Yesterday I posted about how the common conceit that romantic sex must be wordless complicates everyone’s response to so-called gray-area date rape. Catching up on other people’s blogs it looks like problems with communications-free sex is just in the air. I couldn’t be happier.

Annie Dennison of Smart at Love says

We know that a man – even a good one who loves us – cannot read our minds.

But that doesn’t stop us from being disappointed occasionally when we have to spell out for him what we want or need in a relationship.

It seems to come down to two ideas about love that many of us buy into:

“If he loves me – and really gets who I am – he’ll just know what makes me happy.”

And…

“If I have to ask him for something that’s important to me, it doesn’t count.”

I like to think of myself as a woman who doesn’t unrealistically expect a man to be a mind reader for my wants and needs. After doing a recent mental inventory of my relationships, though, you know what I discovered?

In some areas I’m very good at spelling it out with a man, and in other areas I secretly wish he’d just know what I want and need.

Take sex, for instance.

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Not asking in the first place is not a good thing, whether you’re a woman or a man.

Read her clear-eyed post here

And RenegadeEvolution of The Fine Art of Free Speech and Dissent comes to the same point

...a lot of otherwise assertive, on top of it, alpha gals- and those who aren’t- turn a little odd in the bedroom. Suddenly, it’s like they cease being able to communicate, let alone express their desires. They are afraid or ashamed to ask for what they want, tell their partners what works for them or gets them off. They feel selfish or shameful or greedy if they ask for certain acts, or positions, or aspects of foreplay that they enjoy…because there is that lingering shame, or fear, or responsibility. That false yet still creeping theory that women aren’t necessarily supposed to like sex, or want sex, or enjoy sex. They are supposed to be the guardians of morality and all. I remember how floored I was when I read about how many women have never had orgasms, and every time I hear a woman say she’s never had one. My first initial thought is “what the hell are you doing wrong?” And I think I’ve come to the conclusion that what they are doing wrong is not talking. Being embarrassed to experiment, ask for, tell, explore, request, look into what might or will get the job done. I know grown women who will argue with anyone all the day long about anything but are embarrassed to ask their partners for cunnilingus. I know successful, otherwise bad ass females who are ashamed to admit that they like and enjoy certain positions more than others to their partners…let alone request them. I know women who pretty much never enjoy sex, but rather endure it, because they are embarrassed to ask for what they want, and would rather “suffer in silence” as it were than be seen as wanton, lustful…um…sexual and into it.

It makes me want to cry, really. Not all sex is great, even good…but suffering constantly through bad sex because you’re embarrassed to speak up and say what might make it better???

Read the quote in context here

I shouldn’t have to say it, but just to be clear neither I, nor Dennison, nor RE are advocating relentless meta-level conversation during actual sex. Nor are we claiming that lovers never come together wordlessly. However, odds are that lovers, especially first-time-together lovers, have a much, much greater chance of actually coming together if they take the time to confirm to each other than sex is actually desired, that if they find themselves popped out of their erotic haze and back into everyday consciousness that they’ll recruit their partner in order to get back into it, and that afterwards either during subsiding heartbeats and affectionate nuzzling or later over breakfast or lunch they discuss what went well and what they’d enjoy next time.

We’re not saying you must always communicate. (Indeed Dennison adds “Asking for the tenth time – nagging – is not a good thing, either. We’ll tackle that topic another time.”) We’re just saying that failing ever to communicate (and I would add especially the first time with a new partner) is a pretty terrible way to make sure everyone has a good time.

What’s your story?

Many years ago in the late afternoon of a cold spring day, my best friend and I sat in her bedroom facing one another. Sitting on two straight-backed chairs, our cold-chapped knees barely touched. With our identical woolen skirts and white blouses,the uniform of our Catholic high school, we may have looked like bookends turned to face one another. We were not looking at each other, but the ouija board balanced on our laps.

We played that board so many times we knew when “it” was “cranky” or “talking nonsense.” That afternoon, “it” was as eager to please as the two 15 year-olds who asked it questions, about the future and the past.

