Recently by figleaf

My net service is down today. I've got a call in but for now? Am iPhone is nice, but not for blogging.

Too bad! There are some wonderful
comments, some that deserve to be promoted to their own posts.

Ill be bad online soon as I can.

Jessica Valenti of the, um, mainstream feminist website Feministing raises the alarm about proposed revisions to psychiatry's main reference, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM.

...do you happen to be attracted to, or in a relationship with, someone who is differently-abled or differently-sized? Or someone who is gender-variant in some way? Well congratulations, you may now be diagnosed with a paraphilia!

Seriously.

[Contributing author Ken Zucker and Ray] Blanchard and other like-minded sex researchers have coined words like Gynandromorphophilia (attraction to trans women), Andromimetophilia (attraction to trans men), Abasiophilia (attraction to people who are physically disabled), Acrotomophilia (attraction to amputees), Gerontophilia (attraction to elderly people), Fat Fetishism (attraction to fat people), etc., and have forwarded them in the medical literature to denote the presumed "paraphilic" nature of such attractions. This tendency reinforces the cultural belief that young, thin, able-bodied cisgender women and men are the only legitimate objects of sexual desire, and that you must be mentally disordered in some way if you are attracted to someone who falls outside of this ideal. It's bad enough that such cultural norms exist in the first place, but to codify them in the DSM is a truly terrifying prospect.

Another frightening aspect of Blanchard's proposal is that any sexual interest other than "genital stimulation or preparatory fondling" is now, by definition, a paraphilia. In his presentation, he claimed that paraphilias should include all "erotic interests that are not focused on copulatory or precopulatory behaviors, or the equivalent behaviors in same-sex adult partners." Copulatory is defined as related to coitus or sexual intercourse (i.e., penetration sex). So, essentially, all forms of sexual arousal and expression that are not centered around penetration sex may now be considered paraphilias.

She said this, and a lot more, here.

Quite a (dry, bitter) mouthful in my excerpt, above, but Valenti has more in her post. Read it and weep.

Or, possibly, not weep. A lot of ordinary, mundane worries, fantasies, and interests show up in the DSM -- worrying that you forgot to turn off the stove, losing sleep over finances or politics, and stuff like that for instance -- but is technically only a problem when taken to extremes. There's a point on the way to the airport where my partner almost always remembers something we forgot and wonders if we should go back for it. That's not crazy -- not least when, sometimes, it's something we really should go back for... like my wallet. Instead it's a quirk. If she were instead immobilized and unable to leave the house because she obsessively catalogued the things we might otherwise leave behind then one of the DSM diagnoses would kick in and treatment might be sought, approved, and (assuming her insurer agreed... a big assumption) undertaken.

But still, as Valenti points out, perfectly functional people are sometimes saddled with DSM disorders. And some of the proposed "disorders" are actually nobody's flipping business if conducted in privacy on one's own or with other adults who decide they want to participate.

Interestingly, there's been a lot of pressure to back off the so-called gender identity disorders that umbrella transvestism, transgender, and transsexualism. Valenti doesn't mention whether those are still in. (The tactical and strategic reasons for keeping it in, including insurance mandates for sex reassignment, possibly makes this more complicated than it might be.) But adding being attracted to trans-men and women seems like upping the ante: it seems... disordered to attach a disorder to someone who's something it's not a disorder to be.

And along those lines I'm more than a little uncomfortable with designating attraction to the aged or infirm. Not least because, last I heard, it's not a disorder to be aged or infirm. In which case you're really aiming to screw up the lives of otherwise perfectly ordinary people by... scaring off or nailing their prospective partners.

---

This is not, incidentally, an abstract issue. I'm fairly confident the bill died in session (as most, um, quirky bills do) but... well, remind me to post about the (now dead-in-session one hopes) Massachusetts bill "protecting" anyone and everyone over age 60 by adding "and anyone older than 60" to all child sexual assault statutes!

Megan of Jezebel passes along some kind of cool, kind of ominous information about the effectiveness of the old-fashioned "withdrawal" method of birth control. Quoting Rachel K. Jones in the magazine Contraception she says

[Withdrawal] is not as ineffective at preventing pregnancy as we might think.

The best available estimates indicate that with "perfect use," 4% of couples relying on withdrawal will become pregnant within a year, compared with 2% of couples relying on the male condom. More realistic estimates suggest that with "typical use," 18% of couples relying on withdrawal will become pregnant within a year, compared with 17% of those using the male condom. In other words, with either method, more than eight in 10 avoid pregnancy.

So, if it's just pregnancy we're concerned with avoiding, it's actually not the worst choice.

Read the quote in context here.

I'm reminded of the line we were given when I was a teen peer councilor at a sex information hotline back when pregnancy was the biggest concern because all common STIs were still curable with antibiotics: "Condoms... they're better than nothing... barely."

Jones mentions using withdrawal in conjunction with other forms of birth control, which is actually always a good idea anyway. Score one for the evident ongoing migration of the unfortunate "money shot" phenomenon from porn to real life.

But Megan passes along Jones's main point: it's time to stop stigmatizing women (I'd say women and men since, now that I think about it, it's an actual third way men can contribute actively to contraception besides condoms and vasectomies) and...

start talking about it in a scientific fashion with their patients, and that they stop telling women who use it that they might as well use nothing at all — which is both inaccurate and unhelpful.

If people are going to keep using it -- and statistics suggest a heck of a lot of people do -- then yeah, might as well give it a good, hard look and make sure you know what you're talking about when you talk about it. We don't have to like it, but especially if it's in the ballpark with other common alternatives then dealing with is a whole lot more effective than denial.

Dodai of Jezebel dug up a "women's" cigarette ad from the 1970s that illustrates a pretty critical episode in the history of outsider's conceptions of feminism.

Image from Jezebel - click to see in context.

The text says "We make Virginia Slims especially for women because they are biologically superior."

In the 1970s things were both peculiarly hierarchical and simultaneously binary. It was a bad combination, at least in the states. For instance not only was there only "white" and "minority" people, either one or the other had to be better. Not only were there only males and females, but if one wasn't superior the other had to be.

And so, especially in ad copy trying to "catch the groovy wave" of "women's lib" it was inevitable that the idea of, you know, equality wasn't going to come up.

Oh, it gets worse. The idea at the time was that if women weren't going to do the washing, cleaning, and ironing then they'd go to work and men would have to stay home and be the "Mr. Mom." In other words somebody always had to be the "girl" and do all the "women's work." Oh, either that or we had to dress like Devo and pee in the dreaded "unisex" bathrooms. But one way or another a strictly zero-sum competition. Instead of, you know, maybe an increase in diversity, of options, of more hands to share the work, of more opportunities for people to rise to their full potential, and for people to de-stress about a great deal of artificial nonsense.

There are still people who don't just remember those days but still believe it. Not a lot. But there are enough left, I guess, to be totally panicked about the possibility of tolerance, justice, or coexistence. Let alone equality.

Anyway, if it sometimes seems like people, older men in particular (since in critical awareness terms we're a lot further behind the curve), seem unreasonably attached to the idea of gender equality, crap like that ad is a good reminder why. But... y'know, the 70s were a very long time ago. Time to get over it.

After researching the practice of collaring in BDSM, and coming up with, um, idiosyncratic results, Kink In Exile offers...

5 easy things to think about when doing research (kinky or otherwise):

1. Check your sources — how do you know what you know? Is your data coming from the CIA, a research institution, or the kid who lives on your floor? Is the article you are reading peer reviewed?
2. Check multiple sources — are you getting different numbers from different sources? Do your sources have different agendas?
3. Check publication dates — there was a time when the sun went around the earth and all the best scientists of the day would have told you so. Make sure your information is up to date; this is especially vital with medical information.
4. Fact or opinion? — Fact: collaring is a known practice in BDSM communities. Opinion: Collaring ceremonies are only valid between people who play really really hard. (Oh, and I will support my fact by saying that the many articles written on the subject and posted to BDSM community boards are indicative of a shared experience or in-group behavior.)
5. Validity based on what — Does the article provide data from a well-known source, or peer reviewed study, or does it ask you to believe what it says is true because it’s Tradition?

She said it.

Good advice in any context. It's really helpful when dealing with previously suppressed, othered, or otherwise voiceless communities. Even when you're part of the community yourself, but, obviously, especially helpful when you're not.

In passing to a larger point, Echidne of the Snakes raises one of those questions popular with (real, anti-feminism) anti-feminists that rather begs a different one

When I first read about their principles I came across a defense of the female subjugation they demand. It went like this: "Is it so much to ask women to subject themselves to men's leadership? Consider that these men are willing to give up their lives for their families if asked! Compared to that, what's a little oppression?"

Read the quote in context here.

But... but... considering that women have to be willing to give up their lives just to fucking have a family is it too much to ask men to share leadership? And last I heard there were no Supreme Courts or state legislatures requiring men to give up their lives for their families the way they seem willing to mandate it for women. Which leaves one wondering -- if willingness to sacrifice one's life for one's family is should be the metric for family leadership -- whether women should have to share at all.

Of course it's actually a really stupid argument. In the first place there's no reason to imagine that families require top-down as opposed to, say, consensus leadership in the first place. And in the second place, willingness to base leadership on the by-definition lower continuity criteria of who's most likely to die and thus leave a leadership vacuum is just bad management!

Via Petra Boynton, sex researcher Shere Hite, writing in The Indypendent, tackles a subject that's very near and dear to my heart: the representation of hetero men in conventional pornography.

Pornography, it seems to me, presents a highly distorted image of men. While my research with thousands of men shows a different picture of “who men are sexually,” pornography imposes a rigid ideological view on male sexual feelings, expression and behavior. They are not the monolithic beings depicted in most porno images, nor do they find their authentic selves in pornography.

Ironically, pornography seems friendly to men — more than to women — but its underlying message makes fun of men. Subliminally, it tells men that their sexual expression is ridiculous, base, insensitive, even grotesque. Visually it frequently makes men look ugly and coarse, foolish and unappealing.

She said it here.

It's almost cliché that women are presented as one-dimensional and cartoonish in porn. Critiques of women in porn are practically an industry unto itself. Extending that critique to men is rather refreshing.

An emerging criticism of her column and, presumably, her underlying work is that she misunderstands how men are depicted in porn. And while a quick tour this morning of popular porn upload sites like YouPorn and RedTube (we really are presented as almost voiceless, as always having and keeping erections, as uninterested in emotional contact or even non-penis physical contact) suggest she's not that far off the mark.

But reading deeper into her column that's not really her point. Even if everything that's presented about men in porn was sexually enjoyable¹ to do, what's really important is that it's a really, really limited set of the full range of sexually enjoyable things that men can do with a partner.

Hite speaks in particular to something I think men (and, often, even our partners) tend to shy away from in real life and, evidently, avoid like the plague in porn. Here's Hite.

Men say they enjoy masturbation because they can fantasize about whatever they want and there is no pressure on them to perform. During masturbation, in my research, men stimulate themselves in many more places than they do when with a partner.

...

But many men cut short foreplay because they are afraid they may lose the erection which they have been taught is necessary to enjoy sex and which would be “shameful” to lose. More men could reach much higher peaks of feeling and arousal if they did not feel anxious about how they should behave sexually.

The great middle of the bell-shaped curve of porn never goes there, never treats men as interesting or, especially, complicated or, quirkily, fun to play with. We're remarkably fun to play with though.

I think it's great that Hite has raised the question.

And hey, just in time for Kristina Lloyd's Man Candy Monday photo over at porn-for-straight-women Erotica Cover Watch. Oh, and check out comments on this porn-for-women post by Jessica Freely.

And if you're an adult you can click here for yet another entry.

[1: Although seriously, what's fun about stopping everything to wank out a "money shot" when you've got a partner right there who, in real life, would welcome your orgasm in contact and would almost certainly enjoy more active participation in creating it? Especially when it's done over, and over, and over, and over. And over! --fl]

Hey, more good advice from Em & Low, this time on their regular blog. A reader said she was embarrassed to have gotten her period with a regular booty-call partner and wondered what to do about it. Their response is a good table-turner.

First, how does you unexpectedly getting your period reflect badly on you? We’re sure you didn’t plan to turn his bed into a crime scene, right? Sometimes these things happen. Your period is part of life. Heck, it’s part of your sexuality. And have you seen the stuff that comes out of the end of his dick when he ejaculates? Not exactly flowers, either. If you wanted to win the Nice Booty Call of the Year award, you could have offered to either help him clean the sheets (he may not have the experience we ladies do with getting out blood stains) or buy him new ones. But how many guys do you know who offer to clean a woman’s sheets when he spills his seed all over them, huh? It’s just not that big a deal.

They said it here.

The rest of their advice is similarly practical and perspective-building. Body fluids are body fluids. Modern detergent can deal with it, so can we.

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors says

Nan Hunter blogged about this case here, writing:

The Schroer court held that just as discrimination against converts from one to faith to another is still discrimination based on religion, so too discrimination against transgender persons is still sex discrimination. Although doubtless Congress did not have transgender persons in mind when Title VII was enacted in 1964, the court found that the plain text of the statute covers this situation.

“Diane Schroer is a male-to-female transsexual. In August 2004, before she changed her legal name or began presenting as a woman, she applied for the position of Specialist in Terrorism and International Crime with the Congressional Research Service (CRS) at the Library of Congress. The selecting official for the position, Charlotte Preece, offered Schroer the job, but then rescinded the offer after learning of Schroer’s intent to present as a woman when she started at CRS. After a bench trial in August 2008, I found that the Defendant had violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act by discriminating against Schroer because of sex.”

So wrote Judge James Robertson a couple of weeks ago, in the context of awarding Schroer “$183,653 for back pay and benefits, $300,000 for nonpecuniary losses, and $7,537.80 for past pecuniary losses,” comprising “a judgment in Plaintiff’s favor in the amount of $491,190.80.”

There is a lot of legal scholarship on the general topic of transgender/transexual issues in employment discrimination, see e.g. this, this, this, and this.

She said it here.

Good to know. Minus the hideboundedness of gender construction it's hard to imagine there's be quite so much opposition to, or discrimination against, trans people.

In her clear, concise argument in favor of legalizing prostitution Holly of The Pervocracy also said

I think a lot of objections to prostitution are really objections to capitalism. I've never sold my ass, but I sell my body five days a week--I do physical things I don't enjoy and say things I don't mean because I need the money to live. I risk violent assault and exposure to diseases at my job. I have to touch and be nice to strangers off the street with no right to refuse unpleasant ones. The vast majority of the money I take in is kept by my employer.

