Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Seems to me that if our beauty standards were purely about reproductive fitness, as pop sociobiologists and pop evolutionary psychologists claim, and if their notion that “primitive” human society was exactly like Ozzie and Harriet’s nuclear family with breadwinner men and stay-at-home women then…

a) The most desirable-looking women would tend to wear size 10-14 (U.S. standard) or a little bit higher and at least look like they’d survived bearing and nurturing a child at least once previously and look able to do so again. And since any outside activity they did do would tend to be gathering, and thus need to be already well-versed in plant ID and habitat they’d probably also be a bit older so they could remember where all the good stuff could be found.

b) The most desirable men would at least look extraordinarily young and incredibly fit in order to appear able to bring down food and defend their families.

That almost the opposites seem to be true suggests sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists suffer from… considerable selection bias. Keep banging the rocks together, guys.

In comments to my sports/virginity question where I questioned why, for instance, losing one’s virginity was supposed to destroy your life but blowing your knee out in high-school sports isn’t; why getting an STI (even a bad one like HIV) is supposed to ruin your life but picking up hepatitis while trekking in Nepal isn’t, MinorityReport (who blogs at, well, Minority Report) said

Great point. I wish that would have been the gist of my high school sex-ed classes.

An example: The school hired chastity speaker, Molly Kelly. I forget most of her talk. However, I do remember one very clear image she used. Throughout her speech Molly repeatedly dropped an apple. At the end of her presentation she held up the apple she had dropped and an apple that had been set aside. She then asked which we would rather eat, the apple that had been dropped on the floor (repeatedly) or the apple that had been set aside. It drove her point home, and for me at least it made an impact.

I would have been nice to hear something like, “But if you do _______, it’s not the end and life goes on.”

She said it here.

Oohhh, I had this realization after reading her Molly Kelly story and now I’m kind of beside-myself irritated.

You know all those abstinence-only metaphors of apples, roses, even gum and tape? Every one of them is a single-use consumable good. Bouncing an apple into apple sause just takes the cake though. The difference between apples and, oh, say, your body is even if you managed to get bruised during sex you’d still recover quickly. And most of the time, for most women and men, you’re not bruised during sex to begin with.

Apples, gum, roses, tape, suckers, etc., don’t recover at all but they’re fucking things, not people!

You want a better, but still-inanimate metaphor for a man or woman who’s had sex? Try a rubber ball. In fact try a superball since those seem to bounce with more energy than they begin with. How about a book? Try a deep pool that a pebble has been tossed in. A painting, an alarm clock, a window, a fireplace, a chicken and an egg (which came first?), a ski hill, a piano or flute.

And to be perfectly honest I don’t care for any of those because humans aren’t inanimate nor are we, women or men, either literally or figuratively consumed in the course of, well, intercourse.

A dropped apple is simply marvelous for propaganda in the service of patriarchy but evilly inaccurate for sex education.

Several years after Timothy McVeigh’s truck bomb murdered 168 people in Oklahoma City our local paper mentioned in a little snippet that Microsoft, a local company, had donated several hundred copies of it’s Office suite, specially configured for office workers who survived the bombing but were long-term or permanently disabled. Like I say, 168 dead is a nice, tidy number but it’s just not the end of the story.

Via Darksyde of Daily Kos comes yet another reminder that for all its grim, statistical, journalistically-tidy finality, death isn’t necessarily the worst fate for victims of war, fire, and crime.

This time it’s about a victim who survived George Sodini’s murderous assault this summer at a gym in Pittsburgh:

The ‘best healthcare™’ system in the world strikes again:

My sister is a member of the fitness club where that shooting took place. It was just chance that she was not there, and not in that fitness class, the night the shooting took place. My gratefulness for her safety has been tempered by my sadness for the women who were … Well, just imagine my thoughts today when I talked to my sister, and she let me know what was going on for one of the women who was shot at the fitness club.

