Funny (if you can get over the definitely triggery subject.)

Check the difference between

a) Comments in the Ms Magazine report about accused serial rapist Marc O’Leary, which are all about bleeding-heart MRA concerns about the importance of protecting men from false accusations.

b) Comments in the local-to-Lynnwood Everett Herald (some by otherwise classic MRA types) are mostly instead about how the Lynnwood police force makes Reno 911 look like Law and Order.

If April weren't Sexual Assault Awareness Month you'd probably have a very hard time guessing the context for the following snippet in an extended article by Eric Stevick and Diana Hefley (emphasis mine.)

Detectives in Colorado provided information to the Lynnwood police that was strikingly similar to the story told by the woman in 2008. There was forensic evidence collected during the investigation in Lynnwood three years ago. Police here likely will now submit it for testing.

Source: Everett Herald

Don't follow the link if you're even remotely triggerable. It's pretty disgraceful.

While talking about how it's often pretty relevant for researchers to know where a woman is in her menstrual cycleEmily Nagoski nevertheless keeps things in perspective.

[T]he literature on something like sexual interest across the menstrual cycle is far from definitive: while on the one hand there seems to be a small peak in many women’s sexual activity around ovulation, there’s a much more pronounced peak around the weekend. Context is a crucial component in understanding women’s bodies.

Source: Sex Nerd

In other word does it matter? Yes. Does it matter enough to be the holy grail some researchers make it out to be? You tell me.

Actually, while I think the main reason ev psychs and sociobiologists spend so much flinkin' time obesssing about women's levels of horniness has a lot to do with the paradigmatic inability to get that women are sexual creatures "just like people are," I have to admit that a more objective reason is that women's hormone levels are just a lot easier to track.  They take a whole month to cycle!  You can keep pretty much up to date with women's cycles by collecting pee once a day.  Or even just daily diary entries.  Women already frequently chart things like periods and ovulation.  And there's lots of collateral studies one an surf data from, what with them being kind of intimately related to fertility or infertility, maternity, menarche and menopause, and so on.

I'm pretty sure the main reason ev psych and, for that matter, a lot of real scientists spend very little time thinking about men's levels of horniness is because a) men are considered the baseline normal against which women's libidos are measured and b) healthy men are assumed to be horny all the time so why bother?  And also, given that on average researchers have tended to be straight men, eww, who could possibly be interested in horny men?  But I have to admit that a more objective reason is that men have definite hormone cycles but they cycle daily.  Which makes tracking them a heck of a lot harder more difficult: collecting hourly urine samples is doable but, um, distracting for most people.  Especially if what you're trying to track are libido peaks.

None of that means that where women are in their cycles is completely irrelevant.  Just that it's important to keep track of why there might be such disproportionate differences in available research.

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

A reader with the pen name Slap Unhappy asked Em & Lo for advice with the following situation.

My wife and I have been together just over five years. The other night while having sex, she asked me to slap her in the face. Repeatedly. I was raised not to lay a hand down on a woman, and now I am being asked to. We are pretty active and broad in our sexual tastes, but this one is kind of weird to me. Thoughts, ideas?

– Slap Unhappy

Source: Em & Lo

First of all, I recommend reading E&L's response, which is both informative and thoughtful.  But the question brings up another dimension that I don't think is explored often enough.

Back in the late 1970s or early 1980s I ended up breaking up with someone early in a relationship because she wanted me to slap her. It just totally freaked me out. A few years later I was really freaked out when a partner told me she was terribly turned on by spanking.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know about BDSM. In fact I’d done a fair amount of bondage and coercion role-playing. But neither of those partners had seemed the least bit interested — they’d just had previous partners who’d done it to them and they’d discovered they liked it.

My loss in retrospect, and of course theirs too.

What I didn’t understand at the time, and it’s really important for Slap Unhappy too, is that boundaries and respect for boundaries are really important not just to protect the sub, and in more gendered terms they’re not there just to protect the woman.

You’re absolutely right that, especially when we’re turned on, people can withstand far more “impact” than their partners may be psychologically or even physically comfortable giving. (Psychologically as in Unhappy’s and my case where hitting someone went against ingrained upbringing. And physically it often hurts one’s hand more to spank someone than it hurts the spankee’s bottom.)

So anyway, while it might be Unhappy’s partner’s wildest turn on to be slapped, if it’s a turn-off for him then she needs to a) recognize that it’s a boundary issue for him, b) negotiate to see if there’s a way to make him comfortable enough to consent, and if not then c) respect his boundary and his decision not to participate.

Oh, and possibly if he goes ahead anyway then she may also need to d) help work with him through what I’m going to call potential “top drop” afterwards. Because what he might agree to try he might still be bummed about after.

