Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

When I was a really little kid -- some time before 4th grade -- I had a playmate who at least thought he had a good idea about how people had sex.* I remember him saying something about how men would ask their partner to "hand me another 'fuck rubber'" and the women would reply "ok, dear, hand me another Kotex." Whereupon they'd "do it."

Pretty ignorant stuff, right?

And, at least for the early 1960s, fairly excusable in early-elementary school kids.

Not so excusable for anyone else, however. Which brings me to the following segment from Rachel Maddow's show that I stumbled across on a Tumblr blog called Muslim Feminists

Image from What on Earth catalog.

If I'd been drinking milk I would have laughed it through my nose.

For the record, when my children were infants I could have used about a dozen of these and I'd gone for a bunch of "stack overflow" onesies as well.

You can buy the onesie from What on Earth

(via BookOfJoe)

Photoshopped Image by Fran of Blue Gal. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Ok, so there's no reason to believe that every ad that appears on one of Limbaugh's programs is intentionally purchased for his program. For instance a lot of advertising is purchased in wholesale "network buys" from Bain Capital's Clear Channel broadcast conglomerate and Clear Channel then arbitrarily assigns ads to different time slots regardless of what kind of crap they're playing.

Some companies that have found themselves broadcast on Limbaugh are clearly horrified and appear to be taking steps to withdraw even accidental association with the Republican party-machine boss.

Other companies?  Not so much.

BlueGal, who posted the spoof ad, above, has been pretty irked by ProFlowers.com's disclaimer that they "don't endorse the views expressed by Rush Limbaugh."  A view described by some as "more circumspect." 

This "circumspection" is probably the closest ProFlowers.com can come to distancing themselves, not least because elsewhere on their website ProFlowers.com's Limbaugh connections run deep! They evidently offer deep discounts to customers who use "radio codes" from the program. They also recently offered what ProFlowers.com called a "Rush Superfecta" Valentines Day package.

Anyway, that makes their disclaimers sound perhaps a little less circumspect and maybe something closer to disingenuous.

So... about allegations that the incontestible viscious email Montana Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull forwarded to what he must have imagined were like-minded friends after receiving it from his brother.

The implication of the joke is that Barack Obama was conceived during an event wherein his mother had sex not only with men of different races but with animals as well.

As per usual in these cases the judge doesn't like to think he's racist just for sending the email.

Ok.  Fine.  Let's say he's not a racist.

Heck, let's even say what if the joke itself isn't racist!

Let's say Cebul's family(!) joke went something like "Mom, how come your blood type is AB-positive and mine is A-positive?"  "Don't even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you're lucky you don't bark!"

If stripped of all racial overtones would that mean it was suddenly an OK joke?

If Cebull actually wasn't a racist (instead of just one more "don't like to think of myself as a racist" racist) would that make it ok to pass something like that around?

I mean, I wonder if it might have been anything besides racist?

What's funny is that for weeks now huge chunks of the population has been up in arms about extremist assaults on women's health.  How funny, then, that a joke like this makes the round and all people want to talk about are its racist implications.

Oh, by the way?  All hypotheticals aside was the joke racist?  Oh yeah.  Were its authors and propagators racist?  Sure, that too.

It's just that it wasn't only racist.  There just aren't a lot of people talking about what else the kind of people who sent it around might be.

Hey, speaking of dogs...

"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.
(From Arthur Conan Doyle's short story "Silver Blaze")

Hmm... sound familiar?

Photo by Flickr user KK+. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So a little while ago the (NSFW!) Tumblr sex blogger Kat Kinx, was subjected to a particularly nasty spate of anonymous commenters more or less demanding that she hook up with them, Skype with her, post specific photos or stories and performing particular acts, and otherwise totally overstepping boundaries. Oh yeah, and when she started telling them to buzz off at least one of them threatened to try and get Tumblr to cancel her blog. Because (like about 70-million other blogs on Tumblr, it has "sexual content.")

