For the record I just can’t say enough good things about Julie Metzger’s “For Girls Only: A Heart to Heart Talk on Growing Up,” offered through Seattle Children’s Hospital community classes program. In the controlled chaos of a combined family reunion and extended wedding celebration for an older cousin my daughter was thoroughly yet casually ready to handle getting her first period with her usual grace, ability, and understated flair, yes, but also with the knowledge, understanding, and preparation she got from Julie’s course.

Just saying.

Still traveling with family, with very limited opportunities to get online. I did find a connection at a ferry landing so here goes.

In a post called “Ten Ways Giving Up on Perfection May Save Your Love Life” Em & Lo say

#4 Your O-face Try not to think about what you look or sound like during your orgasm, or else you’ll never climax again. Also, we guarantee that what looks like a constipated ape face to you is a total turn-on for your partner. Okay, we don’t guarantee that. But we 80% guarantee it, which is close enough to perfection, remember?

They said it here.

Yup. Like pretty much everything else about humans there’s a range of ways to have orgasms too. But for the most part people who are having an orgasm look way less like anything you see in the movies (porn or Hollywood) and way more like a cross between needing to sneeze and trying to quickly multiply two three-digit numbers in your head.

Even if it wasn’t a turn-on (it is) it would be awesome. In the the figurative sense of “really cool” but also in the literal sense of “inspiring awe.”

And here’s the trick: if you spend time thinking about how you look? Your partner will never get to see it. Which, if you’ve ever seen your partner come, you have to admit isn’t any more fair to them than not having one is to you.

The other nine items are dead-on too. Go check it out either on their blog or cross-posted on their Sundance Channel blog.

I’m traveling with family and have next to no time for blogging but I did want to make what I think is a critical point raised in the middle book of the Stig Larssen “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” series of detective novels.

A major thread in the 2nd book, The Girl Who Played With Fire, involves sex-trafficking in Sweden.

Sex trafficking is the current bugaboo of sex-work abolitionists, both in America and abroad.

In America you hear, um, bullshit about how hundreds of thousands of women and children are trafficked into the country, against both their wills and their inclinations, for use as prostitutes. It’s bullshit because a) while there’s certainly international and intranational sex trafficking in America there’s no conspiracy large enough to conceal an extra million new enslaved people coming into the country every five years and b) there’s no evidence of such numbers either.

The problem seems to be that activists believe that unless the numbers are really, really, really big then nobody will care and nobody will do anything about it. And so they inflate their numbers.

In Larssen’s books, which are set in Sweden, everyone’s scandalized that as many as 400 (that’s four hundred total) humans might be trafficked into Sweden.

You know why I think that’s so cool?

Because 400 people trafficked against their will into any country, for any kind of work, really is a scandal.

Even one would be!

That American anti-trafficking activists feel they have to gin up the numbers is itself scandalous. That they might be right that no one would care if they used real numbers is also scandalous.

Of course I happen to think that, contrary to abolitionist activist hyperbole, ordinary voluntary sex work ought to be legal. I also happen to think that if it was legal then it would be a lot easier to identify and protect the much, much, much smaller number of people who really are illegally trafficked into the country, against their will, to perform sex work. Or any other kind of work.

Coke Talk seriously nails a problem with men’s reaction to “date rape” that’s less well understood but real and highly gender-bound.

Your boyfriend is using denial as a coping mechanism. It’s easier for him to insultingly believe that it never happened than it is for him to process the truth emotionally.

Call your boyfriend out on his denial, and tell him how insulting it is for him not to believe you. Let him know that the truth does not obligate him to act on your behalf. In other words, you’re not asking him to go confront the rapist or defend your honor. All you’re asking for is understanding and respect.

She said it here.

Yup. The social construction of masculinity makes it paradoxically very difficult to do anything but a) go off on a manly rampage or b) go into complete denial. And part of that denial often includes what? Did you say blaming the victim? Right in one!

Clue #2: Contrary to both tradition and English Common Law, when it comes to the male partners of rape victims his honor has nothing to do with it.

Via Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper here’s a cool discussion about alcohol and consent from an organization called SAFERCampus. There’s a lot of good stuff in a single paragraph so I’m slightly reformatting it for clarity.

[T]here is so much defensiveness about alcohol and consent, as though it’s a really really complicated thing. And ya know, I think that for people who are aren’t raised to think about sex as a shared experience in which two people are actively, positively participating, it can actually seem that complicated.

But the reality is that it doesn’t have to be. Having sex with an incapacitated person should be widely understand as rape.

Two drunk people having sex should be aware enough of the other person to have a sense of what is or isn’t consent because they’ve been raised to respect other people, and it’s second nature to them to check and make sure their partner is involved.