Bottom line: We don’t usually think of boundaries and consent as moving in the direction of the top, or in heterosexual relationships as working towards the man. But boundaries are boundaries and consent is consent and when they’re confronted it’s important that they be respected regardless of who’s boundaries they are or who’s consent is required.

It’s always ok to say no.

So Ta-Nehisi Coates started a fairly short post calling bullshit on the notion that women aren't funny.

I haven't finished this Tina Fey piece on Fresh Air yet, but as I've said, my readings of Jane Austen, and now Edith Wharton, have really taken me back to this old claim (most famously aired here and answered here) that women aren't funny. As an adult, probably the first author I found to be truly humorous was Zora Neale Hurston. Better people then me can probably cite a range of other women authors who used humor in their writing, but even in my own small forays it's clear to me that they are there. Leaving aside the desire to say something provocative, if thin, I'm thinking that a large portion of this claim originates in shrinking the range of "funny."

Source: The Atlantic Blog

In comments the conversation eventually turned to Vanity Fair's humorless article "Women Aren't Funny" by Christopher Hitchens. A bit further in DoctorJay said

I just clicked through to Hitchen's piece. I'd never read it.

In his first paragraph he mentions that you don't often hear a man describe his partner/mate as funny. I think this might be a socially accurate observation, within his circle. Or maybe even beyond it.

Reading on, I discovered, to my surprise, that Figleaf's rule number 2 applies. (Many thanks to the commenter here, I think it was K__Bee, who linked that a week or so ago.

If you aren't familiar, rule number 2 is, paraphrased,

Men are not allowed to be the object of desire. [close enough --fl]

In Hitchen's case, he claims that men (at least, straight men) must be funny in order to get laid. If we weren't funny, nobody would fuck us.

Therefore, men have a powerful motivation to be funny.

Of course, to disprove this, all one needs is to think of examples of men who aren't funny, but still got laid. Richard Nixon comes to mind.

At which point the thread becomes more of a discussion of Hitchens and/or of the power of the whole "evolved to be funny to spread our seed" thing.

Sigh!

The whole stupid "pass on your seed" business is so overblown. You know another indisputably evolved behavior that's absolutely critical to "passing on your seed?" Taking a deep breath right after birth. Screw that up and you'll never "get laid" either. Considering some of the other convolutions some people go to to wring sexual selection out of a behavior it's amazing no young cupid has never come forth to explain how men learn to breath after birth because chix think men who breathe are hawt.

So you can buy the whole pitiful-male/gatekeeper-female model, where every action men takes is designed to get her to lower her "barriers" just misses a heck of a lot of, you know, other regular old every day selection you've got to get through to survive long enough to meet, greet, subvert or defeat those gatekeeper-y feeemales.* And Mr. Hitchens joins on the order of millions of otherwise sensible men who fall for it. But doing so means they miss out on a very large group of other possible reasons a trait might develop.

For instance, with all due respect to Hitchens on many other topics I'm... pretty sure men have to be funny, and might even somehow genetically have to be funny,... for the same reason they have to not become objects of desire: to keep from getting beaten up by older and/or bigger boys and men. Or perhaps even more accurately, in order to enter alliances with groups of older, larger boys and men who will either not beat them up or will stand by then when members of other alliances try to beat them up.

Laughing men rarely beat up juveniles and newcomers. Jealous ones do. For that matter men rarely beat up juvenile or newcomer men they perceive as having any non-jealousy-provoking merit or potential. (BTW, say hello to the true, patriarchal source of the whole male worthiness trap.)

Given that in all but the most chaotic, atomized or (possibly) well-ordered societies boys must at some point in their development depend on the tolerance and/or support of older/larger males if they hope to achieve sexual maturity, trying to explain all gendered behavior in terms of male/female sexual selection necessarily overlooks huge swaths of selective pressure (social or biological) on human behavior.

(This latter point, by the way, is one of the biggest reasons Ayn Rand's science-fiction-y novels fall apart. Neither John Galt nor, especially, Howard Roark, can have had human childhoods. Indeed, in The Fountainhead Roark is born full-formed, naked, and to tie it all together, laughing, thigh deep in a stream miles from anyone. As he had to have been. Because otherwise, no matter what a hardass he became, somewhere between the ages of, say, two and sixteen, he'd have had no choice but to compromise, to flex, to joke, to ingratiate, or otherwise fit in -- if not with other boys and men then with parents or their proxies.  But I digress.)

At any rate, whereas at least in patriarchy men tend to be far bigger obstacles to male reproductive success than women, and therefore men might feel like they're under more pressure to be funny, I don't see why it's not obvious that a) women are just as likely to benefit from being funny to men, b) that men benefit from being funny around groups of women, c) that women benefit from being funny around women, etc.

