Ever notice there's a huge difference? A big one!

(I pulled over to type this. Maybe more later.)

So over the years you might have noticed that some people stereotype the owl-poop out of whole classes of people. It's not always malign or dismissive. Sometimes stereotyping can arise from positive or shared experiences with individuals that... can get spatula'ed onto everyone who matches the "category" in question. Which might be fine if the category of persons all really were as a) ideal as claimed, and b) as interchangeable as claimed. Oh, and c) as willing to be homogenized in someone else's mind with all the thousands or millions of individuals the onlooker imagines they resemble.

When one does this -- when one opines that "oh, 'all Africans' are so beautiful and accepting" (based, say, on your Peace Corps experience in a single village in a country continent (almost) bigger and more populous than all of North and South America put together) or "Asians are my favorite students" or "ooh, librarians are hot," etc. -- one may have nothing but the best intentions but one is still engaging in objectification.

One can be no less objectifying even if the category one is drawn to is more often negatively stereotyped. In fact, one can be no less objectifying even when you yourself are a member of the negatively stereotypes category.

I mention this first because one of the most controversial forms of objectification revolves around sexual attraction. And second, because I stumbled across a pretty cool post by new-to-me male fat activist Brian of Red No. 3 who does a very cool job of distinguishing attraction from objectification.

So, I’ve noticed some of my fellow male fat admirers throwing tantrums when women object to be sexualized without consent. These dudes whine about how the women are telling them aren’t allowed to find fat bodies attractive.

Cut that shit out. Like now.

No one is out to confiscate your boners. Sexual attraction to fat bodies is totally awesome. There may be people out there who want to shame you for your sexuality, but its not these women. So, by all means, holster your outrage and listen up.

The issue these women are complaining about isn’t sexual attraction. They are asking to be treated with respect and dignity. Try not to be shocked at this stunning request. You still get that be sexually attracted to fat women. Just, maybe respect them.

And actually, strike that maybe.

Source: Red No. 3

It's definitely worth reading the whole thing. It's ok to be attracted. It's just not ok to forget the who who always and necessarily goes with your what.

Actually, if I can briefly bring in another contentious term, we're all entitled to our preferences. In fact try not being! We are not, however, and never can be entitled to the favors or affections all or even any individuals who happen to embody our preferences.

The rest of Brian's post is similarly sharp and it would be great if you just went and read the whole post. One thing I really appreciate is the way he invokes both altruism and self-interest.

This is especially important for fat women who already live in a culture that conspires to desexualize them. They often find themselves in scenarios where they are told to choose between never being desired sexually or always being objectified sexually. That’s fucked up and wrong. You should be able to know that by just basic empathy, but I’d submit that as fat admirers its in our interest to combat thin privilege and male privilege. Not just because standing with our current or prospective romantic and sexual partners on issues of basic human dignity is the right thing to do (though that really should be enough), but its in our self-interest, too. Those restricted options women face impact us, too. We are being taught that our sexuality is wrong and that if we act upon it that we are deviants. We are told we don’t deserve to open, loving relationships with partners we are sexually attracted to. We are told we shouldn’t date them because they are “unhealthy”. We are told there must be some defect that causes our sexuality. We are being denied the opportunity to embrace our sexuality in the ways men with conventional attractions take for granted. The women who complain about objectification of fat women aren’t trying to take away our sexuality, they are trying to fight for it! We should stand with them and resist those who tell us to sexualize and objectify fat women because they don’t deserve better and we don’t deserve better.

This is just brilliant. When we judge and objectify we subject ourselves to equal objectification and judgment and consequently we reduce ourselves in the eyes of others.

And this is a universal point. Brian ends his post by opening his point

Oh, and if you’re a dude who isn’t a fat admirer, feel free to take the word “fat” out above and it apply the same to you because we all know you dudes do this shit, too.

I'd just add, finally, that the likelihood that it's men who get called for objectification is more an artifact of prior dating conventions than something (stereotypically!) innate to men: as more women take the initiative in dating, as more and more women continue to ask rather than wait to be asked, it'll be easier to notice how objectification tends to be more of a human characteristic than a gendered one.

KinkInExile has this to say about beauty. It's not clear that she's talking about gendered beauty but it's clear she's talking about her beauty.