This is actually a pretty common assumption -- that to describe one's active sex life in the first person... or even just blog about one's active sexual imagination in the first person... you are or should be making yourself virtually or even actively available even to anonymous readers.

One of Kat Kinx (non-anonymous) readers snarkily but accurately put his finger on the fallacy.

“See, it’s totally your fault for being a sexual person and expressing it on your SEX BLOG. People are nuts…. That would be like posting cookies on a baked goods blog and assuming that every anon is going to get some fucking cookies!”

Johnem

Source: banter-tits

Yup. Very early in my blogging career I made the same mistake a couple of times, and had the same mistake made to me as well, before I realized there was a problem with it. But as much as I love food/sex analogies I never thought of a cookie-baking comparison. But it really illustrates the point beautifully.

Via the invaluable and also highly-NSFW Geeky Vamp

Image via AddictingInfo.org.

So thanks to the network effects inherent in Facebook and, I guess, inexpensive cable modems, I've slowly become friends, or at least friends of friends, with a surprising number of men and women from my previous life back in Southern Appalachia.  Most of the men, at least, don't post much, and when they do it's almost stereotypically about bars they used to drink in, or guitars they wish they had, or about high gas prices, or (a lot of them) about the 12-Step Meetings they're attending and/or sponsoring others through.  Oh, and/or a lot of Pot-Farmville posts. You know, salt of the earth type guys but not really particularly connected to current events.  (This on my personal real-name account, not my basically neglected and otherwise unused figleaf one.)  In other words people pretty much just like me before we went our separate ways, and who turned out the ways we did more due to chance than apitutde, ambition, or intent.

Anyway, when I got home today and logged in to Facebook again (hey, evidently like a lot of other people I'm starting to find work!) something was different.

All those guys?  The ones who still drink whatever's cheapest in totally non-ironically-named bars and fix their Ford and Dodge slant-six cars themselves?  The ones who call each other "pee-pencil peckered sons of bitches" when they're mad?  The ones who've been through bad divorces and don't like to go to Red Lobster even after a wedding because it's too fancy?

Four or five of those guys were posting or reposting those photos of that buttwad all-male panel Darryl Issa called up in Congress to talk about how it's immoral for insurance to pay for contraception for women that have been making the rounds all day.

They were not, um, supportive either of Issa or the male panelists or that it was a good idea for a whole row of men to sit around brassing off about how depriving women of healthcare as a matter of "religious freedom."

That's... pretty different.

It's not like these guys were ever likely to vote for Republicans.  They're more likely not to vote at all!

But this got their attention.

If you're a right-wing extremist with an eye on the November elections that can't be good a good sign.

Update: I don't want to give the impression these are all guys who live so close together they've all got the same in-laws. One of them lives in northern Alabama, another in east Tennessee. One's been in Montana for more than 20 years. Another's actually from the middle-Appalachians, in Rick Santorum's rural Pennsylvania. I'm just saying it's weird to hear from any of them in a given month. To hear from all of them in one day, and all about the same thing, is... pretty unusual!

Anyone else noticed anything like this or is it really just a total fluke that I happened to see it?

Update #2: Also to be clear (because there seems to be some confusion) I'm not saying it's unusual for these people to say these things because "people like them" don't support women's rights or women's health.  Instead it's ususual because they rarely comment on politics at all.

Photo via DailyKos.

C'mon! They're not even trying any more!

I sometimes chaff at Amanda Marcotte's assertion that men just want to hurt women. Or even that men have an "I poke it I own it" attitude. And since, in fact, most men actually don't want either to hurt or own women, it's a bit offensive that fucking choad-wads like Issa assemble panels of Y-chromosome dil-dopes all selected based on their opinion that, no, in fact, law of the land should be that if they ever manage to poke it they deserve to own it.

Remember, we're not even talking about abortion here. We're just talking about plain old birth control! Sweet mother of pearl!

---

For those of you playing religious assessment at home check out the official King James rule book.