The young woman had recently graduated college and therefore had “aged out” of coverage on her parents’ health insurance. ... So her friends and family recently sponsored a friggin’ car wash to raise funds to pay her hospital bills. Yes. A car wash.

Read the quote in context here.

If I was a legislator promoting the healthcare initiative currently being debated in Congress I think I’d be inclined to a) determine whether this story is true, b) determine whether it’s really true that there’s really currently no Federal provisions for healthcare for the victims of violent crime, and if I verified a and b, then c) I’d attach an authorizing rider to the bill and then d) decry anyone who failed to support a healthcare-reform bill containing that provision as soft on crime and indifferent to the plight of victims of the likes of Timothy McVeigh and George Sodini… possibly on the grounds that they were sympathetic to the “conservative” views of Misters McVeigh and Sodini.

And yes I suppose e) that would be a gross misrepresentation of the positions of… well, at least several opponents of healthcare reform but f) it wouldn’t be the first such gross misrepresentation in the debate would it?

Interesting conversation overheard at a climbing rock in a nearby park.

Parent #1 mentioned casually that a liver illness while trekking in Asia after college and they’d never really been the same.

Parent #2 mentioned casually that knee and ankle injuries from high-school football meant they’d never really been the same.

Neither parent seemed concerned that either their own or the other’s ailments or injuries had “limited their life choices” or otherwise ruined their lives. They acknowledged constraints (they were opining about how they wouldn’t be accompanying their children on mountaineering trips) there was no sense of stigma, trauma, damage to “reputation,” etc., from their youthful follies.

Hmmm…. there’s a point in there somewhere but gee, I just can’t put my finger on it.

Here’s why I don’t usually participate in the Friday Random 10 iTunes meme. It’s not the songs part, it’s the “justify your choices” part that’s hard.

• Road Movie To Berlin – They Might Be Giants: “We were once so close to heaven / St. Peter came out and gave us medals / declaring us the finest of the damned”
• Fly-by-Night Benny Goodman – All The Cats Join In (Vol 3): What can I say, I can’t think when I’m listening to music with lyrics so I tend to go for instrumentals
• Ballad Of Ronald Reagan – Austin Lounge Lizards: Ominous that I feel nostalgic for the pragmatic politics of Ronald Reagan
• Sometimes I Don’t Wanna Go Home – Joan Armatrading: Awesome song about the uncertainty of emotionally-abusive relationships
• On The Couch – Ry Cooder: Instrumental from Paris, Texas, another epic relationship movie.
• Blues [A Jam Session] – Fats Waller: awesome instrumental ensemble
• Punahele Excerpt – Masters Of Hawaiian Slack Key: awesome slack-key guitar
• Mercenary Territory – Little Feat: “Now some kind of man, he can’t do anything wrong / If I see him I’ll tell him you’re waiting” More lyrics about self-doubt in unhappy relationships, this time from an uncertain man’s perspective.
• Just Joshin’ – Josh Graves (The Great Dobro Sessions): What can I say, Graves invented a lot of what we think of as modern bluegrass Dobro.

• Sousa’s “The Washington Post March” – Leonard Bernstein: New York Philharmonic Orchestra: In a few years this might be the most memorable cultural feature titled “The Washington Post.”

(What can I say? I’ve made a point of buying no new music since the RIAA went all Gestapo. I’ve got thousands of songs but most of them are very old. Then again, most were old when I bought them.)

