Via Daily Kos, and the Huffington Post the Guttmacher Institute noted that in 2011 the state of North Dakota, restless with the prospect of abstinence only before marriage, decided to take things a little further (emphasis mine.)

A new requirement enacted in North Dakota mandates that the health education provided in the state include information on the benefits of abstinence “until and within marriage.”

Source: Guttmacher Institute

Wowzie, huh?  Sounds almost too good to be true, eh?

Well, to be fair it's only mostly true, as a little bit privacy sacrifice to Google reveals.

According to the Minot (North Dakota) Daily News last April

Rep. RaeAnn Kelsch, R-Mandan, the chairwoman of the conference committee, said the phrase "before marriage" could lead students to think they're sexually unrestricted after getting married.

"This sends a much stronger, louder message, and probably more true to the facts," Kelsch said. "Once you're married, it doesn't mean that abstaining from outside issues goes away, and children should be taught that."

Source: Minot Daily News

I'm not positive this is better.  It would indeed be ludicrous for anyone to seriously advocate abstinence within marriage.  And it doesn't look like that's what Kelsch was advocating in her wording change.  (Another story reports that her committee met 12 times to hash out the wording of that one sentence.  So it's not surprising that it might sound a little muddled.)

Instead it sounds like maybe Kelsch thinks North Dakota's children are too stupid to realize that "abstinence in marriage" implies "and monogamous within marriage."  And so she felt it was important to spell it out.

I dunno.  I assume she knows North Dakotans better than I do.  And so perhaps she's responding to some spate of post-marital swinger orgies.  My guess would be that instead she's instead just signaling conservative "credentials" in a state that's already so right-wing conservative there's just not many other directions left in which to express "concern."

So again, probably not as ridiculous as it can be made out to be... but still pretty seriously ridiculous.

Jill Filopovic on the way one Virginia State senator is tackling 'wingers tendencies to use even healthcare to encourage men's sexuality and discourage women's.

To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.

“We need some gender equity here,” she told HuffPost. “The Virginia senate is about to pass a bill that will require a woman to have totally unnecessary medical procedure at their cost and inconvenience. If we’re going to do that to women, why not do that to men?”

Her amendment didn’t pass, but good on her.

Now don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that men should have to undergo rectal exams and cardiac stress tests before getting Viagra. I think that’s silly and wasteful and unnecessary and invasive. But I also think that women’s health is so routinely politicized, and is so widely accepted as something that it’s ok to politicize, that turning the tables might make men think a little bit harder about these issues. Right-wing politicians have positioned reproductive rights as about abortion and babies, not as what they really are: Fundamentally tied to the body. Laws like this force that conversation; they force politicians to explain why a procedure tied to female reproduction should included legally-mandated penetration and shame, while male reproduction gets a smile and a prescription.

Source: Feministe

And of course both Jill and Sen. Howell have been clear that they don't think either men or women should have burdensome, intrusive, and unnecessary procedures imposed on them when all they really need is routine medical care. They were joking -- the seem to believe that both men and women are entitled to ordinary sexual health and healthcare. The 'wingers, unfortunately, are dead serious about increasing the imbalance between what men and women receive.

Kind of weird what you get when you run that L.A. Times article about Tim Gunn's 29 years of celibacy" through Regender.com.

The original article is kind of a piece of work. The reporter (and, evidently tens of thousands of people querying Google) are somewhere between shock, fascination, and denial that the Project Runway co-host hasn't had sex since the early 1980s. All the more so because Gunn says it hasn't been a very big deal for him.

The real hoot is that people who (correctly) don't bat an eye that Gunn's last relationship was with a man nevertheless disapprove of his failure to be sexual at all for three decades.

Another weird thing about the original article is that the reporter asked, of all people, a surgeon who specializes almost exclusively in women's health and sexuality to opine on Gunn's "condition." (You'd think they could find at least one psychologist or urologist in LA who regularly sees gay men. Or men period.)

