Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Image by Flickr user Mark Klotz. Used under a Creative Commons license.

In a review of historic opposition to contraception in the face of President Obama's directive that (virtually) all employee healthcare plans fund contraception for women the way they fund Viagra and Cialis for men E.J. Graff first reviews the biggest standard, historic objection to contraception

Late-19th- and early-20th-century pundits said that the nation would become a bordello if anyone could have sex without consequences and warned of the death of the American family.

Source: TAPPED

And finds it wanting (emphasis mine)

In other words, women can work for Catholic hospitals, colleges, social-services groups, and so on—and still have the same rights to sexual health coverage as men, under the same plans. All that Viagra needn't lead to either 19 children and counting; to abortions; or to impoverished women.

Ouch!

The Viagra-but-no-pill argument actually cuts two ways with hidebound institutions such as the Catholic and many Protestant churches. Their argument against contraception is that it interferes with women's "natural and normal" functioning, and thus constitutes an unnatural intervention in human reproduction.

The problem, of course, is that even if one were to argue (as the Catholic hierarchy in fact still does) that "virtuous" men could use Viagra "only" for reproduction there's the issue of the Church's ban on other forms of "unnatural intervention" like in-vitro and artificial insemnation. Sort of by-definition if a guy can't get a woodie without medication then "nature" has decreed he should do without.

And yet to the very best of my knowledge there is no Church doctrine forbidding its employee insurance plans from covering, or indeed its healthcare facilities from dispensing, Viagra or Cialis.

But I digress...

At the end of the day, neither Viagra or Cialis have created catastrophic baby booms, orgy outbreaks, upticks in divorce, or any of the other bugaboos projected by opponents of contraception. Certainly not among the kind of people willing to become employees of the Church.

Therefore prior evidence suggests that contraception availability will also not produce similar licentiousness.  Nor, as we have seen, above, is contraception any more of an "unnatural intervention" in fertility than is Viagra or Cialis.  Both claims, therefore, are red herrings.  There may be <em>some</em> legitimate reason that conservatives object to giving women control over their own fertility.  But if so they don't seem very comfortable saying it.  Thus the prevarication.

Last week I posted a comment I added to Em & Lo's regular "Wise Guys" feature. This week I'm in the rotation as Em & Lo's "straight married" Wise Guy, answering the question...

“What would you tell a guy who was intimidated by the idea of his partner bringing sex toys into the bedroom?”

Source: Em & Lo

Here's how I answered (slightly reformatted since, hey, now it gets to be a second draft):

The dead cliché answer would be to remind him that they’re only called “toys” and “novelties” to get around puritanical blue laws.In reality, you could tell him, sex “toys” are tools for sex. Guys like tools.

But here’s a more original approach: Tell him, if someone brings a Monopoly board into the den it would be a pretty good sign she’d like to play [Monopoly] with you, right? So if your partner brings a sex toy into the bedroom that’s an even better sign she wants to play with you.

Yeah, we men are under a lot of social pressure to feel inadequate or even jealous about... well... all kinds of things. But, seriously, once you give up on the idea that sex is a test it can be a heck of a lot of fun. Whatever you want to call them, sex toys are pretty much always going to make sex even more fun. For both of you.

Guest-blogger Ziff of Feminist Mormon Housewives wonders

Number of times pornography has been mentioned in General Conference in the past 20 years: 128

Number of times rape has been mentioned: 4

I’ve been wondering recently why General Authorities spend so much time condemning porn use and so little time condemning rape. Porn use and rape seem like related problems: they’re sexual wrongs that men do to women. (I realize they aren’t exclusively done by men or exclusively done to women, but this is their most common variety, and that’s what I’ll talk about.) So why in the Church is there so much focus on one and so little on the other?

Source: Feminist Mormon Housewives

Ziff says he has basically no experience with either rape or porn, and says therefore most of what he says should be considered speculation. And based on some of his speculation you can sort of tell. That said he also drills in very nicely.  From his list of why the church might choose to focus on rape.

