking at your tits long enough to look you in the face then why the fuck would you even *want* to be gracious about someone tattooing a price list on her ass? But then *if* we had a different paradigm prostitution *would* be just another service that... probably wouldn't resemble what people do today at all. At all.
Of course today that's not where we are. We're back here in the old-fashioned 21st Century looking at the peculiar situation where anti-prostitution feminists perceive pro-prostitution feminists as betraying them by ganging up with the anti-feminist majority of the populace that says "at the end of the day all women only have sex for money, some just call what they do 'marriage.'" And where pro-prostitution feminists perceive anti-prostitution feminists as betraying them by ganging up with the anti-feminist majority of the populace that says "whores, like all women, have no, zero, none capacity for, let alone right to, sexual self-determination." It's irrelevant that both side's perceptions of the other are so wrong radar couldn't find them because those *are* the perceptions. And, consequently, with no common ground at all there is no possibility for debate. (And, also consequently, there's no possibility for anything but more of the usual, mutual vitriol.)
So now Deborah Jeane Palfrey is dead, by her own hand, after her conviction for recruiting and managing prostitutes for several thousand extremely affluent, influential, and *colossal* assholes primarily in our nation's capitol. And with her dead I think we've got a little teaching moment for both sides. I'm pretty sure the most outspoken on both sides are set in their ways but what the heck, "if the people lead, the leaders will follow" and all that.
Moment A: Palfrey was kind of a woman who worked almost entirely by herself. That's a bit of a blow to the "women are agencyless thralls" argument against prostitution. She also lived in and, evidently ran her D.C. area escort service out of, suburban California. Which sort of blows the "prostitution exists only when pimps ride herd on their victims" argument. Interview requirements on her recruiting website pretty much screened out women who weren't already in established professions or grad school, nor is there any evidence that those requirements were only for show, which sort of blows the "women become prostitutes only out of dire economic necessity" argument. So *if* one was inclined to be sympathetic towards the pro-prostitution position Palfrey's agency would be a pretty good argument for that position.
Moment B: Almost her entire adult life Palfrey was eyebrows-deep in the dominant one-way-or-another-pussy's-a-commodity ideology. Whereas some of the clients she scheduled escorts for may have been paragons of progressive pro-feminist enlightenment... the ones who've been outed, anyway, have been utter, thuggish, women-hating, woman-denigrating, woman-punishing, woman-curtailing, woman-as-commodity-purchasing, anti-feminist, skin to bone bastards who depended on the discretion of Palfrey and her employees to maintain their public positions as virtuous paragons advocating policies of chastity before marriage, fidelity within marriage, home-binding of wives, lower pay for women so they'd be obliged to *become* bound as wives, anti-choice, anti-contraception, anti-HIV-treatment, and abstinence-only-promotion as the cure for all social and medical ills. So *if* one was inclined to be sympathetic towards the anti-prostitution position Palfrey's agency would be a pretty good argument for that position.
And if you're sitting there basking in Moment A because you think the way out is "hey, my customers and/or pro-prostitution male acquaintances are absolutely cool with what I do and even more fun and more respectful than my family" too bad because you're probably absolutely right. But unless you're willing to deny that *other* customers include men like Senator David Vitters and former White-House Abstinence Ambassador Randall Tobias who manifestly *aren't* then you have to acknowledge that while you've got a good point, Moment B's position, however narrow, is legitimate.
And if you're sitting there basking in Moment B because you think the way out is "but some women are still pimped and trafficked," too bad because you're absolutely right. But if you wish to argue, the way the anti-reproductive-choice crowd does, that *all* women who seek abortions are agency-less victims of abortion doctors, then "some women" just isn't going to cut it. Which means you're going to have to acknowledge that some *aren't,* and if you acknowledge them then you're going to have to acknowledge that while you've got a good point, Moment A's position, however narrow, is legitimate.
And even if you're only grudgingly, teethgrittingly honest enough to acknowledge the other side has a point... then maybe you could begin an analysis that included *both* elements, one that recognized that *maybe* the solution lies not in perpetual attempts at mutual annihilation but agreement that maybe, just maybe *both* sides are giving comfort to the anti-feminist enemy and that maybe, just maybe, even if you can't compromise on your respective positions you might still somehow establish a kind of detente that allows you to engage with and transform the real enemy: not pro-prostitution or anti-prostitution feminists but the anti-feminism that creates and owns the matrix you've been fighting each other about all these years.
Out of respect for a contradictory human being who's no longer bound between the parentheses of birth and death, I'd like to submit this post to both the next Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy and the next Carnival Against Pornography and Prostitution because I'm pretty sure neither side can be complete without the other. (Not, obviously, that anyone is obliged to *include* my submission.)
Photo by Flickr user The Rocketeer. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Just so you know, if you've got a Macintosh you can use the Text to Speech feature to either read someone else's posts or, even better, *proofread* your own!
Not that I'm positive it'll do *me* any good. I tend to write in the same cadences I speak, which is part of why, I think, I'm *so* inclined to terminally interminable run-on sentences. And since I write like I speak, hearing my posts spoken back to me may not help. But it *will* help with some of my less comprehensible sentences (which I also, unfortunately, tend to write the way I'd say them... minus the "um's," and "I mean's.")
Anyway, if you have OSX Leopard there's a new voice called Alex that's a *lot* better at pausing and taking breaths (if not *heavy* breaths) for punctuation. It's a big improvement over the earlier voices.
Windows machines have had the same basic behavior for years as well, I just didn't think to try it for proofreading before I made the switch.
(Tip of the hat to David Alison's Blog, an entirely work-safe and excellent source of Windows-to-Mac conversion tips.)
Update: See Zeborah's comment about the sample sentences Apple gives each voice to play with!!! Yikes! Good eye,Zeborah. I only tried that one voice and didn't even test that before I applied it.
