Thoughts from the funeral of a very nice, very elderly relative who, like so many of that generation returned home from service in one of the “great wars” of the 20th Century and then married someone from their home town. And this is so not an accusation about a specific individual — it’s not that it’s none of my business it’s that I have no information nor reason to imagine any. But!

Check out the enclosed YouTube, an oldie I stumbled across a week or two ago and kept meaning to post about.

Now, let’s turn the scenario in that video around and say “m’kay, girls, your job is to stay completely ignorant about sex until your new, equally ignorant husband dredges up whatever vague ideas he picked up between muttered birds/bees talk, read in a book, or while drunk at a frat party and *try it out on you!”

“Oh yeah, and you can’t complain because it’s his duty to teach you!”

Now let’s turn it around a little further: Instead of jumping in and saying something like “I’m going to give you the best XYZ ever” and the other person saying “no, I don’t think I’d like that” and the “expert” says “Really, not even a little XY?” and the other person says “no, I don’t like that idea” well… then does it really matter whether one parter or the other is supposed to be the “natural” expert and/or authority?

[Not much connectivity where I’m staying — there’s supposed to be WiFi but I have to sort of lean out the window to upload or download. I’ll be back in touch for sure on Thursday when I’m back home. (For a while, I hope.) —fl]

By the way even if it’s because I’ve been really busy in real life it’s not just embarrassing not to answer everyone’s comments. Your comments are a constant source of inspiration as well.

Case in point. In comments to my post about Gold Boars about distressed Wall Street financiers having to “give up” their “high-end girlfriends” because such relationships are supposed to be only about money, Biscuit of One Biscuit Hound said

My husband and I were JUST talking about this last night, but in regards to sexual prowess. A conversation that stemmed from my last blog post, not the news article you’re referring to. He said that when he sees an unattractive man with a beautiful woman, he assumes that the guy must be really good in bed, or the woman wouldn’t be with him.

That “must be good in bed” thing comes up a lot about both men and women. The guess comes more often from men, I think, but I know women sometimes say it as well. There are a couple of problems with it. I’ll get the trivial ones out of the way first before getting to my point.

The first problem is that women aren’t always good at assessing what’s visually attractive to men about other women. As Biscuit hints in the rest of her comment, something like, I dunno, boring clothes and confidence trumps expertly selected attire and no confidence. Similarly men seem particularly bad at assessing what makes other men attractive to women. For instance women mention men’s forearms a lot and I’m pretty sure most men never consider that. Same with smell. Same with conduct, which seems to have more to do with honest reaction which is very different from being a Nice Guy™! And yeah, yeah, there are other more obvious “intangibles” like personality, sense of humor, overlapping personal experiences or history, money, and, of course, compatible neuroses. :-)

But really, the paradox of “must be good in bed” is that assuming that “good in bed” is the non-visible criteria sort of begs the question because… if obvious attractiveness is so critical how does the allegedly unattractive person get a chance to demonstrate it?

[Speaking of busy in real life, I’ll be traveling to the eastern seaboard for an elderly relative’s funeral. Posting may be light, though not non-existent, till Wednesday. —fl]

Photo by Flickr user 30003019. Used under a Creative Commons license.

[Yeah, it’s not Thursday but I didn’t feel like waiting or post-dating this. —fl]

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors raises an issue that every decent, right-thinking independent sex blogger and HNT participant ought to take personally. It’s about the circulating video footage of wingnut Vice-Presidential candidate in a bathing suit when she was around 20 years old.

Egalia at Tennessee Guerilla Women points how here that blogs linking to Sarah Palin’s 1984 beauty pageant swimsuit competition are attempting to trivialize her for doing something traditionally feminine when she was young, using this HuffPo piece as an example. Of course the odious Daily Kos is all over this as well. Actually one of the bloggers at Kos manages to ramp up the sexism an additional notch by comparing Palin to this then teenaged South Carolinian, who certainly gave an oddly rambling and incoherent answer to an interview question during a beauty pageant, but who, last I checked, was not running for political office. And, it should be noted, who turned out to be fairly poised and mature in the face of aggressive widespread mockery.

She said it here.

Seriously!

The first blogger I “outed” myself to was Blogher co-founder Susan Mernit. She was giving a presentation on anonymous sex-blogging at Gnomedex 2006, an über-tech conference. one of her points was, first, that while they were all gathered to talk about developments in, primarily, Web 2.0 infrastructure what she was finding most remarkable were the resulting social developments (often almost dismissively shorthanded in nerd speak as “content.”) In particular she said people… men but especially women…

As I said in my old post, the audience responses from men were pretty uniformly alarmed, and knowledgeable enough about details of on-line sex-related security to have practiced some of it themselves. They were also nearly as uniformly certain that “if you’re not careful” then writing about sex, or posting your photos, or even looking at them when you’re young could come back to bite you later when employers or admissions offices Google your background.