Even weirder, or more like unpleasant, is what the surgeon, Dr. Jennifer R. Berman, has to say.

...Gunn's 29-year, self-imposed dry spell was "not a natural state."

[and]

Berman said that, if she were treating Gunn, she'd like to know: Does he continue to be celibate by choice -- or out of fear? For example, she said, if we lived in a magical world where sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS were not an issue ... would Gunn still abstain from sexual intimacy?

"It's not a natural sort of decision, nor is it biological or physiological -- we are not wired that way," she said. "It sounds like there are issues relating to trust," she added.

Source: The Los Angeles Times

Or, as Jill of I Blame the Patriarchy put it

"If she were treating him for this “illness,” she says, she would get to the bottom of his debilitating trust issues, for Man Must Boink!"

She said it here.

Look, I don't want to single out Berman, or even the reporter, and certainly not all the people who think this is just earth-shattering news. Imagine, a man! Who doesn't have sex! Inconceivable! Almost intolerable!* But that whole "man must boink" business is as clearly socially constructed as a Windsor tie. What's really chilling is that a man who doesn't "boink" isn't just weird, he's broken and wrong and by gum we'd better fix him or else really break him!

Call it the opposite of the other obligatory gender construction, "slut shaming." A man who, when given a choice to take it or leave it picks "leave it" ought to be ashamed of himself. And the only reason people don't shame the crap out of them is there are just a whole lot more places to hide, and a whole lot fewer witnesses (how does one witness not doing it anyway?)

There are a lot of really bad consequences to this assumption that "man must boink." Really bad. And given that, going back as far as the late 1970s researchers have notice that as many as 15% of adult men really would rather not, that's a lot of potential bad stuff. For instance you know that eternal "joke" about how 90% of men masturbate and the other 10% are liars? If you're not one of the 100% who everyone "knows" wants sex then you're going one of a couple of ways, none of them very good and some really bad. For instance you might do really ugly stereotype-ish things because you're trying to "pass." Or you might take the prim/prudish path and say all sex is sin and should only be done "for reproduction." If that. Or you might just lie a lot. But since we live in a misogynist culture pretty much all the ways of "passing" involve misogyny, and since people trying to pass tend to be over the top then, yeah, you can end up with a lot of over-the-top misogyny.

Most of which (though not all) could be mitigated (though probably not eliminated) if the asshats at USAToday and "experts" from the L.A. Times would keep their ignorant, stereotype-enforcing pie holes shut.

A few years ago I got a brainstorm from one of Twisty Faster's posts and decided that in a lot of ways it makes more sense to say that men are the "sex class" (meaning they're the class constructed to be reflexively, uncontrollably, obligately sexual) while women might be better designated as the "no sex" class where it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable that a woman would ever experience, let alone admit, sexual interest. In either case, people who don't fit their respective stereotypes aren't just thought to be somewhere on the normal bell curve, and they're not just considered maybe a little quirky, and they're not maybe just in a less-obvious part of the population, they're broken, sick, wrong, and actually kind of a threat. One that needs to be "mended," or explained away or even outright denied.

The opprobrium heaped on Gunn just makes the case. He's male but not obligately sexual and he's suddenly weirder than if he had three buttocks.

More proof, by the way, that society's patriarchal. And classed. And gendered.

Me? I'm not on the same part of the bell curve as Gunn but since my first trip through a gym lockerroom in 7th grade I've experienced intense pressure not just to "be a man" but to be compulsively sexual. Sexual's fine -- I like being sexual -- but compulsively? No, that's not been good at all -- it pushed me into places I'd rather not have gone, before I was ready to go there, and I'm just continuing to confront, over and over, the places that pressure told me to go that I really should never have gone and wish I hadn't.

I wish Tim Gunn and all the other asexual and unsexual people in the world the best of luck, sure, but even more I wish they got a little more understanding too. Actually, more than that, earnestly hope someday they'll be as tolerated and accepted as "not broken" as anybody else.