But I provide a socially valuable and economically productive service, and I'm in the same boat with most anybody with a job. (How I differ from hookers, other than the obvious: I have the ability to call the cops, to file an L&I claim, and to sue my employer. And because my employer knows this they provide safety systems. Legalization would save lives, people.) Doing un-fun things to meet survival needs is a condition of life outside the Garden of Eden, and I'm not convinced that selling sex is a uniquely horrible way of doing that.

She said it here.

While I agree with her overall argument (if you don't then sorry, you've got blood on your hands) I don't agree with her claim the real objection is to capitalism and not to sex.

Not least because the narratives around prostitution are so highly gendered. To hear most people talk you'd think nearly all prostitutes are women. Instead the only prostitutes activists generally discuss are women prostitutes. For most, including far too many people who imagine themselves feminist, what happens to gay male and, especially, trans prostitutes is irrelevant and immaterial to their little universes. Except, of course, to the extent their opinions of (almost exclusively) male customers are confirmed.

Instead most objections occur in the context of the "no-sex" class paradigm where it's assumed that women naturally aren't, and therefore mustn't be, sexual. And, with that contradictory "aren't and therefore shouldn't be" construction (see also Rule #1) people take the position that women in prostitution are a) fragile, forced, feminine flowers and b) skulking trash who deserve what's coming to them. Oh, unless they're gay or trans in which case c) who cares what happens to the dirty faggots and women-wannabes.

Anyway, that reason and, I think, only that is why Holly's ambulance/EMT work is considered different despite all the overt similarities. And thus I think it's why the main objection is about the sex and not labor.

---

Doh! Actually I realize it's not an issue of sex, it's an issue of gender! People who buy the patriarchal frame that women are essentially non-sexual will, of course, see sex work as an abuse of the expected women-use-sex-for-leverage/men-use-leverage-for-sex paradigm. More contemporary feminists, of course, see that paradigm itself as a abhorrent.

That doesn't mean that sex work is all hunky dory or that we can all just take our clothes of and run naked. The dominant paradigm is, well, dominant. Especially among men who, as a (sex) class seem to be roughly 40 years behind the curve and thus even more mired in the transactional model of sex. (As I've mentioned if not all sex-workers are female, virtually all customers are male.) Until that changes, one way or another, and until the idea that sex is inevitably transactional is turned around, certain elements of sex work will remain problematic.

Cara Kulwicki of the well-known mainstream feminist website Feministe has a just-in-time reminder.

Tomorrow, May 17, is the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. This year, IDAHO is focusing on transphobia:

Each year, the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (the “IDAHO”, as it is usually called), will see actions and initiatives take place in many countries and contexts and on many different issues.

All these activities and initiatives are a very strong signal to all, decisions makers, public opinion, civil rights movements, human rights defenders, etc. throughout the world that our fights for our Rights as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, intersex, etc… is vibrant!

The Day provides all different kind of actors with a very powerful opportunity to express their demands and to advocate for their case. Each year also, the IDAHO aims at using the extra public, political and media attention that it provides at all levels to highlight one specific aspect of the struggle for sexual rights.

This year, we chose to highlight the often neglected but important issue of Transphobia.

Click here to read the full appeal for rights for all trans people across the world (pdf). And then click here to sign the appeal yourself.

Remember, this is an international appeal, so anyone can sign. And of course, don’t forget to spread the word.

via Questioning Transphobia

They said it here.

Kulwicki, of course, posted this in time. I'm just a bit late to the party. Nevertheless, I've signed the IdahoHomophobia.org appeal myself.

For a variety of other takes see also:
* Pam's House Blend
* The F-Word (from April 9th)
* Rebellious JezebelBlogging
* Female Impersonator
* Mariela Castro, director of Cuba's National Center for Sexual Education
* Gender Blender Blog
* Feminist Catalyst
* Socialist Feminista
* Amy of Appetite for Human Rights (a blog for the modern feminist) (from March 30)

I can't say how much I've been enjoying Bob & Susan-Yager-Berkowitz's He's Just Not Up for It Anymore: Why Men Stop Having Sex, and What You Can Do About It (which I first mentioned in passing here.)

It's highly readable, following a familiar and conventional-for-relationship-books mix of case study, quotes, citation, and interpretation without a lot of deep theory or analysis. But if the form is familiar the content is eye-opening.

First of all: In just about half of all "sexless" heterosexual relationships (technically defined as fewer than ten sexual events together per year) it's the man rather than the woman who's less interested.

Second of all: the reasons couples give for men's lack of desire are sometimes cliché, but when they are they're cliché with a twist. Even better, the reasons men give for their lack of desire are interestingly different than the reasons women who's partners lack desire give. One commonality though?

Although the men know (or at least think they know) the reasons for their voluntary celibacy but the women are only guessing, either way the situation is embarrassing and painful. It is therefor not surprising that both men and women agree most with statements that shift responsibility away from themselves.

And it's not as though men are secretly beleaguered, saintly, and misunderstood... just human:

Indeed men indicate a lack of sexual adventure (hers, not his) as primary. It is difficult to believe that this lack of erotic excitement is completely one-sided, and that these men who identify their wives as unadventurous are themselves imaginatively passionate guys, just somehow mysteriously unable to inspire the one woman they chose to marry.

Another interesting tidbit...

Slightly less than half say they are interested in sex, but not with their partners.

...implies that slightly more than half aren't interested in sex with anyone.

The authors bring a seriously interesting twist to another big reason that you'd think would be obvious: weight gain. Again with the nuance -- read to the end of the excerpt before jumping back out. (Emphasis mine.)

It is always easier to obfuscate blame, especially when the problem is, at least in part, yourself. So, let us make this clear before we write another sentence -- we aren't talking about a few extra pounds, which, without question, are an excuse, not a reason. However, if a woman is more than around thirty pounds overweight, her partner maybe telling the truth. ... Mysteriously, whether or not they themselves have added extra pounds, too, is irrelevant [to the men's responses.]

Obesity also diminishes libido, so an overweight person may not be as responsive a partner as he or she once was. There is also new evidence that correlates male obesity and impotence. Mix obesity, ED [another big factor discussed elsewhere in the book --fl] and low libido together and it may be easier to just stop trying.

So, again another instance where popular, gendered stereotypes about women's weight and appearance get in the way of what might actually be going on. (A single anecdote is just an anecdote but the authors quote a woman who found her husband in bed with a neighbor who... was the same weight, age, and appearance as she. Which, if I'm not mistaken, is actually pretty common and which again suggests the most conventional "reason" may not an actual explanation.)

Another really important bit is that women surveyed revealed that their partners weren't that into sex even before their relationships became permanent ones. So it's not just the conventional explanation of familiarity breeding contempt.

And there's more. Which I may post about later when I've finished the book. Which brings up a caveat: it's risky to being positively reviewing a book before you've finished, and I've got a lot more to read. But the information and insights in those first few chapters seem worth the price of admission.

What I especially like about the authors so far is they're wonderfully non-judgmental. They're aware of stereotypes but not bound by them. Willing to pass along conventional ideas from authorities but not willing to swallow them whole. They're on to something new, or, more accurately, something almost never discussed, and so, knowing there are already more than enough stories about gender expectations, they'd prefer not to prematurely make up their own.

Bottom line, though, is yet another half of what we "know" about libido imbalance in relationships, especially hetero relationships, turns out to be myth-based rather than, oh, say, true.

One more instance where what society tells us is true about men, women, sex, and relationships gets in the way of dealing with what's actually happening inside the relationships!

Holly of The Pervocracy, an EMT, says what needs to be said to put sex work in context it needs to be put in. (Emphasis mine.)

Personally, I think legalization is the only way prostitution can be made safe. Prostitution isn't inherently dangerous because it's sexual; it's dangerous because it's marginal. Predators don't attack people in sex shops or strip bars or or swingers' clubs, they don't go where sex is, they go where women with no legal protection or organizational safety measures are.

She said it here.

There's a whole lot more to say, much of which she says very well. But that's the bottom line: predators don't go where sex is, they go where women with no legal protection or organizational safety measures are.

Thanks to a chain of links beginning on Twitter, traversing the Washington Post and ending up at a post by MG Siegler at Tech Crunch I discovered first that Amazon now lets blog authors publish to the Kindle and, second, how to do it.

1. Go to kindlepublishing.amazon.com and sign up for an account.
2. You have to create a completely new account -- your existing customer or associate accounts won't work.
3. Submit an online form identifying and describing your blog
4. Amazon does... something... not sure what
5. Your blog is available for subscription on the Kindle.
6. Update Your blog's Amazon page will look something like this!

The program's in beta -- just a day or two old at this point -- and the original links were about a now-fixed bug that let anyone register anyone else's blog (e.g. you could have registered DailyKos or BoingBoing) and then get any subscription money that might accrue.

As I say that bug's now fixed -- you have to actually be the author of the blog. And since I'm not sure how they're going to validate I thought it would be a good idea to post this in case they check visually.

Proof that water under the bridge is still drinkable. Very cool post last Mother's Day from Em & Low at their other blogging gig at Sundance Channel's Sunfiltered Blog

It’s Mother’s Day this Sunday — don’t forget to call and thank her for all the wonderful advice.

1. Always wear clean underwear.

2. Trim your fingernails and wash your hands thoroughly and often. (It’ll help you avoid infection and make you less likely to tear delicate internal linings during manual sex.)

...

5. Don’t eat candy that’s unwrapped. (It should always have a condom on it.)

...

10. You never call. Why don’t you call? If you say you’re going to call, then call.

Read the rest of the list here.

Hey, it's funny, it's heartwarmingly mushy, and darned excellent advice.

Do you think anyone would say "well, I can't call myself a vegetarian because PETA say sif you're not willing to show up wearing a cage and a coat of paint you're not really a vegetarian?"

And how come nobody says "I'm not a bisexual because Katy Perry and Tia Tequila don't represent me." And why don't we ever hear "I didn't leave homosexuality, homosexuality left me" because Larry Craig rejects gay marriage? But they do say "I can't call myself a feminist" because some zealot with a separatist bulletin board hurt my feeling? Or (to stick with feminism for just another minute) why does it only go one way? Why don't we ever hear people say "Sara Palin says she's a feminist? Camille Paglia does? I'm outta here?"

And who elected Ralph Nader, or Linda Hirshman, or Rush Limbaugh, or Osama bin Laden to be Pope such that they could go around ex-communicating Al Gore, or Megan Carpentier, or Colin Powel, and so on, when the "condemned" is generally perfectly orthodox while their accuser is about as extreme as they come?

I mean, when, exactly, did "extremist" become a synonym for "authority?" I mean, I know it happened, and that it's happening all over, and I sure know it's incredibly divisive, destructive, and, especially, polarizing. But I don't know why.

I mean who gave all these people lifetime appointments anyway? And what ever happened to questioning authority?

So check out this page out of the current issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, posted by Alessia of Relationship Underarm Stick. Specifically, compare and contrast the feature title, "Fun Fearless Female" with the photo of feature profilee Anna Paquin.

Cosmo is the magazine of choice for critics of gender construction sites because it's just an OSHA inspector's enforcement nightmare. Everywhere you look there's a serious health or safety violation. In her post Alessia ably dismantles the text of Cosmo's perpetual gender enforcement, click here to see her take on that. I see a much simpler problem though.

In a standard magazine photo shoot hundreds of photos are typically taken using dozens of poses and, often, multiple settings, outfits, and lighting designs. From that photographic bounty a single image is selected that in the eyes of the editor best represents not only the individual being photographed but also the message of the accompanying article and, of course, the editorial stance of the entire publication.

So compare Paqun's wary, tentative body language and facial expression to the title "Fun Fearless Female." I'm not sure what the image communicates to Cosmo readers but if it showed up in, say, Details magazine I don't think the caption would be about her having fun.

---

I dunno. I probably would have passed it by if Paquin wasn't the lead character, Sookie Stackhouse, in the HBO series True Blood, which is based on Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire series of novels I've been reading lately. I like the books because the character is so much the opposite of protagonists in other, outwardly similar books such as Twilight: capable, respected, sexual, and most importantly integratedly adult.

But as Punkass blogger Lisa KS said in comments on my earlier post

Yep, Twilight sucks butt and Charlaine Harris's series is tons of fun. Whatever you do, don't watch TrueBlood on HBO -- all the things you listed that are great about the books, plus a few more, get completely annihilated in the series, to be replaced with a mixture of high-school romanticism and pointless titillation.

One of the nicest things about the Stackhouse character in the books is that while she's female, and fearless considering her circumstances, and even occasionally fun (again considering her circumstances) she probably wouldn't read Cosmo.

Oh yeah, and for the record I'm just starting book four, Dead to the World. The rest of the series so far, (#2 - Living Dead in Dallas, #3 - Club Dead) hasn't been as consistent or thought-provoking as the original Dead Until Dark. But hey, they're not that bad and besides I've got a cold. Plus a habit of compulsively reading book series to their bitter ends... which is just one more reason I tend to stick with non-fiction. :-)

Em & Lo: Sex. Love. And Everything in Between. give a pretty comprehensive answer to a very specific question about libido and gender assumptions.

[T]here are two kinds of desire when it comes to sex: there’s a physical desire to get naked, and then there’s an emotional desire to be close to your partner. You clearly have the emotional desire. And you know what? Maybe that’s all you’ll ever have. Or maybe you’ll feel emotional desire most of the time and once in a blue moon your physical desire will show up.

But that doesn’t mean you’re “broken inside.” To think that way is to take a very male-centric approach to libido. Just because your physical drive doesn’t match your boyfriend’s, doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you. It just means you’re different.

They said it here.

Even better, they reprint a really excellent column they wrote for Red Magazine in 2007 that really drives home the point that defining libido only in stereotypical/gendered male terms isn't just unfair it's counterproductive. I can't recommend the post enough since they really cover the bases in (even better) completely non-judgmental terms.

Here's where it gets really interesting though. Ordinarily I'd just stop here but by complete coincidence when I opened Em & Lo's post I happened to have in front of me a copy of Bob & Susan-Yager-Berkowitz's He's Just Not Up for It Anymore: Why Men Stop Having Sex, and What You Can Do About It The authors point out that in between 10% and 20% of long-term relationships it's the man not the woman who's got the "dysfunctional" (meaning "lower or non-existent") libido...

