One persistent excuse for lower investment in male contraceptives is the assertion that men, especially young men, wouldn’t use them. I happen to think it’s at best a chicken/egg problem in the sense that the only realistic options available to men are a) vasectomies and b) condoms, each of which has their, um, shortcomings fertility-wise. Vasectomies are very reliable but cost $6,325.00 to reverse (in 1995 dollars since that’s when I had mine) should you ever actually want to have children. And condoms, while they work very well when both parties are sober, invested in the outcome, have the lights on, put it on before even the first bare genital-to-genital contact, remain erect throughout, withdraw immediately after intercourse, dispose of properly, clean up all fluids, remain mindful of any and all post-ejaculation seepage before resuming even incidental genital-to-genital contact, and always have non-defective, high-quality condoms available… well, condoms aren’t always used under those circumstances. So even if it was men who got pregnant instead of women the available options for men are exactly the same as they were in 1975 when I got my vasectomy, and, for that matter, the same as they were in 1890.

So yeah, the story goes that men, especially young men, wouldn’t bother using contraception so why bother developing it?

Well. What if the story wasn’t exactly true. What if there was evidence that men, even young men, were actually pretty interested? Frequent commenter A from France, who’s actually just moved back to England, sent me a BBC article about a British National Health Service report that’s mostly about how women’s sterilization’s are down thanks to increased availability of long-action reversible contraceptives (LARCs.) It ends, however, with what I consider to be very encouraging news:

Male clinic visits

The latest figures also show more men are visiting contraception clinics.

In the past year 117,000 men attended a clinic – an increase of 48% over the past decade.

About 30,000 of these visitors were aged 16 and 17 – a rise of 50% among this age group in just one year.

However, the vast majority of people who visit a clinic are still women – who out-number male visitors by eleven to one.

Source: BBC Online

Yes, an eleven to one women to men ratio is pretty low but it’s a huge improvement over the previous twenty-two to one ratio. If anything else between vasectomies and condoms were available there’s no reason why the ratio wouldn’t plummet towards parity.

Obligatory “to be sure” about STDs since someone always brings it up: yes, non-barrier contraceptives don’t prevent transmission of disease. But for some reason women still seek them out, presumably because the risk of pregnancy is at least an order of magnitude higher especially in longer-term relationships. And in long-term monogamous relationships the pregnancy/std risk approaches — but obviously never reaches — infinity. And if women see fit to use other contraception instead of or — preferably, obviously — in addition to condoms then why wouldn’t men?

“Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.” – James Joyce

1982: Beverly Whipple, John D. Perry, Alice Khan Ladas publish The G Spot: And Other Discoveries about Human Sexuality, which sells 1,000,000 copies.

1950: Ernst Graffenberg, an ophthalmologist turned gynecologist publishes The Role of Urethra in Female Orgasm.

1905: Sigmund Freud theorizes that “mature” women have “vaginal” orgasms that are distinct from “less mature” clitoral ones.

The 1500’s: Ambrose Paré advises other physicians in the treatment of “female hysteria”

Let the mydwife annoint her fingers with oleum nardinum or moschetalinum, or of cloves, or else of spike mixed with musk, ambergreese, civit and other sweet powders, and with these let her rub or tickle the top of the neck of the wombe wish toucheth the inner orifice.

The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)

For the record, Dr. Paré described the symptoms of “hysteria,” which at the time was more commonly, if not exactly charmingly, referred to as “suffocation of the uterus” (due to the panting and shortness of breath associated with the “curative” paroxysms produced by the above listed treatment) as

Those who are free’d of the fit of the suffocation of the womb either by nature or by art, in a short time their color commeth in to their faces by little and little, and the whole beginneth to wax strong, and th eteeth, that were set, and closed fast together, begin (the jaws being loosened) to open and unclose again, and lastly som moisture floweth from the secret parts with a certain tickling pleasure; but in some women, as in those especially in whom the neck of the womb is tickled with the Midwive’s finger, in stead of that moisture com’s thick and gross seed [note: medevalists believed that both men and women produced semen or “seed” for procreation —fl], which moisture or seed when it is fallen, the womb being before as it were rageing, is restored unto its own proper nature and place, and by little and little all symptoms vanish away.

It’s kind of embarrassing to see how over and over men (and it was obvously mostly men till, say, Beverly Whipple and Alice Ladas) managed to lose so much information about their (heterosexual) partners when, really, they don’t seem to have had all that much to begin with. And all in the maintenance of what, exactly?

