Audacia Ray says

Embarrassing Sex Worker Activism:

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO: Decriminalize the practice/occupation of engaging in sexual activity between consenting adults in exchange for payment.

Dear sex worker activists: the Obama administration cannot make this happen. The criminal code is codified at a state level.

If you want to “decriminalize” aka chip away at the legal system that does harm in our lives, start researching the laws in place in your state and city that do this harm. There are lots of local laws that discriminate against sex workers and people profiled as sex workers. Like the fact that condoms can be used as evidence of prostitution, or that until it was defeated this summer, people profiled as sex workers (esp trans women of color) in Louisiana were being put on the sex offender registry.

Source: Waking Vixen

If you follow Dacia's link to the petition at WhiteHouse.gov you'll see the details of the petition are nice but vague, and that while the stated goal is "Signatures needed by Oct. 27, 2011 to reach goal of 5000," the "Total signatures on this petition," at least at the moment, are... 45.

Actually I expect the petitioners were hoping for the President to direct agencies under the control of the executive branch to back off, say, cooperation with multi-state law-enforcement "sweeps" or something.  Which wouldn't hurt.  But even then, since even then the initiatives arise from state and local levels and federal agencies such as the FBI really do mostly just cooperate, she's right that the place to go to work on this stuff is the state and local levels.

Which, since very often what's needed are human faces at human scale, local jurisdictions are probably the right place to make your cases.  And also very often it's the petty outrages like condom carrying as evidence, or sex work as sex offense* that cause the biggest law-related headaches.  And it's also often the merely venal outrages like cops shaking down sex workers for free "dates" as part of the "cost of doing business" that local activism is more likely to have some influence over.

I'd add that it probably really is state and local level activism that'll help incubate "best practices" decriminalization in the long run.  Because as we can tell from Sweden to Nevada to Holland to Australia to Vancouver(!) there are a lot of ways to do it wrong too.

Also, groundswell!  5,000,000 marchers on the D.C. Mall rarely have much impact, even with the backing of FOX news, so 5,000 petition signatures isn't going to cut it either.  If you're going to make a difference I'm... pretty sure it's going to have to be from the bottom up.

* Though, of course, never, oh never, is a customer put on the offender registry.  Even when the sex worker they select is working under duress.  Even when the sex worker they select is working under *age!*http://brilliantatbreakfast.blogspot.com/2011/09/big-dick-goes-to-canadian-pedophile.html

An intelligent answer to a question about oral sex right after brushing your teeth by post by Doctor Kate over at Em & Lo's blog reminded me of one of the shortest, most poignant posts in the old usenet alt.sex boards from (golly!) back around 1992!

I can't find the original post by a very versatile and experimental young man nicknamed Richh but it went something very close to

Don't ask me how I know this but never put toothpaste on your ass. That is all.

And don't ask me how I know, especially after reading Richh's warning, but yeah, a little tingling from leftover mint from a partner’s tongue isn’t a problem on sensitive parts of the body. But what’s tingly in very small quantities can be “OMG where’s a fire extinguisher” in larger ones.

The kinds of high concentrations of peppermint, spearmint, or wintergreen oil, like eucalyptus oil and the essential oils you get in things like toothpaste, shaving cream, perfumes, and even some kinds of ointments are a very, very different matter on more, um, tender parts of the body!

Note: I am not sure how this compares with the much bandied about Altoids Blowjob Technique. (Oh, but just two seconds of Googling suggests you can do it but don't overdo it.)

Update: I never did find the toothpaste reference but I'm sorry to say I did find an obituary for Richh, Rich Halberstein, who died in 2002. He evidently got around by wheelchair, which makes his iconoclastic, exuberantly, kinetic creative writing all the more impressive. If he'd lived a little longer he'd have been a great blogger. It would have been an excellent medium for his responsive writing style.

Photo by Flickr user sparrow611. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Jeana of My Sex Professor says

A lot of advertising is, no surprise, rather sexist and regressive when it comes to gender roles. But if the advertising demonstrates an awareness of sexist tropes, is it still sexist?

Source: My Sex Professor

Her answer, and mine, is yes. As she puts it in her title "Being Ironically Sexist Is Still Sexist"

And while we're at it, using "that's so gay" when you mean "that's so uncool" is homophobic, even if all the other kids are saying it. Even when you "know" you're cool with gay people and you're just being ironic about it.

Calling someone a "dick," a "bitch," or a "cunt" when you mean uncouth, aggressive, or ruthless is also sexist. Even when you mean it ironically.

It's not a matter of knowing what it means so it's ok to use it. It's that intentionally or not, imitating such tropes and stereotypes nevertheless flatters them.

Dear Coke Talk says

[Q] If I am unhappy in my relationship, why do I feel more miserable over the prospect of ending it?

