A ski hill on a warm day? People there are more fit and healthy than average. Half zipped ski suits are unexpectedly revealing. Who
knew? (25 words)

Years and years ago when a lot of my friends were taking a couple of years between high-school and college to bop around and try to support ourselves we discovered something surprising. If you move in with your best friend, instead of going out to visit each other all the time, you seel less of each other not more.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, eh? It’s not that you like each other less, though occasionally you encounter unreconcilable domestic differences. Instead it’s that when you can see each other all the time and partying together in all your spare time… you sort of stop seeing each other at all.

Leela Lamore of Leela finds the same effect in a post about what constitutes vanilla sex.

So there you have it, in our case Digger is quite correct. Because both of us are open to kinky sex we actually don’t have it that often … interesting hey?

Read her whole post here.

Note: Sam Sugar of SugarBank recently posted a list he calls Five Rules of (Sex) Blogging. One of the rules, Credit, takes people to task for, among other things, cloning entire posts so that your visitors never bother to follow your courtesy link. (Yes, it’s tempting to clone Sam’s entire post but you can see it for yourself here.)

In this case, if you’ve read this far and haven’t followed one of the previous links and never returned, you probably do want to visit Leela’s post because she does an excellent job of explaining why she and her partner almost never have anal sex even though he was once mad to try it with her and they both enjoy it.

I think Leela’s answer, and the answer to the problem of friends as roommates I mentioned above, probably also accounts for some of the frustration expressed around the bloggosphere about partners who appear to lose interest in sex (not to mention dancing, romancing, and other emotionally healthy elements of relationships.) I think, in particular, it explains how the “missing” partner often seems so suprised when the absence is pointed out.

I think it’s because, for some people anyway, the fact that you always can do it means you never have to do it now because there’s always right after this ballgame, or this email, or this meal, or this meeting, or this chapter, or this crisis, or this conversation, or this phone call, or this workday, or work week and so on.

In other words I think it’s not that we, or they, lose interest in sex, it’s just that we, or they, don’t notice the time.

I don’t know what the solution might be, but I get the impression a solution would be more than welcome.

I mentioned the other day that I was reading a collection of essays called Revealing Male Bodies and I just wanted to mention a not-so-obvious consequence of our general discomfort with our appearances.

The first essay, “Does Size Matter” by Susan Bordo of the University of Kentucky, nicely articulates the fairly obvious point that men tend to have the same irrational insecurity about penis size that women tend to express about their shape. (She details, for instance, how many or most of the men who get penis-enlargement surgery already have average to large penises but still feel inadequate, and she includes an anecdote that F. Scott Fitzgerald was so worried about his size that finally Ernest Hemingway pulled him into a bathroom, took a look, and pronounced him fine.)

What’s interesting, though, is she also mentions that contrary to what we all expect, men who really are larger than average tend to feel awkward or embarrassed rather than superior about their “advantage.” I’ve noticed the same thing in a number of women who fit one of the two stereotypical models of perfection (either totally busty and “stacked” the way men’s magazines typically rate perfection or totally thin and “racked” the way women’s magazines do.)

So what’s the deal anyway? Those who recognize that they meet our exacting standards of beauty are often self-conscious about it, and meanwhile the rest of us who don’t (including the ones who do but don’t recognize it) are … self-conscious about it.

According to Hanna Arendt, western civilization was really shaken up when Galileo saw the moons of Jupiter with his telescope because for the previous 2000 years or so our tradition held that our natural senses were all that was necessary to know the world. As Descartes put it, would a benevolent creator would give us a passionate drive to know the truth but not give us the senses to perceive it. His effort to derive a way to know something was true even if our senses were clouded by a malevolent entity is where we get “I think therefore I am.”

The biologist JBS Haldane once observed that the creator must have had “an inordinate fondness of beetles” (since roughly a quarter of known species in the world are beetles.) Mark Twain claimed the fondness must have been for biting flies. Were Douglas Adams alive today he might add that the creator also must have had an inordinate fondness for fashion and lad magazine advertisers, image consultants, and plastic surgeons because our contradictory and seemingly irreducible self-image problems make us a perfect prey species for them.

[This is a follow-up to my previous post. It’s also, I hope, a less incoherent reiteration. My first college writing instructor said that the more important the paper is the fewer mistakes you’re likely to make. I may need to add “...unless you feel extremely passionate about the issue you’re writing about, and especially if it’s about something you should have been writing frequent, smaller posts about all along. Oh well. I’ll resume posting more salacious material after I’ve settled down a bit. —fl]

Based on objections to Garance Franke-Ruta’s TNR article and follow-up post on Tapped I need to say I don’t think anyone on our side of the debate is questioning anyone’s right to have multiple abortions. I’m certainly not!