For all the time and money I spend on beauty, fashion and the like, this morning caught me by surprise.  This morning, for reasons that are far too convoluted to go into right now, I ended up breaking down tents, dragging around easy ups, packing trucks, loading and unloading food, and generally scrambling to pull things out of the Occupy Oakland encampment ahead of an advancing police line in the mud while also smiling at and trying to be friendly and engaging toward the police.  After what felt like a sprint of activity both in its intensity and its briefness, as I disrobed next to the washing machine in my apartment and stood in a hallway, sweaty, sore, and naked except for the bandana I had used to tie my unwashed hair out of my face, I realized I hadn’t felt that beautiful in ages.

Source: Kink In Exile

I raise that mostly to contrast with an anonymous correspondent to Em & Lo implicitly offered a substantially gendered view of beauty in general and hers in particular.

Why do guys cheat down? Meaning, picking a woman less attractive. My husband cheated on me with a woman twice my size. He said he found her unattractive but couldn’t help himself. Another friend of mine (she is a model) had her husband cheat on her. It was while he was out of town and all the women were less attractive. Of course these are just two examples. I was always under the impression that if you are going to cheat, at least make it worth it.

She said it here.

So the first question should always be who's idea of beauty are we talking about? Society's? The correspondents? Her partners? My guess is that there's a difference in her experience of society's philosophy of men's relationship beauty and her partner's actual experience of it. (Which is in collision with his experience of society's expectation of him.)

Second question: What makes so many people think that conventional/consensus beauty is the only reliable metric for male attraction? Especially when it so often isn't a very good metric?

Third question: What makes her think beauty for men is an apex rather than a threshold, such that no matter how beautiful one woman is men will inevitably prefer someone even more beautiful?

Fourth question: When woman A is less beautiful but still preferred to woman B, why is the assumption that woman A must "give better head?")

Fifth question: Where do so many people get the idea that beauty is like some kind of points system such that if you’ve got more you automatically win? Or else that it’s an entitlement such that if you’ve got more you should automatically win?

Next question: Would the correspondent feel somehow better if he instead cheated “up?” (If so… if one really would feel better… then stop right there and think about that! Because really?)

Final question: I’m… pretty sure the correspondent would feel insulted if someone suggested that she, like "all women," was attracted to men based only on the gendered masculine quality of income or worth. So why think that men, including her partner, are attracted only on the gendered feminine quality of “beauty?”

---

As long as we're on the subject of gendered notions of attraction, try running the numbers again for men, substituting worthiness for beauty. For question four, replace "must give good head" with "must have a big dick."

---

A lot of years ago a now-dark blogger named Sam Sugar, trying to make a claim about men's nature, said something like "given two women with similarly attractive personalities men will choose the more beautiful one every time." It's actually even true... but not particularly telling. First because what at least ought to be an obvious corollary: "given two women with similar beauty, men will choose the one with the more attractive personality. Second the same true but empty observation could be made about women's attraction to men.

I think the fallacy, which Sam Sugar was perpetuating and which I think a lot of people fall for, is the idea that men simply aren't aware of any qualities other than beauty in women such that they express deep surprise when men actually do enjoy and often prefer other qualities more.

Similarly, of course, it seems to perpetually surprise people when women fail to ignore beauty in men.

---

If you look at beauty in KinkInExile's terms I think it's a lot harder to have disconnects between social expectations and our actual experiences.

---

Disclaimer: I know I sound like I'm all about heteronormativity all the time. Instead just think there's a lot more unconscious assumptions to question about heteronormativity, and that it takes a lot more effort to become conscious of them.

Photoshopped Image from LadyMissKate on Tumblr. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Anyone care to guess how the paragraph in quotes, below, might directly affect your sex life?

Wall Street Journal columnist Eric Felten points out a fascinating problem with the new federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which intentionally or not, makes it a pretty severe crime to fail to follow (for instance) any of the conditions set out in Apple's seventeen thousand word terms of service agreement that you have to click in order to download an iPhone app or iTune MP3.

No. Federal prosecutors aren't very likely to bring charges. But it's still interesting to note that if the obscenely over-stated law is not overturned or amended that...