Which means using men as the "gold standard" for libido (Joan Sewell's term in Em & Lo's repost) doesn't even particularly suit men!

There are not, unfortunately, many texts out there recommending men boost their libidos through (as Em & Lo quip)

... “working on” their libido? [Lingering] in a bubble bath to awaken their nerve endings, [hitting] the treadmill to get their juices flowing, [insisting] on a backrub to help them warm up to the idea...

... or maybe fortunately since, as Joan Sewell documented so ably in I'd Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido, most of those methods aren't particularly reliable for women either.

Throw in the inevitable quips/remarks/laments by women, e.g. "I must secretly be a man inside because I love..." and the probably-thought-but-won't-ever-be-voiced-by-men corollary that men with less interest than their partners must therefore be "secretly women inside," and mix all that up with the statistical "masking" effect of hetero couples with matching libidos... that might be twice a day or once every leap year... who with a slightly different roll of the relationship dice might be deemed terminally dysfunctional and...

You gotta ask yourself why, exactly, we think constructing gender is a better idea than saying, as Hamlet very aptly puts it "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (The problem not being philosophy, obviously, but Horatio's stunting version of it.)

Thomas, writing at Yes Means Yes Blog explains why an abstinence-only counselor assaulting a young woman is a textbook example of the no-sex class paradigm in action.

What he’s done is in a sense hypocrisy, but there is a core consistency. He’s urging young women to say no. He’ll keep telling them to say no, while he sexually molests them. He may even see nothing wrong with his behavior ... and he is probably very upset by any woman’s display of actual sexual agency.

Say no; get raped. As long as women have no voice in how their bodies are sexual, he’s happy.

Read the quote in context here.

Yup. When you think about it sexual assault is almost the purest expression of women's sexuality inside the dominant paradigm: you're not supposed to want it, it "ruins" you to have it, you're coached to decline it, therefore it's "best" or "most natural" to be forced into it.

My only quibble with Thomas would be that while there might be no internalhypocrisy in a 31-year-old abstinence counselor assaulting a 16-year-old girl there is hypocrisy... not to mention total breakdown of predicate logic... in the idea that women must be taught to be naturally chaste.

If it were natural it wouldn't need to be taught. If it's not natural then there must be an agent making the decision when to and when not to. And with whom. And if there's an agent his or her decision must be respected. Since Rule #1 of the Two Rules of Desire says it's both inconceivable and intolerable for a women to feel sexual desire, it's inconceivable and intolerable for her to have agency at all. Thus the no-sex class emphasis on women having "natures" rather than intention or agency. With the result that a counselor thinks nothing of assaulting someone he's teaching to not have sex.

Uggh. I've got a cold, and I haven't worked out in a week. The only part of me that isn't achy and sore are my arms so... here you go.

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

More like this here.

Chloe, guest blogging at Feminist Mormon Housewives has a cool post about "I'm not a feminist but..." feminism.

Today I was in an English class at BYU, admittedly not a hotbed of feminism. While discussing fables and tales the story of Cinderella came up. One young woman made a comment about the Disney version, relating how she doesn’t care for Cinderella’s inability to care for herself, complete reliance on others, and so forth. Naturally, she doesn’t want that to be a model for her own daughter’s behaviors. Until this point I was in general agreement with her, even pleased that someone besides myself seemed to recognize such a thing. And then, it happened. It usually does. I ought to have expected it, but optimist that I am, I never do.

“I mean, I’m not a feminist…”

Wait, what? You believe that women ought to be on equal ground with men and treated with common human decency, don’t you? That’s feminism. I suppose I’m just baffled. I used to operate under the delusion that these negative stigmas of feminism were dead and gone. Of course, Utah in particular has been a harsh awakening.

And you know what? I just don’t get it. If you believe in basic human equality, why wouldn’t you identify as feminist? Furthermore, why is it so important to distinguish that you are in fact, not a feminist? Unless you’re forwarding some ultra-conservative agenda in which women are subjugated, I simply don’t understand why one would need to point out such a thing. I don’t think that’s it (or is it? Am I missing some vast conspiracy at BYU?), so why? Do these people simply not understand the definition of feminism? I ask in earnest; I’m admittedly young and oblivious. How do you respond to such a statement?

(To his credit, the professor also pointed out it’s perfectly okay to be a feminist.)

I nabbed the whole thing from here.

Because seriously, what part would you cut? The part where Chloe's fellow student makes a world of sense? Where Chloe provides a common definition of feminism and wonders where the stigma comes from? The paragraph where she expresses bewilderment that one would believe in the principles of feminism and still deny it? The part where her male professor, at Brigham Young University, told the student, and his class, that it's perfectly ok to be a feminist?

Cool post.

Goose of Living In Outlaw Territory occasionally does the Recipe Tuesday meme. I happened to be on the market for something quick, easy, tasty, and kid-friendly so darned if I didn't print her post (I don't think I've ever printed anyone's post before) and headed to the grocery store.

Here's what I printed. I'm reposting it so that either makes it a Tuesday Recipe by proxy post, a bigger-than-140-character Twitter Retweet, or else just a darn good Tuesday night meal.

So sometimes I want enchiladas mole but I don't want to spend forever wrapping the filling inside each tortilla and I certainly don't want to haul out the spice grinder to hand make my mole. Perhaps that makes me lazy occasionally, so be it.

Here is what I do.

One jar mole paste, diluted with at least two cups water and blended over heat till simmering. This paste tends to want to stay thick so keep adding water if you need to.
15 corn tortillas (cut the sides off so they are rectangular)
Filling, such as-black beans and corn with minced peppers, zucchini, mushrooms and garlic or shredded chicken or pork or whatever you want.
Three cups grated cheese-chedder, monterey jack, queso fresco what have you

Saute up your filling
Spray a glass pan with cooking spray and lay down a layer of tortillas (about 5).
Add a layer of filling, cheese and mole sauce.
Repeat the top the layers with the last batch of tortillas and mole.

Bake at about 350 for 30 minutes.

She said it here.

For once my corner grocery let me down -- no mole sauce of any kind -- so I improvised my own impromptu enchilada sauce with a tub of fresh salsa and a can of tomato sauce.

Otherwise? Wowzie! Quick, easy, and very tasty. I grabbed an ear of fresh corn and some canned black beans, a little pork sausage, some onion and red bell pepper. A little sour cream on top after serving it up and... Mmmm-mmm!

The kids liked it too. Plus there's enough left over for lunches tomorrow.

Or, as Goose put it "It's dang good."

Via Maxwell Hammer of News for Perverts here's a YouTube version of an ad that's evidently not being shown in Australia.

Hammer's take is that Australia is more prudish than America. My take is that prudish or not the male centrism is kind of out of control in the sense that people with really big boobs... even boobs they can't see their shoes over... tend to have spacial awareness and kinesthetic agility such that they can see... pretty much everything. Especially given that to reach one's mid-twenties implies that one was once in one's two's, three's, five's, eleven's and consequently even if they'd been pubescently precocious they'd have long-since figured out how to see around and over them. Oh, and speaking of seeing, someone cognitively capable of addressing a service person would most likely have seen the platter as it was being set before her and so she would have registered that fries were present even if they were momentarily obscured.

Aww, that's just me being no fun at all. I know, maybe she's got short-term memory loss from, say, a stroke, medication, a blow to the head, or maybe a date rape drug like flunitrazepam. Ha ha, wouldn't that be a riot!

Dang, I'm still not getting into it. I know, maybe she's a 21st-Century version of Fred McMurray in the Absent-Minded Professor and she's got her head so wrapped around a problem in the synthesis of amphiphilic block-copolymers it's a marvel she remembered to order fries at all. Hey, now that would actually be pretty funny.

Responding to a knee-squeezing podcast from ZDNet about technology at Sex 2.0 Sabrina Morgan of Sabrina in Stockings left a pretty brilliant comment

Thanks for mentioning my session, although I'm not sure what was behind the case of the giggles as soon as the term "sex" came up. I'm sure you share my understanding that CRM software is a set of useful tools; CRM itself is a mindset and a way of running your business. Sex work as a personalized service industry is no different.

Some of the first and longest-running podcasts were sex podcasts (Open Source Sex, Bedroom Radio, and Whorecast come to mind). At a conference focused on the intersection of sex, technology and feminism, Ellie and Nobilis's Podcasting 101 panel was a perfect fit.

As far as getting free attendance as an analyst - good luck with that one. Most of the attendees were sex/tech/culture analysts and paid regardless. The conference was inexpensive to begin with ($40 for last-minute tickets); if you were interested in attending the event for free, volunteer refunds and scholarship tickets were available.

Read the quote in context here.

Taking it to their professionalism rather than taking it personally isn't just a good idea in general, it's got to have hurt. "I'm sure you share my understanding of CRM...?" Ouch! Reminding commercial podcasters that they weren't there first? Ouch again. And suggesting that if the $40 for "analysts" (who hadn't bothered to analyze the conference $30 early registration fee) was too pricey they could volunteer or request scholarships? That too.

Even better twist? In Twitter she twisted the knife with just 132 razor-sharp characters.

I can't be offended. They managed to get my name right, promote #sex20, make us sound interesting and make themselves look immature.

Nice work!

Kink In Exile discusses a peculiar and novel form of reverse discrimination and asks...

Perhaps it is a testament to the women’s movement that intelligence no longer precludes attractiveness in most people’s minds, but why does attractiveness still preclude intelligence? Why do I feel like people expect my IQ to drop by 20 points when I put on lipstick? Perhaps the social pressure is coming not from the cultural norm, but rather from the counter culture? After all, it isn’t that people expect my makeup to fall through a hole in the space-time continuum if I accidentally read too dense an astronomy paper, but rather that my understanding of said paper will be diminished by makeup. The pressure to conform, for once, is coming from the geeks.

Correlation does not equal causation. Women in math and science fields are frequently less concerned with their appearance than their peers in the humanities. What an interesting correlation! So why do I feel marginalized and suspect when I’m dressed up around geeks? Does anyone else have this experience?

She said it here.

If you're familiar with the phenomenon leave a comment at her site.

Further reflections on "vanilla," "kink" and negotiations. At Sex 2.0 I finally got to meet Miss Calico of Dominatrix Next Door. A week or two ago Calico wrote with warmth and fondness about a BDSM scene she played in with an acquaintance. In addition to sounding eye-rollingly painful for her (which I can handle) her description sounded dangerously out of control (which alarmed me.) I mentioned this to her, in rather maudlin terms that surprised both her and her top.

We talked about it a little further when we met in person and she said, with some exasperation, that she hadn't thought it was necessary to write about the extensive email, phone, and in-person negotiations she and her partner had gone through to detail exactly what they intended to do together, what to expect from each other, what their limits and squicks might be, what their contingencies would be, nor did she think it necessary to talk about their communications before and during the scene nor the details of aftercare afterwards.

I said it made perfect sense that she wouldn't want to do that in her post but that I thought it would be nice for her to talk more about negotiation and aftercare in her blog because a lot of (CoughVanillaCough) people who might like to try kinky things would probably have better experiences if they knew more about it.

The blank look she gave me was worth the price of the plane ticket. "People already know to do that," says she. So I tried to rephrase it, saying that I knew people heard about things like "safe words" but not so much else and that there really wasn't a lot of discussion of "sub drop" and aftercare and that it didn't just come naturally because negotiation, communication, reconsideration, and aftercare isn't really part of standard heteronormative scripts. _[Aside: would Business Time be funny if it wasn't so recognizable? --fl]_ Whereupon she said something that would have been worth the price of a plane ticket to Madagascar to hear it.

"And I'm supposed to justify what I like to do!?!?!?"

Kind of hard to argue with that.

Her observation that heterosexual "vanilla" people make a lot of unspoken assumptions isn't new, of course. That goes back at least as far as Easton and Liszt/Hardy's The Ethical Slut. What was different, though, and what drove home the point was Calico's sense of shocked aggravation not with what happens during vanilla sex but with what generally doesn't happen before. And after. (Think being criticized for driving race cars by people who don't even wear seat belts.)

Which leaves one wondering which practices, exactly, should and should not be discussed in the sexual disorders and fetishes sections of ab-psych classes.

Here are my rough, non-verbatim notes from Cunningminx's excellent ice-breaking presentation "Internet Famous / Conference Shy." The notes are necessarily incomplete during audience-participation sections. Finally, because I arrived a few moments late I missed part of the introduction.

Language note: Minx uses the ominous-sounding term "stalking" in the OKCupid sense of being interested in or curious enough about to want to know more about or to meet someone you know only online. (In real stalking there's obviously no such thing as "stalking politely.")

First, here's the session description from the 2009 Sessions page.

Are you great on a keyboard, but overwhelmed by the time you get to the registration desk? Are you charming on Twitter but glued to the wall at the opening night party? Sometimes internet abundance doesn’t translate well to having a great time at that conference. From wildly famous sexperts to curious wallflowers, from keynoters to first-time guests, conference experiences might not easily translate from the keyboard. Find out how, with just a little preparation, you can have the best possible experience at your next con.

Session leader: Cunning Minx

How do you stalk politely?

• Check blogs and their other sites
• Leave comments
• Follow twitter
• Google for other social-media connections

Be organized

• make a list of who you want to see
• and what you want to talk about with them
  • name/alias
  • organization
  • blog/twitter topics
  • recent events attended

What can I do to be stalkable/open?

• Write best work before the event (most interesting to/about you)
• Be yourself, be interesting
• Reach out via blog, podcast, Twitter
• Use the event #hashtag for Everything
• Blog/Twitter about folks you do know
• Find out/ask who's going
• What you're excited about

Join the conversation

• Mailing list
• Listen first -- take a week to listen to what others are talking about, so you know what is and isn't... topical.
• Answer questions (if you really know)
• Ask questions
• Post a pic to Facebook group
• Post to Facebook wall
• Continue interesting conversations with individuals off list
• Be a real person

Mailing list don't

• Don't use as a dating service

As you pack

• Make sure you've got all your equipment with you
• Including chargers and cables
• And extra batteries
• On the other hand, asking to borrow a power cord is a great ice-breaker
• Bring fresh business cards w/ name/pseudonym, TwitterID, blog, cell-phone or texting
• Backup your laptop
• Give current partner some loving

During the conference

• turn twitter notices on mobile device
• be stalkable
• be your "party self"
• Post about all the fun you're having
• If you show faces do a pod/vidcast
  • seesmic.com
  • audioboom.com [Couldn't find working link. --fl]

Starting a conversation

• Statement
  • I just went to...
  • This is my first...
• Disclosure about yourself ("I" statement)
  • I think...
• Invitation (opportunity for them to say)
  • What do you think about...?