So how about a link round-up instead? These are all posts I recommend highly but probably won’t be able to say what I want to say about them in posts:

• Pek Van Andel has made a video of the still-image MRIs he took of volunteers having intercourse back in 1999. I’m still shocked that no one else seems to be imaging the anatomy of dynamic sexuality. Or at least publishing them. 1999 was a very long time ago now. (Via Em & Lo and Ms Naughty)
• Ann Bartow: Dan Kahan, “Culture, Cognition, and Consent: Who Perceives What, and Why, in ‘Acquaintance Rape’ Cases”. Looks like an extremely interesting investigation with kind of creepy conclusions about victim blaming in men and, especially, women with hierarchical worldviews.
• Joe Sonka: “Are you a treasure or a target?”: More sex ed FAIL from Ohio. What is wrong with those people and their persistent belief that perpetrators are less relevant to sexual assault than their victims?
• Vanessa at Feministing: STIs are so manly. Dismal reflection on the way we “treasure” of women (as pristine objects, anyway) and disregard “uncleanliness” in men. Which is significant because since it’s not the case that sex with men makes women “unclean” men’s “cleanliness” actually matters!
• Hortense at Jezebel: “Godmothers” Begin Taking Control Of Crime Syndicates. An unnecessary demonstration that women are just as capable as men. See also Tyler Cowen on Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate. “Women are significantly less violent than men in the outside world and less lethal when they are violent. This holds in all times and places for which relevant data exist. And yet in prison this universal fact is overturned: women become at least as violent and often more prone to violence than men are.”
• Over-Educated Nympho: Seeking Short-Term Boyfriend (to paint her house.) Tongue in cheek but see also Cheri at Secret Lover’s Lane mentions some kind of Ashley Madison offshoot called Barter Clubs where the idea is evidently taken seriously.
• Geek Feminism Blog: The Thank-You Meme. “I have a theory: Most people in open source support what we are trying to do, it just doesn’t feel that way. On the Internet, no one can see you nod. ... If you get a really positive, well-written thank-you for your work in women in open source, we’d love it if you shared it with the rest of us.”

• Lisa Campo-Engelstein: Autonomous Contraception – Science, Sociology, and the Potential of a Male Pill. Another reason why foot-dragging in male-contraceptive development is dumb: “while mass media articles in the English speaking-world assert women will not trust men (including their partners) with contraception,[16] an international study reveals that only 2 percent of women would not trust their partner to contracept.” (Via Samhita.)

Holly of The Pervocracy knocks another one out of the park.

Men who never get laid pontificate about how every gorgeous actress and model just isn’t thin and busty enough for them to be attracted; women who are chronically single lay out ridiculous “he should be a PhD. and have a six-pack and also blue eyes” requirements for men they’d want to date.

Not that people don’t have the right to be choosers. Don’t settle for someone who won’t make you happy because you think they’re the best you can get. And if you’re committed to waiting until Dr. Blue Eyes PhD. comes along, have fun with that. But it often seems like there’s something more going on here.

It’s partly sour grapes, of course, but it’s also preemptive sour grapes. If you are afraid to approach men or women, saying “I like girls, but the ones around here just aren’t good enough” allows you to pretend you’re not a wuss while justifying your behavior.

She said it here.

I try to say stuff like that but it always takes me like 1000 words and 300 typos.

p.s. I’m not sure how to link it but the cartoon “evolution” at Book of Joe doesn’t demonstrate actual evolution (biological evolution anyway) but seems particularly relevant to the “whoever I don’t think I can have is the only one for me” ideal partner.

Debby Herbenick of My Sex Professor invented a laugh-out-loud game you can play on any computer device that gives you lots and lots of fonts.

For reasons unknown to me, today I wondered which fonts were sexiest. Not sexy as in which font stirs feelings of arousal or excitement (because truly I would be surprised if it did that for many people), but what font made the word “sex” itself look most like the way sex feels?

That exercise quickly spiralled into a sort of reverse fortune cookie game. You know, the game where whatever someone’s fortune is, you then tag on the phrase “in bed” at the end as in “You will have great success (in bed)”.

Except here you do it in reverse: Place the font style word/phrase in front of your word. Soon enough you get things like “Berlin Sans Sex” (which – if you remember your high school French class – means “Berlin without sex”, a sad state of affairs indeed), Century Gothic Sex and even Elephant Sex.

She said it here.