[Note: For the record, Whipple, Ladas, and Perry, followers of Freud disciple Wilhelm Reich, undertook their investigation of the g-spot because they wondered how Freud could have been so wrong about vaginal orgasms in the face of Master’s and Johnson’s equally unilateral “discovery” of the clitoris. —fl]

Photo by Flickr user Year of the Monkey. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Sigh.

When you’re horny your eyelids grow sultry and heavy
And I know, unless…

When you’re horny your lips grow full and red and soft
And I know, unless…

When you’re horny your shoulders go back, pushing your breasts our
And I know, unless…

And when you’re horny your hips tip up and back, tightening your belly, arching your back, cocking your butt back for… well… my cock
And I know, unless…

And when you’re horny your breath grows soft and short and your voice falls to a trembly whisper
And I know, unless…

And when you’re horny your cheeks flush
And I know, unless…

I know unless…

Unless…

Auggh, I hate to shift gears but… unless fashion obliges you to hide it overtly with burka or wimple or veil, sure, or also unless…

Unless we say all eyes must always seem horny/sultry under makeup
Unless we say all lips must always seem horny/full/soft/red under lipstick
Unless we say all breasts must always seem horny/up and forward under “wonder” bras
Unless we say all bellies must pull tight, unless all backs arch, unless all hips must always seem horny/tilted back for cock perched high atop fuck-me pumps
Unless we say all breath must always seem horny/short beneath corsets or endless Pilates crunches…

Trading the certainty of bred-in/bone-in signs of sexuality for the uncertainty of sexualization, we’ve created the conditions where we can’t know if you’re ready to carnally devour us or just bite our heads off for presuming.

Madness, surely, and as mad as mistaking your arousal for disease. No less mad than excising clitoris and labia altogether. And for what benefit?

That even when you’re gagging for it we can maintain our own smug illusion that you’re a chaste flower who without our deft prompting, our seductions, our offers of Ferraris, of life-long financial support, or of darker forms of persuasion you would remain unplucked and, surely, unfucked.

Dressed like a whore, dressed like a virgin, so much more convenient to the “no-sex” class paradigm if we can’t tell the difference.

Photo by Flickr user MIKECNY. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Pam Spaulding of Pandagon quotes a loudmouth country-music superstar being a bigot. A particularly stupid one as we’ll see in a minute.

“I think if you legalize that, you’ve got to legalize some other things that are pretty unsavory. You can call me a radical, but how can you tell an aunt that she can’t marry her nephew if they are really in love and sharing the bills? How can you tell them they can’t get married, but something else that’s unnatural can happen?”

– John Rich of the country group “Big & Rich”, with deep thoughts on marriage equality

Obviously homophobia is alive and well in the world But here’s a point I’ve been trying to make for a little while. Check out this update to Spaulding’s post:

...it looks like Rich must have felt his career was going south fast if he didn’t issue a “clarification” of sorts (that’s kind of surprising; figured he’d have some good old boys come to his defense):

“My earlier comments on same-sex marriage don’t reflect my full views on the broader issues regarding tolerance and the treatment of gays and lesbians in our society. I apologize for that and wish to state clearly my views. I oppose same-sex marriage because my father and minister brought me up to believe that marriage is an institution for the union of a man and a woman. However, I also believe that intolerance, bigotry and hatred are wrong. People should be judged based on their merits, not on their sexual orientation. We are all children of God and should be valued and respected.” – John Rich, of country music duo Big & Rich

You can read the rest of Spaulding’s post here.

The point being that yes, there’s still plenty of homophobia out there. But unlike earlier days they know they’re wrong. Yes, code words like “sanctity of marriage” are just that — code words for gay bashing. But they’re using such words because they can no longer get away with saying what they think.

Even though largely driven to mask their opinions bigots of all stripes still do enormous damage. So no way this is a plea for anyone to rest on his or her laurels. But!

Look. For, oh, say, the last 27 years (since the first Reagan administration) conservatives have made a practice of “working the referees” in the press — never letting the least slight real or imaginary go unchallenged.

The fact that even a popular country-music star would feel the need to backpedal in the face of an uncoordinated push-back suggests that progressives could make a great deal of… well… progress if we started working the refs a little harder ourselves.

And unlike the bigots, the homophobes, the racists, the misogynists, the chicken-hawks, and the “moral” in name only majoritarians in name only, working the ref on behalf of toleration, decency, and authentic American diversity is ethical, moral, and a darn good idea.

Have you ever noticed how much homophobia hurts straight people?

