So… simultaneous orgasms were once all the rage. Sometimes metaphorically, as in “spoken about and sought with enthusiasm.” Sometimes literally as in equalitarians raging about insensitive and/or incompetent men failing to meet their partner’s need. Sometimes it was romantics and performance junkies raging that sex was inauthentic if you didn’t or couldn’t.

I think the fad-like quality might have had something to do with popular culture’s “discovery” that women have orgasms… and that therefore maybe their partners probably ought to see to it that they have one. (Aside: note the previous “no-sex” class notion that women wouldn’t have anything so ungenteel as an orgasm; note also the later “no-sex” class notion that it was the man’s exclusive responsibility to insure their partners had them.)

Anyway, I’m wondering how much attention people pay to simultaneous orgasms these days. Speaking for myself, once I figured out how to avoid ejaculating in the first moments of intercourse it’s been easy, lovely, and very enjoyable to just, well, enjoy intercourse, riding the edge until the partner I was with began hers.

Obviously it’s not the end of the world when a partner came first or I did since intercourse really isn’t the beginning or end of thoroughly enjoyable sex. And, as I hinted above, worrying about it can be a real buzz kill, and sometimes it’s just fun to just focus everything on knocking your partner’s socks off or letting your partner knock yours off. But coming together is fun when you can.

Oh yeah, and obviously I’m not saying you both have to come from intercourse alone! It’s not just fine but a lot of fun for one or both of you to slip fingers or toys into, on to, or over just the right spots.

So. What’s your experience with coming together? If you’ve been having sex for more than, say, ten years has the way you relate to it changed any?

I’ve mentioned elsewhere how much can be done with commercial image-enhancement technology to push our impressions of what constitutes “ideal” beauty beyond achievable limits. A few weeks ago Sam Sugar of SugarBank linked to a YouTube video of a Bulgarian Photoshop artist named InvincibleMinerva that turns a very large young woman in a parody of a cheesecake photo into a very thin young woman in… a parody of a cheesecake photo.

There are dozens of these Photoshop makeovers on YouTube, and while at first it seems as though this is the most extreme, as you look through other retouches it starts to sink in that… hey, Minerva mainly nudges the contours of the original image. Others perform outright plastic surgery — moving eyes, pasting in matching cheekbones, even adding extra teeth!

To be honest I don’t care much for retouching images much past balancing colors. People almost always look nicer when they look like themselves.

Also, any time I try it something always goes terribly wrong. :-) Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

Earlier this week I noted the annual return of the 2002 semen withdrawal causes depression in women pseudo-science story, and now another one has popped up. This time it’s Naomi Wolf’s New York Magazine story called “The Porn Myth,” wherein Wolf opines that porn and strippers have robbed men of all interest in sex with real women.

Hugo Schwyzer points out the Wolf article was published in 2004. (First clue? It begins with the line “At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin…” but Dworkin died in 2005.)

Still, Schwyzer uses the opportunity to reassess his initially positive take in light of what he now recognizes as Wolf’s assertions that, despite her opposition to porn, maintaining the husband’s sexual interest is a wifely duty rather than, say, a shared one.

Wolf also evidently takes it as given that women require no similar attention. Perhaps because she thinks women consent sex only to please and/or keep their husbands and not because they might actually enjoy it themselves? This from an article that criticizes the commodification of women via porn?

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On the other hand Hugo also gets into assumptions about men’s alleged proclivities to seek multiple partners. I totally agree with his sentiment that to the extent it’s a problem it’s one men ourselves need to deal with rather than to have it dealt with for us. (By, say, the Wolfian strategy of our partners keeping us guessing with doled-out “mysteries.”)

My issue with that issue is that by all measurements the majority of men don’t seek multiple partners. Painting us all as polygamists by nature when fewer than half of us ever are seems to miss one mark. And, of course, the assumption… well… assumes that women have no similar natural inclination when their lifetime averages aren’t that much different from men’s. In the West, at least, actual percentages vary from study to study but the relative proportion between men and women between studies is fairly close. In fact while minorities of both genders report extra-relationship relationships, the majority of both men and women appear to be lifelong monogamists.