Conversation Starters

• Which session are you going to?
• Oh, I missed that, how was it
• Going anywhere for dinner (be specific
• What do you do at XXX
• How did you find out about YYY
• Did you see the season finale of ZZZ? (Battlestar Galactica, good example -- kind of random, good break-out-of-conference-mode question.)

Say what you want

• I'd like to present/scene with you tonight (Can't get what you don't ask for -- they're not telepathic)
• I'd like to get to know you better
• I'd love to hear you scream
• Point being -- get it out there out loud so they can respond

Practice believing in yourself

• If you get emo get yourself out of it by... asking/outreach to pull yourself back into "party" space
• Say fears out loud
• "Egging on" exercise -- you vent, they agree instead of saying "oh no." Point is you can end up laughing about it instead of resisting their resistance.

Take care of yourself

• Adopt a policy of
  • Trying new things
  • meeting new people
  • having new experiences
  • no regrets (you won't enjoy everything you try, e.g. the 9-star tofu faux chicken-liver appetizer everyone else at dinner said they liked.)
• Decide you will kick ass

It's really annoying, and patronizing, and counterproductive to refer to sexually aware people who don't drool down other people's blouses (without a negotiated invitation anyway) as "sex geeks." Or geeks, period.

---

Which gets to something Ghostorchid said about "vanilla" vs. "kink" approaches to sex in comments to Miriam Perez's post at Feministing

I feel like there's sometimes a tendency in the alt.sex and sex blogger scene where it's "all kinks respected" but it's okay to make little jokes about "vanilla" or to imply that more conventional folks would benefit from "more creativity" and "exploring" and whatnot. There's this tiny assumption that they're a little repressed, playing on the safe side, or missing out.

I also feel like there's an assumption that trickles around in alt sex communities that the alt sex scene is the "healthier, better alternative", when it's really just as great and as screwed up as every other scene. I get frequently told I should try more kink stuff by people who don't understand or can't believe that I've had horrible experiences in the kink scene. They insist I was just with the wrong people, although I was surrounded by radical self-identified feminist types who departed feeling like they'd exhibited great sexual politics while I felt sad and betrayed and erased. It's as though alt.sex and kink is the cure-all to sexual power issues.

She said it here.

Before I go anywhere else with this I want to acknowledge Orchid Ghost's unhappy experiences. They're way too common in kink where, unfortunately, the "smartest people in the room" effect -- where it's assumed that if we're doing it we must be doing it right so if you don't like it you must be doing something wrong -- can be as common as anywhere else something new or unfamiliar is practiced. There's also the plain old ordinary fact that players and users are as likely to attach themselves to sexual advocacy groups as anywhere else (in non-sexual terms see eternal attempts by "young socialist" and "anarchist" groups to hijack or subvert social-organizing and protest movements.) And finally, like any other complex skill involving technology, emotions, and/or body fluids, it's easy for beginners to get hurt -- either by themselves or because those who are adept forget that it's not "intuitive." (Computer pundit John Dvorak correctly quipped that the Unix operating system is intuitive once you thoroughly understand it.)

That said...

The common assumption is that "vanilla" equals "normal" and "kink" means alternative, naughty, radical, or (especially) transgressive. Instead "vanilla" implies a patriarchal and heteronormative, reproduction-centric, penis-in-vagina-intercourse-till-male-ejaculation-focused form of sex where negotiation terminates with a woman's "consent" to let the man proceed to "take" her as he sees fit.

Whereas "kink" tends to include any sexual activity with any combination of individuals, orientations, body parts, and sensory preferences (including the traditional "vanilla" ones) with the significant difference being that consent signals the beginning rather than the end of communication, negotiation, and shared decision-making.

That "vanilla" people think it's "kinky" to continue negotiating after consent has been given says all anyone needs to know about why both terms are almost perfectly inappropriate and non-descriptive terms.

And returning to Orchid Ghost's unfortunate experiences, simply calling one's self "kinky" can be as empty as calling one's self "sex positive" or (from back in the 1960s and 1970s) "sexually liberated." But it is the case that "kink" has more of a framework for intentionality, negotiation, and a "principle of least surprise" than "vanilla..." which (speaking of principle of least surprise!) can include the inherently non-consensual, non-negotiated and extraordinarily transgressive "penis in popcorn box" stunt. Just sayin'

Update: In comments SnowdropExplodes says Dw3t-Hthr talks about being the "clean up crew" when people have been "smartest in the room"ing.

Really nice writeup of Sex 2.0 by Miriam Perez at Feministing. She concluded with

One of my favorite quotes from the weekend:

Ricci Levy, Woodhull Freedom Foundation Executive Director

"Imagine a country where you are just as comfortable talking to people about sex and what you like as you are talking about chocolate. That would be what sexual freedom would look like."

Miriam said it here.

The quote caused a bit of a ruckus among commenters. Some said Ricci was trying to sexualize everything. Others complained chocolate has become a plaything of the rich.

I thought a post from Lisa KS from Punkassblog.com, who also attended, might put the Levy quote in a more affirmative perspective.

"I didn’t notice for quite a while that I wasn’t being stared at like usual. Not til I went outside briefly and found myself being whistled at and ogled by two men walking past me on the street. That woke me up, as it usually does, and when I went back inside the hotel where the conference was being held, when I looked around, I found that really nobody was looking at me much at all. ... It was pretty awesome."

Lisa said it here.

The point being Ricci wasn't saying "ooh wouldn't it be cool if everybody could just talk about acculturated obsessions with dessert 24 hours a day."

And not to sound nettled but to have jumped to that conclusion is to be no different from the two cat-calling passers by outside the conference site: so indoctrinated by the culture of sexualization they can't tell they're being rude.

For the record I was reminded by another commenter, Miriam, that food and sex are such excellent joint metaphors that they tend to produce "gotchas" when used as analogies for each other.

So had it been me I might have instead said "Imagine a country where you are just as comfortable talking to people about sex and what you like as you are talking about bicycles."

Because whether one has one bike, or many, or none it's unremarkable! And thus not likely to draw judgmental, uninvited, unwelcome, out of context, and/or appropriating remarks from passers by on sidewalks or online. Which was, of course, Ricci Levy's point.

Renegade Iconoclast of Oh No They Didn't quotes disk jockey Howard Stern, who was criticized in Rolling Stone magazine by mainstream porn star Sasha Grey.

I mean quite frankly, porn stars do great on Howard TV and all, but some of them are just so vapid. Some of them have something to say. For the most part I really don't' want to hear a porn star try to prove how intelligent and her porn is a political statement. I mean that just sounds absurd to me.

Read the quote in context here.

The possibility that an AM-radio-centric disk jockey could imagine himself the social better of any other kind of media personality is... well, I must be missing something here. It's not that it's bad to be a disk jockey, nor is it easy to be a successful one. It's just that it's not bad to be a porn star nor easy to be a successful one of those either.

Consequently one must assume that Stern was not speaking for himself but speaking to the insecurities and presumed inferiority complexes of the demographics of his target market.

So thanks to a comment a few days ago on this post where I quoted Karen Forsythe's point that intercourse is only one of several options I learned about a cool-concept blog, Feminists with Female Sexual Dysfunction. From the "About" page

Welcome to Feminists with FSD, a blog written by, for, and from the perspective of feminists with female sexual dysfunction.

This project began as after this blogger, a self-identifying feminist with vulvodynia, became fed up with the available information about FSD from a feminist perspective! There are relatively few discussions about this topic on the internet, despite the fact that up to 43% of women experience some form of FSD during thier lifetime according to the American Medical Association - and that’s just in the US! I found that what little material there is, while well-meaning, is all too often misinformed or jumps to distressing (or even outright wrong) conclusions.

This blog’s mission statement is: To provide women with FSD, and their partners, a voice on the internet where we can discuss how feminism influences our views of sex, and how our sexuality influence our views of feminism.

Read the quote in context here.

The intro says a lot, but it skirts the point: vulvodynia, vaginismus, vestibulitis, interstitial cystitis, and other conditions of the pelvic floor makes penis-in-vagina extremely painful. And consequently treatment tends to revolve around making it less painful. Or, ideally, not painful at all, but it's considered progress if treatment only reduces how painful it is.

That's a pretty androcentric outlook. And if we didn't have feminism we could just leave it at that and be done -- less painful good, more painful bad. And if we had only Rush Limbaugh and maybe Twisty Faster's also-androcentric vision of political-lesbian "rad-fem" the answer would be nearly as clear cut: intercourse is bad for women anyway so just don't have PIV intercourse. (Actually see the author's nuanced take on Twisty's ideas about it here.)

But in fact androcentrism isn't the most helpful approach. The biggest one being that the pain often extends beyond PIV penetration to any kind of touch at all. Including wearing clothes, sitting down, walking, etc. The other being that even when the context is sex and even when the desired outcome involves contact, insertion, and intercourse it doesn't have to have anything to do with the convenience of men.

Shocking I know. But all the more reason to examine it from the perspective of those who actually have it instead of their partners or random pundits and passers by.

At Sex 2.0 blogger Maria Diaz presented a session on "Revenge Porn." Here are my rough, non-verbatim notes taken live during the session. Update Calico has posted video transcripts.

Initially inspired by hassles faced by Gretchen Rossi of a TV show called "Real Housewives of Orange County"

• Ex boyfriend started to post photos to thedirty.com after the show aired
• She doesn't talk about it but she's attempted legal action against the website

So! What is revenge porn?

• Photos or images distributed by someone in an attempt to humiliate the subject; sometimes includes contact info
• First used on urbandictionary in 2007
• (Comment: For sex-industry people may not be photos but might be contact info)

Reason for the talk

• People are sharing more pictures and other personal information than ever.
  • Not just for world but peer group
• Solution has to be more realistic than "never take naked photos or otherwise do anything else that could ever get online ever."

Different flavors of revenge porn

• Celebrity sex tape
• Scorned ex who distributes tapes to world or to friends
• Faux revenge professional porn
• The Revenge Porn threat (blackmail) "Do what I want or I'll release the photos

4 Cases

• Lena Chen (formerly of Sex and the Ivy blog)
  • Outed in photos by disgruntled ex
• Kim Kardashian (Public celebrity)
• Carrie Prejean (Miss California)
  • Carrie Prejean was outed as revenge for homophobia... but still was outed and it was still revenge
• Jason Fortuny (with a twist)
  • Posted respondents to his "violent craigslist" prank
  • Imagined he was in the clear but wound up losing court battle

Maria Diaz asked: Why do outed celebrities' seem to suffer less career-wise (but not suffer less personally)

• Guess: Probably papparazi influence

Question: Why the market for humiliated/revenge-upon-ed wives, husbands?

• Opportunity to look down on someone
  • "At least I don't have naked photos of me..."
• Eroticizing shaming/prudery
• Justifying/viewing "object lesson" participation
• How people think about women (has to do with why it's almost always women.)
• Not much stigma for men because (no-sex class moment here) it's expected that men will "debase" themselves. It might happen that they're outed but it's not "news."

Question: With everyone growing up with phonecams, etc do you think it'll ever reach a point where someone won't have to resign or won't be hired if outed?

• Probably so. There's often little lasting damage now
• There is a control issue. Sex bloggers (e.g. Lena Chen) who post their own photos still felt hurt and betrayed when an partner does it against their wishes

Maria: Problem with Jason Fortuny and other revenge/stalking cases is there were, or are, no real laws.

Point: Revenge porn ought to be treated as internet stalking
Downside: law enforcement may not be prepared/motivated to enforce stalking in the first place

Point: saturation of millions of "yeah I did that too" takes power away from straight-up revenge. Saturation doesn't protect in Fortuny-type "craigslist respondent" outings

Point Saying "If you have to do it... lock it down, get "collateral," is implicitly agreeing it's wrong. Saying "it's the worst thing" is only an issue if it's really the worst thing!

Possible "fight fire with fire" Strategy:

• Cuts both ways
• Out people who post revenge porn.
• Saturation may protect victims (I mean, at some point it's going to become "so what") but it's unlikely to protect perpetrators.
• At some point in the future we'll be blazé about being naked on the internet...
• But! At no point are we ever likely to be unconcerned about assholes who out people.

This post is about an effective way to deal with people who post sexually "incriminating" information about others against their will: outing the posters so that their future employers, partners, and customers find out when they Google them.

On Saturday at Sex 2.0 Maria Diaz gave a presentation on "revenge porn" "Revenge porn" is the umbrella term for the act of distributing information about a person's sexual nature against the victim's wishes, but it's most closely associated with posting nude photos taken before a relationship ends as a way of getting back at an ex.

One of the big concerns for victims is that even if they get redress from perpetrators... or even if the perpetrator genuinely regrets their decision, once information goes into circulation it can't be recalled.

One potential bright spot is that as more, and more, and more people "grow up online" and as more and more people's photos end up in distribution (either involuntarily or voluntarily) we can expect to reach a certain saturation level such that the existence of such photos won't be scandalous at all. (In 1984 the discovery of years-old nude photos of Vanessa L. Williams obliged her surrender her position as Miss America. Some years later the disclosure of far more sexual photos of rabid right-wing radio host "Doctor" Laura Schlessinger raised eyebrows but caused no lasting damage. Just recently the discovery of photos of controversial figure Carrie Prejean have caused scarcely a ripple. (Compared, at least, to her genuinely scandalous, but unconcealed homophobia.)

Odds are that it won't be that long before such photos won't derail a Supreme Court nomination.

That will be then, however. This is now. And now, for whatever reason, not only do people feel embarrassed and threatened when a former partner posts photos, they also face potential discrimination from future partners, colleges, and employers during routine background searches.

So what to do?

Well, Google and background checks cut both ways. If Google can turn up "incriminating" photos indicating that, like the entire rest of the population, one has a pee-pee and an inclination to do things that feel nice with them, well? Google can also turn up information on the assholes who think it's fun, funny, or "revenge" to post them.

And you know what? Whereas a "saturation" effect may protect victims in the future it's extremely unlikely that future employers, partners, journalists, or biographers will ever be pleased when they turn up evidence that a candidate has posted such photos.