I do agree with Garance and almost anyone with a brain that if 50% of abortions are second or subsequent ones then something is wrong elsewhere in the system. (Considering the current political climate this is barkingly obvious but bears repeating over and over.)

Something is wrong in particular because, having escorted friends and strangers to have abortions since before Roe v. Wade, and having sat with my partner during an excruciating post-miscarriage D&E committed by an inept and clearly unpracticed pro-life ob/gyn, I’m aware by proxy that abortions are usually painful enough not to be the birth control method of choice. They’re also expensive, inconvenient, and while they’re by no means as risky as pregnancy to term they’re still far riskier than finding ways not to get pregnant in the first place.

So that 50% number bugs me not because abortions are intrinsically bad, immoral, unethical, or wrong (they’re not) but because a lot of women are being let down in way too many ways. I’ll enumerate three: 1) They aren’t receiving adequate education and/or 2) they don’t have access to affordable/followable/reliable contraception and/or 3) they aren’t receiving adequate social support (informal and institutional) to reliably use whatever education and contraception they do get. This isn’t necessarily surprising in a country that’s surpassed only by Iran in terms of barriers to contraception but it’s still problematic.

Having volunteered for NARAL back before they repurposed themselves as NARAL/Pro-choice America I’m comfortable with the point that they’re an advocacy group and not necessarily a contraception advocacy group. On the other hand I’m also aware that, at least into the 1990s (according to a Washington Monthly article on contraception I took notes on back then) Planned Parenthood contributed to a deadlock situation in Congress (at least the Senate and, I believe, the House) that effectively blocked all new appropriations and legislation linked to contraception. (The article named Planned Parenthood as one of a group of pro-choice advocates who refused to support initiatives that didn’t include funding for abortion while a group of anti-choice advocates including The Christian Coalition refused to support initiatives that did. With no support nothing happened for at least ten years. The subsequent Gingrich revolution of 1994 changed the dynamics somewhat but the article predated those changes.) The point being that while NARAL may not have any responsibility for the decades-long neglected state of contraception in America, other progressive, pro-choice groups certainly do.

I ought to add that contraception policy is not irrelevant in this debate. Having bitten the bullet, registered for TNR, and read Garance’s article I’d like to point out what seems to me to be the crux of her lead paragraph: “...when, after a condom failure…” Back in 1970 and 1971 when I was an active volunteer for a sex information and referral service that provided birth-control and abortion assistance we were told that the only form of birth control more useless than condoms was the rhythm method. It’s boggling that 35 years later people are still relying on the damn things. I appreciate that they’re helpful for limiting the spread of infectious disease but I really wonder if several billion dollars spent over the last 20-25 years might not have produced something more reliable with no more side effects had any major group with serious pro-choice credentials been seriously lobbying for it!

I can’t speak for any other middle-aged men, and I certainly don’t presume to speak for any women, but I would like to see the number of necessary abortions drop by at least half, and preferably by a factor of 10, and I see doing everything possible to help women avoid the need for additional abortions as a good place to start. Here’s why I’d like to reduce that number.

The current figure, “500,000 abortions performed a year,” has a galvanizing ring to it. This certainly hasn’t escaped the attention of the troglodytes running their anti-choice scams. Operation Rescue’s Randall Terry is on record saying that birth control policies need to be curtailed to keep the number of abortions at an inflammatorily high level. His very well-founded (in my opinion) fear is that if safe, effective, and available contraception was widely accessible annual abortions would fall to a rate that most American would find acceptable — an eventuality that would (in Terry’s opinion) be a disaster for conservatives. Thus past our failure to address ways to reduce abortions on the demand side — for whatever historical reasons — aids and abets those would instead reduce it on the supply side.

Thus that 50% number really leaps out at me as an opportunity rather than an obstacle or scandal or an irrelevancy. No one I’m aware of sees abortion as an objective good. Instead we see it as an objective necessity that needs to remain an inalienable right. If by reducing that necessity through appropriate and accessible means we can undercut opponents of abortion, and if progressives are dithering about ways to reframe issues to take the pressure off of abortion rights, then we ought to look at this as a way to do it. If ‘wingers, framing the social conditions that produce unwanted pregnancies as an abortion issue are able to peel off moderates uneasy with abortion we have an obligation to reframe those conditions as a contraception and contraception availability issue and bring them back. (It should go without saying that we should be able to do this without in any way compromising abortion as a fundamental right for women who need, want, or even prefer it.)