• ^{Matthew 23:13} "But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.
• Matthew 23:4 "For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on [wo]men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers"
• Matthew 23:15 "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves."
• Matthew 23:23 "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

Point being that, yeah, there's a strong sense among people of faith that religion is under assault in America. And so it is. But the assault comes from within. Opposition from without is driven far more by alienation than antipathy.

Photo by Flickr user Simply Boaz. Used under a Creative Commons license.

First of all it could be true that basically all relationships that begin with sex on the first date tend not to become long-term relationships.

Hetero relationships anyway.

I mean yeah, I'm skeptical, but it really could be true.  I just don't know.

But while cooking spaghetti sauce from scratch this evening the thought popped into my head that while It's certainly true that most relationships that begin with sex on the first date but then don't pan out it's also true that don't begin with sex on the first date also don't pan out.

If you're in a society that piles sex with great huge loads of signals, signifiers, and consequences then you (and everybody else) is going to notice when sex on the first date doesn't lead to a longer relationship.  But that's not quite the same thing.

At all.

This does not mean I think everybody, hetero or otherwise, should have sex on the first date!  There are still plenty of perfectly fine reasons to do so there are probably even more equally good reasons not to.

My very strong suspicion is that fear of blowing something longer term probably isn't one of those reasons.

In the course of saying 13th-Century-thinking presidential candidate Rick Santorum is an idiot, Will Wilkerson says

It's really is amazing how far we've come in such a short time, equality-wise. Within the span my own lifetime, it was thought that women ought to be barred from the Olympic marathon due to the inherent fragility of the female. Now we've got Haywire and an unreconstructed, full-on patriarchal, old-school Catholic, Republican office-seeker saying maybe women shouldn't go to the front-lines because men are too hopelessly emotional.

Source: Big Think Proxy

The context, of course, being Santorum's pretzel logic assertion that no amount of professionalism or experience can possibly prepare male soldiers for the emotional reaction of seeing women soldiers put "in harms way" on the battlefield. Wilkerson correctly concludes that if Santorum was right that men are really that flighty and distractible in combat then the logical thing to do would be to replace them with cool-headed professional women soldiers.

Of course Santorum and his ilk aren't right. About that or anything else having to do with the "true nature" of either women or men. Yet another reason to question his qualifications for office.

Even more proof (if we ever needed it) that for all the right-wing handwringing about feminists being "man haters," nobody anywhere has a frothier mix of hatred and contempt for men than anti-feminists and other gender "traditionalists."

Update: two other things. 

First, my quote above really doesn't do justice to Wilkerson's post. I always hope that when I quote someone that readers will go read the original.  (Hey, I'm old enough to remember when following links to the source was the whole point of "web logging!"

Second, and more importantly to anti-feminist gender discrimination, is the implied assumption that while men would be "upset" if women squad members were injured or killed in battle they must necessarily not give much of a shit if their male squad members are.  Talk about conservative man hating!  Sweet mother of pearl!

Going a step further, what are the odds Santorum & company imagines that women soldiers wouldn't be terribly bothered if their male squad members were injured or killed.  He certainly doesn't raise that possibility in his objection to women in combat.  Which implies a couple of things, the biggest being an assumption that women think of men as disposable or expendible the way assholes like Santorum do.

Quick question: besides being politicians and nominally having XY chromosomes what important trait do all of the following men have in common? It's a quality that culturally almost all of us "know" extremely well, but which turns out to be surprisingly "wrong."