Susie Bright succinctly nails the elephant in the bluestocking/purity/abstinence/“anti-sex” school of conservatism.

...[t]he painful closet cases who hide behind “purity pledges” and the threat of “porn addiction” as a way to keep anyone from seeing that they’re queer, and as horny, as any other human being.

Read the quote in context here.

The list of crimes committed when conservatives finally crack, from fairly humorous wide stances to starkly tragic sexual abuse of custodial minors, is well known and much discussed. And perpetual charges of hypocrisy leveled against the stands taken, especially, by the most egregious transgressors are a (sadly when you think about it) provoke familiar streams of progressive punditry.

Less frequently discussed are the benefits such sanctimony brings to people who would otherwise be excluded: the closeted gay men and lesbians of conservative faith to name only one. How much easier to crusade against sex in general when the sex you might otherwise be expected/allowed to have turns your stomach anyway?

We can continue keeping people trapped in their closets and miserable about their sexual desires (or lack thereof — asexuality is also a much-maligned orientation) such that they use anti-sex social levers to make everyone miserable. Or…

Look, those of us who are straight but not narrow sometimes forget that homophobia doesn’t just affect non-heterosexuals: when driven there by others who are less tolerant, some may head for the closet, and some may head for the coasts, but some too head for pulpits, lecterns, legislatures, and courts to take it out on the rest of us. In other words homophobia isn’t not just someone else’s problem that we can opt in or opt out of as time permits.

Photo by Flickr user AnaCamila. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Hugo Schwyzer reports on the details of a fascinating conversation with an older anti-feminist woman who, as a young woman, volunteered for Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum/STOP ERA crusade to keep women separate and unequal.

One point Schwyzer makes that’s dear to my heart:

The “complementarian” view of marriage, to which YM and other anti-feminists tend to subscribe, sees men and women as fundamentally ill-suited to step outside traditional roles. This “separate spheres” ideology assumes women are better nurturers, better parent-figures, better home-makers; men are better leaders, better earners, better protectors. In a complementarian marriage, each does for the other what he or she cannot (because of their sex) do for themselves.

A feminist marriage, like a complementarian marriage, recognizes that two different people will always have different gifts. But a feminist marriage doesn’t assign roles based on sex — it allows for flexibility based not on genitalia but on desire and on need. My wife will be the one getting pregnant, and nothing can change that — I can’t take on that role. But when it comes to earning, spending, cleaning, planning, building, washing, dreaming, shopping, and caring — we are both equally well-equipped as full and complete human beings to do these tasks. We both wear pants in our family.

He says this and more here.

I’ll probably have more to say about Schwyzer’s correspondent in another post but for now I’d just like to say that the “separate spheres” or yin/yang theory of gender looks like handcuffs. I mean if there’s some “man’s area” that the man happens to be bad at or incapable of then the couple’s screwed. And they’re not screwed because the woman can’t take up the slack but because she shouldn’t. And, for that matter, she’d better fucking not or, as is the case of women driving in, say, Saudi Arabia, she can go to jail if she gets caught. Same if, for instance, she’s a lousy cook and he’d be pretty good at it — the two-sphere model says they should both eat cold food out of cans because it’s wrong for him to cook.

Or wrong for men to cook at home anyway. He could still be a chef. I still remember being reassured that while I could never grow up to be a “cafeteria lady” at my elementary school — a job that seemed like paradise since they had all that cool equipment and, I imagined, could eat all the dessert they wanted — my sister shouldn’t tease me because unlike her I could grow up to be a chef and chefs were always more important cooks than cafeteria ladies.

I choose those two examples because they really are so arbitrary. There’s nothing magical about a threshold such that a man can cook outside but not inside the home. And as far as I know even Ann Coulter, Wendy Shalit believe women should be allowed to drive.

Now to be fair, in Schwyzer’s notion of feminist marriage there may still be gaps in what can be accomplished but if so they’re bound to be fewer and, I’m guessing, regarded more sympathetically when both sides recognize it’s not “supposed” to be a gender assignment. And as long as I’m reminiscing about my extreme youth I also remember more than one father in my neighborhood comparing “his” wife’s poor cooking or ironing skills to someone else’s. He might not have been able to do a better job but the (totally arbitrary, remember) “two sphere” model forbade either of them from finding out.

Photo by Flickr user Tal Bright used under a Creative Commons license.

I enjoy answering the questions and taking the quizzes on OkCupid as I’ve mentioned elsewhere. If nothing else it’s great blogging fodder (although, of course, it’s a great way to find people you’d be at least compatible with, if not actually romantically ideal for, all over the world.)