To make a too-long story short I’m not saying that NARAL needs to tackle this issue. I’m not even saying Planned Parenthood should even though their mission does include contraception. Actually I think both those agencies are already filling critical abortion-related needs and putting the burden on them might not be productive. I am saying, though, that somebody needs to be willing to focus intensely on the issues of contraception, contraception education, and contraception availability.

Incidentally I can think of a whole mess of Democrats who are looking for better ways to distinguish their policies from those of their main political rivals. If I thought they were maxed out managing other pressing issues I’d be more reluctant to add another plank to their platform but actually I think they’ve got quite a lot of time on their hands since the current administration are having a bit of a train wreck and so I think they could easily do both. But if not them then who? That’s the whole problem because I don’t know. I don’t see anybody in the US who’s trying it. (Pro-Familia comes to mind — they’ve been pretty effective in other countries — but they don’t seem to have much presence here.)

Rather than take pot-shots at Garance or Kevin Drum [who was not associated with the Washington Monthly article I mention above] or others for their (mis)perceived softness on abortion (as some policy bloggers are choosing to do) I’d like to see a little more heat put on the bastards that are trying to shove abortion back into alleys and off-shore facilities and stuff women back into the home where they imagine they belong. Once again there’s a big, big difference between Bill Clinton’s wimpy and compromised “Let’s keep abortion safe, legal, and rare” and my preference which would be to say “Let’s make abortion safe, legal, and rarely necessary” and I’d like to hear someone with more brains, more heart, and more influence than I’ve got out there saying it.

This is going to be a little bit heavier, and longer, than I usually get but it’s important for the sex-positive community to get ahead of to keep the ‘wingers from dictating the terms of the next phase of the abortion debate.

The topic is a new frame in abortion politics, and one that’s gaining traction in progressive circles. The specific issue is the increasing number of abortions that are second and third abortions. Rather than wait for the ‘wingers to begin beating us up over the issue I’d like to get in ahead of them and frame the debate in our own progressive, sex-positive terms. It’s my fairly well informed opinion that abortions, and particularly subsequent abortions, represent a failure of education, policy, and, most particularly, birth control. I believe (passionately!) in your right to determine what happens in your bodies. The choice is, and should be, yours, and yours alone when and whether to bear children. Without that right the society I wish to live in as a citizen, a human, a partner, a father, and a man isn’t tenable. It’s your choice: end of discussion. I also feel, passionately, that controversies over abortion have almost completely degraded the far more important, and relevant, issue of the miserable state of birth control. And finally, I feel, passionately, that with contemporary availability, education, and investment in new birth control technology choice in North America in particular and the world in general is egregiously limited.

Here’s the scoop, as articulated most recently by Garance Franke-Ruta in The New Republic and excerpted in her post on Tapped the blog of the progressive The American Prospect magazine.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion-rights organization respected for its data collection, close to half of the 1.3 million abortions performed in the United States each year are repeat abortions, up from just 12 percent in 1973. Most repeat abortions are, like Amy’s, a woman’s second, yet the number of third abortions is not insubstantial. In 2000, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that 18 percent of abortions were performed on women seeking at least their third pregnancy termination. In contrast, studies have shown that rape and incest victims, the most politically sympathetic and high-profile group of abortion-seekers, account for about 1 percent of abortions.

Despite its prevalence, repeat abortion is the least discussed or researched aspect of abortion in the United States. In the past year, liberals and Democrats have increasingly focused on preventing unwanted pregnancies as a means of preventing abortion. But they have yet to address the specific needs of women who have already had abortions, partly out of fear of affirming conservative stereotypes about why women abort or how they react to an abortion….

The sad fact is that, three decades after legalization, abortion is no longer mainly a tool women use to shape their own destinies, but rather a symptom of larger social problems that ought to be addressed by policymakers.

You should read her whole post on Tapped here or, better, see her original article (free registration required) here in The New Republic.

Got that? Since roughly the time abstinence-only education began rearing it’s ugly head…

• Only 12% of abortions in the 1970s were repeat abortions
• Today over 50% are repeat abortions
• Today 18% are third abortions
• Rape and incest account for only 1% of abortions

Here are some other interesting tidbits I collected the last time I dug into this. They may be a little out of date and I’ll be updating them as I gather new information. (I’m pretty confident any new figures will only be more depressing so I’ll leap before I look.)