Ugg. Sorry about the rant. Hope it doesn't sound like man'splaining, it's just... I've got a lot of frustration about this. And I'm really glad you brought it up, Jill, because if we're ever going to get out of the patriarchy/gender trap (I know we have different opinions about whether we can) we're going to have to get people to stop contemplating psychiatric "fixes" for men who don't fit the "and the other 10% are lying" stereotype.

* Where have I used that kind of language before? No, I probably won't make it Rule #3. But...

Note: I lightly edited this post for clarity and a couple of more glaring typos when Andrew Sullivan linked to it. There are bound to be plenty of other typos and general grammar failures. --fl

Image by Flickr user Mark Klotz. Used under a Creative Commons license.

In a review of historic opposition to contraception in the face of President Obama's directive that (virtually) all employee healthcare plans fund contraception for women the way they fund Viagra and Cialis for men E.J. Graff first reviews the biggest standard, historic objection to contraception

Late-19th- and early-20th-century pundits said that the nation would become a bordello if anyone could have sex without consequences and warned of the death of the American family.

Source: TAPPED

And finds it wanting (emphasis mine)

In other words, women can work for Catholic hospitals, colleges, social-services groups, and so on—and still have the same rights to sexual health coverage as men, under the same plans. All that Viagra needn't lead to either 19 children and counting; to abortions; or to impoverished women.

Ouch!

The Viagra-but-no-pill argument actually cuts two ways with hidebound institutions such as the Catholic and many Protestant churches. Their argument against contraception is that it interferes with women's "natural and normal" functioning, and thus constitutes an unnatural intervention in human reproduction.

The problem, of course, is that even if one were to argue (as the Catholic hierarchy in fact still does) that "virtuous" men could use Viagra "only" for reproduction there's the issue of the Church's ban on other forms of "unnatural intervention" like in-vitro and artificial insemnation. Sort of by-definition if a guy can't get a woodie without medication then "nature" has decreed he should do without.

And yet to the very best of my knowledge there is no Church doctrine forbidding its employee insurance plans from covering, or indeed its healthcare facilities from dispensing, Viagra or Cialis.

But I digress...

At the end of the day, neither Viagra or Cialis have created catastrophic baby booms, orgy outbreaks, upticks in divorce, or any of the other bugaboos projected by opponents of contraception. Certainly not among the kind of people willing to become employees of the Church.

Therefore prior evidence suggests that contraception availability will also not produce similar licentiousness.  Nor, as we have seen, above, is contraception any more of an "unnatural intervention" in fertility than is Viagra or Cialis.  Both claims, therefore, are red herrings.  There may be <em>some</em> legitimate reason that conservatives object to giving women control over their own fertility.  But if so they don't seem very comfortable saying it.  Thus the prevarication.

Last week I posted a comment I added to Em & Lo's regular "Wise Guys" feature. This week I'm in the rotation as Em & Lo's "straight married" Wise Guy, answering the question...

“What would you tell a guy who was intimidated by the idea of his partner bringing sex toys into the bedroom?”

Source: Em & Lo

Here's how I answered (slightly reformatted since, hey, now it gets to be a second draft):

The dead cliché answer would be to remind him that they’re only called “toys” and “novelties” to get around puritanical blue laws.In reality, you could tell him, sex “toys” are tools for sex. Guys like tools.

But here’s a more original approach: Tell him, if someone brings a Monopoly board into the den it would be a pretty good sign she’d like to play [Monopoly] with you, right? So if your partner brings a sex toy into the bedroom that’s an even better sign she wants to play with you.

Yeah, we men are under a lot of social pressure to feel inadequate or even jealous about... well... all kinds of things. But, seriously, once you give up on the idea that sex is a test it can be a heck of a lot of fun. Whatever you want to call them, sex toys are pretty much always going to make sex even more fun. For both of you.