Anyway, one question that came up I simply couldn’t answer at all.

Do you enjoy meaningless sex?

• Yes
• No

Alright, how do you even answer that question? By “meaningless sex” does one mean a brief sexual encounter with an interesting, incredibly compatible person one meets under circumstances that can’t possibly lead to a long-term relationship? Or by “meaningless” does one mean one more right-after-Leno resetting of the hormonal/horniness clock with one’s married partner of many years?

That’s a trick answer, of course, in the sense that both of the examples I gave are particularly heightened counterexamples of the familiar definitions of “meaningless sex.” But to the extent I’m a prudish libertine that I would have more problems with the latter than I would with the former. And it’s not so much approve of all sex inside or outside of marriage (although I tend to) as much as I just question the assumption that if one insists on assigning meaning to sex in the first place then the mere fact of marriage grants meaning to all sex within it.

[Warning note: the photo after the jump is again more risqué than usual. —fl]

This post is about gender assumptions. In this case both “assume” in the normal sense of “impose by expectation informed by stereotype” but also “assume” in the sense of “take on titles, offices, duties, responsibilities.”

Emily Bazelon of Slate’s quasi-ghettoized XX-Factor blog raises two good points, one about stereotyping forward, the other about struggling out of self-stereotype.

This morning one of my co-workers was worrying about a conversation he’d had with a mother at his daughter’s school, who’d tried to talk to him about rearranging a playdate for his kid and hers. He hadn’t known anything about the arrangement in the first place, and I said that most moms would know not to try to talk playdate with a dad. Which didn’t exactly give him credit for trying to sort it all out, or encourage him to try again next time. This is why when my husband chides me for referring to “my kitchen,” I say I’m sorry. At least I think I do.

She said it here.

Play dates are easy for women because play dates are easy for the stay at home parent and, still, more often than not, women are the stay at home parent.

As the stay at home dad I’m nominally supposed to do most of the play date arranging. And indeed since I pick up our children from school more often than my partner since she’s often working I do arrange more play dates over all — mostly by being grabbed by this child or that asking “can we have a play date?” If the mom (there are still usually only a few other dads at school) is at hand we negotiate it there. Otherwise it’s out with my cell phone and (since the youngest is in 3rd grade now and, of course, the play date candidates know their parent’s phone number) I let them ask permission of which ever parent they see fit. Sometimes we arrange play dates in advance but those are usually ordered around things like soccer practice or games where I just bring home children to play till practice. Parents usually pick up their own children and often one of them will return mine so I don’t have to make an extra trip. Sometimes you or another child’s parent makes calls and arrange play dates in advance.

That all works fabulously well and it’s extraordinarily easy to keep track of.

If you’re the one making the arrangements.

That all works fabulously well, too, and is extraordinarily easy for one’s partner to keep track of if…

if…

if and only if…
You write it down where the other partner(s) can see it should they need to know! In other words it’s not a testicle thing. It’s not an ovary thing. It’s a calendar/schedule/daytimer/communication thing.

Also a is-this-a-shared-responsibility thing, of course, and that makes a nice segue into Bazelon’s second point: who’s kitchen is it?

I do virtually all the shopping and cooking in our house, from first coffee in the morning to breakfast (something hot and home-made most days like oatmeal, steamed pot-stickers, pancakes or eggs, with cold cereal once or twice) to school lunches (sometimes a sandwich, sometimes freshly steamed veggies with nori seaweed, sometimes left-over soup or fresh-cooked spaghetti or ravioli) to dinner (I won’t even start) to desserts if there are any to late night snacks (if, for instance, ramen or some other kind of soup is requested.) And while I certainly don’t do all the cleanup I do quite a bit.

That’s been the arrangement for roughly as long as our 5th grader has been in school. Every now and then, though, my partner still gets nettled about the way I prioritize kitchen cleanup. Indoctrination runs deep. The funny thing is that any time she goes off that way I initially cringe and start apologizing for… what? Messing up her kitchen? Yes, it’s silly. And yes even though I spend a lot of time there it’s still our kitchen. But we each had that Kool-aid poured for us long before we could speak.

But “poured for us” isn’t the same as “bred into us.” Our children may have their own domestic manias and obsessions when they grow up, but I’ll be surprised if they’re the same as ours.

Photo by Flickr user onnufry used under a Creative Commons license.

Photo by Flickr user intvgene. Used under a Creative Commons license.

