Via Brute Reason, here's a great post about not bashing those you're merely not attracted to from The Polyamorous Misanthrope

[L]et’s stop claiming that people we’re not attracted to are “disgusting”:

Can we all, please, stop using terms of disgust for people to whom we are not sexually attracted?

[...]Let’s say that, oh, people with brown hair aren’t attractive to you. It does not make people who have brown hair offensive or disgusting. It just means that they have brown hair and that isn’t your thing. It’s okay that it’s not your thing.

It’s not okay to get indignant because someone has the temerity not to be attractive to you.

Like curvy chicks? That’s cool. It’s not cool to snark the skinny ones just because that ain’t your thang.

Gay male? Cool. But freaking out about how disgusting pussy is? Gimme a break.

Source: Brutereason

This reminds me of a related point I was telling my children about yesterday afternoon. (They're right in the middle of the school-age crush zone at the moment.) Specifically my daughter mentioned a friend's disappointment upon learning that White Collar star Matt Bomer is not just gay but happily raising three children with his partner. My observation was that orientation really matters if and only if the person in question is a direct prospective partner. Which pretty much by-definition Matt Bomer, who lives a continent away, isn't now and isn't likely to be. Nor would it matter if my daughter's friend was a gay-identifying male: Matt Bomer still lives a continent -- not to mention a generation -- away!

This post fits in really nicely with that point! Consider the 1990s trope of people joking about then-attorney-general Janet Reno's lack of conventional/cliche sex appeal. Or the more recent "positive" comments about Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman's conventional/cliche good looks. Or the ambiguous but unnecessarily derogatory and/or adulatory remarks about nominally conservative performance artist Ann Coulter's appearance.

It doesn't matter because, since they probably wouldn't sleep with you, their looks, orientation, speculative, or even real talents in bed have no, zero, none bearing on one's fandom.

And, as you say so nicely, it even has no bearing if you're the one who wouldn't sleep with them! There's never, ever a reason to say anything more than "not my type."

Not least because saying anything more reveals far more about you than it does about the object of one's scorn.

And of course the added bonus confrontation when faced with someone's virulent rejection of, say, Marylin Monroe's mole or Paul Ryan's hairline or (my personal bugaboo) the makeup worn by various Kardashians.. or is that spelled Cardassians would be "projection much?" And/or "Trying to pass?"

Responding to my last post, On Guilt or Innocence While Intoxicated a commenter named Samantha who shortens it to Sam at the end pointed out that my argument that the line dividing competence to consent to sexual overtures breaks down at the same point one is intoxicated enough that reasonable third parties would ask for their car keys.

Of course we shouldn't be saying that all victims must be sober in order to "count." But where it seems to me that this gets complicated is that after a mugging, one person is missing the wallet and the other one has it; after a shooting, one person is dead and the other is alive. But after intercourse between two drunk people, both people had sex (or, were raped?). I agree with the upshot that people too drunk to consent or to get consent shouldn't be having sex, period, but this doesn't much help with establishing the identities of perpetrators and victims.

Brief quibble: It might be more accurate to say it doesn't help much with establishing the guilt or innocence of perpetrators.  But I think it can still be used consistently and fairly to determine whether the party or parties were to "tipsy" to competently consent or competently distinguish a prospective partner's consent.

I don't think this is all that big a problem because to a large extent it's already been solved in other contexts. Based on considerable case law on the liability of bartenders and hosts when they serve to someone who's intoxication later leads to injuries or death, the fact that it's vague isn't as important as one might reflexively make it.  Specifically, a guideline, rule, or law doesn't have to handle *every* edge case to severely narrow the area in which edge cases -- what's sometimes called the 'gray area" -- occurs.  Judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys have established some pretty effective methods for determining drunkenness and liability after the fact, even in cases where "hard facts" like blood alcohol levels are in question.  And therefore it shouldn't be that difficult to apply those same established criteria to questions of whether or not a victim was deemed competent to drive, and therefore whether he or she was competent to autonomously decide to have sex.