Guest-blogger Ziff of Feminist Mormon Housewives wonders

Number of times pornography has been mentioned in General Conference in the past 20 years: 128

Number of times rape has been mentioned: 4

I’ve been wondering recently why General Authorities spend so much time condemning porn use and so little time condemning rape. Porn use and rape seem like related problems: they’re sexual wrongs that men do to women. (I realize they aren’t exclusively done by men or exclusively done to women, but this is their most common variety, and that’s what I’ll talk about.) So why in the Church is there so much focus on one and so little on the other?

Source: Feminist Mormon Housewives

Ziff says he has basically no experience with either rape or porn, and says therefore most of what he says should be considered speculation. And based on some of his speculation you can sort of tell. That said he also drills in very nicely.  From his list of why the church might choose to focus on rape.

6. GAs may blame women for rape, at least to some degree. I think this is evident in the excessive rhetoric on modesty they direct at young women with the rationale that women control men’s thoughts. It’s a short step from blaming women for men’s thoughts to blaming women for men’s actions. Their attitude probably shouldn’t be surprising considering the ages of the most senior GAs: they were raised in a time when blaming women for rape was probably typical.

7. GAs may not realize that most rape victims are raped by men they know. This is pretty speculative on my part, but if GAs are hanging on to the old belief that rapists are mostly strangers lurking in dark allies, they may feel like it’s hopeless to preach to such psychopaths. Again, given their ages, it wouldn’t be surprising if they believed this.

And from his reasons why his church should address rape more directly than it has been.

A. Mormon women are particularly vulnerable to being raped. They are taught to be deferential and submissive.

...

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being tender, kind, and refined. But resisting rape requires toughness, and probably also coarseness and rudeness. Women who are taught that toughness is worldly and therefore wrong are women who are less likely to stand up and say no when their boyfriends or husbands are pushing them sexually in ways they don’t want to go.

B. Mormon women are particularly likely to blame themselves for being raped. As I’ve already mentioned, there’s not much Church teaching out there on the topic of rape. A woman who is raped is likely to find only the old line of thinking popularized by President Kimball that a woman is better of dying than ‘allowing’ herself to be raped. She may also connect the dots as I did in reason #6 above, and figure that she must be to blame for being raped because of what she wore (or if she doesn’t do this, people around her may do it for her).

Both of these teachings are incredibly destructive. Women are not responsible to sacrifice their lives if attacked by a rapist. Women’s clothing choices are not to blame for rape. The last thing women who are raped need is a heaping pile of guilt to add to their pain. GAs’ choice to leave these teachings out there unrepudiated is a choice to let women suffer more.

It's good stuff.  And while he, as a Mormon, is specifically referencing the teachings of his particular church it's really, seriously important not to get caught saying "oh yeah, those whacky, out-of-touch Mormon elders."  Because, duh, the same dynamics affect a heck of a lot of other denominations.

For that matter, as has been much observed lately, the same dynamics affect <em>atheists!</em>  Who may not rail about porn as much but sure as heck ruminate on rape in their own communities.

Speaking of impacts on communities, another of Ziff's speculations ought to make every self-interested heterosexual male take note.  (Emphasis mine.)

Rape is far more evil than porn use is. This is the obvious response to #1. A man who rapes a woman not only hurts her in the moment of the act, he also likely causes her to suffer for a long time afterward. Her experience of sex, which should be such a wonderful way to connect with her partner, becomes laden with horrifying associations. Her ability to trust other people will likely be harmed, making all kinds of social interaction more difficult. Her feeling of personal safety may also be reduced, restricting her ability to go to particular places or to go out at particular times. I can’t see that porn use is anything like as bad as this.

You know, the funny thing about stereotypes is that even nominally "inoffensive" ones like, say, things we "know" must be true about Mormon men given their church's history, can be damagingly off the mark.