[A] Because you mistakenly think that ending it is failure.

Source: Dear Coke Talk

First of all no, this isn't about my personal life. :-)

Second of all, though, I think this is a really, really important point about relationships.

First (didn't I already start counting once?) there are better ways than duration to measure the quality of a relationship. In the trivial sense a "fling" can be a complete relationship. For that matter so can a one-night stand. Or even a brief flirtation across a reservation desk. In the more enduring sense a relationship can be complete when you've both achieved the goals you hoped to meet together and there's nothing else you need to do with each other that couldn't better be done either alone or with someone else.

There are better ways to measure relationship failure than by when it ends. "Till death do you part" can be either "it seemed like only yesterday that we first met" or it can be spent looking at actuarial tables with the same longing intensity that high-school students look at the classroom clock.

And not to put too fine a point on it, what is for many people one of the most domestic relationships, the ones we have with our children, nevertheless effectively end after 18-20 years. This doesn't mean love fades. It does mean, though, that it changes dramatically from the complete melding when they first move in to bittersweet happiness that comes when they move away.

That we generally continue speaking to our children, continue to love them, continue to share feelings for them... unless of course they linger on or we try to hold them back. This ought to be the best indicator that romantic love needn't end either in death or anger nor feeling of failure.

Nor does it mean that a relationship fought for or clung to is a relationship that's succeeding.

Second, just as we are not our work, neither are we our relationships. Karl Marx and Carrie Bradshaw notwithstanding this is a terrible error of categories. We are people, as are out children and partners. Relationships and work are things.

Though I'm not sure she'd have thought of the child perspective I remain envious of the way Coke Talk can say the same thing in a single sentence.

Sigh.

The mildly naughty-leaning Seattle food blogger Linda Miller Nicholoson of Salty Seattle, who I just stumbled upon a day or two ago, wrote a very smart post about dealing with some kind of animal rights or possibly food-allergy troll who not only heaped the usual loads of invective on her but also threatened to both her and her child.

It's a pretty cool, level-headed post about the impact it had on her, how she located details about the commenter (including the street address associated with the originating computer's IP address) decision to go public with those details, and advice on where and how to report such computer-based threats to the appropriate local and federal authorities including a specific agency website set up for reporting not only online frauds and hacks but internet-based threats such as these.  (The Internet Crime Complaint Center.)

You should read the whole post both for context and specifics but I'd like to highlight what one of her commenters said

I got one of these comments as well (though not as troubling) with the email charles’dot’bollinger at gmail’dot’com. Both names sound similar to Charles, or Chuck.

Methinks this is that same trollish DocChuck that has been harrassing SteamyKitchen and Pioneer Woman for a long time. I know he DOES in fact live in Florida, and seems to search around for mentions of famous bloggers and attack the blogs that do the mentioning — it seems he might be googling the peanut butter pie phenomenon. Think of him as the Westboro Baptist Church of internet trolls :(

Source: Salty Seattle

This is what happens when you go public with your cyber demons -- you not only discover it's not just you, you also inform other targets that it's also not just them!

It's important to realize that no victim is ever obliged report or even publicize his or her troll's behavior.  And in fact most of the time folks deal by just moderating such comments or blocking the sender.  Although sometimes they also take down their blogs.*

But while it's ok to keep such threats quiet, by going public you can often multiply both the pressure on one's tormentor and provide solidarity and relief to other victims.  Who may in turn provide solidarity, relief, and solid suggestions, to you.

Anyway, I should also mention that Nicholoson's more typical fare, Gourmet orSaveur quality posts about food that range from philosophy to comfort to haute cuisine to molecular gastronomy, is pretty good reading.  And as a nominal sex blogger I appreciate her flip attitudes and sometimes very cute salacious analogies.  Definitely worth a look.

Update: I just noticed that Nicholoson is also the sponsor of what looks like an annual fundraiser/photography-contest site, NudieFoodies.  Again, mildly salacious while staying pretty safe for work.  Nicholoson's got the right attitude, incidentally -- for her own entry she made a bikini from marshmallow Peeps!

*For sad but obvious reasons this has been a common response among anonymous sex bloggers.  For even sadder reasons, at one time there was at least one fairly popular sex blogger who decided the best way to rise through the ranks was by smearing, stalking, and even threatening more popular competitors unless or until they dropped out!