• When it comes to health-care policy at the national level, pro-choice groups like Planned Parenthood won’t get behind birth control initiatives unless they include support for abortion as well
• When it comes to health-care policy at the national level, anti-choice groups like The Christian Coalition won’t get behind birth control initiatives unless they exclude support for abortion
• Consequently legislators have generally failed to enact any meaningful policies at all
• Consequently medical researchers and curriculum developers have failed to produce any meaningful products at all (in America anyway)
• Consequently abortions resulting from birth control failure account for only 10% of all abortions
• Consequently abortions resulting from a failure to use birth control account for the remaining 90%
• Consequently aside from Iran, birth control technology and education in the United States is more primitive than in any other country

And, consequently, as Franke-Ruta points out, roughly half of all abortions today are second and third abortions.

Politics and society

The first question pro-choice advocates are going to say is (or ought to be, I’m pro-choice too) “So what? The right to choose is an absolute.” I agree choice is, and ought to remain, an absolute right. I’ll point out, however, that opposition to abortion is one of only three real legs the right-wing psychopaths who are presently imploding civil society have to stand on. (The other two legs being homophobia and, to a lesser extent, prayer in schools.)

Right wingers, I might, add are keenly aware of the galvanizing (and fundraising) value of abortion politics. I happen to believe that if we can find progressive, sex-positive means to drastically reduce the need for abortions we can undermine on of their most effective supports.

I think the most progressive, sex-positive way to do it is to hammer, hammer, hammer away at the fact that better and more available birth control and birth-control education means up to 90% fewer abortions in general and almost no second or third abortions.

I think the most progressive, sex-positive way to frame this is to say that working birth control is the best way to stop abortion, and conversely that opposition to birth control is explicit support for abortion. I mean, it’s possible — though only remotely so — that some people out there see abortion as a good in and of itself, and it’s… possible… that these people see second and third abortions as laudable. If so I’ve yet to meet one and, more to the point, there are none in policy making positions. On the other hand I have heard anti-choice people on the right explicitly say they’re opposed to birth control precisely because it would reduce abortions to a point where nobody cared anymore, and who explicitly say the number of abortions must remain high in order to keep abortion as a front-burner hot-button fund-raising, vote-getting issue.

I ought to add that abortion is a tremendous wedge issue that keeps otherwise progressive people in the conservative camp, and the spillover threatens to drive a wedge between non-conservatives. Last fall there was a (justifiable) spat between political strategists IUD, anti-Plan-B, and anti HPV-vaccine contentions that these methods are somehow more risky than no protection at all. They’re not. Failing to use those methods increases the risks of pregnancy and thus the risks of abortion, pre-eclampsia, pregnancy-induced diabetes, ectopic pregnancies, gestational trophoblastic disease, maternal strokes, complications of caesarian section surgery, hemorrhage, embolism, infection, incomplete placental separation, and on and on and on.

Yes but…
Yes, but birth control doesn’t always work!!! Lynn Gazis-Sax expressed her concern here. (I responded in comments there as well.) Yes, it’s true. Contemporary birth control doesn’t work extraordinarily well. That would be an issue if I was advocating for completely eliminating abortion (or completely eliminating unplanned pregnancies, not all of which are also unwanted) but I’m not. I’m suggesting only that compared to the half-assed and haphazard birth control policies we have today, even minimal efforts could reduce or eliminate abortion to effectively ignorable levels. Remember that barely 10% of abortions result from birth control failure compared to 90% that result from failure to use birth control.

Furthermore, to say that current birth control technology is as good as we can get is… ok, words fail me. Let’s consider some options though:

• First of all, when we talk about “birth control failure” we’re talking about variations on the rhythm method. Rather than debate whether that even counts, how about pushing research to make a test for detecting fertility as inexpensive and reliable as a grocery store pregnancy tests are now? That would dramatically improve the relatively questionable reliability of rhythm, mucous, and temperature-based methods and would certainly help with the recently noticed problem of variable ovarian follicle development.
• How about improving vasectomy technology so that, for instance, injecting a plug that dissolves after a year or two is no more painful than a visit to a waxing salon? (If she can stand getting a Brazilian he ought to be able to stand getting a plug.)
• How about vastly more research into contraception for men? I was happy to get my vasectomy back in 1976 or so but only because there wasn’t anything else available. (It’s risible that condoms remain the only contraceptive alternative for men.)
• How about an inexpensive kit for detecting live sperm in similar to pregnancy kits to work in conjunction with various male contraceptives under development? Few men would object to their partners producing a little pre-ejaculate for testing and it would be a logical hedge against the possibility that one’s partner only claimed he was infertile.
• How about a little research into more targeted approaches to inhibiting ovulation than (relatively) massive injections or ingestions of whole-body hormones?