* Quick point: throughout history and literature, virtually all gatekeepers are flunkies, lackies, or at best trusted servants of the lord or master who owns the gate itself. Women are designated "gatekeepers" to their sexualities alright, but by convention, tradition, and often law the gate they're charged to defend with their lives and honors actually belongs to a custodial male. Thus people who label women "gate keepers" are 100% up to their scuppers in patriarchy.

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

Using her powers of feminism (and personal preference) Ozymandias dismantles yet another PUA restatement of the worthiness trap (a subsidiary of Rule #2.)

No girl wants to cuddle with an unaccomplished writer hack who lives in his dad’s basement.

I do! I do! Pick me!

Well, I mean, if he's nice, and attractive, and likes Star Wars. and enjoys going down on me, and can talk intelligently about some topic other than sports, because I am biased against sports. Which gets back to the main point: thanks to feminism (remember, Roosh? That thing where women can vote you were complaining* about before?), women get to pick their dates because of compatibility, and not because of their pocketbooks, because women have money too. You're not "pulling one over" on women when you fuck them while not  being rich. You're reaping the benefits of feminism, which made it so women don't care about how much money you have. Love used to be a trade of sex for money a little less crass than prostitution. Now it's the connection of minds and bodies, both primal and celestial, combining the highest and most animal instincts in the human soul, and it's some cool fucking shit.

Source: Ozymandias's Crushing and Venting Engine of Doom

Rule #2, you'll recall, says that it's not really conceivable for men to be just intrinsically sexually desirable and so if we want sex we've instead got to instead earn by doing or having things that are deemed admirable or worthy in some other dimensions such as a good income, a nice car, a heroic job like fire figher or rock star, political power, or some other form of "status" that women will trade sex to gain access to.

And so by that logic a starving writer (or, worse, gamer!) should never, ever get laid.

Except, as Ozy and others regularly point out, unless they're a complete dicks men like that actually get laid approximately as often as anyone else. Because, in fact, those Cee-Lo lyrics, "I guess the change in my pocket, wasn't enough. ... If I was rich'a I'd still be with ya. ... Yeah I'm sorry I can't afford a Ferrarri" are almost always wrong. Handy if, but mainly only if, you don't want to confront the likely real reasons a partner left you or wouldn't go out with you in the first place.

Actually... hmm... I have to admit I'm not enough up on the nuances of PUA culture but for all their talk about nice guys, alphas, and jerks I can't remember how PUA strategies are designed to cope with the fairly routine question "what does she see in that loser?" Where the loser in question clearly isn't an "alpha," isn't a jerk, and isn't really identifiable as "worthy" in any other way. But does seem to break all the rules about women not liking unremarkable but "nice" fellows. I'm not saying PUA culture doesn't deal with the question, I'm just saying it doesn't seem to percolate to the top of the usual lists.

* Earlier this PUA guy "Roosh" had said "Charm died in Western women on August 18, 1920" To with Ozy replied "When they got the vote! That Roosh, such a charmer."

Historiann, reporting on a surprising-to-me finding that (when taken with the usual grains of salt) suggests that the best predictor of college grade point average is... time spent drinking.

Does anyone look back on their college years and wish they had engaged in more drinking?  For more than a decade, I’ve heard from current college students that the reason they “party hard” now is that they think that after graduation, their access to friendship and alcohol will suddenly dry up, and they’ll never have fun again.  (I’ve written here about what an impoverished view of adulthood this is, and how it saddens me.  Is it just the narcissism of youth and the students’ inability to more creatively imagine what they might be like as adults, or is evidence of the absence of meaningful inner lives among most American adults?)

Source: Historiann

She's mentioned this before, and for that matter I've linked to her when she's mentioned it. But that's because it's a really, really important point! For the record I don't think it's narcissism as much as simply growing up without a lot of good modeling of what adulthood is really like. And not to put too fine a point on it but having once been a child and now being a parent of children I think it's as bad an idea to get your ideas about adulthood from watching your parents' behavior around you as it would be to get your sex-ed instruction from watching your parents. For better or worse our behavior when our parents were interacting with us, or our behavior when we interact with our children, is not really representative of real adult behavior either whether that's outside the home, at parties or gatherings of friends, or in the bedroom.

That's not so say we just keep driving the porcelain bus after the kids are down. But neither do we just sit around and snip at each other about money or snip at our children, and each other, about chores and homework.

That's even presupposing that we marry, settle down, buy houses, and have children immediately after college.  Which, increasingly, we don't.

In retrospect I've noticed we also don't immediately die of arthritis and wrinkles either. I was not immediately clear about this when I was the age most people go to college, and I'm pretty sure I was not the only young person who's ever made that mistake.