Photo by Flickr user Jon Bragg. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Here's Lynn Gazis-Sax on the recent dealbreaker meme. Pointing out, correctly, that there's probably no controversy about what she calls "red flag" dealbreakers, and there shouldn't be much of an issue with "we don't share the same values" dealbreakers (say, a collector and a declutterer) there are also "shallow" dealbreakers. About which she has some great points (emphasis hers):

Finally, there are the “shallow” dealbreakers, the ones that involve looks, hobbies, tastes, etc. Now, the thing about shallow dealbreakers is that several things are true:

• You have the right to have any dealbreaker you darn well please.
• That “right” doesn’t mean a right never to be criticized for your dealbreakers (and it especially doesn’t mean a right never to be criticized for your dealbreakers if you announce them in a particularly rude way). It does mean that, once the deal is broken, the person you’re not going to date needs to accept no for an answer, and it does mean that at a certain point you get to tell people to butt out of your business.
• You should, in fact, not date anyone you don’t want. That applies even if the reason you don’t want him is contrary to other people’s values. It also applies if the reason you don’t want him is contrary to your own values. If, for instance, you really, really wish you could be sexually attracted to men (because your faith won’t allow you to sleep with other women), but you’re actually only attracted to women, it’s not fair to pick a guy you’re not attracted to and date him anyway. For as long as your attractions and your faith are in conflict, suck up and be abstinent; at least that way, you don’t wind up imposing on some unhappy man who would have liked a woman who actually found him attractive.
• At the same time, some “dealbreakers” may turn out to be more malleable than you thought they were. Sometimes people’s attractions even change (though the one about which sex you’re actually attracted to seems to be, if at least partly mutable for some people, pretty darn resistant to deliberate change). If you’re not happy with the men you’re actually choosing, you may want to rethink your choices. That might mean caring less about how a man dresses, or deciding that values are dealbreakers but tastes are fungible. The point here, though, isn’t to “settle” (and it isn’t that no one gets to have any “shallow” dealbreaker – see above about how you’re doing no one any favors if you date people you can’t find attractive); it’s to pick useful standards, ones that actually bring you a happy relationship, rather than being more exacting about things that matter less than about things that matter more.

Source: Noli Irritare Leones

I think the second point nicely handles, say, Jill Filipovic's defense of "shallow" dealbreakers while making sense out of Rebecca Watson's reservations about mocking those you've declined to date for "shallow" dealbreaker reasons.  While also nicely handling the case where when it's a woman who balks over a "shallow" dealbreaker it instantly stops being about the shallowness and turns into zomg there'sfeminernazifemalebichesusingwordsonmyinternetsmakeitstopppsss!!!!

But I digress.  One peculiarity in the discourse is an assumption that it's generally women who wield the dealbreakers.  Actually that's not all that peculiar in and of itself.  Inside the dominant paradigm where men are supposed to initiate and women are only supposed to accept or decline it makes sense that women's dealbreakers are visible (it's easy and almost inevitable to wonder "why did you say no") whereas men's are invisible (it's almost impossible to imagine anyone saying "why did you just not ask me out just then?")  And therefore inside the dominant paradigm it follows that there would be talk of shallow "gatekeeping" but none about the often equally shallow... I dunno... call it "gate passing."

What I don't get so much is how much of the conversation hasn't mentioned, or mocked, shallow gate passing.  (Note: if I was feeling more strident I'd mention how this is yet further another still instance where we men have the wind at our backs.)

Because it seems like the Lynn's points about dealbreaking apply equally to both responding to and initiating relationship overtures.

A month or so ago Hexy outlined one of the problems with the egregious Swedish Model of sex work "legalization."

It’s also worth noting that, under the Swedish model of policing sex work, if the police interrupt a sex work transaction, the sex worker is taken into custody.

Source: Feministe

She adds

Sex workers in Sweden have had their children removed from them when it was found that they engaged in sex work, even though doing sex work is not a criminal activity.

And then there's this

Most disturbingly, the strict pimping laws apply to people who live with sex workers (the good old ‘living off the earnings’ schtick) which may include partners and even sex workers’ children. There have been cases in Sweden already where sex workers have had their grownup children charged with pimping because they were living with them and not paying rent.

While this seems insane from an outside perspective it arises more from a serious disconnect between the feminist ideals of the law (whatever one thinks of the consequent essentialism, denial of agency, fairness, safety implications, or effectiveness) and the implementation by those who may pay only lip service to those ideals.

The strong impression I’ve gotten from people who do sex-work advocacy and research in Sweden say that whereas sex work is nominally legal, and sex workers nominally victims, in practice they’re often treated as material witnesses to illegally being a customer. With the result that being detained for income-robbing periods or having your minor or adult children threatened are just fairly typical procedures used by police almost everywhere to essentially extort cooperation.

This “material witness” ploy is evidently one of the reasons sex workers retreat back into areas that aren’t regularly patrolled by (non-corrupt) police — with the same increases of risk of rape, robbery, assault, police shakedowns, coercion into trafficking situations, or of course serial murder as we see in the standard U.S. model where sex workers are considered the criminals and customers are just naughty boys who sometimes have to go to John school.