"Youthful indiscretion" is almost by definition a transitory phenomenon that, again almost by definition, has no bearing on one's likely future performance. "Being an asshole," on the other hand, can be a little more... indicative. (For instance it's very likely that no matter what he does in the years between, 30 years from now Jason Fortuny's odds of a supreme-court nomination will be approximately what they are now: zero.)

So to the extent you can't recall photos posted on the internet I'd like to suggest making it just as difficult to recall the information identifying the individuals who posted those photos.

Yes, I'm aware that many victims would prefer the incident be forgotten as quickly as possible rather than dredged up again in the future. That's obviously fine. But not every victim will feel that way. And, really, it only takes a few to create a laudable "chilling effect" on other would-be perpetrators.

On a whim, while looking for some uncharacteristic-for-me very light reading for the plane, I picked up a copy of Charlaine Harris's Dead Until Dark, the first book in a non-gothic, non-Twilight vampire novel that's the basis for the TV show True Blood. (I haven't seen the show but two people in the airport bookstore said it's not as good as the books.)

I haven't read the Twilight series but I've read more than enough reviews to have a good idea what it's about. And to suspect I wouldn't care much for it. Harris's book, on the other hand, while following almost the same template reads almost the opposite of what Twilight sounds like.

I don't know if the author intends any of this but...

• The vampire doesn't help the protagonist remain celibate. Quite the opposite.
• Rather than be physically harmed by sex with her vampire partner (it invigorates her and helps her heal faster) she's socially harmed (and sometimes put at physical risk) for her association with him.
• Even though there are male and female vampires their power, social conventions, and ruthlessness towards humans -- who till the recent development of synthetic blood were straight-up prey -- things are even more patriarchal rather than less
• The exaggerated patriarchalism and paternalism of vampire society makes it easier for the reader to notice the "ordinary" patriarchy of contemporary human society.
• The protagonist uses many of the same skills to cope with vampire culture that she developed as an intelligent but lower-working class woman to negotiate conventional society

All that said she remains a part of her culture instead of particularly questioning it, being "too good" for it, or otherwise being angsty or alienated.

All that plus southern (north Louisiana) culture, murder mystery, family drama, and of course romance, danger and lust made it pretty delightful light summer or long-flight reading.

I've already read the second book (I stayed home with my son who's come down what I rather pointedly hope is just a cold) and while I wasn't as enamored of it I'll read the next to see if I want to read the rest. But the first one was pretty good.

Not the best possible holiday timing but Megan of Jezebel says

About 3.2 million women, mostly in the developing world, gave birth to stillborn children last year, and one-third of those women lost their children during labor. Little research is done to address the problem. [UPI]

Read the quote in context here.

All you need to know about the "pro-life" movement is that we heard about this from the feminist politics desk at Jezebel instead via deeply concerned press releases from every single "pro-life" on the planet.

Oh wait! How callous of me. Of course the "pro-life" movement cares when a wanted child dies before or during birth. Just the other day Alaska's Governor Palin signed a bill authorizing... birth certificates for stillbirths! (Quoth the Governor: "I'm thankful that Alaska's legislature recognizes how important a step like this is as Alaska embraces a culture of life and respects precious babies, including babies stillborn...")

But if you were to search Google News with the keywords "stillbirth pro-life" you'll get... well, you'll find nothing at all indicating that men and women who care enough about "unborn life" to commit assault, vandalism, arson, and murder for hire have anything to say at all about stillbirth.

Again, that's all you need to know about the "pro-life" movement. Period. At all.

Fuck them and the horse they rode up on.

One of the evening activities after Sex 2.0 (Twitter tag #sex20con) this evening was a screening of award-winning porn, including Matinee, directed by Jennifer Lyon Bell, from the Cinekink 2009 event. Here's a synopsis of Matinee from Cinekink

Actors Mariah and Daniel play lovers every night, but their onstage romance lacks spark. One slow afternoon, they discover that today's matinée performance will make or break both of their careers. Daniel wants to make big changes, and Mariah starts to wonder: are Daniel's suggestions reasonable? Or has he lost track of the boundary between actor and character? Rushed to the stage, in front of a live audience, they must figure it out together.

They said it here.

I came in late and, because the room was very crowded, I didn't stay long. And so I don't know much about the premise or plot. But the one sex scene I saw was in my opinion a real eye-opener.

The female lead leads! Every step of the way she's the active party. The point of view focuses on both of them but she's the one doing the foreplay, stroking him hard, eating him, unwrapping the condom, pulling him toward her, guiding him into her. Even when he's on top she's actively moving up against him as much as he's moving into her.

They separate before either of them come. She climbs on top of him. He holds himself this time, but more to hold himself steady as engulfs him. Once they're joined he leans back and she moves. As she gets more excited she reaches down and rolls her own clitoris.

Again they stop before either of them come. She rolls back. Their hands join over her vulva. He strokes her to a well-acted but persuasive rather than porn/theatrical orgasm. Rather than jump to the next scene there's a really nice enactment of the pause for "aftershock" care.

There were a lot of highly non-vanilla people present and I didn't think the film was well received (they may have just been really rowdy, or else perhaps the into scenes, which I didn't see, were unbearably hokey.) But I thought from a gender-role perspective its hetero/vanilla veneer made it all the more transgressive. She put the condom on him even before she began to eat him. The pace and tempo was in regular-intercourse tempo rather than the conventional hyper-porn bippity-bippity-bip pace that, I think, is pitched more for the tempo of male masturbation. There was no money shot. No calling anyone a bitch or grimacing out "give me your fat rutabaga you big stud." At least while I was there she came and he didn't. In fact except that there was nudity, PIV penetration, and couple of porn-style moans and groans it missed most of the tropes I remember driving me to give up on video porn.

That last bit is kind of interesting: any bumpkin in porn can cough out a money shot, and many do. The standard routine is, roughly, that the director gets all the shots he or she needs, all the positions, acts, and angles, and then they stop everything re-arrange the shoot, and the actor stands or kneels and quickly wanks out an ejaculation. Usually on somebody else's body or face. Whee! Just how I always want to finish when I have sex (but, to be fair, it probably helps the target-male customer identify since at that point he's probably masturbating too.) What's different about Matinee is that she has the "money shot" using only his hands -- considerably more difficult even for porn actresses to produce in male actors (given how rarely they do it instead of him.)

An important point that I probably wouldn't have picked up on if I hadn't been watching with other, perhaps more porn-savvy viewers: I get the impression is more of a masturbation aid than representative sex. And so, I think, maybe the stylized, 7-minute naked-step-aerobics of "real" porn is more effective for people who use it to get off than the stuff regular people do. (Sort of like you might enjoy seeing a whole top-chef episode worth of effort to prepare your meal even though you probably wouldn't want to cook under that kind of pressure yourself every evening.

But by and large? Although personally I like a little more turn-taking when I have sex it was all in all the kind of slow comfortable, cuddly, orgasmic screw I'd thoroughly enjoy spending a matinee-long afternoon doing with a partner.

Anyway, cool scene in what looked like a cool movie. (The Cinekink jury evidently agreed. They gave Matinee the award for best narrative short.

Learn something new every day.

At dinner at the Sex 2.0 conference I learned from Bad Influence Girl, who writes sex-toy reviews and erotic reveries, that...

"Female condoms," the kind of sleeves that are inserted vaginally instead of rolled onto the penis as with condoms for men, are cooler than I'd been led to believe.

• First, they're great for women who's partners have difficulty getting or maintaining erections. That would include those who loose steam while putting on condoms, sure, but also for those who have difficulty getting or maintaining full erections at all.
• Next, they're nice because they make initial entry, the kind involving a lot of nice, cooperative bumping and sliding and aligning when you're not using your hands, feel more natural.
• Oh yeah, and most of them are polyurethane or nitrile polymer instead of latex, which is not only great for people with real latex allergy-allergies, but for people who's skin is irritated by that kind of squeaky friction you get even when you use lube.

Anyway, that's actually pretty cool to hear about. The operative language about condoms in general, and condoms for women in particular, is that the language used to discuss them is often highly... operational. Yes, they give women control, especially in the sense of women who's partners selfishly refuse to use condoms themselves. And yes they provide roughly the same protection regular condoms to (more in the case of so-called "bikini condoms" since they offer more protection from skin-to-skin transmission of, say, perineal or scrotal herpes; some of the earlier versions provided less protection; like regular condoms they can be difficult to learn to use properly.)

But... BadInfluence wasn't talking about the pragmatics, she was talking about what made them more enjoyable, for her, than male condoms.

Your mileage may vary but if you use condoms with a second form of contraception and, especially, if you or your partner has erection problems, you might enjoy checking them out.

Hugo Schwyzer has taken up the issue I raised in Unforseen Consequences of Men Believing Themselves Unseen.

In comments he ran into some perfectly legitimate but somewhat skeptical objections. The first being Lisa KS (of Punkassblog) who said

“I have lost track of the number of women of my acquaintance, now often in their thirties, who have a lot of bitterness and anger about the fact that no man has ever really intensely physically desired them–made them feel hot in the way you so eloquently describe above–no man has ever said such things to them. This same hurt and rage in women is absolutely identical, and anecdotally I’d say nearly as prevalent, as it is in men.”

Her point is interrelated to the point Hugo (and I) are raising but it’s really, really important. What Hugo is talking about is the different heterosexual gender narratives of desirability. What she's talking about is the disconnect between gender narratives and actual real life.

In other words a) we have little vocabulary for discussing visual/physical desire for men and b) the vocabulary that exists for discussing desire for women excludes many or most actual women.

That’s not to belittle Lisa's point. At all! I spend a lot of time thinking about it, and trying to work through it. In fact the lack of a narrative of desire for men first occurred to me while thinking about it. But they’re different problems. That both need to be addressed.

Frequent commenter Mythago said

Feeling that your body is ‘neutral’ - that men’s bodies are just sort of, you know, people bodies, but women’s bodies are the sexy ones - isn’t the same thing as “I have a penis so I’m ugly”.

And another commenter ElleDee said

"I’m having a hard time feeling too sorry for guys about this.”

and

“How about this? We (straight women) will tell you when we think you are hot if y’all (straight dudes) tell us when you think we are smart and funny and really interesting.”

Feeling sorry for men wouldn’t be all that helpful anyway. It’s at least part of a bed we’ve made and are laying in. So the most productive thing to do… for us and anyone who’s willing to help… is figure how to get us to get up.

I think that’s more critical than almost anything for getting over the next gender hurdle. The gendered beauty and worthiness traps are caustic in the extreme. Whereas Mythago correctly identifies male form as “neutral” men tend to perceive “neutral” as irrelevant. With the result that men imagine we can only be attractive in terms of material-accumulation or accomplishment. With the further result that we perceive heterosexuality as transactional. With the further result that we’re indoctrinated to see women’s accomplishments not just as competition but as an existential threat. Because, to paraphrase male-persona Red Green, “if the women don’t find you handsome, and don’t find you handy, they’re not going to give you the time of day.” And would that form a nice basis for ultimate self-hating misogyny? Why I believe it would!

So anyway, at least for me, the point isn’t to make us men feel better by broadening beauty narratives to include us. Instead it’s to further bend the gender conventions that say there’s only one way society assesses men just like we’re already working to alter the way society assess women. It’s about finding more ways to subvert the dominant paradigm wherein men are men, women are women, and never the twain shall be treated alike.

---

Meanwhile... Mathilde Madden of Erotica Cover Watch (a blog wherein two straight women erotica authors are occasionally reviled as radicals and even lesbians for wanting to see more good-looking men on the covers of erotica written by and for straight women) reveals one of her "Man Candy Monday" sources

I was idly flicking through regular candyland Hunk du Jour and discovered I couldn’t choose between these two. I know, it’s a tough old life.

Read the quote in context here.

Most of the images at Hunk du Jour seem fairly work safe. Looks like you can find other, somewhat less work-safe sources in Madden and her co-blogger Kristina Lloyd's blogroll.

If you're an adult you can click here to see a possibly not-work-safe image.

In comments to a great troll beat-down by Sady of Tigerbeatdown, belmanoir quotes the troll and adds what might be the missing piece to an critically important puzzle (emphasis mine)

"Another thing, why is it always up to the guy to stay sober enough to stop the act? If I go home with a girl after drinking, and we both have sex wasted as hell, she can wake up and say that she didn't want it. Then I go to jail. Where does that seem right at all? How about don't get drunk enough to agree to sex with a random stranger unless you are prepared to accept the consequences? That's how you 'ask for it'."

I think I love it so much because Tom is identifying the consequences of HIM getting drunk enough to agree to have sex with a random stranger as a POSSIBLE RAPE CHARGE and he doesn't seem to want to accept that at all! By his logic, guys who have drunk sex are "asking" to be accused of rape. And I can't help feeling like that wasn't his point.

Here's a link to the comment.

Because seriously, it stands to reason that if drunken women are "asking to be raped" then drunken men are "asking to be charged with rape." The symmetry is beautiful not least because those most inclined to be... or at least to sympathize with... drunken men are going to be saying "now wait a minute, that doesn't make sense!" To which the answer, obviously, would be exactly!

To be honest I think it actually is problematic that date rapists are pretty consistently as hammered as their victims. But it's never been sufficient to say we should manage men's alcohol consumption any more than it's sufficient to claim we should manage women's. Still you can say to men, as we evidently insist on saying to women "if you go out drinking then you're asking for it."

---

More generally, though, I like belmanoir proposal that if drunken women¹ are asking to be raped then, well, you're asking to be charged with rape for having sex with drunken women.

What's nice about that construction is that it works even in the Seth Rogan movie where his rent-a-cop rapes a profoundly intoxicated woman while he's sober.

---

Good informal metric: if someone's too drunk for you to feel comfortable with them driving, they're probably too drunk to competently either give or to discern consent.

That doesn't mean they won't consent when they're hammered. It doesn't mean they won't attempt to discern it. It just means that, as with driving competence, they're not going to be up for doing it competently.

---

I think the biggest concern here is that it feels patronizing to make determinations about other people's competence. But hello, car keys? Which wouldn't be a metaphor in the first place if intoxication and competent decision-making played well together.

As for "well it was her/his decision, who was I to judge?" Doesn't work for bartenders, and it only sometimes works for social hosts. So I'd say nope.

---

Final point: yeah, you say, but you and/or your partner love tipsy sex. How do you get there if competent consent goes out the window? It's hard to imagine anyone objecting if you and your partner(s), together, to get drunk and screw before you get drunk and screw.