None of these, or any number of other avenues I’ve overlooked, would take longer or cost more to develop and promote than the next me-too version of a premature climax inhibitor for women(?!?) but there has to be a positive infrastructure for them to sell into or nobody will bother.

Fallback
Taking this position is also a strong hedge against the very real possibility that the current administration will finally succeed in packing the courts with anti-choice, pro-forced-pregnancy, women-hating, sex-hating psychopathic activist judges like Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, and others of their ilk who will finally redefine abortion as murder. Should that happen we’d better be there with very strong, very well-developed birth-control initiatives or risk sliding back into the middle ages.

The Bottom Line
My goal here is not to pontificate or pundificate. It’s to propose way out of a decades-long deadlock over what Franke-Ruta, others like her, and I see as “a symptom of larger social problems that ought to be addressed by policymakers.” This post isn’t a final word on anything. Given my very limited skills and knowledge I think it’s barely a beginning. I would prefer that better minds be involved. Fortunately better minds shouldn’t be hard to find. I do hope, though, that at the end of the debate at least one of the following points (in no particular order) becomes the conventional wisdom. Not because I thought of them (none are unique to me) but because we’d all be better off than if we don’t.

• Reframe the abortion debate as a birth control debate because a) it’s sex-positive, b) progressive, and c) a majority of Americans would support it.
• Push abortion as a failure of birth control not a failure of self control
• National policy should be to reduce unwanted pregnancy, not to reduce abortions. Birth control is the best way to reduce unwanted pregnancy
• Keeping the focus on abortion is hugely attractive to social conservatives. Reducing the number of abortions without limiting women’s choice undercuts the appeal of social conservatives.
• Birth control is safer than pregnancy or abortion
• Contraceptive research shouldn’t be confined to women, though since men wouldn’t be the ones who wound up pregnant, methods of verification should probably be developed in conjunction with male contraceptives.
• If or when the troglodytes finally gain enough clout to outlaw abortion we need to have something in place to reduce our dependence on abortion.
• Discard the Clinton’s “keep abortion safe, legal, and rare” for the more sex-positive “make abortion safe, legal, and rarely needed.”
• Inadequate access to reliable birth control limits our choices as surely as social conservatives would eliminate our choices
• The right of women to choose an abortion is, and should always remain, absolute and absolutely her choice and nothing in this post should be construed as meaning otherwise. I hope the differences between “rare” and “rarely needed” make that perfectly clear.

If you’ve made it this far I appreciate your patience. I’m not used to writing five-page essays as a single draft and, considering the third-rail-like qualities of the subject I’m probably insane for posting it as a first draft. I welcome any and all constructive criticism (and corrections of typos) and will do my best to incorporate them, giving credit where due. Eeek! I’m going to push the post button.

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Update: I ought to mention that ema of The well-timed period has a great deal of information mainly on contraceptives for women. If you know of other good resources, particularly regarding contraception policy (rather than contraceptive technology) please let me know via email or in comments and I’ll append them here.

Ok, here’s something that’s bugged me for decades: people who refer to adults of their own gender as “men” or “women” but refer to their adult gender opposites as “males” or “females.” It’s really creepy. Male humans are “men.” Female humans are “women.” Failing to refer to adults as men or women when addressing their gender seems disrespectful at the very least, and grating at the very best. (Not that respect for one’s opposite gender begins or ends there, as Jill of Feministe points out, but even so.)

But this is a grammar question, not a political one. What, if any, grammatical terms would be used to differentiate between the general gender addess “female” or “male” and the more specific “man,” “woman,” “girl,” or “boy?”

In case you wonder how I spend my evenings…

Revealing Men’s Bodies Edited by Nancy Tuana, William Cowling, Maurice Hamington, Greg Johnson, and Terrance MacMullan, published in 2002 by Indiana Press.

...the first scholarly collection that directly confronts male lived experience. ... Missing from the literature, however, is a sustained analysis of the phenomenology of male gendered bodies. Revealing Male Bodies addresses this omission by examining how male bodies are physically and experientially constituted by the economic, theoretical, and social practices in which men are immersed.

It’s a wicked fascinating series of essays based mainly on the works of Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Lacan. Most of the editors were men enrolled in a post-graduate women’s studies program at the University of Oregon.