Now mind you, this seems to be the only area where establishing an accuser's intoxication or sobriety might be used against his or her assertion of having been attacked.  (For instance how many non-sexual assault victims have to demonstrate that they were sober before someone will accept their accusation that the didn't want to be in a fight?  Even if the accused said no, it was all in good fun and it wasn't fighting it was consensual sparring.)  But that's actually neither here nor there -- another edge case and an analogy to boot.  But in the main, anyone with experience in the field of host/bartender liability would have no trouble in the field of intoxication assault.

Oh, and speaking of bar fights and assault there's another metric where bartenders (probably more than lawyers or judges) are likely to have perfectly average judgment: assessing whether someone in a bar fight was just the loser of a two-party fight or the victim of a one-party fight.  Even when both parties to a fight are equally intoxicated body language, behavior, shock response, between someone who actively participated in a fight but lost and someone who hadn't wished to fight at all is readily apparent.  Even a day later when they've sobered up.  I'm not about to say "oh, let's just be all subjective about it" but I'm very confident that it's an assessable and teachable skill.  That, now that I think about it, might be an interesting public-safety research project.

Bottom line, though, is that based on several years of third-hand, second-hand, and I'm now very ashamed to say first-hand experience in college bar culture in the mid-1970s (the era Mary Koss was prompted to begin her research, incidentally) the issue isn't *quite* as clear-cut as some proponents say but it's *waaaay* less ambiguous than almost any detractors say.

A not completely unreasonable objection to the general assumption that in no- or badgered-consent situations both parties can be equally intoxicated yet one party can be consdered a victim and the other a perpetrator.  The objection does become unreasonable when an analogy is drawn between a drunk driver who's held accountable for passing out behind the wheel and a drunk victim who passes out where he or she can be assaulted.  For both not-unreasonable and unreasonable objections here's how that thing works:

If I roll a drunk for his wallet he’s a victim, no matter how drunk he was. And if I’m drunk when I roll him I’m still a mugger, no matter how drunk I was. Same if a drunk murders another drunk — doesn’t matter how drunk the parties were, the victim’s the victim and the murderer’s the murderer. Now, you can argue whether that’s fair or unfair, but you can’t say it’s an unusual distinction.

Similarly, in almost all law a contract or agreement signed while drugged or intoxicated can be invalidated with the completely reasonable argument that when drunk or drugged one is not capable of making sound decisions. And again, it doesn’t matter whether the counterparty to the signature was drunk, nor does it matter how drunk that party was.

So. Even if I was drawing an analogy between being too drunk to drive and too drunk to either consent or accurately discern consent in others, instead of making a pharmacological distinction, it still wouldn’t matter. Or wouldn’t matter if there wasn’t the historical assumption that a woman who gets drunk “deserves” to be assaulted because she would have been "more careful" had she remained sober.

But!

Again, I making a pharmacological distinction not drawing an analogy: if you're so drunk your friends are asking you for your keys you're also too drunk to make a competent decision about your own or a prospective partner's consent.

Ozy Frantz started a nice conversation about whether "drunk sex" is rape. Since the possible cases under discussion range from one or both parties having only half a glass of wine all the way over to both parties are incompetently black-out drunk I thought I'd reiterate my position.

As for the “tipsy” vs. “drunk” vs. “wasted” distinctions, my hard and fast rule is “if someone is drink enough for you to ask for their keys because they’re too drunk to realize they shouldn’t drive then they’re also too drunk for meaningful consent.

Similarly if you’re drunk enough to realize you shouldn’t drive then you’re also drunk enough to realize you shouldn’t try to accurately determine whether someone else is consenting.

Either way, that’s where I draw line between “tipsy” and “drunk.” It’s also the point where red flags ought to start going up for a) one’s self, b) one’s prospective paramours, and c) friends, onlookers, family members, and especially hosts and bartenders.

I say “especially bartenders” in part I used to be a bartender. In a college town. Where “spinning” drunk women into “consent” was all too often considered par for the course rather than what it actually was.

Which, incidentally, is exactly why “but I do that so it can’t be rape” is such a dire total fucking bullshit metric. As is, incidentally, “but everybody does that so it can’t be rape.” Because you know what… it sure as shooting can be. Not always. Not necessarily. But, yeah, you hear someone say anything like that and it should send up a big red flag.