Almost by definition allies aren't soul mates.  (For instance the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were allies in world war two!)  And so almost by definition we're going to have differences with allies that we might not have (or that we at least overlook) in soul-mate affinity groups.  But we can find allies in the most unexpected places.  And we overlook or, worse, alienate allies at our peril.

Tweet from @LOLGOP.

Objectively speaking, Britney Spears is more likely to be a competent President than Newt Gingrich. Yet nobody's calling her activities "leadership."* Meanwhile, objectively speaking, Newt Gingrich has had more sex partner than Britney Spears.* Yet nobody's calling him a "whore."

This observation isn't particularly limited to the GOP in particular or even conservatism in general -- in non-partisan terms Gingrich is just a poster child of a much larger phenomen.  The bogus Two Rules of Desire are alive and well.

* Note: Rumors and tabloid headlines about her private life notwithstanding, Spears is an adroit public performer, choreography, producer, and impresario.
** Note: Rumors and tabloid headlines nothwithstanding, Spears' total "life list" of sexual partners still isn't that much higher than the number of Gingrich's marriages, let alone his other affairs, dalliances, hookups, or casual/commercial sexual relationships.

Image by Benjamin Dewey of Things Could Be Worse. Order a print here.

Benjamin Dewey says draws

Do You know a ravishing scientist who deserves more attention for her mathematical derivations than for her aesthetic wonders? Show her you understand how vexing the veil of comeliness can be when it masks an equally exquisite brain for which no one shows a primary concern! This illustration is available as a keepsake from my emporium.

Tagged: For Lisa Randall. Steph Levi. Saskia de Vries and Hedy Lamarr Beauty Great Thinker Lady Scientist Cupid Brilliant often overshadows work Deriving Maxwell's Equations for the Potentials chalk top hat love

Source: Things Could Be Worse

It's kind of a big deal. There was a sort of lowlife blogger years ago who'd preface many of the images he'd repost with comments like "With a body like that she should never have to work a day."

Leaving aside the insane idea that supporting one's self with sex or "beauty" isn't work, where does anyone get the idea that it would be fun to have a brain and never fucking use it?

In my socially checkered past I've managed to live in a number of situations where one occasionally encounters "kept" women: higher-end rock music culture, cocaine-dealer culture (closely related to the preceding), middle-upper-class and upper-upper-class neighborhoods (where I was a paperboy), and country-club culture (related to the preceding.) And near as I can tell, a almost-synonymous word for people (mostly women) who not only aren't expected not to work but are outright expected not to work is "alcoholic."

Human beings don't make very good pets.

Years and years ago a friend my age, a nursing student who had grown up in country-club culture, said she had to get out because what other girls from her neighborhood were going through was either making them insane or driving them to drink. She said, yeah, it might sound like fun to "do nothing but lie on your back eating bonbons and drinking Cutty Sark," while your husband worked, the gardner and maid took care of the house and the nanny took care of the kids, but, "Frankly I'd be happier changing bedpans for a living." (I lost touch with her decades ago, before she finished nursing school, but she was on track to become a Nurse Practitioner rather than a bedpan changer.)

I dunno. I've been catching up on my reading this morning and running into a lot of commentary by women scientists, women skeptics, women in medicine, and even little girls trying to go to school. The theme is just...

You know what, it's just dumb! Not to mention just an unbelievable assault on human potential. Not to mention an even bigger insult to half of all of humanity! But mostly just really fucking dumb. Richard Fineman was attractive enough but no one ever suggested he couldn't be attractive and also win a Nobel Prize in physics. Anderson Cooper is attractive enough but no one ever suggest he's "too pretty to do real reporting." And even though the first President George Bush selected the sorry-assed J. Danforth Quayle for his good looks ("women will be throwing their underwear at him at campaign stops"), and even though he was never smarter than a bag full of golf balls, there was still never any question that he was also going to work. Heck, even Mitt (Mittens) Romney, who was born with both a silver foot in his mouth and a full head of hair continues to work even after making further piles of money putting other people out of work. And while a lot of people believe he shouldn't do the job he's looking for, nobody deplores his basic interest or desire in working, period. So where's the fucking contradiction in women being attractive and working? Brilliantly or otherwise?