6. GAs may blame women for rape, at least to some degree. I think this is evident in the excessive rhetoric on modesty they direct at young women with the rationale that women control men’s thoughts. It’s a short step from blaming women for men’s thoughts to blaming women for men’s actions. Their attitude probably shouldn’t be surprising considering the ages of the most senior GAs: they were raised in a time when blaming women for rape was probably typical.

7. GAs may not realize that most rape victims are raped by men they know. This is pretty speculative on my part, but if GAs are hanging on to the old belief that rapists are mostly strangers lurking in dark allies, they may feel like it’s hopeless to preach to such psychopaths. Again, given their ages, it wouldn’t be surprising if they believed this.

And from his reasons why his church should address rape more directly than it has been.

A. Mormon women are particularly vulnerable to being raped. They are taught to be deferential and submissive.

...

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being tender, kind, and refined. But resisting rape requires toughness, and probably also coarseness and rudeness. Women who are taught that toughness is worldly and therefore wrong are women who are less likely to stand up and say no when their boyfriends or husbands are pushing them sexually in ways they don’t want to go.

B. Mormon women are particularly likely to blame themselves for being raped. As I’ve already mentioned, there’s not much Church teaching out there on the topic of rape. A woman who is raped is likely to find only the old line of thinking popularized by President Kimball that a woman is better of dying than ‘allowing’ herself to be raped. She may also connect the dots as I did in reason #6 above, and figure that she must be to blame for being raped because of what she wore (or if she doesn’t do this, people around her may do it for her).

Both of these teachings are incredibly destructive. Women are not responsible to sacrifice their lives if attacked by a rapist. Women’s clothing choices are not to blame for rape. The last thing women who are raped need is a heaping pile of guilt to add to their pain. GAs’ choice to leave these teachings out there unrepudiated is a choice to let women suffer more.

It's good stuff.  And while he, as a Mormon, is specifically referencing the teachings of his particular church it's really, seriously important not to get caught saying "oh yeah, those whacky, out-of-touch Mormon elders."  Because, duh, the same dynamics affect a heck of a lot of other denominations.

For that matter, as has been much observed lately, the same dynamics affect <em>atheists!</em>  Who may not rail about porn as much but sure as heck ruminate on rape in their own communities.

Speaking of impacts on communities, another of Ziff's speculations ought to make every self-interested heterosexual male take note.  (Emphasis mine.)

Rape is far more evil than porn use is. This is the obvious response to #1. A man who rapes a woman not only hurts her in the moment of the act, he also likely causes her to suffer for a long time afterward. Her experience of sex, which should be such a wonderful way to connect with her partner, becomes laden with horrifying associations. Her ability to trust other people will likely be harmed, making all kinds of social interaction more difficult. Her feeling of personal safety may also be reduced, restricting her ability to go to particular places or to go out at particular times. I can’t see that porn use is anything like as bad as this.

You know, the funny thing about stereotypes is that even nominally "inoffensive" ones like, say, things we "know" must be true about Mormon men given their church's history, can be damagingly off the mark.

Almost by definition allies aren't soul mates.  (For instance the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were allies in world war two!)  And so almost by definition we're going to have differences with allies that we might not have (or that we at least overlook) in soul-mate affinity groups.  But we can find allies in the most unexpected places.  And we overlook or, worse, alienate allies at our peril.

Tweet from @LOLGOP.

Objectively speaking, Britney Spears is more likely to be a competent President than Newt Gingrich. Yet nobody's calling her activities "leadership."* Meanwhile, objectively speaking, Newt Gingrich has had more sex partner than Britney Spears.* Yet nobody's calling him a "whore."

This observation isn't particularly limited to the GOP in particular or even conservatism in general -- in non-partisan terms Gingrich is just a poster child of a much larger phenomen.  The bogus Two Rules of Desire are alive and well.

* Note: Rumors and tabloid headlines about her private life notwithstanding, Spears is an adroit public performer, choreography, producer, and impresario.
** Note: Rumors and tabloid headlines nothwithstanding, Spears' total "life list" of sexual partners still isn't that much higher than the number of Gingrich's marriages, let alone his other affairs, dalliances, hookups, or casual/commercial sexual relationships.