As it stands, the statute allows punishment of anyone who "exceeds authorized access" to any computer. According to critics of the law, such as Prof. Kerr (himself once a computer-crime prosecutor at the Justice Department), that vague and broad statutory language makes it a federal offense to violate any Terms of Service agreement. Take the user compact for the dating site Match.com, which states "You will not provide inaccurate, misleading or false information…to any other Member." At the congressional hearing this week, Prof. Kerr argued that, given people's natural propensity to fudge when cataloging their physical assets, "Most Americans who have an Internet dating profile are criminals under the Justice Department's interpretation of the CFAA."

Source: bookofjoe

Postscript note for any anti-government conservatives in the audience. The term you're looking for here isn't "government-bureaucratic overreach," it's "regulatory capture by industry."

Via Joe Stirt,

Emily Nagoski says

In looking up something unrelated, I stumbled into this 2010 British Journal of Pharmacology article (pdf). You don’t have to read it, I’ll tell you why it’s bullshit.

It’s the first sentence in the abstract, that’s why. It reads:

Female sexual arousal consists of a number of physiological responses resulting from increased genital blood.

Aaaaaaaand, that’s why the pharmaceutical industry is stupid.

Source: sex nerd

I was just going to do a nice post related to Lidia Anain's lovely post about enjoying the personal benefit of busting the myth that men don't need foreplay. Which is just awesomely true...

In fact I'm going to cheat for a second and post a quote, even though that's really not what my post is going to be about. Here's Anain:

During that session of lovemaking, I realized how much he needed, wanted and loved foreplay! *It* wasn’t that great always between us when we got into bed but *it* was great on this day. A few minutes of foreplay had gotten him very excited and so in control that he was able to hold back just until he knew that I was coming and he let go!

After we both had amazing orgasms, I had an epiphany – the sex that followed me giving him foreplay had ALWAYS been better than when he didn’t get it.

Read the whole thing at Lydia Anain: sex, love & joy uncensored. Hat tip ErosBlog.

Sigh. Her whole post is great but what totally derailed my posting intention.

You know that sentence Emily Nagoski quoted? The one that's all you really need to know they're stupid?

Check out the next sentence from the abstract of that study! How did they decide sexual arousal is just a matter of physiological responses? And not maybe some combination of emotion, mood, SSA overcoming SSI, and physiological response?

They figured it out by...

Shooting dying rabbits with lasers!

Really.

Check it out.

“Vaginal and clitoral blood flow (VBF and CBF) were monitored using laser Doppler in terminally anaesthetized New Zealand rabbits. Increases in VBF and CBF were induced by either electrical stimulation of the pelvic nerve or by i.v. infusion of VIP.”

Source: British Journal of Paid Advertising Pharmacology (pdf)

I would so not want my friends to date any of those researchers!

I think sports-writer emeritus Frank Deford is almost right about the silence... knowing, uncomfortable, yes, but still silence... at Penn State.

[A]s always, always, the defenders of football are furious that the violence might be curtailed by do-gooders, that football will be sissified. The expression heard from the time little boys first play is that football "teaches you to become a real man," to be manly. Nobody ever says that about even the most sublime basketball or baseball players.

The only other North American school sport that approaches football in its meanness is ice hockey, and — yes, maybe just coincidentally — hockey has also experienced horrifying cases of pedophile coaches that went unreported for years. How could anyone believe an abused boy that such a manly sport could possibly produce such sexually perverted men?

For football's devotees, the sport is public proof that our American men are still tougher than anyone else. Because of that reputation of machismo — that conceit, that creed — it surely becomes painful, almost traitorous, for men who love football to accept such an abject contradiction of their sport's manliness — the very rape of a little boy by a coach.

Source: National Public Radio

There is a degree of transgression-denial in major college sports. (And to a lesser degree professional sports.) I don't agree, however, that coaches are afforded the same latitude for behavioral transgressions that players are. Football players, especially, are encouraged to be quick tempered, violent, and at least somewhat entitled. And coaches are sort of encouraged to skate as close to the lines in order to win, first of all, but also to foster players who can win and winnow out players who can't. So while they may be excused for "going overboard" on players and of course for recruiting violations they're not really excused for personal transgressions such as car theft, real-estate fraud, or... pedophilia.