On the other hand, in a way that surprised me at the time, the relative handful of tech women in the audience, ages ranging from twenties at the low end to maybe fifty at the high end, were perfectly sanguine about it. Which, in retrospect, strongly reinforced Mernit’s thesis. Their reaction was “no big deal, more and more people are doing it and when ‘in the future’ happens it’ll be no bigger a deal than having a tattoo is today.

Well, two things come to mind immediately after contemplating the Palin pagent video. #1: To paraphrase William Gibson, “in the future” has already arrived, it’s just not evenly distributed yet #2: Whoever initially posted that video was probably a man who still imagined it’s a “gotcha.”

But here’s the deal: chances are very good that if you’re a blogger reading this post you’ve written about your own sex life. And chances are pretty good you’ve participated in popular and consequently non-scandalous Osbasso’s Half-Nekkid Thursday meme. Which, incidentally, started… roughly around the time Mernit made her presentation! And therefore chances are the immature troll who posted that Palin video is the kind of asshole who whacks off to your photos in private but would discriminate against you in public. And whoever snickers along with them saying “yeah, she was a beauty contestant, what a bimbo” is also insulting you! Oh yeah, and they’re also threatening you. So yeah, they’re not just sexist, they’re immature, knee-squeezing, not-caught-up-on-the-21st-Century assholes who’d do the same to you given half a chance.

So! Governor Palin is a corrupt, imprudent, professional-line-crossing wingnut. Fine. Governor Palin is scary-unprepared to uphold the Constitution and administer the executive functions of the United States of America (or even, it would seem, execute the far more limited functions of President of the Senate — the VP’s day job till the President’s unanticipated departure.) Got that too. But unlike every one of her many, many “fail stamp” flaws, that she ever paraded in a bathing suit… or for that matter birthday suit… or had Teh kinky Sex… or had Teh Sex at all… either in her youth or last week is not a blot on her character. It’s not a disqualification for office. It’s not even a big surprise since people have been doing those things since long before Edward Land introduced the first Polaroid camera. Instead it’s what ordinary people do, and have done. If certain asshats got a problem with that it’s their problem, not hers. If they think it’s a point against her, surprise! It’s a point against them.

Action item: when you see the future isn’t distributed properly like that leave a comment saying get over it. Even better? Get used to it. Sod off works too.

I mean, yeah, most of us still post under internet aliases, and most other people don’t post anything at all, because the future still really isn’t well-distributed at all. Yet. Challenging mouth breathers who think that video, or who’s in it, or how they got there is significant is one way to help break up the lumps.

—-

Also see: “The Price of Profanity” (not.)

Image from the Babeland product page for the
“Monkey Spanker” toy for men.Megan of Jezebel brings up a great point!

A male colleague of mine remarked to be recently that writing about vibrators is a Jezebel scribe’s rite of passage. And, it’s true, we totally write about vibrators a lot; in fact, I popped my own vibrator-story cherry not that long ago! It is a rare day, however, that any of us writes about male masturbatory aides — and, when we have, we usually focus on Real Dolls and how vaguely disturbing we find the men who are into them. But then I saw this article in The Independent today about the surge in men purchasing all sorts of things to their dicks into or up their butts, and I realized that it wasn’t just sex dolls I find vaguely disturbing… and that that’s kind of sexist of me.

I mean, why is it that the mental image I have of a guy who utilizes sex toys is someone kind of creepy? Is this fleshlight any stranger-looking than a rabbit, really? Why is it that I am fine with a guy jerking off with his hands, but if he’s jerking off in something I’m vaguely disturbed? Why is it not remotely strange to me that men would buy things to shove up their butts — or to have their partners shove up their butts — but, still, looking at this picture of something the would stick their dicks in, some reptilian part of my brain goes “Ewww.”? Even the author of the article, Tanya Gold, admits to masturbating with mechanical aids, but seems to find male sex toys — from the pocket pussies to the pussy-in-a-jar devices to the blow-up and real dolls — disturbing in their appearance and what they say about the men who utilize them.

She discusses the issue further here.

I’m not sure sexism is the right word for the impulse for judging men’s masturbation, ahem, differently from women’s but she’s right about the double standard.