Image by Benjamin Dewey of Things Could Be Worse. Order a print here.

Benjamin Dewey says draws

Do You know a ravishing scientist who deserves more attention for her mathematical derivations than for her aesthetic wonders? Show her you understand how vexing the veil of comeliness can be when it masks an equally exquisite brain for which no one shows a primary concern! This illustration is available as a keepsake from my emporium.

Tagged: For Lisa Randall. Steph Levi. Saskia de Vries and Hedy Lamarr Beauty Great Thinker Lady Scientist Cupid Brilliant often overshadows work Deriving Maxwell's Equations for the Potentials chalk top hat love

Source: Things Could Be Worse

It's kind of a big deal. There was a sort of lowlife blogger years ago who'd preface many of the images he'd repost with comments like "With a body like that she should never have to work a day."

Leaving aside the insane idea that supporting one's self with sex or "beauty" isn't work, where does anyone get the idea that it would be fun to have a brain and never fucking use it?

In my socially checkered past I've managed to live in a number of situations where one occasionally encounters "kept" women: higher-end rock music culture, cocaine-dealer culture (closely related to the preceding), middle-upper-class and upper-upper-class neighborhoods (where I was a paperboy), and country-club culture (related to the preceding.) And near as I can tell, a almost-synonymous word for people (mostly women) who not only aren't expected not to work but are outright expected not to work is "alcoholic."

Human beings don't make very good pets.

Years and years ago a friend my age, a nursing student who had grown up in country-club culture, said she had to get out because what other girls from her neighborhood were going through was either making them insane or driving them to drink. She said, yeah, it might sound like fun to "do nothing but lie on your back eating bonbons and drinking Cutty Sark," while your husband worked, the gardner and maid took care of the house and the nanny took care of the kids, but, "Frankly I'd be happier changing bedpans for a living." (I lost touch with her decades ago, before she finished nursing school, but she was on track to become a Nurse Practitioner rather than a bedpan changer.)

I dunno. I've been catching up on my reading this morning and running into a lot of commentary by women scientists, women skeptics, women in medicine, and even little girls trying to go to school. The theme is just...

You know what, it's just dumb! Not to mention just an unbelievable assault on human potential. Not to mention an even bigger insult to half of all of humanity! But mostly just really fucking dumb. Richard Fineman was attractive enough but no one ever suggested he couldn't be attractive and also win a Nobel Prize in physics. Anderson Cooper is attractive enough but no one ever suggest he's "too pretty to do real reporting." And even though the first President George Bush selected the sorry-assed J. Danforth Quayle for his good looks ("women will be throwing their underwear at him at campaign stops"), and even though he was never smarter than a bag full of golf balls, there was still never any question that he was also going to work. Heck, even Mitt (Mittens) Romney, who was born with both a silver foot in his mouth and a full head of hair continues to work even after making further piles of money putting other people out of work. And while a lot of people believe he shouldn't do the job he's looking for, nobody deplores his basic interest or desire in working, period. So where's the fucking contradiction in women being attractive and working? Brilliantly or otherwise?

Y'know, Echidne of the Snakes is a pretty four-square feminist. So check out how she "hates" men.

It's hard for me to address [anti-feminist Caitlin] Flanagan's theories as they are based on such an odd concept of what adolescent boys and adult men are all about. At the same time, she refuses to even look at the question what the culture might be teaching adolescent boys (this is very evident in the interview, the way she slithers away from any attempt to move the question to both boys and girls).

Source: Echidne of the Snakes

Good for her! She approvingly cites Amanda Marcotte's assessment of Flannagan's notions of what boys are all about (in the process doing an excellent job of capturing Flannagan's complete investment in the bogus Two Rules of Desire:

[F]or all the puffery about girlhood fascinations and diaries, Flanagan is really only making one argument, one we know really well, that goes like this:

• Boys and men only care about sex, and mainly see girls and women as these tedious obstacles between them and pussy.
• Girls and women only care about romance---the more princessy, the better---and see sex as this filthy ritual they have to perform in order to get it.
• Therefore, women should use sex as a bartering chip to get men to pretend to like us.