I still don’t care much for the role sex work plays in the transactional model of sex, but I hate the kind of calculated immiseration and endangerment of sex workers that's nominally done in the name of "protecting" them.

Happy belated blog anniversary for Holly Pervocracy, who kicks off year number five by reminding us that when it comes to even progressive sex education there's still a rather enjoyable elephant in the room:

When I had my first sex ed class, they told me that the man would get an erection and put it in the woman's vagina. (They did not tell me about other configurations, which is kind of a shame considering how much those other configurations have become a part of my life. It's like taking an Auto Shop class that has a moral stance against any discussion of the radiator.) What they didn't tell me was why people would do such a thing. To have kids, okay, and... peer pressure? Low self-esteem? Media glamorization? Dealers?

By the time sex ed rolled around again, I'd gone through puberty. (And gotten an Internet connection.) I understood quite well now. And I also understood that the teacher, being post-pubescent and married herself, probably was also familiar with those funny feelings that make you want to do the baby thing. And yet those funny feelings didn't come up at all in sex ed class this time either. In a room full of people who more or less all knew full well what it feels like to have a boner or get wet or masturbate or have a wet dream, we spent an entire semester pretending to wonder why people would do such a thing. Peer pressure, perhaps...

This stalwart denial of the bleeding obvious is still following me around as an adult. Almost every discussion about sex--even the ones by the "good guys"--seems to footnote pleasure if it doesn't ignore it altogether.

Source: The Pervocracy

Yup. Because when we're finished impounding sex by overloading it with various social, political, evolutionary-psychology, and (heaven help us!) economic overtones it's almost an afterthought that we mostly do it because unless you're outright doing it wrong it feels really, really good.

And yes, as a matter of fact there really are a lot of ways to do it wrong -- not least thanks to the myriad elements we overload it with -- but if only we had some kind of well-developed social institution, maybe one that begins with "educa" and ends with "tion," that we could begin giving people in age-appropriate measures that would help them not only avoid doing it wrong but actually doing it right.

Nah, that's crazy talk.

Amanda Marcotte on the (no, seriously) bright side of right-winger comparisons of homosexuality to alcoholism.

Here's what I find fascinating about all this: the "homosexuality is like alcoholism" thing actually came about because social conservatives are trying to sound more tolerant of gays.  It's actually an attempt to evade accusations of bigotry.  The old line was basically that gays are molesters and perverts who only do gay stuff because they're bad people.  The narrative is that gays are broken people with a disease, a compulsion---and that they need "help" to overcome it.  But the public saw through that attempt at revisionism as quickly as it was concocted.  

Source: Pandagon

She reminds us that this latest slur is just, well, the latest in a slow but steady retreat from raw demonization. For many conservatives it's more a matter of, well, resistance to change -- they're still at least nominally opposed but their hearts just aren't in it anymore. See also their similarly reluctant but nevertheless evolving attitudes towards women in the workplace.

Again, it's not that they wouldn't slam on the brakes if they could -- that was pretty much the iconic William F. Buckley's definition of conservatism. It's just that as more and more gay people come out... and, as Dan Savage has pointed out, turn out to be just about as boring as anyone else, there's just not all that much to get the shrieking kajeebees about.

Lynn Gazis-Sax points out that the problem with comparing abstinence with other forms of birth control or safer sex isn't about the typical vs. ideal failure rate of the method. As methods go, abstinence is an almost* 100% effective.

Instead what's important is the typical vs. ideal rate of use. (Emphasis mine.)

One flaw in arguments for abstinence is that they often compare perfect use effectiveness rates for abstinence with typical use effectiveness rates for contraception. Maggie Gallagher, for example, places great emphasis, when speaking of contraception, on the typical use failure rates, to supply an estimate that your chances of getting pregnant if you use the Pill are actually not that low. And she has a point. If you assume a typical use effectiveness rate, for the Pill, of around 92%, and if you further note that that typical use effectiveness rate is the chance that you successfully avoid getting pregnant for just one year, the chance that you will ever be pregnant, over the course of your entire reproductive life, while you were attempting to avoid pregnancy with the Pill, may not be that small. The same is true of condoms, which have a lower typical use effectiveness rate than the Pill.

...

Condoms are better at preventing AIDS than abstinence is, for the simple reason that, however often people may fail to use condoms, they fail to abstain even more often. And most methods of birth control have a better “typical use” success rate than abstinence, in the sense that people are much better at using birth control mostly reliably than they are at abstaining from sex until they’re ready for kids.

Source: Noli Irritare Leones

* Lynn mentions the obvious case where it didn't work when Mary had Jesus, and pretty much by-definition abstinence isn't effective for someone forced to have sex against her or his will.