It was my turn. “Who was I?”
Skating across the lacquered board, the three-legged pointer spelled a name: “R-O-S-E.”
“When?” I asked.
“1-9-0-1,” was the reply, but before I could ask another question, it spelled out this word: “P-R-O-S-T-I-T-U-T-E.”

“That figures,” snorted my friend, who considered my marathon petting sessions too risque for a nominal virgin. She was definitely of the mind that sex before marriage ruined the merchandise, while I thought sex was the best investion since the proverbial sliced bread and certainly not as boring. So the news that I may have been a prostitute in a former life did not upset me; in fact, it made perfect sense.

Of course I had little knowledge of what life may have been like for a prostitute around 1900, as I had no inkling that my joy in discovering sex would be tainted by hearing what other girls considered normal or complaints of boyfriends who said I asked for it too often, and the convoluted logic that made me think that if I was really desirable, then I shouldn’t have to ask for it. All the whispers and self-doubt that separate us from what should be a life-long delight.

So it is appropriate on Walpurgis Night, the night of women’s magic — a night of pursuit, love, loss and death — that I speak of the prostitutes of whom I knew so little on that spring afternoon almost 40 years ago.

Over the past month I have read a stack of reports, articles, and interviews to determine if decriminalization or legalization have made any difference in the lives of women employed as prostitutes, both those who work in brothels as well as street walkers. What I found is that for prostitutes in Sweden, New Zealand, Netherlands, or Australia, decriminalization and legalization of their trade has not removed the stigma of engaging in sex work. Even where sex work is legal within certain zoned areas of a city, prostitutes are reluctant to press charges against an abusive client because of the lack of support from local law enforcement. Complaints of police harassment were cited in most reports I read. Some prostitutes did not want to even register as members of the sex trade, because they felt that, once registered, the stigma could never be erased. Based on the reports that I read, and I sought a balance of both pro and con, legalization or decriminalization do not bring the expected benefits to sex workers, except for an elite few.

By no means am I suggesting that we should not continue to advocate for harm reduction for sex workers, whether through decriminilization, legalization or special laws against trafficking. But it is important to recognize that the problems afflicting sex workers run deeper. That the stigma attached to the work they do is also attached to what is the greatest source of power for a man or woman. When we are cut off from our sexuality, we are crippled in both mind and body. Society’s rigid view of what is normal is a distorted mirror in which we can never see ourselves as desirable sexual beings.

Professor Elizabeth Wood of Sex in the Public Square , tells us to put down the distorted mirror and see that none are exempt from the problems afflicting sex workers:

1. No women are safe until sex workers are safe. As long as being a prostitute makes one a target for violence, and as long as that violence can be perpetrated with much less risk of sanction, and as long as all women are potentially identifiable as prostitutes, no women are safe until sex workers are safe.

2. An injury to one is an injury to all. When we don’t speak up to protect the safety of other groups, we cannot expect much support when we ourselves are targeted. Solidarity is important across groups of workers. Stigma and bias only serve to divide us.

From : Remembering Sex Workers on Workers Memorial Day .

In her post, Prof. Wood recalls how at a vigil held this past December, the names of 60 sex workers murdered in 2006 were read during the ceremony. I think of those that have been murdered and assaulted each year, going back in time, back to the beginning of the last century, these women whose deaths were anything but natural. For them, and especially for one who may have been named Rose, the candles are burning on this Walpurgis Night.

Ok, so earlier I was saying I thought it was weird that folks were getting all “gotcha” over the story that (in the statistical sense) abstractly implies that abstinence-only education works when the abrupt resignation of Randall Tobias directly implies it doesn’t even work for high-level federal directors of abstinence-only campaigns!

Tim Noah of Slate.com, who I think is a very good reporter, at least mentions it but only as an aside.

Tobias’ resignation was announced at 5 p.m. on a Friday, traditionally the hour for releasing bad news, because reporters are busy making weekend plans, and readers, at least in theory, pay less attention to news that comes out on a Saturday. The strategy seems to have worked in this instance, because neither ABC News nor the Post reported one highly relevant detail: Tobias is the Bush administration’s leading advocate of abstinence-only programs abroad!

Find more juicy but irrelevant evidence of Tobias’ talking the talk but not walking the walk here.