I don’t know if I’ll post anything directly about the book but chances are the collected essays will color my writing. Merleau-Ponty, with whom I wasn’t familar, sounds particularly interesting. He seems to have argued against the Cartesian idea of the separation of the body from consciousness. This seems like a nice antedote both to the Jehova/Yaweh/Allah idea of the body as corrupt, on the one hand, and the Gnostic idea that we can escape our bodies to reveal underlying realities. I think this has particular bearing on what it means to experience small-L lust, subspace, and other sexual states. We’ll see though.

What I’m really interested in, however, are the entries on men’s and women’s perception of men’s bodies as corporeal objects. One interesting point that I must have overlooked when I was reading Freud years ago, is the generally accepted philosophical idea that “the phallus” is something distinct from “the penis.” I get it, though I’d have to get back to you if you wanted me to put it in a nutshell. I’ll just add that, based on what I’ve read so far, in addition to the phallus (a power symbol) and the penis (an occasionally impolite reproductive organ) I’d want to add “the cock” as an object of a partner’s sexual desire. I think that last bit is important because neither the scepter-like phallus or the thrusting and sometimes intrusive “you gotta help me out here” penis embodies the idea that men also have an organ that can caress and be caressed. Since of the most popular euphemisms “cock” has the fewest negative connotations (at least in sex-blogging circles) I’m going to try to use that term for this overlooked dimension of male sexuality.

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Woof! I was really just going to make this a bare list of the books I’m trying to read right now. I’ll mention in passing that the other books sitting next to me at the moment include The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality by Edmund Leites, Easton & Liszt’s The Ethical Slut, Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors, Schnarch’s Passionate Marriage, and Katie & Mitchell’s Loving What Is.

Question #1: Would you rather look at a very chilly person in skimpy undies or the same person, very warm, in flannel PJs?

Question #2: Would you rather jump under the covers with a very chilly person who just skinned out of skimpy undies, or a very warm person who just took off his or her flannel PJs?

You don’t even have to guess what my answer would be do you?

Great ethical thought-experiment from Phoebe of What would Phoebe do?

Let’s say a woman walks into a pharmacy to fill her prescription for the Pill. Turns out she gets one of those social-conservative pharmacists who won’t give it to her. This is their conversation:

Woman: I’d like to fill this prescription.
Pharmacist: Sorry, that goes against my religion, I cannot provide it.
Woman: But I need it for health reasons.
Pharmacist: That’s what they all say.
Woman: Seriously, health reasons only.
Pharmacist: How could I possibly believe that?
Woman: I’m a lesbian.

What happens next? Would she get the prescription? Surely no matter how wrong a social conservative considers homosexuality, there’s no moral reason to prevent a lesbian who is truly taking the Pill for health reasons from taking it, unless the pharmacist believes that a) the woman might get raped, and all life is sacred, ergo… or b) she may well have a change of heart and become ex-gay before the month is over.

Read her whole post here.

As more and more faith-based pharmacists (and the big corporations that evidently continue to employ them) begin to balk at providing women with even basic birth control, and as the wrong-wingers push for further discrimination against non-heterosexuals, this question may become progressively less hypothetical.

Me? I keep thinking about this great progressive chauvenist motto: “Keep your laws out of my wife’s body.”

I used to fantasize mightily about being a vampire. As a kid it was about the idea of being able to turn into a bat and fly, get to stay up all night, and (probably) to scare the dickens out of people. Oh yeah, and I just loved that wiggy Bella Lugosi accent.

As a pubescent lad it was the idea of being able to mesmerize women, swoop my cape around them, and bite their necks. (Also, a teetotaler even then, I liked the idea that vampires “never drink… vine.” :-)

Truth be told I never wanted to bite women’s necks, instead I wanted to let them feel warm breath on their throats, to kiss thir necks passionately and only graze them with the tips of my eye teeth, and feel them quiver with passion as their breathing quickened. I’d heard older folks talk about “necking” and I always assumed that’s what they meant.

I’m not sure what made me think about it tonight but now I’ve got a question, nearly a month late for Halloween. The nice thing, though, is now you’ve got eleven months to think about it. If you were to plan a post-Halloween-Ball assignation a tall, dark, attractive gentleman in a scarlet-lined cape would you prefer he look you in the eyes, fold you into his arms, tip your head up and kiss you from the front, or would you prefer he stood behind you, swept an arm around you just under your breasts, leaned his head forward and kissed you from earlobe to collarbone?