Amanda said it here.

So what have we got going on here? Two died-in-the-wool feminists, Echidne and Amanda, standing up pretty vigorously for men and boys, and desperately anti-feminist Flannagan blithly running them into the dirt.

Look, are there women out there who really, genuinely, truely hate men's guts? Yeah. But they're not exactly feminists are they? Stereotypes notwithstanding, feminists mostly rock when it comes to men. And yeah, they get exasperated when men fall for the kind of bullshit Flannagan shovels. But that's not quite the same thing as hate is it? Not a bit.

Photo by Flickr user Universal Pops. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So for their regular weekly Wise Guys feature Em & Lo asked for answers to a reader's question: "What’s the appeal of the “money shot?" Although I'm one of their Wise Guy contributors the question didn't pop up in my rotation. But I did leave a comment. Em & Lo were then nice enough to make it their comment of the week this week.

So once again the question was "What’s the appeal of the “money shot?" Here's what I said.

I’m not even stepping into the whole “facial” business. I’ll just point out Charlie Glickman’s thoughts from a post that arrived in my newsreader moments before this one.

Instead I’ll just say I think the “money shot” is a seriously stupid dual artifact of porn. First, in the production of porn it’s just way more convenient to towel semen off skin than out of bodily orifices and therefore it’s more cost effective. This is why, at least early on, it was the low-budget porn shops that did money shots rather than the well-heeled ones. Second, for decades, anyway, porn was primarily an aid for male masturbation and so, I think, money shots are a way to help watchers identify with male actors.

I really think the masturbation element is key. Yes, you’ll occasionally see men’s parters “finishing” them off, but for the vast, vast, vast majority of cases the man essentially stops interacting physically with his partner, steps back a ways, and basically jacks off.

Again, fine if you’re at home alone. But seems to me sort of the whole point of sex with a partner is to have sex with them… not just on them.

Now, that said, don’t get me wrong. If you’re both into it (and increasing numbers of both men and women seem to be) and it’s all good clean fun for both of you then great. Lots of great things about “sex” don’t actually involve sex.

Also, that said, another name for “money shots” is “the withdrawal method.” And while nothing in life is certain, when ejaculation occurs outside a partner’s body it at best reduces the odds of pregnancy and STI transmission and even at worst it evens them out between the semen donor and semen receiver. So that’s ok too.

But at the end of the day, for me, the physical pleasure reduction of orgasm via masturbation rather than with a partner isn’t worth whatever symbolic enjoyment it seems to bring other people.

So, again for me, thanks but no thanks.

Source: Em & Lo

Note: I shared the comment-of-the-week slot with fellow Wise Guy pinch-hitter Mark Luczak, who seems to share my assessment.

Kaili Joy Gray of Daily Kos says

Rush Limbaugh, who has been married even more times than Newt, isrushing to Newt's defense:

Now, there's an accusation out there that Newt wanted an open marriage, just like Bill and Hillary. And in fact, Newt even had the politeness to ask permission for it. Do you think Bill ever did that?

Hardy har har. See, even when a Republican cheats on his wife, it's really about Bill Clinton, and how the Most Important Blowjob In History^TM was was so much worse. Because, um ... well, because. So there.

Source: Daily Kos

Oddly, while there's no evidence the Clintons agreed to have an "open marriage" there's no evidence they didn't either. Even more odd, back in the 1990s there was certainly plenty of speculation by Rush Limbaugh and the 'winger outrage machine that Bill and Hillary were such out-of-touch west-coast liberals there was such an agreement between them.

Image from ICanHasCheezeburger.com anti-SOPA site lifeaftersopa.cheezburger.com. Used, as I always attempt to do on this blog, with correct acknowledgement and link back to the host site.

So there's a big call to action today by right-minded internet users and providers about the thuggish powerplay cooked up by a collection of 20th-Century-nostalgic content middlemen (RIAA, MPAA, Rupert Murdoch, et. al) and some of their stupider lackies in Congress.