If one were inclined to examine the basis of stereotypes, one might wonder if the perception that men are promiscuous and women aren’t might have something to do with the convention that limits women to saying yes or no and deters them from initiating relationships themselves. A convention which in turn trains men to approach multiple potential partners in order to find the ones who are actually interested. Hmmm, and — what to you know — men keep “little black books” while women wait by the phone. Oh yeah, that couldn’t be social convention, it’s gotta be human nature. Right? Sort of hard to believe.

Samhita of Feministing has a nice post that, to my mind, suggests why the recent blowup about women of color and feminism and the (sometimes-deliberate)misperception that American feminism (in particular) stints non-white, non-affluent, non-first-world women is relevant.

Health activists in sub-Saharan Africa are seeing that attempts at stopping FGM based on women’s rights isn’t working, so they are turning to the Quran, to find evidence that it is not a religious necessity.

...

I am sure part of the problem is that Muslim ideas and Western feminist ideas tend to run in opposition to one another. The feminist movement, as it is understood world-wide, is considered to be Western and white. It seems almost logical that local leaders would reject the terms of women’s rights if they are based on a Western model of “women’s liberation.”

Read her entire post here.

The point, by the way, isn’t that feminism is inclusive. As Jessica Valenti puts it early in Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters, the idea that “Feminism is for Old White Ladies” is a myth.

But like stories about feminists burning bras or all being fat, hairy, ugly lesbians-because-no-man-would-have-them it’s an extremely useful one propagated by those who, like Christina Hoff Sommers of The Weekly Standard and too many conservative fundamentalists of all religions, oppose feminism and dismiss women of color.

Consider the opening lyrics from the 1966 hit “Cherish,” written by Terry Kirkma and originally performed by “The Association:”

Cherish is the word I use to describe
All the feeling that I have hiding here for you inside
You don’t know how many times I’ve wished that I had told you
You don’t know how many times I’ve wished that I could hold you
You don’t know how many times I’ve wished that I could
Mold you into someone who could
Cherish me as much as I cherish you

From the 1966 single by ‘The Association’

Do all men and women, boys and girls, cherish others? Sure. Have hidden feelings they can’t reveal? Wish they had told the person they long for? Wish they could hold that person? Yes, yes, and yes.

But how about wishing they could mold someone who would feel the same way in return? I’m pretty sure the molding prospective partners into someone who could “cherish” them is pretty much an exclusively guy thing.

If I’m wrong this would be a good time to let me know.

(Otherwise I might launch into another extended essay that boils down to “men are conditioned to believe women aren’t naturally interested in them and therefor require some manner of male intervention.”)

There’s no way I’m linking to the original website, but it looks like once again the “Psychology Today reports that men’s semen reduces depression in women” is on the move.

Like a lot of other stories along these lines this one continues to circulate not because the research was credible (it wasn’t!) or the researcher widely respected by his peers (he doesn’t appear to be.) Instead it circulates because it’s too good to fact check. Too good for lad-magazines and anti-feminists to pass up because, hey, it’s another line for doods to use on chix. Too good for for feminists to pass up because, hey, it’s outrageous. Too good for health professionals because, hey, it’s a chance to fret about increased risk of infectious disease.

I’m not exactly sure why it’s cropped up again this week, but it’s been popping up all over. 30 seconds with your favorite search engine should turn up dozens of breathlessly excited, fulminating, and/or concerned posts, all carrying on as if Jonas Salk, Alfred Kinsey, Carl Jung, and Rosalind Franklin all arose from the dead, last week, with the news.

Instead it’s not even new. The Psychology Today article cited was published in 2002! Not 2004. Not 2006. Definitely not 2007. But, like some sort of annual migration of statue-shellacking pigeons, the story returns year after year.

Instead it’s not even news! First clue that it’s not true: all references to this research, new or old, this year, last year, the year before, etc., cite the same magazine article. If the research had been well-founded additional research would have been undertaken and published. It hasn’t. Get over it.