So. About the various debates about "knowing whether action X, Y, or Z is wrong" going around the world lately. Over on Ozy Frants's new blog a commenter named Joshua Bennett nails the general case.

Socrates admonished us that no one knowingly does evil. Everyone has a reason for what they do, even if it’s a ridiculous, selfish reason. Our actions seem like a good idea at the time. Only in retrospect do we realize we were wrong. We all do this, so some measure of empathy is in order even for those who hurt others.

But this doesn’t mean we should just say, “Oh, your heart was in the right place,” and let shit slide. Condemnation is a powerful social tool to change people’s behaviors. People who are shamed or otherwise punished for their actions are more likely to avoid doing the same thing in the future, especially if they can see in retrospect why their actions were wrong.

Furthermore, when society makes a Big Deal™ about things like the importance of consent, we’re less likely to think our own reasons make our actions okay. The more we talk about this, the more it sticks in people’s brains: “Having sex with someone without their explicit consent is never okay! No, not even then.”

Source: Ozy Frantz's Blog

He was talking in the context of a post about "date rape," (a.k.a. "rape") but like it or not the same metric applies to countless other contexts both larger (shooting up a school in Connecticut, piloting a drone into a school in Pakistan) and smaller (grabbing the parking space someone else was clearly waiting for, grabbing the nice gloves in the lost and found that "nobody will miss.")

What I particularly like about Joshua's point about making things a "Big Deal™" is that it really has worked in other realms of crime and violence -- assaults, murders, and even domestic violence are way down compared to 50 years ago and waaaaayyyy down compared to 150 years ago or further. In particular it'll continue making it harder to blow off other people's or our own excuses. For that reason I agree that continuing to make a Big Deal™ about "date rape" (again a.k.a. "rape") will continue to make a difference.

I’m still so trying to wrap my little brain around the idea that it’s 99% hetero women’s partners spanking them rather than the other way around.

No knocks on Em & Lo, who's post about their new book (150 Shades of Play: A Beginner's Guide to Kink ) prompted this post. They lean heavily though not completely men-spank/women-are-spanked.  But the mix for heteros seems so common as to make generalizations like that fine.

I’m just curious about the physics, or anatomy here. Because even doing non-”spanking” tapotement (those kind of “karate chops” with the edge and flat of the hands massage therapists use) seems to get way more women’s motors running than men’s. Or is it the psychology? I’ve almost never heard of gay men routinely spanking each other outside the context of more intentional BDSM. And it’s almost never mentioned by lesbians. And, maybe even more perplexing, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of bi men carrying spanking over to male partners, nor bi women requesting spankings from their female partners.

Do I just not get out enough anymore (entirely possible?) Or is this really an overwhelmingly majority-hetero activity?

And don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with it being majority hetero, if that’s what it is. What gets our motors running in bed is or should be entirely separate from what motivates our conduct elsewhere. I’m just curious about the source of the apparent differences.

Photo by Flickr user Anne Petersen. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Geekyvamp, commiserating with another woman sex blogger about the number of unsolicited penis photos she gets sent to her Tumblr dashboard, raises and interesting point about how women feel about men's bodies vs. how men feel about our bodies. (Emphasis mine.)

Hah! I often wish I had a dick too, so I could a) not send it to people, and b) have sword fights. I see guys all over my dash playing meat-sword jousty-time, so it must be common, eh?

Source: A Heart Like Crazy Paving

Just because she doesn't like getting unsolicited penis photos doesn't mean GV doesn't like men. Or penises. (The idea that not liking unsolicited penises equals not liking penises at all is, of course, embedded in bogus Rule of Desire #1. Also rape culture. But I repeat myself. And digress...)

Instead GV likes penises, and men, quite a lot. In fact she thinks we can be pretty hot. In ones, and, as in the case of men playfully sword-fighting each other with their penises, in multiples. (See for instance her animated outtakes from Supernatural.)

I'm pretty sure most hetero Anglo/Austro/American men don't spend much time thinking about sword-fighting each other with our penises. (Hmm... there's no doubt about rape culture but I think old 70s-style feminists were mistaken about the part about men routinely regarding our penises as actual weapons. But I'm digressing again...)