Emily Nagoski says

I’m at a conference hosted by the federal government called “Title IX and sexual assault: changing the paradigm.” As a faculty member from the Harvard Law School mentioned at lunch, it’s remarkable that the federal government is even using the idea of “changing the paradigm.”

What’s striking to me is that their “new paradigm” is the paradigm in which I was trained in during my original training as a prevention educator and crisis hotline volunteer. In 1996.

New?

It’s stuff like:

• Most rapes involve two people who know each other “acquaintance rape,” not a stranger
• Rape is not a “miscommunication” or an accident
• Women aren’t to blame for their assault

Well, it’s the difference between the prevention/counseling/crisis response side and the law enforcement/legal side.

Source: Sex Nerd

I'd just add that while she may have had training for it in 1996 counselors were already using some version of those bullet points back in the 1980s.

Later on she mentions that the feds are still up to their asses in the notion that all sexual assaults are male on female. Not that they don't acknowledge that men are assaulted, that men assault other men, that women commit assault on women or men, that trans people can be assailants and survivors, etc. But since it's not part of their mental model they still don't sound very prepared to cope.

I think part of the problem for them might be statistical. For disgraceful but historical reasons national crime-reporting standards are very specific about what is and isn't rape, and who can and who can't commit it, etc. So a lot of the violent events people call a crisis hotline, a hospital, or 911 to report are events the feds are still legally obliged to be biased against.

So the good news is that prevention, counseling, crisis responders, and even some emergency rooms and police departments are on the ball.  Some more good news is that at the national level law enforcement is beginning to catch up. The bad news is they still have a long way to go.

Aaah, there now. After cooling off for a week or two I'm finally able to post the following without delving into an over-the-top rant about the acute immorality of those who claim the only kind of trafficking we should worry about is "sex trafficking."

Monica Potts puts her finger squarely on why I'm so overcaffeinatedly intolerant of those who dismiss all trafficking that isn't sex trafficking as a prostitution-industry smoke screen.

Carina Diaz worked in fields in upstate New York for seven years, picking tomatoes, planting onions, and growing other specialty vegetable crops like beets. During that time, she says, she and the other women she worked with were sexually harassed by their supervisor and his friend. Her supervisor groped the women, made vulgar comments and threatened them. She says she had a boss who threatened to deport undocumented workers because he didn't want to pay them bonuses they were due. In general, the supervisors acted as if the harassment were acceptable because they gave the women jobs, and the women were afraid to report the abuse because they needed the money and didn't trust law enforcement. "Supervisors touch women's bodies and they think they can get away with it," she said this morning at an event hosted by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Source: The American Prospect

By almost all accounts only about 20% of humans are trafficked into prostitution. The majority are instead trafficked into a) agriculture, b) industry (sweat shops, construction) c) domestic service and d) hospitality (i.e. janitorial / room service.)

The trick being that, y'know, even when an individual isn't trafficked into commercial sex they can still be subjected to quite a lot of sexual coercion.

For reasons that completely elude me an awful lot of people who might otherwise take a serious interest in the rape, harassment, and other sexual exploitation of trafficked and otherwise subjugated workers are so invested in making their plights invisible.

It's enough to make you think that maybe they hate prostitution for reasons that don't really have very much to do with worrying about sexual exploitation of those who perform it.

Oh for crying out loud! This isn't so much shameful as it is outrageous: for all the fucking bullshit we subject ourselves and our children to in order to "protect" teens from learning the names of the body parts they're getting pregnant with, Americans have an outrageous, even atrocious teen pregnancy rate compared to the "decadent and depraved" nations of Western Europe. Em & Lo says

Image from the website for the film Let's Talk About Sex.

Its title may be tired, but the documentary LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX is as relevant and necessary as ever in a country that’s schizo about sex, with teens paying the price in crazy rates of pregnancy and STDs.

Source: Em & Lo

And no, it's not because they cover up their teenage pregnancy rates because they have buy-one-get-one-free abortion on demand. Because even if that were true (rate of pregnancy being independent of the rate of live birth, miscarriage, or abortion -- all of which are higher here too) another graphic from the same site can't be wallpapered that way because it's not about pregnancy at all.

Image from the website for the film Let's Talk About Sex.

Ouch!

American teenagers get pregnant and contract STIs at atrocious rates because American adults keep being childish about what teenagers need to know to avoid them the first place.

And no, the blunt trauma of abstinence-only education, while evidently comforting to childish adults, doesn't seem to be the answer. It doesn't work.

In fact it doesn't even appear to work for teens who aren't ready and would prefer to wait! For that you need stuff like, oh, say, negotiation, self-assessment, confidence building, self determination, and clear boundary setting. You don't get that from classroom instruction involving sweater lint, lollypops, and shame.