This seems like as good a time as any to point out that men should not be into feminism because it's "the right thing to do." Men should not go into feminism "even though there's nothing in it for them." And men really, really shouldn't get into feminism in hopes they might get laid (or finally get laid.)

First of all because each of those reasons is based on totally false premises in the first place. But more importantly because stories about "should" and "ought" are just the 21st Century equivalent of men opening doors for women: more of what we're trying to get away from!

Instead from better health to longer lives to more financial independence to better sex there are plenty of staggeringly obvious reasons why men should be jumping into feminism with both feet. In fact, the supporting evidence is so obvious that one of the biggest reasons all over that just might be...

just might be...

just might be that we think we should, or that we ought to, or that it has to inconvenience us, that it's a zero-sum game, that us guys just have to fondly step aside because it's "Teh Ladies'" turn.

F'shea right. The blinders go on the horse, Galahad, not the rider.

---

Quick note: When I talk about issues related to feminism I really try to talk in terms of the way men relate to it. With regards to this topic, though, the idea that men should support feminism simply because "it's the right thing to do" spans both genders. I'm not going to say that women asking men to do something "because it's the right thing to do" is playing into generations of oppressive conditioning... but I will say that when that argument is made it seems to trigger all the wrong reflexes in men.

Photo by Flickr user intvgene. Used under a Creative Commons license." class="imagecache-Normal" />

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, speaking of a recurring complaint about hormonal contraception, puts the issue into a perspective that was very, very common back in the days before Roe v. Wade that we seem a little more confused about…

[T]he real side effects of the pill have a genuine benefit over the alternative. (Remember: Forefront of mine. We’re talking about the option between pill and pregnancy, not just pill and not-pill.) Minor weight gain is a highly touted side effect of the pill,* but major weight gain is a side effect of pregnancy. But even if you suffer really severe consequences, you can get un-pilled pretty rapidly by not taking them. To un-pregnant yourself, you have to engage in an invasive medical procedure and/or wait nine months to push out a baby in a manner that’s hard on fully grown women, and much, much harder on younger women. What bothers me about a lot of the hand-wringing over the pill from women who’ve experienced side effects is how condescending it is to the rest of us, like we’re too damn stupid to understand what they figured out, which is that if the pill starts to bother you, you have the option to go back to the doctor and either change prescriptions or change methods. The notion that taking the pill once locks you into a lifetime of it is insulting. You don’t see that kind of, “Oh my god what will you do if you have side effects? Surely you can’t go back to the doctor and manage the side effects!”-type thinking with any other drug. The lurking sense that side effects is a biological punishment for slatternly behavior is hard to scrub off.

She says it here.

“...the option between pill and pregnancy, not just pill and not-pill…” You know, I talk a lot about how back then it was “a whole ‘nuther world“ back in the 1960s and early 1970s. But different doesn’t automatically mean worse. I wouldn’t go back to the era of Nixon and Bobby Riggs and “You’ve come a long way, baby” on a bet, but back then we were drilled on what would now be called risk abatement or mitigation of risk in a way that’s obviously still out there but also obviously (or Marcotte wouldn’t be so testy about having to bring it back up) the consideration that the pill trumps abortion which in turn also trumps pregnancy to term.

Marcotte’s also delves deeply into current and traditional antipathies to the pill as they relate to self-determination. Like it or not (and all right-thinking people obviously don’t) the pill is opposed because male cooperation is not required.

A girl that’s having sex at a too-young age has a vanishingly small chance of having the personal power to negotiate the condom. Period. So if you limit girls this young to only a male-controlled birth control option, many to most will simply go without, afraid to say no to unprotected sex.

...

...we have every reason to believe that young men who are highly interested in having complete control in a relationship are drawn to very young, vulnerable, easy-to-control young women…

Birth control pills are easy to hide, and only the most egregiously monitored girl or woman can’t get away for the two minutes it takes to palm a pill and then swallow it with water. The same can’t be said at all about condoms, or diaphrams, or withdrawal, or — even though I think it’s great — vasectomies, all of which require male cooperation.

I still passionately believe in discreet, reliable contraception for every individual who is or (and this is a big one) might possibly be sexually active voluntarily or (another big one) involuntarily, and I believe it’s equally critical for both women and men. Because nobody should be forced to trust anyone else when it comes to something as fundamental as reproductive choice. But I also have to acknowledge that whereas condoms are wonderful contraceptives and still the gold standard for disease prevention they only work as well as the partner who’s willing to use it in good faith. The pill? You don’t have to trust anybody else. Which, sadly, is sometimes the least worst we can get.