As I said before I so rudely interrupted myself (as men evidently do tend to do... Dang it I'm doing it again!)

As I said, again, it's a good bet most hetero men don't think of male/male genital contact as erotic. And it's a sure bet almost no hetero men think such contact would be erotic to women.

There are probably numerous reasons for this -- both Rule 1 (it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for women to have sexual desire) and Rule 2 (it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for men to be sexually desired) play a big role obviously. The accompanying cultural belief (perpetrated not least by Cosmopolitan Magazine) that heterosexuality is all about men's gratification probably contributes to the notion as well.

The biggest reason, I think, is the deep cultural belief that men and women are not just poles apart but whole planets! And so it never occurs to... well... either sex that it stands to reason that if men think female/female contact is erotic, which many men do, then women would be just as likely to be similarly aroused by male/male contact.

And for the same reasons! Especially for hetero men and women! In fact, the more hetero (I'm guessing) the more likely seeing the opposite sexes together is going to seem erotic because sort of by-definition if we're hetero we're not only attracted to the opposite sex we're not particularly attracted to the same sex. Which means that two members of one's opposite rather than one of the opposite and one of your own means not only twice as many of your preferred sex to look at, it also means one less of your non-preferred sex.

Which in turn means less distraction and/or dismay (if you're phobic.) It means less self-conscious comparison. It means no matter how they arrange themselves the view of individuals you want to see aren't obscured by individuals you're indifferent to and/or uncomfortable with (again if you're phobic.) It means no particular source for envy. It means no particular source for competition. It means you can identify with the actions of either partner. And so on.

These are fairly obvious observations. Or would be if we weren't all gendered out the wazoo. When we're gendered, especially when that gendering assigns all sexual focus on one of those genders, then it's not obvious at all.

One area where we are different is plain old anatomy. For this reason in fantasy it's easy to imagine members of the opposite sex doing things actual members of the opposite sex probably wouldn't. Like sword-fighting each other with your erections. Because, gender constructions of brutal, domineering men not withstanding, penises are actually pretty sensitive. And easily sprained or even fractured(!!!)

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

I'm pretty much always home getting my own kids off to school on weekday mornings.  But this morning I needed to go out and get coffee beans.  Well, turns out there's a Catholic school in my neighborhood.  And the kids wear Catholic school uniforms, which are cute on little kids, with the boys in their dark pants and the girls in little knee-length plaid kilts with bare legs and everybody wearing fitted white button-up shirts and ties.

Kids in older grades wear the same thing.

Except that boys in older grades look like young interns in their fitted button-downs shirts, ties, and dark pants.

Girls in older grades, however, do not look like young interns in their fitted button-down shirts, ties, and short plaid skirts with bare legs.

I suddenly understand why the "Catholic Schoolgirl" look is such an archetype for adults to wear to "naughty" Halloween costume parties.  The fitted shirts emphasize narrow waists and expansive breasts.  The tie emphasizes cleavage.  The belted kilt emphasize broad hips, the pleats emphasize the behind and facilitate movement around the legs.  The above-the-knee hemlines emphasize legs.  These are the same reasons commercial-venue uniform designers specify similar criteria for waitresses, cocktail waitresses, and hostesses that cater to traditional male clientelle: they're frankly but flagrantly erotic.

For that reason, what I don't understand is why school officials and parents ever thought, let alone continue to think it, would be a good idea to specify that attire for older girls.

Should we congratulate conservatives when they correctly say the obvious? I'd say yes. Case in point: Mary Matalin says, correctly, that failed heterosexual marriages are a far greater threat to the institution of marriage than successful gay ones. David Edwards has the scoop:

Republican strategist Mary Matalin, who has previously said that marriage equality is not a civil right, asserted that polls now show Americans support same sex marriage because they know it’s not a “threat to the civil order.”

“Well, because Americans have common sense,” she explained. “There are important constitutional, biological, theological, ontological questions relative to homosexual marriage. People who live in the real world say, the greater threat to the civil order are the heterosexuals who don’t get married and are making babies. That’s an epidemic in crisis proportions. That is irrefutably more problematic for our culture than homosexuals getting married.”