She recommends trying the same thing with other words. I’ll leave it up to you to come up with the best ones you come up with either here in comments or on your own blog. (I’ll promote good ones to the front page. Though if you use Wingdings had better be very good.)

If you take the meme to your blog or elsewhere make sure you give Herbenick the credit she deserves.

Ms Naughty of Porn for Women Blog says the only commercial porn movie I’ve had the patience to watch in years, Jennifer Lyon Bell’s Matinee

In Berlin last year I had the honour of meeting Jennifer Lyon Bell, an American filmmaker with a compelling vision for erotic film. Her film Matinee is a gorgeous work of art, well written, masterfully acted and beautifully filmed. It is a wonderful addition to the growing canon of well-made, female-focused erotic films and I consider it to be part of the new wave of sex-positive movies that are forging a new path in porn.

Naturally this means the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification has banned it.

She said it here.

As I mentioned in my review (I saw it at the Sex 2.0 conference last spring) I had pretty much the same impression of the film. Ms Naughty quotes Bell and her backers as saying that was exactly what she was trying to convey

It’s just two characters enjoying sex in a realistic way that fits with their characters’ personalities. Consensual sex, nothing weird. Why on earth would that be dangerous to watch?

And, seriously, I don’t see how there’s anything possibly offensive or objectionable to the movie except that a) it has direct sex in it and b) the female partner leads the entire way from the first kiss to rousing him to erection to unwrapping and putting on the condom to insertion. Oh, and c) there’s nothing daring or defiant or “gender-bendery” or “toppish” about her actions, nor anything inconsistent with what any two heterosexual lovers might do when they’re both a bit melancholy about their circumstances and are used to finding emotional connection and comfort in sex.

On the other hand that might indeed be the offensive part. Final quote from Ms Naughty:

The organisers rightly point out that the OFLC didn’t have a problem with Lars Van Trier’s Antichrist, which disturbingly depicts a scene of female genital mutilation and seems to be misogynist in intent. Jen’s film, which only shows two people having nuanced, meaningful, tender sex, is apparently more offensive than that.

Not sure what to say here. Violently injuring genitals is ok. Romantic sex heterosexual sex not so much.

Incidentally the OFLC also banned two Tony Comstock’s films about romantic homosexual sex. He and everyone else assumed they were balking at the homosexuality part. Starting to sound like it’s the romance part they can’t handle.

$%!*#@!!!

Abby Spector, guest-posting forEm & Lo says

I consider myself a sexual adventurer. As a bisexual who has posed naked for photographers, enjoys threesomes, and has a collection of vibrators, I think I deserve the label. However, there is one sexual act I refuse to partake in: handjobs.

For years I struggled trying to perfect my phallus-massaging abilities. Touching peen is only the first foot on third base (with oral being a whole body slide). We are taught that we have to run the diamond in base order. No skipping allowed. Five bruised penises later, I have learned how to stand up for myself. I look men in all three of their eyes and tell them the truth. “I, Abby Spector, will never give you a handjob.”

She said it here.

Here’s my take on handjobs. (Which in places, except for the bruising part, echos some of Spector’s points.)

I sort of held off waiting to hear other people’s comments before leaving my own. But based on what’s been said so far I think the big surprise ought to be where people (who haven’t tried it) ever got the idea handjobs for men are easy. And please don’t worry about it or feel dumb for not knowing — you’re so not the only one it’s not funny.

I think it’s sort of a natural mistake. Very young men can be pretty quick to ejaculate, and unless I’m really mistaken handjobs are most common really early in sexual relationship formation. Conversely handjobs fall out of favor pretty quickly once men, and their partners, begin to add penetrative acts to their repertoire. Add in the mistaken observation that if he can rub one out in a minute or two then it ought to be easy for her. (Most men, if you think about it, take months and even years to figure out how to do it the first time too!)