I think instead what's going on is something closer to what show-conservative David Brooks wrote about in a recent column: a sort of institutional numbness and... call it a "circle the wagons" mentality that's common in many, many organizations from football teams to insurance offices to "kink" communities: "this would make us all look bad so let's ignore it or cover it up." One really good diagnostic for organizations like that? Is there a hierarchy such that when you witness a crime an implicit or even explicit policy obliging you to report it to a superior rather than to the police. At Penn State, in the Catholic Church, at Goldman Sachs or Leman Brothers, in the Boy Scouts of America, in most political parties, in "alt" cultures, and in formal and informal kink communities there usually is such a "report up" rather than "report out" culture. The consequences are rarely pretty. Bottom line: no one should have to rely on a manager, supervisor, or mentor to call the police about an issue you've witnessed with your own two eyes.

So to that extent I think Deford and Brooks miss the mark. It's not a football problem, and it's not a Rwanda/Bosnia/Tea-Party problem, it's an institutional culture one.

Is it "worse" because we expect more from our sports heros?  I don't think so.  Surely we expect no less from our priests and politicians, from our "dungeon masters," our scout leaders, our soldiers, or our bankers.  And not just from the guys (and it's still mostly guys) way up the hierarchies who for predictable if not admirable reasons must keep their eyes, ears, mouths and... all to often... their noses closed.

New York based sex-worker advocate Crystal DeBoise has a positively charming example of how anti-prostitution tactics produce results we'd... probably rather not have produced.

Last winter, “Sheila,” a sex worker in her early 20s, had just finished her counseling session with me at the Sex Workers Project, and was heading out the door. Sheila was seeking counseling from the Sex Workers Project to help her make a career change, but had no financial support and was still working in the sex industry. I gestured towards our colorful shoebox of condoms, lube and pamphlets about safe sex and reminded her to take whatever she needed. She looked at me as if I were suggesting she walk into the January snow barefoot and said, “Are you crazy? I’m not carrying those things around! You want me to get arrested or something?”

Sheila was referring to a situation in New York that permits the use of condoms as evidence of prostitution, resulting in their collection and confiscation from women who are detained by the police. This practice is an outright slap in the face to the decades of hard work that public health advocates have undertaken to increase safe sex, decrease HIV and create a positive shift in the cultural acceptance of condom use. This policy discourages a stigmatized and marginalized group of sexually active people from carrying the tools they need to be healthy and safe. And this occurs despite the fact that the New York City itself runs a free condom distribution program because “Using a condom every time you have anal, oral or vaginal sex protects you and your partners from getting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases … and prevents unplanned pregnancies.”

Source: Feministe

I'm pretty sure you could find the random conservative fundamentalist, or cartoonishly stereotypical pimp, or neo-conservative "feminist," or trans-phobist, or heck, even gay basher who really, truely doesn't care that sex workers are discouraged from protecting themselves or their customers from illness or death by anti-condom police policies.  But I don't think you'd find very many.   Therefore I'm not sure what, exactly, the appeal of the we'll bust you if we catch you with condoms policy really is.

It's often observed by college students that one is most inclined to clean one's room when one should be writing one's term papers. Similarly ones term papers urgently demand attention to the precise degree that one's room needs cleaning.

This morning I have been doubly productive -- not only cleaning to the uttermost depths of the refrigerator but also knocking out posts with aplomb. I have not, however, made an inch of progress on a project that a) I'll actually get paid to do that is b) due Monday morning. :-P

Meanwhile, though, I might as well mention something I've been meaning to write about in greater detail for several weeks. In one of my whirlwind patrols of the Tumblr erotic self-photograpy circuit I've started to notice more and more women seem to be picking up the vulva equivalent of male cock-shot syndrome. While increasing numbers of women seem to be engaging in this allegedly exclusively male behavior I don't know if they're yet emailing them to random recipients on dating sites. But I sort of imagine that as time passes and social permissions equalize we'll probably start seeing a little more of women doing it.

Another observation about the male-cock-shot syndrome. Just as not all women are likely to start exclusively posting 8x10 color glossies of their vulvas, it turns out that neither do most men!