“Blossom Sleeve” toy for men.I’m the first to agree that the, um, highly stylized attempts at representing disembodied vulvas is disquieting and probably disturbing to people with the actual parts. That could be projection on my part though because I’m disquieted by the no-less “realistic” disembodied erections you see in a lot of sex toys for women. Fortunately many sex toys, for both men or women, aren’t really anatomical at all — consider the very novel, but allegedly quite effective “Monkey Spanker” toy for men in the photo, above.** But I digress…

I can think of two other reasons why we might feel more squeamish about male masturbation than for women. The first being that for many mainstream cultures, now and through much of history, have (believe it or not) placed a huge emphasis on male chastity. Several major religions and related medical traditions.*** (See Ayurvedic medicine, for instance.) In the West, from roughly 1825 to 1975, doctors were convinced that ejaculation in general and (male) masturbation in particular were the root causes of tuberculosis, insanity, curvature of the spine. The original Boy Scouts was founded to help divert young male minds from “self pollution.” John Harvey Kellogg invented corn flakes, Charlie Post cooked up Postum and Grape Nuts, and Sylvester Graham invented Graham flour and Graham crackers because they believed bland, whole-fiber foods temper hot lust. And the tradition of non-religious male circumcision was introduced and successfully promoted by physicians because it was believed to inhibit masturbation in boys and men. It was as much an article of medical faith in the late 1800s that “excess” ejaculation was as life-shortening as the (much more well-founded) belief that smoking is life-shortening today. That’s a lot of propaganda, and the late 20th Century, when the idea that masturbation-as-health-hazard was finally put to rest. And, well, perversely it really was the case that due to convention and social pressure those who did masturbate, or admit it, really could be seen as marginal or socially suspect. (Compare it to the reaction today to people who won’t wear seat belts or won’t car-seat their children — at this point if you haven’t gotten the safety message, and can manage to ignore all the dashboard lights, there really is something else going on.) And the late 20th Century just wasn’t that long ago — some of us still remember it quite distinctly. :-) Anyway, that’s one good reason.

“Fleshlight” toy for men.The other is that (soapbox here) the classic feminist construction of women as the sex class has it backwards. In fact it’s more accurate to say women are (prescriptively and proscriptively) supposed to be the restrained, chaste, non-sexual “no-sex” class, whereas men are held to be the reflexive, relentless (every seven minutes!), think-with-the-little-head, fuck-anything-that-moves, fuck-anything-that-*doesn’t*-move (Megan mentions “Real Dolls,” for instance, but drunk-date rape is a lot more problematic) sex class that perpetually threatens the chastity and propriety of “delicate flower,” “hey, my mom was a woman!” femininity. And so male sexuality, while considered utterly predictable, is also a commodity produced in quantities that far exceed demand.

Oh, see also the universally degrading “why buy the cow when the milk is free” philosophy advanced by the patriarchy as a means to induce men to marry… once they’re deemed “worthy” to receive the woman’s father’s consent. Given that Patriarchy functions not only by treating women as domestic livestock but also as a system for controlling men via access to sex, then that system is overridden by what author Neil Stevenson wryly termed “manual override.”

“Aneros Prostate Stimulator”
Oh, and one last thing. Recently, in the last year or so, several women have confided to me that they’re running into more and more men who now prefer masturbation to sex. With them. And whereas tradition, not to mention the “no-sex” class paradigm, says they ought to be relieved not to have to endure men’s lustful advances, reality says women desire and enjoy sex no less than men and consequently a “I see you as just a friend” isn’t so, well, hot. No, obviously the plural of anecdote isn’t data, nor am I ready yet to accept the generally breathless claims that, say, Japanese men are losing interest represents a real trend. But if it really does become a trend, and if toys for men become as sophisticated for men as they’ve become for women then I wonder if at some point traditional disgust or distress at male masturbation would flip over into resentment.

[** Note: Clicking the images in this post will take you to the corresponding pages at Babeland. I’m not at all affiliated with Babeland but that’s where I’ve nicked all accompanying images so it only seemed fair. They’re a good company though and the original store’s here in Seattle. Worth a visit if you’re in town. —fl]

[*** Male chastity being distinctly, well, distinct from male virginity. —fl]

Laura Agustín of Border Thinking on Migration, Culture, Economy and Sex is a sociologist who’s work focuses on legal and illegal immigrants in general, and migrant sex workers in particular, at the interface between NGOs and migrants themselves. She’s using her blog, in part, to publish some of her earlier works. Here’s an excerpt from “Challenging ‘Place:’ Leaving Home for Sex.”