[1: The discussion was framed in stereotypical gendered terms but the principle is obviously general. --fl]

Everybody says the Pacific Northwest is rainy. And sure, it is. But it's almost always a drizzle so fine office workers will sometimes sit out in it and housepainters will (only half-jokingly) say "that's not rain that's coastal fog... keep working."

Meanwhile in northern Virginia, almost in sight of Washington, D.C, it was raining so hard a few minutes ago I got more thoroughly drenched just running across the street to catch a shuttle than I have in all the years I've lived in the northwest. Combined!

Point being that even though it rains "all the time" hardly anyone in the urban Northwest except little kids and tourists actually owns an umbrella because you don't really need them. But here? I don't think I'm going to bother here either -- it was raining so hard an umbrella wouldn't have helped!

It was raining so hard I got soaked to what would be my underwear. Assuming I wore underwear. Which usually isn't a problem. Unless you get so wet people can... almost tell. Even through heavy jeans!

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

It may be easier to Twitter so follow me there (@talkingfigleaf) or just keep an eye on the widget in the top-right column on this site.

Oh, and since I seem to be operating in full prudish-libertine form lately, WTF is up with the promotional text for Kink.com's latest offering?

What is Public Disgrace?

Public Disgrace is the best public sex and BDSM site on the web. Women are bound, stripped, and punished in public. PublicDisgrace.com features porn with public nudity, public spanking, and public fucking at a new level.

...

Our amazing director takes hot girls into public and humiliates them. ... The girls are made a public disgrace, public female humiliation at its best.

Source: PublicDisgrace.com "enter" page

Public sex? Cool. BDSM? Sounds like fun. Binding and stripping? Sure, why not? Humiliation? Not so much my thing but I know it stirs other people's paint so go for it.

But punished?

Punished for what, exactly?

If it turns you on to participate then where does the punishment angle come in? And if it doesn't turn you on then what, exactly, makes it sex?

I mean... punishment is something you want to happen to Dick Cheney or Phillip Markoff. Punishment is something you want to happen to the umpire for calling your favorite base-runner out at home. Punishment is something you want to happen to your neighbor's child for saying "I'm sorry you're a pooter" when you tell them to apologize for saying you're a pooter. I would be profoundly disturbed, however, to learn you connected punishing Cheney, Markoff, an umpire, or your neighbor's child with anything having to do with sex at all.

And what the ski-jumping jimminies does punishment have to do with sex?

I mean, I don't want to be an old stick in the mud or anything. And dear sweet mother of pearl I'm acutely aware that the production side of Kink.com is consensual, sensitive, labor-friendly, well-paying, boundaries-articulating-and-respecting, and civic minded enterprise. And yes, I know sex-bloggers reliably catch more grief for criticizing Kink.com than Republicans get for criticizing Rush Limbaugh.

But c'mon! Whatever big group hug they've got going behind the scenes they sure seem awfully willing to deliberately to grow the market for people who don't think public sex, aggressive sex, BDSM sex, and male-top/female-bottom sex is hot but because it's degrading punishment.

Call me a prudish libertine. Call me a curmudgeon. Tell me Kink.com really isn't thiiiiiis close to jumping the shark anyway. But it's kind of annoying to spend time and effort trying to create the idea that sex is not punishment, that it's not unwanted, that it's not degrading "even when women do it," that even rough, "extreme" sex is cool for people who enjoy it. And I just don't see a lot of common ground between me and the kind of people who's promotional text appears to be actively recruiting adherents to the no-sex class ideology for customers.

Sheesh! What's their next "BDSM" adventure gonna be? "Hot and Housebound?" Where generically butch-looking men with shaved heads chain women in peekaboo wedding dresses to stoves and force them to cook bacon and clean hot ovens naked? Oh wait! (Note: the link is blandly work-safe but c'mon!)

Sometimes it seems to me that if you announce to the world that you're, say, a "self-admitted sociopath" or a misanthrope or a separatist, and you use the rhetoric of sociopathology or misanthropy or separatism to advance your causes of, say, sex-worker rights or recognition of women as human beings... that you're going to encounter quite a bit of, um, resistance. Or resentment. Or misunderstanding. Or exclusion.

Which is fine. Sociopaths, misanthropes, and separatists expect and perhaps demand resistance, resentment, misunderstanding, or even exclusion. And so when they get it they're happy. Indeed one gets the impression sometimes that when such individuals detect acceptance or adoption of their positions they flee extremeward... sometimes further than their own comfort zones... in order to re-establish the adversity their self-identity demands.

And that's fine too. Just yesterday... somewhere on Twitter or a post or in a PDF or comments to someone else's post or somewhere else... someone I wish I could identify raised the perfectly valid point that almost by definition change is not initiated by well-adjusted people. So thank goodness for misanthropes, sociopaths, and separatists!

The problem arises, I think, when one confuses rejection of one's unpleasant or adversarial rhetoric or personality with rejection of one's cause. Because after a certain point ones audience can begin to entertain the same confusion. With the result that in addition to closing their ears to one's asshole behavior they close their ears to one's perfectly legitimate cause.

Update: See also risk identified by Ezra Klein re: Sen. Inhofe as conservative id rather than crazy uncle.

So an anonymous donor has granted a big chunk of money to colleges run by women, stipulating that the money be given as scholarships to women and minorities. NPR Claudio Sanchez reporter evidently asked whether colleges run by men would get any money.

Twisty Faster of I Blame The Patriarchy response illustrated two things it's really important to know about her. First, she understands (heck, she taught me!) that the goal of radical feminism isn't so that women can gain access to the slightly nicer cage men are trapped in, it's to get everybody out of the damn cages. Second that she thinks hyperbolic misanthropy is the best way to explain radical feminism.

No, Claudio. I’m afraid men are shit out of luck. It’s the Law of the Conservation of Human Dignity, which states that, within a social order based on dominance and submission, the total amount of human dignity must remain constant. In other words, whenever women are treated with an iota of decency, a reciprocal diminishment of men’s humanity must obtain.

A consequence of this law is that whenever a girl gets to kick a soccer ball, somewhere a boy will be made to play with Barbies. Whenever a woman exercises sovereignty over the contents of her internal organs, somewhere a man will have to wear a frumpy 19th century calico dress and do the family laundry by hand. Whenever a woman publishes a paper on particle physics, somewhere a man will be waterboarded for a week before being shot by a firing squad of hairy humorless feminists. Etc.

Read the quote in context here.

Another way to put that first paragraph would be that no, the donor probably noticed there are plenty of schools who's presidents are men, and plenty of scholarships available to men, and so no, there will still be plenty of money for men in academia.

And another way to put that first paragraph would be that it's probably not a zero-sum endowment. Given the nature of the grant the choice probably wasn't between women vs. men in academia but instead a choice between advancing women in academia vs. advancing, say, women's health, reproductive rights, or political freedom. Therefore the endowment is just as likely to have increased the sum of money available to academia rather than shifting it from men to women.

And another way to put that second paragraph is that no part of feminism, especially radical feminism, is a zero-sum game with men where for every gain a woman makes a man must lose.

If you want to put it hyperbolically one might perfectly correctly say an endowment for women in academia isn't a blow to men because advancing feminism isn't about redistributing deck chairs on the Titanic, it's about getting everybody safely off the Titanic! And not just because the Titanic is gonna sink under a combination of bad design and bad management. It's because once you get off the Titanic there's a whole rest of the planet's worth of possibilities.

Putting it any of those ways, though, demonstrates that including misanthropy in one's argument isn't necessarily the most effective way to make one's case.

Holly of The Pervocracy says

There's a weird paradox in every issue of Cosmo: they constantly say that men have huge sex drives and aren't picky, then lay out thousands of things things you must do exactly right in order to get and please a man. Apparently dudes will fuck anything that moves... unless it's wearing last season's eyeshadow, gawd.

She dismantles another issue of Cosmo here.

Observation #1: For some reason this way of putting it got the idea through my thick skull that many women really mean it when they say they think most men are picky about the minutest details of their appearance. (It's not that men, being people, aren't picky about stuff. Even superficial stuff. It's that we're generally not picky about what Cosmo insists we are, nor do the strategies they offer help with what we really are picky about.)

Observation #2: The fallacy in #1, above, is enough to justify Twisty's "sex strike" mania, not because it would work but because it's an antidote to the idea that if you don't break your jaw trying to please a guy he'll ditch you.

Observation #3: The idea of a sex strike being, of course, incompatible with the vision of men shared by no-sex-class-fetishizing antifeminists their equally paradigm-loving "rad-fem" feminists colleagues: as willing and able to have sex with anything (else) that moves including goats. Which incidentally would also be why I think men are more suited to the "sex class" designation.

Anyway, I'm not sure answering dumb idea with dumb idea makes it a good idea. But... seriously. Wow.

---

Sort of like men get the idea if they're not "Seven Or Better," or if they can't get past the rope line of whatever club all the PUA shows are taped in they're never going to get laid at all.

The calculated insecurity driving the beauty and worthiness traps are great if you want to sell soap, or mascara, or motorcycle jackets. But they're steaming mounds of crap if you want to re-diffuse sexual joy and excitement over the spectrum of human existence.

Another post I've been meaning to get to. Back in April Margaret Jezebel let us know about a new dating website.

Do you hate wasting your time dating guys and learning all about their thoughts and feelings only to find out later that they have an average-sized penis? Then 7orbetter.com is the dating site for you.

7orbetter.com is a new site for people interested in meeting men with penises that are seven inches or longer. According to the website, the mission of 7orbetter.com is to let women know "upfront if a man has what it takes to satisfy you sexually."

She said it here.

Margaret quotes Washington City Paper writer Amanda Hess's wry reaction

Isn't society just terrible? A "properly behaved woman" who is only interested in men with huge penises may have to wait months-months!-before figuring out that the man that she has spent months falling in love with has been hiding a dick that's slightly too small to deserve that love. Now, with Seven or Better, that woman can know from the first date the exact dimensions of that penis she doesn't want to see yet.

Hess said it here.

Margaret adds that the site welcomes people of all persuasions including men seeking men and, perhaps less intuitively, women seeking women. She also says the editors want some sort of 3rd-party verification and they take a dim view of "any photograph [they deem] to be of such superior quality (i.e. modeling shots, magazine pages, etc,) that it raises the question of that photograph not being a reasonable representation of said member." It's not clear what exactly they mean by "said member."

I know men are raised to believe that length of erection is better but, at least on the heterosexual side most people I know who've expressed a preference seem to prefer girth over length.

It's all moot to me, of course. I may be tall, and I may have big hands, but I'm otherwise perfectly average.

NSFW Caveat: If you're an adult you can click here to see a disappointingly (according to 7orbetter.com) average cock. In a disappointingly cluttered environment.

I've been meaning to mention this video from the National Sexuality Resource Center called "How to Have the Best Sex of Your Life after Fifty." It's an interview with sex educator Karen Forsythe from Second Wind, a sex site for sexually active men and women ages 50 and up.

I can't embed the interview here but you can go see for yourself.

Notable Forsythe quotes:

"Get away from the idea of "intercourse" as the biggest kahuna in the world because it's not. At our age intercourse becomes only one of several options you can have."

"You're going to get laid for the rest of your life."

And since, by the way, you are going to get laid for the rest of your life (if I don't get that point across I'm not doing my job!) you ought to check out Second Wind. It's a cool site whatever your age.

Weekend editor Hortense of Jezebel says

Oh, internet. Without you, how would we ever learn about Boytaurs and those who love them? According to Urlesque, there's an entire (NSFW) Boytaur site devoted to those who prefer "pony boys with octopus arms."

Boytaurs fall into several categories, apparently: either half-man, half-horse, or just men with multiple arms and legs. "Of course, many boytaurs don't stop with four legs," notes the site, "Some add more legs, going six-legged or more. Some add extra arms. And many, enjoying all their boytaur feet, decide to go wristfooted as well."

She said it here.

She found the link via URLesque.com

To be honest I'm not terribly impressed. I'm not sure the site's intention is even erotic so much as more of the same old iconic/stereotypic/lookee-thar. And pretty much by definition photoshopping men's torsos on to horse bodies (let alone photoshopping more muscles onto already musclebound men) doesn't representing the erotic possibilities inherent in the figure of the ordinary heterosexual male. Still, if manamal mashups are your thing boytaur.com seems to be your go-to destination.

If you're an adult you can click here to see a possibly not-work-safe image.

The <a target="_blank" href="following meme seems to be pretty contagious. I'm doing my part to help make it a pandemic.

90 people get the swine flu and everybody wants to wear a mask. A million people have AIDS and no one wants to wear a condom.

Source: All over Google.

In case anyone wants to quibble, yes, the number of flu victims is larger than 90 and growing another quibble would be that more than a million people have AIDS, and that's number's still growing too.

Via a Maymay on Twitter, Virginia Prince said in 1967

The human male is in a cultural cage, though most of them don't know it.

Original source can be read at Google Books

While Price was talking about transgender issues I think that's a good way to summarize what's wrong with men not participating in feminism. Because for all our ostensible lordly privileges of gender it still amounts to life in a somewhat nicer cage than everyone else gets.

The problem with traditional, classic liberal feminism is that seeking equality with men limits all of us to getting to spend time in the bigger cage. The problem with traditional male superiority is it's all and only about getting to stay in the nicer cage. The trouble with a lot of progressive male superiority is that it boils down to "ok, I said you ought to be allowed into the nicer cage, now can I have a cookie?" And the problem with the traditional debate about what men's role in feminism should be is that it's all about why on earth men should let women into the nicer cage. With or without a fight.

The great thing about radical feminism is that it's about getting everybody out of the damn cages! And the benefit of that particular ambition is whatever cage you're born or raised into isn't nearly as important as "how do we get outta here?"

Call me radical but... oh wait, I am radical!

Matthew Yglesias has a telling message related to the seemingly dry but actually critical phenomenon of intra-factional conflict in any non-majority social or political movement. The post itself relates to Republican reaction to Sen. Specter's defection from the party but it's a general principle. (Emphasis his.)

Via Ed Kilgore, Ed Rogers from the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations makes the point that it’s basically never good to lose a Senator:

Notice to Republicans: Arlen Specter changing parties is good for the Democrats and President Obama and bad for us. If you think otherwise, put down the Ann Coulter book and go get some fresh air. There’s always a delusional element within the GOP that thinks if we lose badly enough the Democrats will gain so much power they will implement all their crazy plans, the people will revolt and purest Republicans will then be swept back into power. Even if this were true, it doesn’t take into account the damage done while our opponents are in control.