Source: Raw Story

Good for Matalan!

Now one could argue, as I often do, that the tradition of marriage has some violent and alienating elements that make even successful marriage problematic (i.e. Which Husband Would You Stone For Adultery?) And one could argue, as I've also done in the past but Kevin Drum and others have done more recently, that single-parent families aren't as problematic for society as Matalan suggests. And one could argue, as numerous others have argued, that rather than celebrate secular recognition of gay marriage we should stop secularly recognizing marriage at all. But! If you're going to stand up for the institution, as Matalan and others gay and straight choose to, then there's exactly zero question that Newt Gingrich, Ronald Reagan, or Britney Spears' hetero marriages undermine the institution far, far, far more than the gay and lesbian couples who began getting married here in Washington State at 12:01 AM this morning. The heterosexual shotgun marriages of children in Nebraska and elsewhere undermine it far more than the same-sex marriages that will soon take place in Maine. The shaky, fragile, and outright false heterosexual marriages of David Vitters, Elliot Spitzer, Ted Haggard, or Phyllis Gates can't make less of a mockery of the institution any gay marriages that's likely take place in California, Minnesota, Hawaii, Massachusetts and on and on around the country.

Note: this doesn't mean some percentage of same-sex couples won't eventually turn out to have marriages every bit as bogus as current hetero ones can get. In fact, since gay people are exactly like straight people that's both a) inevitable but also b) the whole point! We're not enabling gay marriage because gay people are more noble nor because straight people are more depraved -- we're doing it because if any couple should be able to do it then every should be!

So yeah. Even though it's obvious, good for Matalan!

If one Y (male) chromosome is bad two must be worse, right? Well, no, but it's taken a while for the once very-popular notion to fall out of favor. I've argued frequently allegedly "man hating" beliefs attributed to "radical feminism" generally pre-date feminism. Here's a great example, from a sympathetic post by genetics researcher Ricki Lewis (emphasis mine)

A battered paperback entitled The XYY Man, by Kenneth Royce, leans in a corner of my bookshelf. It’s a spy novel that chronicles the adventures of “Spider” Scott, an ex-felon who wants to become law-abiding, but finds that he is genetically predisposed to criminality because he has an extra chromosome. Unlike most men whose XY sex karyotype imparts their maleness, Scott has been endowed with an XYY karyotype by his novelist creator.

This condition is not fanciful.

...

In 1970 geneticist H. Bentley Glass advocated the relaxation of abortion laws to allow women to end pregnancies if the fetus was XYY. Speculation even ran that Richard Speck, the infamous murderer of eight student nurses in Chicago in 1966, owed his propensity to violence to an extra Y chromosome. That proved untrue. In one notorious case of the mid-1970s, a British court wrongfully convicted Stefan Kiszko of the murder of an 11-year-old girl largely because of his XYY karyotype, and it took more than 15 years for him to win release from prison. For further historical takes on the misunderstood extra chromosome see Y Envy.

Source: PLOS DNA Science Blog

Kennith Royce (born in 1920) was not a stalwart feminist when he wrote his gender-determinist spy novel. Nor was Hiram Bentley Glass (born in 1906) when he issued his prejudgment of "excessively male" infants.

Again, it's trendy in some circles to say there's no such thing as misandry. It's even trendier in even more circles to say there is such a thing as misandry but it's all feminism's fault. Both trendy circles are wrong: there is such a thing, and it's roots lie not in feminism but in the same bullshit culture that motivated feminists in the first place.

Oh and speaking of bullshit, while it turns out that about 1/1000 boys and men really do have an extra Y chromosome the modern scientific consensus is that the impact is minimal. As Lewis puts it in her concluding paragraph

Slowly, as the suppositions of the 1960s give way to current research, the public is changing its thinking on XYY syndrome. Few people today believe that an extra Y chromosome condemns its owner to a life of violent crime. Genetic counselors explain the condition to families and teach ways to nurture XYY boys. Men like the fictional “Spider” Scott can exercise their free will without fear that a sex chromosome has turned them bad.

I would have called it "the superstitions of the 1960s" but close enough. Good riddance.