Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Interesting paper, Figleaf! The University of Illinois is my alma mater as well as my hometown (go Illini!) and one of the two Champaign schools studied was my high school. When I was in high school (I graduated in 1991), there was no Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) and no one I knew in high school would have admitted to being gay for fear of harassment and hatred. So, that there is a such thing as a GSA is progress. Because I was a leftist feminist hippy with an opinion about everything I was sometimes accused of being a lesbian. I was not comfortable being called that, not because I wasn’t a lesbian but because the hatred behind the accusation was so scary, and I can only imagine what it would have felt like if I really was a lesbian. I remember that once a mean girl called me a lesbian and I cheerfully said, “Fuck like dogs, purr like kittens!” It was my way of being subtle and telling her that I was not a lesbian because I enjoyed fucking like a dog, which (in my mind) is a pretty hetero thing to do, but it of course went right over her head and she thought I was admitting to being a lesbian. Sigh. High school sucked.

The part where the student says that in sex ed they didn’t talk about oral, anal or digital sex, at all…what is digital sex? Is it finger fucking or is it something else? I thought that was an amusing term-digital sex.

Here in Champaign, teens have an additional sex education resource that is (probably) pretty good. It’s Planned Parenthood’s Teen Awareness Group (TAG) which is a sex education program by and for teens. I love Planned Parenthood.

Finally, I wanted to tell you that I don’t think that your writing is boring or patronizing. Sometimes it might be off point or even wrong, but no one can be right all of the time. Every time you write, you risk being wrong or missing the point, but I think that the only way to get to the good stuff, to put your finger on what is really going on, to challenge the way we think about things and change the things that need changing, is to talk about about it and explore the ideas that you bring up. It is inevitable that sometimes you will not get it right, so try not to take it personally when people disagree with you and remember that (in addition to the hundreds? of people who read your blog and say nothing)you are among friends who think you’re pretty cool.

[I really like the way the article equates the sort of heavy-foot approach to both women and gay men — all that talk about death and disease and not that much about why, let alone how, one might actually consider doing such a thing. And part of the silence, I might add, is driven by the genuinely sexist notion that boys don’t have to be taught and, in fact, might not even be teachable, because everything for the sex class is just so automatic and assumed and patriarchally normative there’s just no changing any of it. When, in fact, there’s a surprising correlation between “neglect of education” and “ignorance forced to rely on basic impulses.” Thanks, Mag. —fl]

Well, perhaps sometimes the things you say seem outdated or a little out there, but then again maybe I missed out on a lot of things that most people in the US take for granted.

First, I never got the sense that women didn’t or weren’t supposed to enjoy sex. (I did get the sense that evangelical christians weren’t supposed to enjoy sex, though.) I didn’t know what it meant when I was a child, but I was told that it’s something that adults do because it’s fun. Even my mother later said that if she didn’t enjoy sex with my father so much she would have divorced him a lot earlier than she did. Actually, come to think of it, it was mostly women that I heard talking about enjoying sex, for men, it was mostly something that they just did.

Then I got sex education and family planning classes (actually, a special 2-day lesson that replaced one of my normal classes) in middle school – it included teaching proper condom use. Though it was entirely clinical and only discussed penis-vagina sex. I didn’t find out until years later that this wasn’t exactly normal for US public education.

And I’d seen at least a couple of ads on TV showing women being turned on by the sight of an attractive, bare-chested man. Actually I think I’d seen it in a few movies, too. So no indication that women were non-visual either.

Oh, and um, after my parents did divorce, I was living with my father for a time, and he had they playboy channel. I wasn’t really supposed to watch that, but I did a few times anyway when he wasn’t around, mostly out of curiousity. In the soft-core movies on that channel (which actually had plots!) I never saw anything that indicated that women didn’t want, enjoy, or initiate sex – quite the opposite, usually. Nor were they just passive things for men to use – they had their own plans, plots, jobs, and were usually full participants in any sexual act. Oh, and there was this call-in talk show that discussed sexual tips and toys – the hosts were women, and so were some of the callers. It’s always possible that this small slice of it that I saw was coincidentally not typical of the content on that channel, but that’s irrelevant to my point – that my experiences growing up don’t jive with the no-sex-class or no-agency paradigms at all.

It wasn’t until I was around 20 that I became aware that a very large portion of the population doesn’t live in that kind of reality.

[Hey Nightfall. I totally understand how individuals can grow up bypassing a lot of the booshwa I talk about a lot, but as you say in your last paragraph, a very large part of the population hasn’t had that chance. Yet. And if it turns out that everyone your age and younger (women and men!) is out from under that particular umbrella then so much the better, I’ll eventually retire happy! Thanks! —fl]

I can kind of get where you’re coming from, Nightfall, because I have a bunch of fortunate atypicalities in my own background.

Where I really see the paradigm play out is in the relationships I have – and in the ones I choose not to have. It’s not so much “no-sex class” in its full-blown Victorian anti-glory, as “sex-optional class” – women might enjoy sex, but not to the point where they’d miss it if they never got it again, therefore sexual behavior necessarily centres around the gender that “needs” it.

Hence the guy who can’t figure out why acknowledging a woman’s right to say “no” doesn’t cause her to say “yes”. It doesn’t occur to him that, however much we might appreciate the acknowledgement, it doesn’t in itself arouse our desire – in his mind, it’s about female consent (“letting” him, and him jumping through the right hoops so that we think he’s worthy), not female desire.

Hence the guy who likes his female partner to take the initiative, but only likes it when he’s feeling amorous – when he’s not, he just finds it annoying. And will explicitly tell her not to do it – but will complain when she doesn’t.

I could go on citing examples, but this is Figleaf’s blog, not mine (and, since I do have one of my own – an LJ – and plan to talk there on the subject in coming months, it seems redundant). Sure, some of these are guys for whom “it’s all about them” in all kinds of other ways – but an awful lot of them are men who are otherwise not jerks, not self-centred, not particularly sexist. Some of them are even feminists – honest-to-goddess supporters of gender equality – in every other respect. They’ve just been fed an all-too-consistent diet of guff about female sexuality. (And so have a lot of women.)

Sunflower

[Wow, Sunflower. Can I just say you’ve just put into a couple of paragraphs what I’ve been trying to say since last summer! It’s really helpful to hear how it sounds from the outside. To thank you I’m going to promote your comment with a note saying “I wish I’d said that.” —fl]