I do think it’s always worth considering an alternative. I think it’s very possible that Democrats could “gain so much power” that they implement at least some of their “crazy plans” and that the people, rather than revolting, will just turn their attention to other issues.

He said it here.

A good example in politics might be when a purist schism of progressives decided Dick Cheney and George Bush would be better in the long run than a progressive. Eight years later progressives are indeed in power (though no thanks at all to the original purist schismatics) and progressives even have renewed commitment to some purist principles. But as Rogers and Yglesias point out the damage has been... severe enough that even with exceptional effort and skill there's a decidedly non-zero chance we'll never recover.

While I have no, zero, none sympathy for the Republican position they're facing the same situation: each defection further reduces their fond ambition of collapsing the economy, destroying the environment, driving more decent people -- Americans and everyone else -- into poverty, depriving more children of health care and education, and, terrifying non-whites into subservience and, evidently, stripping women not only of rights and clothes but also the vote. To the extent they continue fiddling, their version of Rome will continue to burn.

But this is a blog about the intersection of sex, gender, relationships and politics I bring all this up to suggest, as I often do, that the schismatics of feminism pose similar risks.

Just as the "I'm not a liberal but..." trick diminished the progressive movement in years between the beginning of the first Bush administration and the end of the second, the "I'm not a feminist but..." trick dilutes the general movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. And, not to put too fine a point on it, both feminism and liberalism over the last generation or so have suffered from the collusion between ardently conservative assholes and ultra über movement purists to assert that indeed only purists really count... with the result that vast, vast swaths of perfectly liberal and/or feminist allies wind up feeling alienated, marginalized, hesitant and -- too often -- insulted to be called what by anyone else's definition would be a perfectly accurate description.

The effect is so bad, and so pervasive, that "the l-word" and "the f-word" are downright ground into our culture. "The L-Word" so much so that the promotional materials for the show of the same name played shamelessly with the idea that it referenced either more taboo... or maybe less taboo that the original euphemism for liberal!

And just to be clear here, it's not that the differences between schisms aren't relevant. The differences between pro- and anti-sex-work factions in feminism is nothing if not profound! But given the 80-90% of everything else held in common they sure look like differences between feminists but with the benefits of the dispute accruing far more to, say, anti-feminists like Laura Ingraham and her ilk than anybody inside the movement.

Replying to a comment of mine about orgasm fetishes, of Miss Calico, who occasionally works as a professional dominant, raises a paradoxical point (emphasis mine.)

I think I have been extra, super put off by the post-’70s reactive feminist stuff because so many submissive men fetishize it. I mean I’ve literally had men come to me and tell me how they were “raised by feminists to be submissive to women”. (What does this entail? Lots of humiliating them, telling them how they can’t please a woman, and kicking them in the balls, apparently. Because not being pleased is ever so pleasing to me.)

She said it in comments here.

Um. Yeah. All the feminists I know raise their boys to be submissive. Because, you know, that's all feminism is about, right? Yup. Oh wait!

There's only one way to be heterosexual in this world: one partner has to be dominant, the other has to submit; if the man can't be top in a relationships the only possible alternative is to be the bottom. Feminism is about women not always being submissive, therefore feminism must logically be about men becoming subs.

Or...

Maybe they're full of it. Maybe they're just making shit up.

Because... you know, even long before I started figuring out my relationship to feminism I knew a lot of feminists. Many of the women in my hometown church called it "women's lib," and a few, now in their 70s, 80s, and even 90s, still do. Many of my early partners would listen to feminist musicans and talk about whether they would "come out" if the musician did. In college there many, many feminist women including a noticeable handful of stereotype-embodying, Birkenstock-and-wool-sock wearing, man-hating, political-lesbian, turkey-baster-self-inseminating separatists. I know feminist programmers, feminist document handlers, feminist bloggers, feminist minister, feminist lawyers, artists, athletes, parents, and even feminist sex workers. Many or most of my partners both sexual and otherwise have been somewhere between Shulamith Firestone quoting to "I'm not a feminist, but" feminists. And yet... and yet...

Y'know? Sex with feminists is pretty much like sex with anyone else. Events leading up to sex are often decidedly different since if it's going to happen there's often a lot less bullshit to wade through (compare and contrast what worked and didn't work for Holly) but since when did "steers clear of assholes" equal "demands submission?"

AlwaysArousedGirl asks the approximately 25% of Americans who would test positive for the Herpes Simplex Virus's I or II

But maybe it’s time to stop the slut-shaming in regard to an infection that could easily creep into any of us on any day.  Maybe it’s time to think of it as no more to be desired — and yet no more to be feared — than any of the countless other viruses ubiquitous in our daily lives.

She said it here.

I'm obviously self-interested here since, again like roughly 25% of the population I test positive for herpes too. And I'm not saying at all that we should disregard herpes. Or any other STI. It's just that past a certain point there's not much sense stigmatizing it.

Not least because people who take the stigmatization seriously don't just transmit the stigma. They transmit the STI.

Herpes might be incurable. Denial isn't.

It's here. It's theere. Get used to it.

Comic by Modern Hooker. Used with permission from the artist.

I love this comic. It just says what ought to be official policy. If, and only if, sex-work isn't going to go away using all the methods available of course... oh wait! Making it illegal doesn't seem to make it safe. In fact, instead, since sex-workers can't call the police, or even solicit orders from the chief of police, or even collaborate on street safety without risking running afoul of RICO anti-racketeering statutes, or even having _all their property summarily confiscated if they show up on police radar at all.

Another image, though, from her "borrow" page

Image by Modern Hooker. Appears to be freely postable.

Her blog over at Wordpress is pretty sharp too.

Even further follow-ups on Kink in Exile's post about erotic appeal and men. Shulamith Firestone, one of the original 60's-era radical feminist and author of Dialectics of Sex actually has some seriously cool stuff to say about beauty and eroticism. In a way that pushes forward her agenda, not at all backing it off. Check it out.

And eroticism becomes erotomania. ... From every magazine cover, film screen, TV Tube, subway sign, jump breasts, legs, shoulders, thighs. ... Even with the best of intentions, it is difficult to focus on anything else. ... But in all this barrage of erotic stimuli, men themselves are seldom portrayed as erotic objects. Women's eroticism, as well as men's, becomes increasingly directed towards women.

Hmm... no wonder critics accused Mathilde Madden and Kristina Lloyd of being "‘hard-headed feminists’ ‘do gooders’ and, um, ‘lesbians‘" for thinking erotic photos of men are hawt!

Firestone continues

I want to add a note about the special difficulties of attacking the sex class system [Note: seriously, "no-sex class system" would have been better nomenclature --fl] through its means of cultural indoctrination. Sex objects are beautiful. An attack on them can be confused with an attack on beauty itself. Feminists need not get so pious in their efforts taht they feel they must flatly deny the beauty of the face on the cover of Vogue. For this is not the point. The real question is: is the face beautiful in a human way - does it allow for growth and flux and decay, does it express negative as well as positive emotions, does it fall apart without artificial props - or does it falsely imitate the very different beauty of an inanimate object, like wood trying to be metal?

I say "no-sex class" is more appropriate than "sex class" precisely because women as ideal sex objects are projected as wood or stone -- faces and forms frozen... literally "statuesque," eyes on the horizon, jaws tilted and knees locked just so. (One wonders whether the seemingly enforced breakdowns of... almost exclusively... women at Kink.com is fired by desire not so much to see them break down as to see how much they can "take" before they do.)

It gets better though,

To attack eroticism creates similar problems. Eroticism is exciting. No one wants to get rid of it. Life would be a drab and routine affair without at least taht spark. That's just the point. Why has all joy and excitement been concentrated, driven into one narrow, difficult-to-find alley of human experience, and all the rest laid waste? When we demand the elimination of eroticism, we mean not the elimination of sexual joy and excitement but its rediffusion over - there's plenty to go around, it increases with use - the spectrum of our lives.

That's so cool! Everybody thinks radical feminists are anti-sex, or, even better, "sex negative." It's more like... you know that old joke "I like both kinds of music, country and western?" Or "We have both kinds of wine, red and white." Or, maybe more accurately, "We only serve the best beer -- if it doesn't come in a green bottle we won't sell it." It's like they're objecting to that kind of view of sex -- not that there's something wrong with country music, or beer in green bottles, or even no-strings simulated sex with submissive skinny supermodel sibling sluts from Sweden and Saskatchewan but that that's the only valid kind, and only if you "pass the test" of either beauty for women or worthiness for men and if you don't fit you don't count.

Because great hand-blown hummingbird feeders that view of sex, relationships, and sexuality isn't just "sexist" or bad for women (though obviously it is) it's also a desperately, starvingly impoverished view for everybody.

What. Ever.

It's funny but even though I don't always feel comfortable or welcome claiming I'm a plain old feminist it's stuff like this that makes me say, unhesitatingly, that I identify as a radical feminist.

Conveniently for a follow-up to yesterday's post about the men's insufficient vocabulary for our own appearances Scott Adams of Dilbert.com Blog says

Yesterday I spent several hours at a photo shoot. The photographer was an award-winning top-of-his-field professional with an almost supernatural sense of visual rightness. At one point he was taking some profile shots of me and I mentioned that I thought I had a "good side" but couldn't remember which one it was. So he had me face left, then right. As soon as I turned right he said, "It's that one." No hesitation. No doubt about it.

I find this to be an inconvenient sort of knowledge. For the rest of my life, every time I talk to someone I will want to cheat my face toward the good side. I will never again make eye contact unless it by peripheral vision. In the interest of public safety I will only walk on the side of the street that puts my good side toward traffic.

...

Or was it my other side that the photographer said was my good one? Shit.

Read the quote in context here.

Again, it's not that we can't know who does or doesn't looks good to us as far as men go, it's that there's so little context we can't related it to anything.

---

Follow-up to the follow-up: an important point I forgot to mention yesterday that I only glanced off off with the Dan Quayle discussion. It wouldn't matter that men's ideas of attractive men were the same as women's. It's that very often when we say "don't you think so-and-so is attractive" we're often asked if we're serious. Which sounds like another way of saying "not so much."

And yes, in a way it shouldn't matter. And yes, it's grievously unfair... and dumb... that straight women and gay men, who may be no more attracted to attracted to other women than straight men are to other men, nevertheless are saturated to the scuppers with messages about exactly what is or isn't desirable about women's appearance. And oh yes, it would be a serious problem if men were evaluated only by their ability to reflect photons in an appealing way. But the preferred alternative to TMI isn't sphinx-like silence, it's something closer to a happy medium.

If you're an adult you can click here for what may be a mildly non-work-safe image: Celtic Knot Belt 031

Oof! I can't believe I missed this the first time! Kink In Exile reflects of Rule #2 of the bogus, corrosive Two Rules of Desire (It's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desirable) and finds it wanting. (Italics mine.)

So there is an interesting twist on this whole sex positive thing that I just wanted to mentioned because it’s come up a bunch recently. Think of this as a placeholder for a post…

If sex is something women have and men want how does this impact men’s self confidence? I’ve heard a few men express that it is novel to feel sexually wanted, not because they were not sexually wanted in the past but because there is not a space in which that is typically expressed. This is remarkable because all of the conversations I have had about this with all the various people these conversations have happened were in the last couple of months. Why is it so new and crazy to think that maybe men want to know that they are found attractive and desirable? I mean I want to hear that expressed by a partner…

Read the quote in context here.

I was told for the first time in real life that I'm "handsome" some time last Summer. By a friend I've known since we were both teenagers. In the 1970s. What was cool was she wasn't saying it romantically or anything, just as a casual remark comparing me to someone else our age (who she's also fond of.)

People have mentioned it in reference to the photos I've posted. And I get the impression hetero women talk to each other about attractiveness in men. But as KIE's friend said, there's not a space in which it's typically expressed. To the point that I'm pretty sure women might be surprised how few hetero men have ever heard it said. And certainly ever heard it said about them.

Which harks back, incidentally, to something Holly of The Pervocracy said earlier this month. (For the record I have a quibble only with the quoted paragraph, the rest of her post is dead on and worth reading.)

It always bothers me when straight guys claim they "can't tell" if another guy is attractive. It's such an annoying form of overcompensation. (It's also not true; maybe a totally straight guy can't make fine distinctions or have a "type," but he can tell you whether Gilbert Gottfried or Brad Pitt is more attractive.) I didn't ask if he gave you a boner, all you have to do is use your eyes and a completely detached, theoretic sense of attractiveness. It won't make you gay.

Read the quote in context here.

See, this isn't exactly right. We can tell if another guy is attractive to us. Even if he doesn't give us a boner. That's not the point. The point is that, outside of maybe Brad Pitt, we don't have much of an impression of which men are attractive to women. Because, again, physical, visual attractiveness in men, for men, doesn't really have a lot of vocabulary that... well... doesn't originate with men. So we can get opinions by the senior George Bush or John McCain that former Vice President Dan Quayle was so handsome they expected women to riot. And I'm pretty sure most men would have agreed that he ought to have been that appealing to women since he embodies a lot of what men think is good looking. But... but... that didn't happen.

For the record, I still don't think I personally look all that great in the sense that in no way do I conform to what I consider standards of attractiveness. I get that other people on-line think otherwise, but I still think that's only because nobody online sees my face.

Since both Rules of Desire are problematic, and since they conspire to make us feel undesirable for any reason but the worthiness of our accomplishments or status (largely, I believe, as a byproduct of accommodating other of men's preferences), it's just one more barrier that needs to fall before gender equality is really gonna work. And not because men should be objectified equally to women (wrong direction) but because not understanding that we can appear as physically attractive leads us to go a little overboard on the worthiness front. From which much hilarity does not ensue.

Anyway, it's great to hear that both Holly and Kink in Exile, as well as MayMay, the authors of Erotica Cover Watch, and maybe a few others, are noticing and/or contributing and/or starting a discussion of the matter in the last few months.

A follow-up on my "Quitcher Bitchin" post from yesterday since I think I may not have clearly reflected my concern. Turns out last week Kimberlly of of The Errant Wife found herself subjected to a rash of insults that possibly better reflect the point I was trying to make.

Well, who doesn't love a torrent of abuse on a Thursday?

...