The rest of the article is a bit about inside baseball and a lot of really egregious quotes. (In keeping with another post from yesterday it turns out Tobias’ most recent job involved requiring foreign aid recipients to denounce prostitution.)

But I still want to get back to the main point. As Noah makes clear in his quotations, Tobias wasn’t an utterly clueless, Bush or Gonzales style empty suit. He was able to clearly articulate the adult abstinence (outside of marriage) programs his agency endorsed, and he was also able to clearly distinguish them from similar programs that put a heavier emphasis on condoms for reducing transmission of HIV.

In other words, he wasn’t just a “heck of a job, Brownie” bench-warmer. He understood the programs, he could speak persuasively about the matter, and he could deftly debate the details with outright opponents or advocates for competing programs.

Knowing all that he still couldn’t actually do it!

And get this. One can hear much twittering about Tobias-the-hypocrite who hired prostitutes even though he’s married. (As if hiring prostitutes when you’re not is ok?) Set aside those nervous adolescent chuckles, though, and an even larger issue arises. Tobias couldn’t uphold abstinence-and-fidelity principles even though he’s married and therefore could have sex at home.

How, one wonders, can we expect highly hormone-charged young people to keep their hands out of their own and their partner’s pants when a 62-year-old married man with an authoritative grasp of abstinence-only policies is unable to stick with the program?

And how, one wonders, can journalists and pundits be so distracted by “huh huh huh he had Teh Sex” that they can pass up a chance to take down a federal government policy that costs on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars and encumbers on the order of tens of millions of matching funds for the (dwindling number of) states that choose to participate?

Look. Tobias hired women from a company offering “adult fantasy services.” Chances are very good those women got his penis wet with their saliva and/or let him put his penis inside their bodies and move it around. That’s called sex. Undersecretary Tobias is an adult and that’s what adults do. Even CNN and Fox news anchors have sex (though you’d never believe it to hear them talk.) And unless he and the woman he married had an expressed understanding then he was a bit of a jerk for getting his penis wet with someone other than her. His behavior may be disgraceful in moral terms but otherwise it’s pretty routine.

The real question, then, is not how he could have forgone abstinence while advocating abstinence, or how he could have been unfaithful while advocating faithfulness, or how he could have hired prostitutes while advocating restricting prostitution. Those are upside down questions. The real question is how could he have continued to advocate public health programs intended to address problems as serious as HIV transmission in Africa when his personal experience made it clear that those policies aren’t, and perhaps can’t be effective.

There’s an integrity problem here, but it’s not about who wets his whistle.

I’m just sayin’

Most of the time a date-rapist knows exactly what he’s doing. The so-called “gray area” isn’t really all that gray. I’m going to say that, oh, pretty much all the time his victim knows exactly what he’s doing too. The so-called “gray area” isn’t very gray at all.

What perplexes me endlessly is that so many date-rapists are genuinely shocked by the charges. And that so many victims seem so uncertain about it.

I’ve got this little theory. It’s called a romantic ideal that sex “done right” is wordless. Sort of like going to church. Or a funeral. Or the bathroom in a public stall.

People marvel endlessly about how so many people forego the pause to use barrier forms of contraception because it “breaks the romance of the moment.” That even considering contraception in advance is so… so… pre-meditated. (And meditating about sex before having it is supposed to be a bad idea?) But I think the condom/contraception aversion is just the tip of the iceberg. The drop in the bucket. Not even the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Heck, based on reactions around the blogosphere (though not with my readers) just asking each other how you might want to deal with an unwanted, unplanned pregnancy before sex is a bit of a social gaff!

Yeah, a lot of people don’t mind talking about it at all. That’s great but, like the problem that 10,000 nice guys being as nice as nice human beings possibly can not having any influence on one guy psycho enough to shoot up a school, 10,000 sex-positive partners communicating clearly before hand has exactly zero bearing on the willful, naive, poorly informed or badly in denial partners who think sex should be had but neither spoken of nor prepared for.

Based on one clear-cut case back when I participated in an intervention shortly after having been a peer councilor I believe there really are “gray area” date rapes wherein the rapist naively assumes lack of resistance implies consent. But such very tiny parasols cast insufficient shade to account for the countless twilit date and acquaintance rapes around the world.