My example here is migrant women and transsexuals in Europe, but the discourses which construct them as ‘trafficked’ exist all over the world and are being addressed by international bodies.[6] At the time of this writing, the majority of migrant prostitutes in Europe come from the west of Africa, Latin America, eastern Europe and countries of the ex-Soviet Union. While domestic workers have begun to unite across ethnic borders to demand basic rights, sex workers have not, making them impossible to fit into classic migration frameworks, in which associations are formed as an essential step to ‘settling’ down. For a variety of legislative and social reasons, not least of which are the repressive policies of police and immigration all over Europe, prostitutes tend to keep moving, from city to city and from country to country.[7] This itinerant lifestyle creates a particular relationship to ‘place’ that impedes doing the things migrants are ‘supposed’ to do, related to establishing themselves and becoming good (subaltern) citizens (the Roma suffer from the same impediment). While nomadism is found romantic in people who live far away (such as the Bedouin) it tends to be seen as a social problem inside the West.

Read additional insights she brings to the discussion here.

Agustín makes the further point that if tradition in both countries of origin (usually in the 2nd- and 3rd-world), and destination countries (usually in the 2nd- or 1st) make jobs available to women only in the domestic, “caring,” and sex industries** then that’s… pretty much where they’re going to end up in the course of doing what men have done for centuries: emigrate in search of greater economic or social opportunities elsewhere.

This suggests two things where one’s obvious and the other ought to be. First, that without shifts away from limiting women, especially at the margins, to tasks that tie them to “home” activities no amount of criminalization of sex work is going to reduce the likelihood of surplus workers winding up in it (whether more or less against their will.) Second, as the quoted passage illustrates, the specific criminalization of sex work complicates the development of networks available to other migrants for “landing” in a place and becoming established — leaving them perpetually both more displaced and more vulnerable to continuing coercion and exploitation.

Link via Red Spine.

[** I’d add sweatshop piece work which, based on my own childhood experiences with small-scale farming in the middle of the last century, is itself an offshoot of the tendency for the partners of male farmers to process, finish, or package what the male farmer harvests and takes to market. —fl]

Emily Douglas of RHRealityCheck.org passes along word that

Republican Majority for Choice today announced that it will not issue an endorsement in this election. The organization of pro-choice Republicans cites an “outpouring of concern from members” opposed to the endorsement of candidates John McCain and Sarah Palin as the reason for its announcement.

Read the quote in context here.

Good for them! It must not have been easy for them — the Log Cabin Republicans have stayed on board despite their party’s intense and calculated homophobia — but sometimes principle has to trump partisanship and I want to acknowledge them for that.

While clearing out the very back-est, furnace-room-iest part of the basement I found this pair of really old, rusty dumbells. I vaguely remember picking them up from a pile of junk left by a previous tenant at an apartment I lived in, and I vaguely remember taking them with me each time I moved. But I distinctly remember not ever using them. Actually I got a number of pieces to begin with but each time I moved I wound up with less and less. Evidently by the time I moved here these were all that remained of the original collection.

Amazingly, even though they’re still rusty, dusty, and cobwebby they still work! :-)

Also, cool what kind of lighting you get in a basement from really overcast, rainy northwest skys in the Fall, eh?

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

More like this here.

Heather Corinna of the sex-ed site Scarleteen, and others, remind us that

September 25th is the last day to submit public comment on the proposed HHS regulations which are not only superfluous, but more importantly, would further limit access to reproductive healthcare (and other healthcare) services in the U.S., particularly for those who already have the greatest limitations to care, like teens.

It’s so important to have public comment on this, so if you have not done so yet, take a few minutes tonight and be sure to get something in.

• • *

I am writing to urge you to stop efforts to block women’s access to basic reproductive health services.

I understand that the proposed regulations that the Department of Health and Human Services released on August 21, 2008 expand existing law to allow more health care providers and institutions to refuse to provide needed care.

As written, the regulations could allow institutions and individuals — based on religious beliefs — to deny women access to birth control and permit individuals to refuse to provide information and counseling about basic heath care services. Moreover, they expand existing laws by permitting a wider range of health care professionals to refuse to provide even referrals for abortion services.

For those of us working in healthcare, the onus is on us to choose a clinic or an area of practice where we know we want to provide the healthcare services offered to clients, and which we feel is in alignment with our personal values or religious beliefs. It should not be on those seeking needed health services. It is our responsibility — and we have the greater agency as as workers — to seek out the work we want, and leave the work we do not want, or do not feel we can live with, to those who are supportive and can honor any given job description. It is also our responsibility to take a job earnestly, not disingenuously. In healthcare, we have an extra responsibility, which is to put our clients needs and their physical health — not our ideas about their spiritual health — ahead of our own, and to care for them in the way which is best for them, objectively, rather than in the ways we feel would be best for us, or feel our religion would mandate.