I understand this is reductive; that it’s real nice to think about this sexual utopia where things are simple, but perhaps not a realistic picture of how things are now so what’s the point. But I think that we overcomplicate consent; people say that defining consent is making something natural more complicated than it needs to be, but really isn’t something only complicated when it’s unclear?

Wouldn’t the actions themselves be less complicated if we had the complicated conversations beforehand?

Read the quote in context here.

It kills me that it’s not obvious that sex is a shared experience between active participants! For all the talk about heartfelt-edness and intimacy and ultimate-icy our actual expectations of sex are barkingly unilateral. And it doesn’t just go one way — not only does institutional thinking from the original Code of Hammurabi to, say, Details Magazine encourages men to be insecurely selfish in their expectations about heterosexual sex, institutional thinking represented by, say, Cosmopolitan Magazine encourages women to be… insecurely selfless about their expectations! No hilarity ensues.

Once you get it that that’s the status quo, though, a heck of a lot of other stuff about “date rape” and “gray area” rape starts to make sense. Particularly the parts about “too unconscious to say no means yes.”

A staffer at TMZ Sports says

A woman has come forward in the Lawrence Taylor case to say the NFL legend did not have sex with the 16-year-old girl he is accused of raping.

The witness — a 23-year-old stripper who says she was living with the 16-year-old girl and her alleged pimp at the time — gave a sworn statement to investigators from the defense team, saying she was waiting outside the hotel at the time of the alleged incident. According to the AP, the woman says the teenager returned to the car with $300 in cash and said, “It was weird … we didn’t even have sex.”

Read the quote in context here.

According to another source, nfl.fanhouse.com, the defense witness claims “Taylor rubbed himself on the girl, but they did not have sex.” Which, I guess, is supposed to make it all better.

At the end of the day, though, what really matters… what the case boils down to… what’s wrong with the entire picture can be summed up in something else the woman is reported to have been concerned about. Again from the nfl.fanhouse newswire

The woman said in her statement that she did not come forward initially because she worried she would get in trouble because she knew the girl was underage.

Um. Yeah. She was living with this 51-year-old pimp and a 16-year-old girl she knew he was pimping, she accompanied the girl and the pimp to a customer’s hotel room and stood outside waiting while an act of teen prostitution took place. If it wasn’t for the evident fact that the word “prostitution” magically washes away all traces of “statutory rape,” “sexual assault of a child,” “sex offender registry,” “corruption of a minor,” and every other offense prosecutors, judges, and juries are usually (and, I think, correctly) willing to throw at people who have sex with minors, the woman had every reason to worry she’d get in trouble.

For that matter I’m really inclined to question (but certainly not challenge) the rape charges leveled against Taylor in the first place. It’s extremely unusual for prosecutors to charge johns with sexual assault… even when the johns commit violent assault against adult sex workers rather than statutory sexual assault against minor ones.

I’m not knocking their decision because I think it’s a really good idea to hold johns accountable for not meticulously verifying the age of the sex workers they hire. (Taylor claims he asked and the girl told him she was 19. Which doesn’t wash in my book — if she’d said she was Mother Theresa he’d probably have asked to see her ID so…)

But it’s so unusual I’m curious about the particulars that led to this, well, particular charge being brought.

Anyway, bottom line here is that a) yes, whatever one can say about voluntary, entrepreneurial sex work there are also sex workers who are conscripted and coerced, sometimes by violence, b) yes, whatever one can say about consenting adults we do not say the same thing about minors, even consenting ones, and c) while it’s laudable that prosecutors appear to be charging Lawrence with rape and the pimp with sex trafficking they’re still failing to bring with perfectly-accurate and well-deserved charges against them for crimes that would put them on sex-offender registries for life.

It’s perfectly possible to support legalizing the sale and purchase of sexual services from autonomous, uncoerced adults (as I am, even though I’m not terrifically enthusiastic about it) while also supporting draconian measures against the sale or purchase of sexual access to the bodies of those who are conscripted, coerced, trafficked, or otherwise unable to freely and legally consent.

It’s a mistake to imagine that rape is the right word for voluntary commercial sexual services. It’s an even bigger mistake to imagine any other word will do for those who are coerced into sexual servitude.

Via AlwaysArousedGirl Greta Christna, writing at Blowfish Blog has a lovely post titled “Sex and the Off-Label Use of Our Bodies.”

Human beings took our animal need for palatable food . . . and turned it into chocolate souffles with salted caramel cream. We took our ability to co-operate as a social species . . . and turned it into craft circles and bowling leagues and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We took our capacity to make and use tools . . . and turned it into the Apollo moon landing. We took our uniquely precise ability to communicate through language . . . and turned it into King Lear.