When my peers and I participated in that intervention in 1974 neither the term “date rape” nor the slogan “no means no” were known. I’m not sure it would have helped though, because simply waiting for “no” isn’t enough.

It’s time to ditch this stupid notion that ideal sex is all voiceless passion. Even the dullest poet or novelist could effortlessly knit positive affirmation into even the most romantic love scene. Even the thickest lout or the most delicate flower can recognize and appreciate the importance of the exchange of words.

And it’s time to understand that even in a world that recognizes and respects “no means no,” it’s insufficient to proceed in the absence of “no.” Instead one must seek, and the other must deliver an affirmative yes. And in the presence an expectation of a clear request and a clear response, then at least neither assailant nor victim can leave the encounter conflicted about what had happened. “Did you ask?” or “Did they ask?” can be followed with “No further questions.”

Do me a favor. Do us all a favor. Spread the word that silence is neither sexy nor does it constitute consent.

Speaking of the Randall Tobias/Deborah Palfrey dust up, Nico at ThinkProgress brings up a point that I think might not be getting enough attention. Nico posts the transcript of an upcoming 20/20 piece on Palfrey’s extensive phone records. ABC reporter Brian Ross says (with my emphasis added)

ROSS: There are thousands of names, tens of thousands of phone numbers, and there are people there at the Pentagon, lobbyists, others at the White House, prominent lawyers — a long, long list, and as well, the women who work for the service, David, include university professors, legal secretaries, scientists, military officers.

Read the ThinkProgress post here.

While everyone is slavering to find out who among Washington, D.C.‘s high and mighty are among Palfrey’s thousands of names and tens of thousands of phone numbers, I’d rather hear more about her employees. No, not their identities but their working conditions: how were they recruited, how were they screened and hired? How were the were managed, how they were scheduled? How easy it was for them to leave Palfrey’s service when they wanted to?

We have such intense opinions about prostitution, for and/or against. We know that it should be crushed, or that it should be legalized, or tolerated, or that it should be shunned, or that it should be ignored. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We know so much about prostitution, yet we know scarcely anything at all.

Who, in the aggregate, were these 132 women? (The story would have even more buzz if Palfrey had also employed men) Who were these professors, these legal secretaries, these scientists, these military officers, these Thai and Central American “gals” who worked for a woman in a $480,000 home in Escondido, CA — a continent away — over the last thirteen years?

I don’t know.

A few days ago while discussing the institutionalized adolescence of “entertainers” like Don Imus I cited Steven Stark’s “>now-difficult-to-access essay from the Sept. 1994 Atlantic Monthly Magazine called “Where the Boys Are.”

I didn’t discuss it but Stark highlights what he identifies as contemporary journalism’s adolescent attitudes to public figures, particularly those with actual authority.

Also in Journalism as currently practiced, reporters often set themselves up as passive observers of events and then spend much of their time identifying with those who exercise real power — a point of view that is reminiscent of the way a young teenager views his parents. Moreover, if today’s journalism has a driving principle , that principle centers on an obsession with hypocrisy. Journalism is about many things, but these days it is often about revealing that public figures are phonies. Covering Bill Clinton, or Prince Charles, or Michael Jackson, reporters frame their stories by saying implicitly, “These people aren’t what they say they are. Look, they lied to you.”

...

Political coverage tends to focus on gaffes, girlfriends, and youthful indiscretions while far more important, “adult” issues go underreported.

This attitude handily explains how on the one hand journalists could get their tightie-whities and granny-panties in such a bunch over Bill Clinton’s semen stains while disregarding some fairly glaring, um, issues with the conduct (let alone the instigation) of an ongoing military conflict.

I’m therefore stepping into the issue of Deputy Secretary of State and director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development Randall L. Tobias’ resignation last week in the face of revelations that he booked $300/hour prostitutes escorts “Central American gals” for massages through the recently arrested Deborah Jeane Palfrey. The married Tobias’ previous job in the Bush administration was “AIDS czar,” in which position he pressed his position that faithfulness and abstinence were better tools than condoms for preventing HIV transmission.