Read the rest of her article here. Seriously!

It’s a pretty big deal and your comments (pro or, I guess, con) can make a big difference. The reproductive-health website passes along a link to an online comments form at Physicans for Reproductive Choice and Health. You can write your own comments or just use the template letter they provide. I’ve added mine, please consider adding yours.

Thank you!

figleaf

Sokari of The F-Word Blog in the U.K. says of the AND by failing to support those women who are real victims of crime, more women like Lara are put at risk by having to go underground and of loosing their children. What the Brothel Report doesn’t show is the hypocrisy of the British government towards trafficking victims who when found are in nearly all cases deported back to their home countries where they are once again vulnerable to be trafficked not just back to the UK but other countries across Europe and beyond.

She said it here.

It’s an incredible summary of what irks me about moves inspired by the coalition of evangelicals, neoconservatives, and their various fellow travelers to to divert policy and law-enforcement resources away from actual trafficking, which doesn’t seem to bother them much in favor of anti-prostitution enforcement, which — voluntary or coerced — bothers them quite a lot.

That last bit, about deporting (often summarily deporting) trafficked sex workers is a story told all across Europe. Although I oppose recently proposed amendments the otherwise generally laudable Wilberforce (a.k.a. “White Slavery”) Act in the U.S. is at least better engineered to forestall deportation. But the general deportation-centric approach for trafficking victims, along with casual attitudes towards the actual traffickers and their customers**, strongly betrays what motivates these sorts of initiatives.

I think I’ve mentioned this before but I was reflecting again today (especially after this post by Debauchette) on the by-definition not perfect analogy between sex work and agricultural labor: just as there can’t be a blanket policy that makes no distinctions between free farmers, skilled labor, substance/survival farming, migrant labor, and slave labor, a blanket policy that assumes all sex workers are trafficked, prostituted, or otherwise conscripted or coerced is going to leave the sort of substantial enforcement gaps Sokari points to. It’s why we can’t play either the blue-nose or the libertarian card but instead must to actually craft policy to fit cases. The first, obviously, between those who do what they do on purpose (however much we do or don’t approve)and those who have no say at all. (And anyone who approves of that isn’t just part of the problem, they’re the blood adversary!)

[** Remember johns of trafficking victims are the trafficker’s customers, not the victim’s. —fl]

Have I mentioned I seem to have very strong willpower in the face of consensual but extraordinary temptation? The trick seems to be… thoroughly enjoy having it.

In comments last week Curvaceous Dee mentioned teasing a partner who was forced to keep his eyes on the road while she caressed herself in the passenger seat. All the way home. I’ve always had a roaringly good time in exactly those kinds of situations.

Of course teasing can go both ways with that. For instance sweet-talking about what you’d like to do to each other if you could only find a place to pull over… and then “accidentally” missing a promising deserted exit or side road? Oh yeah, extending the agony for another few miles… even if that really only means a few more minutes of driving time. Saying “ooh, I think there’s a spot just up ahead where we can pull over and… oh no, too many lights?” Also pretty humidifying.

But of course you don’t have to be in a car to find, or invent, all sorts of opportunities for teasing and denying yourselves. If you’re younger there’s always “not yet, I think your <sibling/parents/sitter> hasn’t <left/gone to bed/gone downstairs>!” And of course if you’ve got children — and the time and energy left anything but sleep :-) — there’s always “I think I hear footsteps.” And if you’re daft enough to have at-work relationships, well, the opportunities are endless — during normal work hours or after.

And then, obviously, there’s the “haven’t gone that far” phase of new relationships, although the actual, legitimate uncertainties are usually too distracting… not to mention too important… to call it tease and denial.

A couple of caveats. While it’s fun when it’s mutual and cooperative, unilateral teasing isn’t any more admirable than… I dunno… playground teasing. And when it gets wrapped up in the whole “no-sex” class thing it’s a bit too cliché, not to mention stereotype-enforcing to be very cool at all.

Fortunately it doesn’t have to be either unilateral or cliché. Instead it can be… delightfully appetizing. For hours, although preferably not for days.

And the nice thing about playing together, of course, is that when you’re working it together the worst that can happen is… you both lose! Which, when you’re talking about sexual tension, means you also both win. :-)