The issue isn't protection of intellectual property -- people who create content really ought to be able to seek compensation for it!  Instead the issue is about how much "security theater" hampering needs to happen in order to protect that intellectual property.  Proponents of bills like SOPA and PIPA believe that every American should be treated like criminals (how do you like seeing those lingering, un-skippable FBI warnings on every #%!#% DVD you try to play?)  They believe further that no measure is too draconian, no inconvenience is too great, no destabilization of the entire fucking infrastructure of the internet is too great, and, in the case of SOPA especially, no legislation too capricious.

Just the threat by sites major and minor to go dark today has had some effect.  But, as this post by Joan McCarter of Daily Kos makes clear, the results are more cosmetic than substantial.

The weekend was good for opponents of SOPA and PIPA, notably for the assurances to Rep. Darrell Issa from Majority Leader Eric Cantor that a SOPA vote in the House wouldn't happen "unless there is consensus on the bill."

Judiciary Chair (and copyright violator) Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) is going to try to force consensus by resuming the markup on the bill next month. From his press release:

Stop Online Piracy Act Markup to Resume in February

Washington, D.C. - House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) today said that he expects the Committee to continue its markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act in February.

Chairman Smith: "To enact legislation that protects consumers, businesses and jobs from foreign thieves who steal America's intellectual property, we will continue to bring together industry representatives and Members to find ways to combat online piracy.

"Due to the Republican and Democratic retreats taking place over the next two weeks, markup of the Stop Online Piracy Act is expected to resume in February.

"I am committed to continuing to work with my colleagues in the House and Senate to send a bipartisan bill to the White House that saves American jobs and protects intellectual property."

Which means the legislation is far from dead, and Smith just as hell-bent on passing this bad legislation as ever, with a big assist from the MPAA.

Which means tomorrow's internet blackout, in which hundreds of sites are participating, is still absolutely necessary.

It also means members of Congress have to hear from us. You can use this form to send an email to your representative, and this one to contact your senators to tell them to oppose this bad bill.

Source: Daily Kos

Three weeks ago it looked like this thing was a sure shot to pass quietly.  The authors of the bill, and their stenographers in Congress, have roughly zero intention of giving up.  Don't you give up either.

Candice Wing says

I’ve met a good many mature men looking for affairs and divorced men looking for a second wife. None of them have said – “oh dear me, my wife is old and fat and thus unattractive and therefore I feel compelled to seek a younger and therefore more attractive option”.

Source: Candidly Candice

She goes on to list real reasons men have told her for separating from their partners

• Wife does not want to have sex with me or wife does not want to have enough sex with me.
• Wife does not like me and does not have sex with me.
• We are not compatible and I am looking for more than just boring sex.
• Wife is not affectionate.
• Wife is boring in bed and generally boring.
• Wife is a cranky harpy.
• Wife is lazy and boring with poor grooming and presentation.
• I (or wife) want to divorce.

You can read the whole thing yourself, and if you do you'll get her simple one-paragraph explanation of why the vast majority of men remain perfectly attached to their partners.

Candice has been writing a lot about her own experiences sex, love, and aging. This is another great post along those lines.

While, sure, some people (not just men) really do lose interest specifically over their partner's looks, it happens at any age. And if it happens at any age then emphasizing one age over another is just stereotype reinforcement.

Meanwhile the other reasons you list are much more plausible, particularly for very long-term relationships. Although, hmm, now that I'm thinking about it even that shows up more predictably at certain points in a relationship than at certain ages. For instance I seem to recall there's a spike in divorce rates at the 21-22 year mark whether the couple marries in their late teens or mid 40s. And if you just think about it for a minute, if some people in their 40s find their flames going out while others in their 40s find themselves igniting, then age probably isn't the cut-off factor young people, hack novelists, and pop social scientists keep claiming it is.

Either way I agree with Candice that it's way more complicated than the popular but too-pat stories about husbands leaving because their partners "lose their looks" post-menopause. In fact it's so complicated it might not be happening for specific age-related reasons at all.