There’s certainly enough going on in that last paragraph to keep an army of Holden Caulfield’s hands busy in their laptops for weeks. I decline to participate. Hiring prostitutes from a well-established madame, whether for massages or strap-on sex while promoting abstinence and faithfulness over safe sex practices is certainly hypocritical, and if his wife tripped him a the top of a set of stairs I’d say he had it coming. I’d rather look at some of the other elements in the case.

First of all, as a policy matter how effective can abstinence- and faithfulness-only programs be if not even the political appointee in charge is inclined to pursue it? One can hardly open a blog page these days without tripping over mention of Mathematica Policy Research Inc’s finding that abstinence-only education has no effect on either the timing or the rate with which elementary middle-school students begin having sex. That’s a classic journalistic “gotcha,” whether adolescent or no. Fine, fine work, sure, and a worthwhile story, but also highly myopic in the sense that Stark emphasizes.

It’s not unusual to get all snarky when the numbers of a high-level policy program don’t add up. It’s certainly not unusual to get all snarky about a high public official seeing prostitutes. But pickles on a stick, boys and girls, the policy didn’t even work on Randall L. Tobias — highly-trusted, Karl-Rove-vetted, Bush appointed, repeatedly-turned-to-White-House-silverback in charge of implementing it overseas to curtail HIV transmission! That’s the story!

And I’m not just sayin’ this time, I’m requesting: start writing about it.

Jill of Feministe unearths an absolutely fabulous reason why the a pro-choice position is better than the nominal “pro-life” position: human beings shouldn’t play God.

The gentleman she quotes proposes playing God, declaring that women rather than their infants should die during catastrophic labor and delivery.

I am strongly pro-life (of the baby). I would always choose the life of my child over my own life or anyone else’s life, including my wife. Harsh? Think about it. What’s more precious, an innocent life of a child who has their entire life ahead of them or a grown adult who has had a fair opportunity to live their life and have whatever experiences they have been blessed to have?

In your case there was no way to save the baby, they tried, they did everything they could but because of the dilation it was an inevitable loss and I’m terribly sorry for that. But I congratulate you on your efforts to do everything within your power to at least try to save your baby, even to the point of losing your wife. And I applaud you for hesitating as to whether or not to abort.

I am not against aborting if there is no possible alternative to saving the mother.. but if the child can be saved at the loss of the mother then I would choose the child. There is no logic to losing both, but it’s a risk worth taking, to take it as far as you took it should happen in every case, in my opinion.

Read the quote, and Jill’s reactions here.

My concern in response has nothing to do with a man with neither concern, consideration, nor love for his wife. Nor even an arrogant assumption that his preferences would trump hers nor anyone else’s. My concern instead is that if I were allowed to play God I’d go the other way. For equally arbitrary but no less morally well-founded grounds that it’s better to save someone you’re related to by bonds, trust, friendship, love, and partnership than someone you haven’t met.

The monsterous arrogance of either his opinion or mine not withstanding, the problem is that there’s no right answer. No right answer for the Supreme Court. No right answer for clergy. No right answer for doctors, nurses, or midwives. No right answer for the father or family. There’s not even a right answer for the mother herself!

And since there’s no right answer, in fact because there’s no right answer, there’s only one person with the right to make the decision when a decision must be made.

It’s not for the father or family to decide. It’s not for doctors, nurses, or midwives to decide. It’s not for clergy to decide. It’s not for the Supreme Court to decide. It’s for the woman who’s life is on the line to decide. And it’s for everyone else up and down the line to support and defend her decision, and to defend or celebrate it as their various and sundry personal opinion allows.

A couple of points, though:

- It’s peculiar that in one breath the gentleman Jill quotes could chipperly reassure his correspondent that he and his wife can always have another child after their encounter with stillbirth and then proceed to advocate trying to kill her next time if necessary in the next.

- I wonder if the gentleman can be so sanguine about living without a friend, a companion, and a loving partner because with an attitude because he already lives his life that way. I would find it a terribly lonely, empty, bitter, and meaningless life having nothing but a wife out there in the barn along side my “house, nor cattle, nor manservant, nor maidservant, nor anthing else” that was mine.