None of these things are necessary for survival and reproduction. That is exactly what makes them so splendid. When we take our basic evolutionary wiring and transform it into something far beyond any prosaic matters of survival and reproduction . . . that’s when humanity is at its best. That’s when we show ourselves to be capable of creating meaning and joy, for ourselves and for one another. That’s when we’re most uniquely human.

And the same is true for sex. Human beings have a deep, hard-wired urge to replicate our DNA, instilled in us by millions of years of evolution. And we’ve turned it into an intense and delightful form of communication, intimacy, creativity, community, personal expression, transcendence, joy, pleasure, and love. Regardless of whether any DNA gets replicated in the process.

Why should we see this as sinful?

What makes this any different from chocolate souffles and King Lear?

She said it here.

That’s what I’m talking about!

Yes, technically once can say as Karl Marx did that humans create for the same reason silkworms spin silk, and technically you can say as Freud and his direct evolutionary-psychology descendants do that humans have sex only to procreate. All the more reason to call those guys REALLY BORING HUMAN BEINGS!

So a couple of years ago I ran into a neighbor when I was taking a bus downtown for a tech seminar. I knew she worked for the local university alumni office fundraising department so I asked what her current project was. She said she was researching “the giving habits of those who donate $250,000,000.00 or more.” She said it was… different.

I was reminded of this when Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors mentioned serious but very difficult to address issue

Earlier this week the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article called “The Wrong Type of Solicitation” about the sexual harassment of higher education planned-giving personnel.  

“Sexual harassment can occur in any job, but certain aspects of fund raising make it more likely. For one thing, women now dominate the profession. Three-fourths of the 30,000 members of the Association of Fundraising Professionals are female.

In many cases, those women are appealing to older, powerful men for large donations. To succeed, fund raisers must build long-term relationships with donors. And they often visit donors in their homes or meet them in social settings where alcohol and personal information are plentiful.”

Read the whole post and follow Crawford’s links here.

The impression my friend gave me is that the fraction-of-a-billion-dollar donors rarely involve themselves directly with fundraising staff. But there are plenty of others who may be willing and able to play bullshit/bullying games that go beyond asking to have buildings or departments named after them. And there are very, very few fundraisers who’s agencies are in a position to decline a donor who’s being an asshole, let alone out them.

Apropos of no one in particular but in keeping with an ongoing theme of mine about terminology there’s been a tendency over the years for bloggers to distinguish themselves from other people who blog about sex on the grounds that those people are sex bloggers but and/or so I must not be one.

My rule of thumb for telling if you’re a sex blogger? If the only people willing to advertise on your site sell products that are somehow related to sex then whether you like it or not (and you might not), and whether you identify that way or not (and you might not) then at least in the eyes of the world you’re a sex blogger.

Monica Potts of TAPPED passes along word that the Vatican’s new anti-sex-abuse policies also deals with a problem they see as even more equally pernicious.

...the attempted ordination of women as a “grave crime” subject to the same set of procedures and punishments meted out for sex abuse.

Read the quote in context here.

Hey, how about a nice round of screw you to those stupid little in-denial closet pedophiles and the (hobby)horses they rode up on?

I mean, yeah, if an unseemly taste for children, an abiding distaste for women, and a misunderstanding so deep that I couldn’t understand that when given the opportunity women in authority can sexually abuse boys with no less aplomb than men, then I’d be absolutely freaked out at the prospect of women as professional peers who might blow the whistle on me. And all things considered it’s easy to imagine that’s really what the Bishops and Cardinals are most concerned about. Even though they needn’t be.

And why yes, I am in rather a bad mood about this. Oddly, their main excuse for not ordaining women into the priesthood is that Jesus chose no women Disciples. This despite the fact that to the best of our knowledge none of Jesus’s Disciples were pedophiles either. And yet they’ve never threatened to excommunicate pedophiles… or for that matter the priests who ordained them… or for that matter the bishops, cardinals, and Popes who’ve whitewashed the whole sorry sex-abuse enterprise.

And why yes, my main point would just happen to be that archaic religious conceits about gender notwithstanding, the downsides of gender equivalence demonstrate the undeniability of gender equivalence just as much as the myriad upsides do. It’s not that there are no differences between men and women — at the very least the fact that every human being who’s ever existed has been a product of the union of biological male and female gametes makes that sort of irrefutable. The question instead is whether the differences are significant enough to warrant excluding one sex and privileging another, and the answer there is also irrefutably no.

Did I mention I was in a bad mood about this?