If you like semen that’s just great. If you don’t, well, that’s great too. If you’re hungry for it, well cool, but it’s not addictive. If you wouldn’t go near the stuff, it’s not like you’re missing out on anything. I propose that you should enjoy it, or not enjoy it because it’s semen, not because it might cure anything.

Hmm. What do you suppose the implications of the word “consent” are in a world where the dominant male paradigm posits that women have no innate interest in sex?

I was thinking about someone I quoted earlier on the limits of “no means no” and it occurred to me that even the concept of requiring consent is kind of missing a big point.

We don’t seek our friend’s “consent” when we ask them to join us for lunch. Instead we seek consent to park our car in somebody’s driveway. We don’t seek “consent” when we have a couple of extra tickets and ask if our friends want to tag along. We seek consent to use the school gymnasium for a neighborhood fundraiser.

To the extent society acknowledges heterosexual women initiating sex at all it seems to me it occurs more in terms of the woman inviting a partner and him accepting, or not accepting. Outside of the extremely structured confines of booty calls it seems to me that men don’t often simply invite women to have sex, nor does she simply accept or decline.

The assumption behind consent is that one party has something the other wants but otherwise wouldn’t be interested in or likely wouldn’t initiate.

The reality on the ground is that men, far, far more than women, are expected to seek consent because, way, way to often they don’t seek consent. Thus the very real need for a requirement that men wait till consent is clearly granted. I’m suggesting that either way the heteronormative assumption is that sex is something to be obtained by the man, and dispensed by the woman… that sex is requested by the man and granted by the woman… which in turn assumes that sex isn’t something she just might naturally just want to have. And that’s what I mean by the dominant male paradigm of women as the “no-sex” class — that by nature women just aren’t interested, let alone motivated, the way men are.

This is neither a request that women invite men to have sex more often, nor a suggestion that men lighten up rather than “seek consent.” [Note how both those admonitions would reinforce the paradigm. —fl]Instead it’s, well, an invitation to reflect on the assumptions we make about the way we conduct our relationships. Rather than endlessly seeking excuses validation for the status quo in, say, evolutionary psychology or relative levels of testosterone and estrogen. If men (speaking for my gender anyway) instead assumed that men and women, being people and all, had the same degree of interest then I think more practical ideas fall out when we shake it.

Final note here: when examining assumptions don’t assume either gender’s sexuality is the baseline norm from which the other gender’s sexuality is the deviation. Interesting things fall out of both sides when you shake it, and we won’t get all the benefit if we’re not looking at everything.)

Non-sex blogger Ezra Klein of Tomorrow’s media conspiracy today found a hot dating tip in Seventeen magazine:

In a finely conceived piece on “Dating Dares,” the wise and forward-thinking Elisa Benson of Seventeen explains that she’s “uncovered a few new guys for you to try! Among them are those old mainstays The Emo Guy (“Find him at: A dive-y dinner with his buddies, discussing the merits of My Chemical Romance.”), The Club Promoter, and The Store Clerk (“Your first move: Write your name and phone number on the receipt he hands you, then slyly push it back across the counter.”). But watch out, girls, because we’ve now got, The Blogger:

You don’t agree with all his posts, but they make you think about new issues — and whether he’s as cute as his pics!

Find him at: A friend of a friend’s Top 8 Your first move: Bloggers love having an audience almost as much as they like a battle of wits, so stir up some controversy by telling him when you disagree with a post.

Hidden payoff: An outspoken guy can stir up passions you never knew what you had — and help you figure out what you really stand for.

Like universal health care!?

Read all about it here.

Not too sure about loving an audience but I certainly appreciate you. Also not sure about making other people think but I really appreciate the way others make me think. and finally? Not sure at all what a “Top 8” might be.

Ok, so for some complicated reason I started thinking about headstands today. (Let’s just say the train of thought began with the Ghostbuster’s theme song in the corner store, then something about B-movie icon Bruce Campbell, then wondering how movie stunt people deal with colds, then wondering how I’m doing with the cold I’m coming down with, then thinking about yoga, then handstands, then wondering if I could still do handstands, then thinking about the old 80’s era gravity-boots fad, and so on.)