- I prefer the word “partner” for the person I married to the word “wife” not least because one can not own a partner. Nor can one morally or ethically make a decision on behalf of a partner without prior consultation and consent. One ought not do such things to a wife either, but evidently this is not a universally held position.

The title of this post is derived from Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion which upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Ban. Apparently, knowledge of the gruesome details of the procedure by which the skull of the fetus is pierced and the contents removed is too much for any mother or Justice Kennedy to endure. The law provided no exceptions for cases where the mother’s health or survival could be in jeopardy, since such an exception, according to the majority opinion, would be subject to abuse.

Since the Senators who voted for the passage of this law and the Justices who upheld it are so moved with compassion for the women contemplating this procedure, at the very least, I would have expected them to raise their voices in protest at the “grief more anguished” of welfare mothers who are forced to give up their children.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, aka Welfare Reform Act, required that, in order to receive benefits, recipients must be searching for a job, training for a job or actively working in a job. If not, their benefits will be suspended until they can show that they are complying with these requirements. However, the Welfare Reform Act also placed a five year limitation on the time period for receiving benefits (some states have more restrictive guidelines). Suspension of benefits due to failure to comply does not stop the clock from ticking — the five year period will expire whether the recipient actually receives benefits or not.

However, if a welfare mother has not found work, the benefits to children will not be cut if the children are living with other relatives or adults . In an interview published in the August 2004 issue of The Sun Magazine, Sharon Hays, Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Virginia and author of Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform, explained the effect of this policy as follows:

My guess is that desperate women will give their children to the grandparents to raise so that their kids still get welfare. The law basically encourages poor women to give up their children. It is also interesting to note that many states have chosen to cook the books by removing such “child-only” welfare cases from the welfare statistics they report to the federal government. That way, the decrease in the welfare rolls appears greater than it really is. So welfare-reform proponents are calling it a “success” if you make a mom give up her kids. [Emphasis mine, Kochanie]

If personal responsibility is the key here, it would seem logical that the agencies administering these programs would give these women access to family planning and birth control to avoid the possibility of giving up their children. Not so. According to Sharon Hays, who interviewed welfare receipients and their caseworkers for three years:

The welfare-reform act included a prize of $100 million to be shared among the five states that showed a decrease in the rate of unwed births without a corresponding increase in the rate of abortion. Of course, the welfare-reform act didn’t include any proposals for family planning. In fact, it absolutely prohibited the promotion of family planning by any method other than abstinence. In one of the welfare offices I researched, the caseworkers were strictly forbidden even to mention birth control. This is a self-defeating policy. Almost no one thinks promoting abstinence is a solution. Congress eventually decided to discontinue the anti-abortion bonus, because it found that a state’s welfare policies had no effect on its rates of unwed births and abortion.

But what about the welfare fraud that was the main reason these law were passed during the Clinton Administration? While it is estimated that 2% of welfare recipients are engaged in serious fraud, most recipients find that their benefits are too meager and try to fill the gap with on-the-side jobs like housecleaning or hair styling. But it is difficult to imagine how one is going to become wealthy with benefits paying $350 per month.

Keeping and maintaining a job requires reliable child care. At an annual cost of $4,000 or higher, child care is out of the range for most families of the working poor. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 was supposed to bring large scale funding of child care assistance programs to the states. Unfortunately, these child care assistance benefits are not available once a family’s income moves above the poverty level. According to the National Women’s Health Center: In 2004, a family earning just above 150 percent of poverty ($23,500 for a family of three) would not even qualify for child care assistance in 13 states. In Missouri, a family of three earning over $17,800 a year would not qualify for help. Which explains why so many mothers are forced to leave their children at home alone, or supervised by an ‘older’ child, or a relative, while they work at one or two low-paying jobs to make ends meet.

Personally, I would prefer to have these children at home with their mothers and see no reason why we the government pays childcare workers more than what it would cost for a mother to care for her own children. If the Justices of the Supreme Court are horrified at the thought of Partial Birth Extraction, why are they not horrified by Partial Life Extraction, the practice by which we take apart the families of the poor, piece by piece? Why are our lawmakers not moved by the sorrow of these mothers, who give up their children to grandparents or rarely see them after working two low-paying jobs? Apparently their sorrow just doesn’t qualify as “profound.”