Yes, there are men for whom handjobs are easy and rewarding, and there are women for whom it comes naturally. But out of all the times I’ve had sex with partners I can think of only one or two times that someone managed to find the right spots, and the right rhythms, and had the interest, and the stamina, to get me all the way off — and not just warm me up — with just her hands.

—

That said, if you’ve actually been bruising your partners trying to get them off here’s a tip: Back off! There are some (not most) kinksters that might work for but even though almost all men like firmer pressure than most women would, but if you’re being rough enough to leave marks you’re also being way too rough to get him off. Point being “try harder next time” is not the solution to every problem!

In her unfortunately-subtitled post about being parent to a newborn, Katie Roiphe writes at Double-XX “When the baby was four weeks old… I apologized and told him that I couldn’t sign books, that I had to run home.”

She also said

I remember visiting one of my closest friends on her maternity leave last summer. We sat on a wooden bench in her garden and drank iced coffees, and gazed at her second baby. She is a writer, and we talked about how the women writers we most admired had no children, or have had one child, at the absolute most, but never two. (Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen had no children; Mary McCarthy, Rebecca West, Joan Didion, and Janet Malcolm all had one.) My friend looked down at her newborn and her tiny eyelashes. She could entertain this conversation in an academic way, but as she adjusted the baby’s hat I could see how far removed it was from anything that mattered to her. Here, sitting in the garden, looking at the eyelashes, would you trade the baby for the possibility of writing The House of Mirth? You would not.

Vicki Iovine, mother of four children and, ahem, author of at least four books and numerous articles, wrote in the staggeringly stealth-brilliant The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy that we forget to take into account the post-delivery “fourth trimester” at our peril. That was her term for the foggy, sleep-deprived shakedown/recovery period that goes almost entirely unmentioned in medical and anecdotal parenting lore. People who adopt newborns report something similar, and after only four weeks I certainly couldn’t stay focused when I was away from home either. So it’s not too surprising that Roiphe had a hard time at her book signing.

Just one more reason we have feminism to thank for the Family Leave Act. And one more reason why American feminists continue to advocate amending the act to make it paid leave. Just saying.

Doh! But then we get to the real rub in Roiphe’s article:

One of the minor dishonesties of the feminist movement has been to underestimate the passion of this time, to try for a rational, politically expedient assessment. Historically, feminists have emphasized the difficulty, the drudgery of new motherhood. They have tried to analogize childcare to the work of men; and so for a long time, women have called motherhood a “vocation.” The act of caring for a baby is demanding, and arduous, of course, but it is wilder and more narcotic than any kind of work I have ever done.

Um, no, it hasn’t. One major dishonesty of anti-feminism is that these feelings are exclusive to biological mothers. As I mentioned they’re not. Not for fathers. Not for adoptive parents.

And if I may anticipate a possible objection to the preceding point, a second dishonesty of anti-feminism is that new mothers are perfectly prepared to be left at home to resume any and all prior domestic duties, including caring for previous children, as soon as they return from the birthing center and their partner returns to work. If you’ve been pregnant then even if you’re not caring for a newborn that 4th trimester (which, remember, takes its pound of flesh from fathers and adoptive parents too) is not recovered from overnight or in a couple of days. And so no, the average mother of the average newborn is probably not ready to be dropped back into her domestic routine. And, thus, probably not ready to hop back into a career either. (See, again, Family Leave Act and recommended extensions.)

Point being that if Roiphe feels feminism wrongly pressures women to believe they should resume their duties before they’re ready, and if it’s true that feminism actually does say having a newborn should have no, zero, none impact on one’s career, authorial or otherwise, then that’s a fault feminism shares with anti-feminism.

And srsly, 17th-Century women’s activist Anne Hutchinson (ahem, author of no major books but any number of lectures and sermons) was pregnant with her 15th child when she went her local Puritan magistrates put her on trial for blasphemy and sedition. And so again what’s Roiphe’s point about feminism being indifferent to women before, during, or after pregnancy compared to its contemporaries — in the Colonial era or any other?