It also occurs to me that, gender narratives notwithstanding, a lot of men may have been sending out those photos for the same reason women seem to have started doing it. Because they can, sure. But also not so much because they're aggressive or even utterly, esthetically clueless. I think instead it's because they imagine that everyone else will be as fascinated by the poster's locus of erotic pleasure as the posters themselves tend to be.

Well.

Duty calls.

Oh, not that duty though! I can't work on my paid, near-deadline project now, oh no. Now I have to go shopping for the week!

After that I may have to mop the roof! :-P

Kaili Joy Gray asks yet another big WTF to what she calls Feminism™. The issue? What one would imagine to be the premier pro-choice/abortion-rights organization in America, NARAL/ProChoiceAmerica, waited till... the week before the election to comment on Mississippi Initiative 26, the so-called "Personhood Amendment" that would have outlawed not only abortion and stem-cell research but miscarriages and as many forms of non-barrier birth control as opponents could think of.

Seriously? Just a week before? Yeah, seriously, just a week before.

[T]hank god NARAL sweeps in, just days before the election, to educate us about something we apparently know nothing about. Excellent timing, isn't it? Because if we are really as ignorant as Nancy Keenan thinks we are, a few days is plenty of notice to launch an effective campaign to defeat the bill, isn't it?

Source: Daily Kos

What really seems to chap Gray's ass is the headline of NARAL president Nancy Keenan's press release at Huffington Post: "The War on Women You Haven't Heard of."

Seriously? Yes, seriously.

Just for the record, a) whereas Mississippi's "Personhood" amendment has been going wall to wall since roughly minutes after it was first introduced back in March of 2011, and b) whereas even the National Organization for Women, which can sometimes be, um, slow to respond was mentioning the the amendment last summer, and c) whereas even the NARAL branch Pro-Choice Ohio was all over the admendment, a fairly detailed search of the NARAL site suggests that, indeed, the organization that's nominally the premier pro-choice organization and certainly one of the biggest sources of pro-choice donations first mentioned Mississippi's "Personhood" amendment on November 1st! Seven days before the election.

Oops. Except Keenan mentioned it first in the Huffington Post. At NARAL/ProChoiceAmerica it was first mentioned... the day after the election!

Which kind of leaves me in the same camp as Kaily Joy Gray. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, if NARAL does not want to use its public platform and fundraising prowess to advance the cause of choice, I know some people who would like to borrow it for a time, provided they could see how it could be made to do something.

Because seven days before election night?!?!?! Sweet mother of pearl!

Lest you think NARAL/ProChoiceAmerica focuses only on choice at the national level, and prefers to leave minor issues like Initiative 26 to state an local chapters, Gray points out (correctly as far as I can tell) that the national organization has been equally mum on any of the several groups in Congress and the Senate who are currently circulating "Personhood" amendments to the Constitution.

Which leaves me wondering (as does Gray) whether NARAL intends to wait to start fundraising organizing till seven days before Congress tries to pass "personhood" Amendment, or perhaps till seven days before the 38th (and therefore last) state ratifies?

!#%*&%@!

David Futrelle has the scoop.

The most common “critique” of the #mencallmethings hashtag that blew up on Twitter last week was that the women posting examples of misogynistic shit they got called online were making a big deal out of nothing.

...

It’s funny, then, that when MRAs find themselves described with less-than-flattering language they have a strange tendency to act like they’ve suddenly been struck with a case of the vapors. Witness the reaction of MRAs when someone calls them the “c-word.” No, not “cunt” – “creep.”

Source: Man Boobz

Now as it happens, I agree that calling a man a creep is a very, very rude thing. And implying that all men are creeps, as, say, the egregiously offensive Robert Jensen evidently routinely does is really, really degrading, demeaning, and very bad. (Not to mention, in Jensen anyway, extraordinarily self-hating.)

But, seriously, a little perspective here would be welcome. If you think someone is "thin skinned" or "can't take a joke" just because you called her a "cunt*" but when she turns around and calls you a "creep" you have a heavy metal breakdown? Irony. It's in the dictionary somewhere between "hypocrisy" and "perspective."

* or any subset of other gender-specific epithets Sady Doyle has conveniently cataloged in a single post.