This post is about the Thinking Blogger Awards meme that was started by (I think I’ve got the name right) Ilker Yoldas. Ironically, Yoldas, like me, doesn’t participate in many tag-someone-else memes.

Remittance Girl, Bonnie, Gillette, Anastasia, WryGirl, Cat, and Ephiphany Alone kindly named me to their lists, and several others have honorably mentioned me and I’d like to thank them all. Follow their links, too, not just because I think they’re good bloggers but because the other bloggers they name are also pretty interesting.

[I ought to mention right here that while I’m flattered to have been named a thinking blogger I’ve had to rewrite this post after boneheadedly deleting instead of saving it. At least once. So far! So much for that label. :-) —fl]

Just about everybody in my blogroll has made me think — sometimes deep thoughts, sometimes deeply erotic ones. That’s generally how people get in there so it’s neither exactly easy nor fair to single anyone out. But there are a few who, at least once, have totally turned me around and I’d like to thank them.

1) Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon. I recently did a grind through an extract of my blog, pulling out everyone I’ve linked to in posts and Marcotte was the hands-down winner. Reading her has helped me, more than anyone, realize that radical feminists care for men far, far more than the capital-P Patriarchy ever has or ever will.

2) Tie: Contemplating the now-mostly-quiet submissive Madelena of Myths and Metawhores made me completely rethink my relationship to sadomasochism, dominance, and submission. So did the enthusiastically masochistic Richard of Down on my knees.

3) Tie: Tony Comstock of Comstock Films and Sam Sugar of SugarBank two completely different pornographers who are both working to reshape the exhausted, commodifying tropes of pornography.

4) The non-sex blogger Matthew Yglesias. “Big Media Matt,” a Harvard philosophy major turned political pundit (now blogging under the banner of The Atlantic Monthly) has made me think in terms of the essential picture and instead of the bigger one, as well as showing me more about the theory and practice of practical blogging, than anyone else.

5) Heather Corinna of Scarleteen who’s made me think more about how we navigate the path from the polymorphous innocence of childhood to sexually healthy adulthood than anyone else in more than 30 years.

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Update: Five isn’t enough.

6) The now quiet DirtyTalkingGirl and Wendy of the now-dark Housewyfe & Caveman kickstarted my complete rethinking of gender-based “sexual imbalances” in relationships. If Joan Sewell had a blog (hint, hint) she’d be a very solid entry in this category as well.

7) And since this a sex blog , and since horniness tends to play a large role in sex, I really ought to name the blogger or bloggers who make me think delicious, fever-inspiring, “mmm, I’d like to try that” thoughts. For better or worse, though, men don’t kiss and tell even when it’s all only fantasy.

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Official rules of the meme.

The participation rules are simple:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

The meme started here.

Have I mentioned that there’s a whole sub-genre of porn involving rape and forced impregnation? I believe I have! I ran across that old post, from January, 2006, while looking for something else entirely, but it’s awfully timely.

Whether [then up-for-confirmation Supreme-Court nominee Samuel Alito is willing to] admit it (to others or himself) the nominee believes the law should force women to bear their molester’s babies. Whether they admit it (to others or themselves) the men who nominated him believe the law should force women to bear their molester’s babies. Whether they admit it (to others or themselves) majority of men in the Senate who plan to confirm this judge believe the law should force women to bear their molester’s babies. The men who pay them believe this as well, and I’m guessing that many of those men rapturously ejaculate to fantasies of denying women abortions so they must bear their molester’s babies. (There are thousands of forced-pregnancy porn stories on the internet which implies an awful lot of men are jacking off over them, which turns my stomach, which makes me want to disappoint the men who would make their fantasies law.)

It still turns my stomach and chances are it turns yours. If you’d rather not have your stomach turned further don’t click the link below for examples I turned up with just a couple of minutes of Googling. They’re written stories, and the excerpts aren’t explicit, but you you probably ought to know what kind of stories evidently turn some people on. (I mean it does seem odd that only men were at the signing ceremony for the “Partial Birth” abortion ban that was just upheld in Gonsales vs. Carhart?)