• Carter, Jimmy , Nobel Peace Prize recipient; 39th President of the United States
• Clinton, Bill, 42nd President of the United States
• Colson, Chuck, former top aide to President Richard Nixon
• Gore, Al, Vice-President of the United States from 1993 – 2001; 2000 Democratic presidential candidate, Nobel Peace Prize recipient.
• Harding, Warren G., 29th President of the United States
• Yukio Hatoyama, 60th Prime Minister of Japan.
• Huckabee, Mike, (R) former governor of Arkansas and 2008 Presidential candidate
• Jackson, Jesse Louis,American civil rights activist and ... He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as shadow senator for the District of Columbia from 1991 to 1997.
• Johnson, Andrew, 17th President of the United States
• Johnson, Richard M., United States Vice President under Martin Van Buren (1837–41)
• Claude Kirkpatrick, former member of the Louisiana House of Representatives and director of his state's department of public works; involved in various ... activities within Louisiana ...
• Lincoln, Abraham, 16th President of the United States. Lincoln was a ... but,for the sake of the country he kept it to himself as an adult
• McCain, John, United States Senator (R) Arizona, Presidential candidate
• Paul, Ron, United States Congressman (R) and former Libertarian Party Presidential candidate, who is known for his libertarian leanings.
• Rockefeller, Nelson, U.S. Vice-President under Gerald Ford (1974–77)
• Truman, Harry, 33rd President of the United States

Before you look at the answer (here for the impatient)

Consider Ozymandia's rumination about what everybody "knows" about men.

The funny thing about Stuff Men Like is that proving it wrong only requires about five seconds of thought. If I consciously think “hey, men all like anal sex,” my brain will instantly crowd with counterexamples, namely, every man I’ve ever slept with. But if it’s just there in the background, as an unstated premise, the cultural detritus picked up from years of living in sex-negative society… well, I start arguing against “sex-positive feminism gives into the patriarchy because it encourages women to do what men want in bed” with “no, it encourages people to do what they want in bed, that is the whole point” as opposed to “what the fuck does that even mean?“

I mean, Christ. We’re going to try to get Tim Gunn, Maymay, James Deen, James Dobson, and that one porn star who keeps making women vomit with his cock to agree on what a fun sex life looks like? Good luck.

Zie said it here.

Or look at what we "know" about the Republican party and reproductive choice!

Or look at what a lot of people seem to "know" about what all feminists are like.

And so on.

The point isn't to say "gee, everything we 'know' is wrong." Because, for instance, we all no-scare-quotes know that pretty much everybody's different. So I'm just saying, as I often do, that it's a good idea to constantly assess our assumptions about what we "know." For instance, extrapolating from my own personal assumptions and stereotypes (hey, if nothing else remember the motto of this blog is "learning from my mistakes so you won't have to"), if I say "Southern Baptist" there's a pretty good chance your mind's eye summons up a pretty specific image...

The trick is that, depending on your background experience the vision you call up for "Southern Baptist" may be pretty different from mine. For instance I might think "Jimmy Carter." You might think "Martin Luther King" Someone else will snap as quickly to "Billy Graham." Those are pretty seriously different people, though, with often radically different political, cultural, economic, and even plain-old religious outlooks. Add in Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Rockerfeller, Ron Paul, Al Gore, and Yukio Hatoyama and...

Ok, it's like this. If our stereotype of X, Y, or Z is that one individual is representative -- that, say, our stereotype of men is that they're all like James Dobson*
or our stereotype about feminists is that they're all like Geraldine Ferraro -- then we're necessarily erasing a heck of a lot of people who actually are an X, Y, or Z without being at all like our designated type.

Oh, and it suddenly occurred to me, apropos my paragraph on the Whoopie Goldberg / Roman Polanski "rape-rape" debacle, that this type vs. stereotype business cuts both ways.

In the world of Legos it's not really possible for some parts to fit but not others. In spy movies each piece of the evesdropper's or assassin's equipment always fits precisely into its molded case. In those cases if a piece doesn't fit in its place it doesn't belong at all. I'm not sure why we so reflexively assume people's qualities are like Legos or spy equipment (ok, at least I keep finding myself reflexively making that assumption, but I'm pretty sure I'm the only one.) But... but... people just aren't one thing. You can be an acid racist and a Southern Baptist, which fits a lot of typical stereotypes. But you can also be Dr. Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln or Tina Turner or Justin Timberlake (who knew?) and a Southern Baptist. You can be a Geraldine Ferraro and be a feminist, which fits a lot of people's stereotypes. But you can also be Betty Ford or bell hooks or Barbara Bush and be a feminist.

* Dobson is not, my stereotype was surprised to learn, a Southern Baptist.