Y'know, Echidne of the Snakes is a pretty four-square feminist. So check out how she "hates" men.

It's hard for me to address [anti-feminist Caitlin] Flanagan's theories as they are based on such an odd concept of what adolescent boys and adult men are all about. At the same time, she refuses to even look at the question what the culture might be teaching adolescent boys (this is very evident in the interview, the way she slithers away from any attempt to move the question to both boys and girls).

Source: Echidne of the Snakes

Good for her! She approvingly cites Amanda Marcotte's assessment of Flannagan's notions of what boys are all about (in the process doing an excellent job of capturing Flannagan's complete investment in the bogus Two Rules of Desire:

[F]or all the puffery about girlhood fascinations and diaries, Flanagan is really only making one argument, one we know really well, that goes like this:

• Boys and men only care about sex, and mainly see girls and women as these tedious obstacles between them and pussy.
• Girls and women only care about romance---the more princessy, the better---and see sex as this filthy ritual they have to perform in order to get it.
• Therefore, women should use sex as a bartering chip to get men to pretend to like us.

Amanda said it here.

So what have we got going on here? Two died-in-the-wool feminists, Echidne and Amanda, standing up pretty vigorously for men and boys, and desperately anti-feminist Flannagan blithly running them into the dirt.

Look, are there women out there who really, genuinely, truely hate men's guts? Yeah. But they're not exactly feminists are they? Stereotypes notwithstanding, feminists mostly rock when it comes to men. And yeah, they get exasperated when men fall for the kind of bullshit Flannagan shovels. But that's not quite the same thing as hate is it? Not a bit.

Photo by Flickr user Universal Pops. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So for their regular weekly Wise Guys feature Em & Lo asked for answers to a reader's question: "What’s the appeal of the “money shot?" Although I'm one of their Wise Guy contributors the question didn't pop up in my rotation. But I did leave a comment. Em & Lo were then nice enough to make it their comment of the week this week.

So once again the question was "What’s the appeal of the “money shot?" Here's what I said.

I’m not even stepping into the whole “facial” business. I’ll just point out Charlie Glickman’s thoughts from a post that arrived in my newsreader moments before this one.

Instead I’ll just say I think the “money shot” is a seriously stupid dual artifact of porn. First, in the production of porn it’s just way more convenient to towel semen off skin than out of bodily orifices and therefore it’s more cost effective. This is why, at least early on, it was the low-budget porn shops that did money shots rather than the well-heeled ones. Second, for decades, anyway, porn was primarily an aid for male masturbation and so, I think, money shots are a way to help watchers identify with male actors.

I really think the masturbation element is key. Yes, you’ll occasionally see men’s parters “finishing” them off, but for the vast, vast, vast majority of cases the man essentially stops interacting physically with his partner, steps back a ways, and basically jacks off.

Again, fine if you’re at home alone. But seems to me sort of the whole point of sex with a partner is to have sex with them… not just on them.

Now, that said, don’t get me wrong. If you’re both into it (and increasing numbers of both men and women seem to be) and it’s all good clean fun for both of you then great. Lots of great things about “sex” don’t actually involve sex.

Also, that said, another name for “money shots” is “the withdrawal method.” And while nothing in life is certain, when ejaculation occurs outside a partner’s body it at best reduces the odds of pregnancy and STI transmission and even at worst it evens them out between the semen donor and semen receiver. So that’s ok too.

But at the end of the day, for me, the physical pleasure reduction of orgasm via masturbation rather than with a partner isn’t worth whatever symbolic enjoyment it seems to bring other people.

So, again for me, thanks but no thanks.

Source: Em & Lo

Note: I shared the comment-of-the-week slot with fellow Wise Guy pinch-hitter Mark Luczak, who seems to share my assessment.