Anyway, my stream of consciousness came up short with the realization that in porn images you’ll sometimes see women models doing headstands in order to, say, perform oral sex or to let an ostensible partner perform it on her. I’m pretty sure I’ve never, ever seen a man doing it to make life easier for his ostensible partner.

It makes total sense, of course. Almost all porn lives square in the “no-sex” class paradigm of women as passive, almost aloof to sex without a man on hand to coax her into it. True, women in porn often initiate, but those that do are always represented as “wild” or “sluts” or tempted by offers of cash or t-shirts or too naive to “know better” or otherwise markedly unlike “normal” women who, especially in porn, wouldn’t do anything of the sort of their own volition.

Which is all sort of a shame because I think it would be kind of fun to stand on my hands or hang from gravity boots, partially immobilized yes but not by-definition in bondage, so that a partner could caress me as she saw fit, needing neither to stand on tiptoes nor sit or kneel to reach me, unbutton me, explore me, or arouse me, to rock or turn or gimbal my head, my hands, my heart, my cock, to direct me where she wanted my contact.

But that’s the thing. In the “no-sex” class view that doesn’t really happen, or at least not outside of “femdom” bondage — the signs and symbols of which again are expressly outside of non-dominatrix “normal good girl” behavior.

The tough thing about dominant paradigms isn’t that things that don’t fit the theory can’t happen. As we all at least covertly know, they happen all the time. Instead the problem is that when you’re wrapped up in a paradigm you can’t see them when they happen.

In fact in Thomas Kuhn’s book, which popularized the notion of paradigm shifts, the shift happens only when so many exceptions to the current view of the world crop up that it’s finally no longer possible to explain them all away as exceptions to the rules. (This is what I’m trying to do with this series of posts — keep kicking up exceptions we’ve been trying to explain away as aberrations or just-plain-not-trueisms till the old model tips over.) But I digress…

As I said, what’s tough about dominant paradigms in general, and sexual and gender-dominant ones in particular, is that you wind up closing off half the cool, sweet, sexy, fun, and highly pleasurable possibilities in the masses of cycles and epicycles that get tacked on to preserve a system that… sometimes aren’t worth saving in the first place.

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Don’t get me wrong, by the way. I’m not suggesting that when men learn to give up the “no-sex” class perception of women there’ll be equal numbers of upside-down men as women in porn. “Increased equality” doesn’t automatically equal “paradigm shift.” Nor am I saying that if we finally unload our luggage from that metaphor there will no longer be porn at all. I am pretty confident it won’t be like the porn we have now.

Some news about comments, kudos to a software developer, and a special request for human commenters.

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So I used to get so much machine-generated comment spam (up to 2000 a day last week!) that I had to start using comment moderation. Which makes it hard on comment spammers but even harder on actual commenters.

The other day it got so out of control I broke down and, sort of against my better judgment, I installed a new layer of filter designed specifically to block machine-generated spam. Of course the new software promptly broke all comments.

Actually that’s technically incorrect. Because technically I broke comments by not installing it correctly. I did manage to fix it though. And boy is it now fixed! I haven’t gotten a single bogus comment since!

In fact, it’s worked so well I’ve turned off comment moderation. Now if you’ve got something to say you can just… say it! And not have to wait till I come along to verify and unblock it before you or anyone else can see it.

What I especially like about that is that you can talk amongst yourselves without me getting in the way. I was really missing that.

You’ve always been welcome to walk around the cabin here. Now you’re actually free to.

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Hats off to Alogblog, the developers of the MovableType “CCode” plugin. If you’re a MovableType blogger, and if you administer your own domain I think it’s a great blog engine, I recommend checking it out.

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Since this has been an otherwise highly non-sex-related post, and I really try to avoid those, and since I’d really like to test whether comments are really de-moderated, I’d like to invite you to write about an erotic memory or fantasy that maybe breaks the conventional gender-role mold for you.