So far I have been called despicable, a urinal, a whore, a cunt, a bad mother a bad wife, a swine: and that is just what they are calling me on my comments, you should see what they are saying over there. By a day in it had degenerated completely: apparently I should be killed and I should have AIDS - if the world were fair that is. Interestingly, the comments got uglier as time went on. "Group think" as my husband put it. Much as we bloggers legitimize ourselves via our similar leanings - they draw strength from their numbers.

The use the perceived worst things of femininity: I have my period, I am a bad wife, a bad mother, I am ugly, I am fat, I am rapidly aging, I have a big vagina, I am (god forbid) saggy - they judge me based on a view of what it is to be a woman that I have long since rejected.

It fascinates me that in crafting their insults they see only the female - I am not a terrible person, I am a terrible woman - most of what they hurl at me from their safe anonymity are gendered insults. Because I am not a person, you see, I am an object to be possessed.

Read the quote in context here.

Yes, I'm aware of various etymological and linguistic support for the inevitability, and even, I guess, desirability, of using attribute-denigrating language. That plus various "recovering meaning" initiatives for words like "slut" and "queer." And the whole "but you n-words say 'n-word' all the time" business.

I don't think Kimberly's interlocutors have any of that in mind when they call her the words they call her. Instead they call her those things because they believe it specifically, descriptively identifies her as precisely those things. Which, they believe, are the shittiest, crappiest, lowest, most worthless, things they're capable of imagining: characteristics "of or peculiar to" something with a vagina.

My point in saying it's hard to be sex-positive and still use those words wasn't because I thought it's just naughty to use un-PC words because they might hurt someone else's feelings. Nor was it because I think there's a real problem with people using dead metaphors without considering their once-living implications.

Instead I mean what I said, in my usual starchy way, in my first post ever on this site: "it's hard to use cock-sucker as an epithet once you've met someone who knows how to do it."

It's not that calling someone a cunt, a cocksucker, or a slut might hurt their feelings. If you want to hurt their feelings go for it -- if you pick a really scummy degrading one maybe it will hit home and they'll feel really bad and you'll win! It's just... it's hard to use those words as insults once you have an actual sexually positive understanding of their "technical" meaning.

Call me naive but I'm pretty sure none of Kimberly's comments come from particularly sex-positive individuals.

Via economics blogger Tyler Cowen and sex-blogger Violet Blue we've got not one but two works of epic fiction, one sociobiology and evolutionary psychology that, together, explain perfectly why so many women can have orgasms the regular way (with fingers, toys, tongues) but no so much from intercourse.

Exhibit #1 would be sociobiologist David Barash (in his first book, incidentally, he claimed the behavior of microscopic, parasitic acanthocephalan worm somehow explains or justifies homosexual rape in humans) who's new book, How Women Got Their Curves and Other Just-So Stories: Evolutionary Enigmas co-written with long-time collaborator Judith Eve Lipton, M.D., spends an entire chapter on the "Enigmatic Orgasm" (Note: sociobiologists think only women's orgasms are enigmatic while men's are thoroughly self-evident... and therefore absolutely unnecessary to explore)

Anthropologist-primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy suggests that female orgasm evolved as a spur to having sex with many different males. “Based on both clinical observations and interviews with women,” writes Hrdy, “there is a disconcerting mismatch between a female capable of multiple sequential orgasms and a male partner typically capable of one climax per copulatory bout.” A potential consequence of this “mismatch” is that females would be inclined to seek multiple partners in order to achieve their orgasmic potential. As for why this potential exists at all, Hrdy suggests that it is ultimately driven by the fitness benefit of taking out an anti-infanticide insurance policy, as proposed earlier for the evolution of concealed ovulation. Thus, female orgasm and its requirement of sustained stimulation may have provided the proximate mechanism under­pinning the ultimate payoff deriving from having sex with multiple partners. Here are Hrdy’s own words: “It is possible that as in baboons and chimps the pleasurable sensations of sexual climax once functioned to condition females to seek sustained clitoral stimulation by mating with successive partners, one right after the other, and that orgasms have since become secondarily enlisted by humans to serve other ends (such as enhancing pair-bonds).”

Read the quote in context here.

So. Got that? Them gang-bangin' hoor women somehow evolved mulitple orgasms... or maybe evolved... um... difficulty having orgasms with just one partner... in order to encourage them to have lots of group sex. Got that?

But wait, there's more!

This month's Scientific American Jesse Bering summarizes the latest word on Ev Psych thinking about the evolution of penis shape in "Secrets of the Phallus: Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?"

It too takes the line that women are just a bunch of train-pulling cum dumpsters, and therefore, mens penises have evolved our evidently atypical bulbous glans and flared coronas in order to...

...effectively displace the semen of competitors from their partner’s vagina, a well-synchronized effect facilitated by the “upsuck” of thrusting during intercourse. Specifically, the coronal ridge offers a special removal service by expunging foreign sperm. According to this analysis, the effect of thrusting would be to draw other men’s sperm away from the cervix and back around the glans, thus “scooping out” the semen deposited by a sexual rival.

See page #2, here.

So. Got that? Men evolved the kind of penises we have becausea them gang-bangin' hoor womin pulllin alla them trains. Got that?

So we've got a little concordance here between "creationist" sociobiology and it's more sophisticated "intelligent design" ev-psych descendant: them gangbangin' hoor women forced men to evolve plunger-shaped penises out of reproductive self-defense. We didn't want to, women made us!

Now this is where things start to get tricky. See, the researchers Bering mentions tested their semen-extraction hypothesis with sex toys. Specifically with "anatomical" vs. smooth-sided dildos inserted into masturbation sleeves. And sure enough, dildos with coronas extract more artificial semen (they boiled precisely measured quantities of flour and water for precisely measured quantities of time so it has to be science) than did dildos without coronas.

All well and good. Except, of course, unlike dime store "pocket pussies," actual vaginas, rather like actual live human beings with vaginas, are complex, dynamic, muscular, and responsive. Worse, from the ev-psych/sociobiology point of view real women's vaginas do that darned tenting thing as they get close to orgasm, meaning this carefully selected-for "semen extraction" business isn't going to do much good at all if the woman's even slightly aroused.

Which is where the ev-psych/sociobiology unified field theory rides to the rescue! If penises don't efficiently displace (other men's) semen in pre-orgasmically aroused women then men must not be accidentally incompetent about helping their partners have orgasms during PIV intercourse compared to other methods, our incompetence is evolved!

At last! Not just a biological basis but an evolutionarily determined basis for the proscriptions and prescriptions of the no-sex class paradigm! :-)

---

Now truth be told there are more than a few teeth missing from the ev-psych/sociobiology combs here. Which is fine, of course. There are a few muffins short of a baker's dozen in my arguments as well. The difference being, however, that I don't pretend to be a scientist.

Gap #1: Other closely-related species are also promiscuous (hello chimps? bonobos? Orangutans? Though not gorillas) but Bering says they're not semen pumper-shaped.

Gap #2: Which means we would have had to evolve ours in the ~6,000,000 years, or call it 2-300,000 generations since separate speciation from common ancestors. Which, sorry, isn't a lot of time for multiple-partner competitive semen-extraction to be a significant selective factor at the margin.

Gap #3: Just because it's not selected for doesn't mean that human penis shape doesn't facilitate semen extraction. The authors Bering cites aren't the first to notice the effect. Bering cleverly proposes that the male post-orgasmic refractory is evolved to prevent men from pumping their own semen back out of their partners by resuming intercourse too soon after ejaculation. The down side of this, though, would be that if Barash's interpretation of Hrdy is correct and women "evolved" to favor lots of group sex (um...) then a refractory period would tend to be maladaptive for all men who weren't women's final partner.

Gap #4: So based on #3 the refractory period suggests men and women both evolved having more single-partner sex than Barash, Hrdy, and Bering suggest, or else there's some other reason for the refractory period. I can see having one, or the other, but both doesn't make much sense. (And, at least as Barash is willing to admit in his title, these are all "just so" stories so there could be plenty of other reasons instead of the ones proposed.)

Gap #5: All of the above leaves out... um... y'know... women, even "primitive" proto-human women, making decisions in the matter. A counter experiment I might propose would be instead of using phthalate-laden plastic sleeves to ask real, actual women to try not two types of dildos but three: the original smooth-sided and "anatomical" ones, sure, but also one of the new glass dildos which tend to have lots of extra bulbs and ridges. Oh wait! We don't have to conduct that experiment, women who can afford them speak highly of glass dildos. (For instance.)

Gap #6: See gap #5.

Gap #7: See gap #6.

Gap #8: For something called "Evolutionary Psychology" these guys (and it's still mostly guys) don't spend much time on the psychology part. In fact they're highly resistant to it. The problem being that humans almost certainly started being able to do mind hacks around the time we learned to make tools -- which would have been at least 1.36 million years ago. And the problem with mind-hacks is that they by definition derail predestination.

That doesn't mean humans haven't evolved. Or even that human penises haven't evolved. Or even that human behavior isn't adaptive or selected for (see human facial expressions, for instance.) It just means you can't base every flipping hypothesis for human sexual selection on the behavior displayed in reruns of The Flintstones and Mad Max.

%$$!@$!^&*!!!

NSFW Caveat: If and only if you're an adult you can click here for an extravagantly not-work-safe image possibly related to penis evolution... in a primitive habitat no less. :-)

Turns out it's hard to show it in photos, but when I wear boxers I always have a contrary problem. Unlike the old Markie Mark and others, it's not that my pants fall down exposing my boxers. Instead my boxers slide halfway down my ass inside my pants. Which never slip down at all. (Unless, of course, I push them down.)

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

More like this here.

[Note: This was an experiment only. I've always gotten by fine without underwear and I see no real reason to switch now. :-) --fl]

Amber Rhea of Being Amber Rhea talks about how most of the euphemisms for female genitalia double as insults that imply "weakness, uselessness, and contemptability."

So, yeah, I will continue to get my panties in a bunch about pussy being used as an insult. Because it is NOT OKAY, and it IS important - not something to be “overlooked.” Likewise, years ago I stopped using “bitch” as an insult - there is no need to use a gendered insult when the non-gendered “asshole” or “jackass” or a million others will do. Plus I just hate the word. It makes me bristle and rankle and feel really bad inside. If I hear someone use it whom I consider a friend, suddenly I find myself questioning how much I should trust them.

And I will not abide those who roll their eyes and insist this is a minor issue and I’m - wait for it, here it comes - too sensitive.

If you give a shit about the status of women in society, you will STOP using those insults. That’s all there is to it.

She said it here.

Yes. Absolutely. It's not just disgraceful it's stupid.

I'll go a step further and say you probably shouldn't call yourself "sex positive" if you use any gender- or genitalia- or sex-act-specific terms as insults.

And yes, this goes waaaay back for me.

Found here and elsewhere.

From Audacia Ray's “Speak Up! Media Skills for the Empowered Sex Worker” workshop.

It is not the case that all sex-workers are empowered. It is also not the case that this is either innate or unalterable.

I don't know if we have to have sex workers, any more than I think we have to have image consultants or quantatative analysts. But since they're here there's no real benefit, and quite a lot of mischief, to encouraging them to keep shut just because folks want to Rorschach away about them as if they were random ink blots instead of human beings with own thoughts, words, and deeds. Not to mention personalities, hobbies, course-loads, pets, parents, reading habits, day jobs, and <coughcough>bacon<coughcough> dining preferences.

A couple of thoughts based on reading Cheri of Secret Lover's Lane response to an anonymous commenter who, evidently informed by the Two Rules of Desire, claimed, roughly, that women want only emotional rewards from sex and men want only physical rewards. (In her post Cheri angrily but ably challenges the commenter, as you can for yourself here.)

Claims of sociobiology not withstanding, it seems like our social structures make it so that women can't afford to prize physical enjoyment with multiple partners and men can't afford to prize emotional rewards with partners either. Our traditional social contract says women must be economically marginalized to the point that they and/or their children will suffer if they don't hitch their wagons to someone who's earning power isn't artificially suppressed. And meanwhile under the same contract men are expected to financially and socially support any partner they form emotional bonds with (see "kept woman," "mistress.")

"Can't afford" is obviously not the same thing as "don't have." I'm not necessarily endorsing polyamory. I don't think it's bad, I'm just not necessarily endorsing it. But, for instance, rethinking the constructed dichotomies would benefit both men and women in serial monogamy, short-term pre-relationship dating, or the kind of studious "hookup culture" relationships. Especially in areas where there's enough social and economic parity, sufficient income/productivity/social-infrastructure, and access to fertility management to allow individuals of any gender to raise children independently.

Getting back to Cheri, point #2 would seem particularly clear because while she's married she's the primary income earner, the primary household manager, the primary child-care provider (though I could be really mistaken about that) and the one most experienced with what she seeks in multiple relationships.

I keep forgetting to do this but if you're an adult you can click to see a possibly not-work-safe image.

Via Research Blogging, psychology blogger Dr. Deb says

Uh oh. 

This is sure to spark some debate.

The sexual behavior of teenagers who pledge abstinence does not differ from that of closely matched non-pledgers. Moreover, pledgers are less likely to protect themselves from pregnancy and disease. 

Rosenbaum, J. (2009). Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers PEDIATRICS, 123 (1) DOI: 10.1542/peds.2008-0407

She said it here.

And while we're at it, from the abstract of the actual paper by Rosenbaum. (Emphasis mine.)

OBJECTIVE. The US government spends more than $200 million annually on abstinence-promotion programs, including virginity pledges. This study compares the sexual activity of adolescent virginity pledgers with matched nonpledgers by using more robust methods than past research.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS. The subjects for this study were National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health respondents, a nationally representative sample of middle and high school students who, when surveyed in 1995, had never had sex or taken a virginity pledge and who were >15 years of age (n = 3440). Adolescents who reported taking a virginity pledge on the 1996 survey (n = 289) were matched with nonpledgers (n = 645) by using exact and nearest-neighbor matching within propensity score calipers on factors including prepledge religiosity and attitudes toward sex and birth control. Pledgers and matched nonpledgers were compared 5 years after the pledge on self-reported sexual behaviors and positive test results for Chlamydia trachomatis, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, and Trichomonas vaginalis, and safe sex outside of marriage by use of birth control and condoms in the past year and at last sex.

RESULTS. Five years after the pledge, 82% of pledgers denied having ever pledged. Pledgers and matched nonpledgers did not differ in premarital sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and anal and oral sex variables. Pledgers had 0.1 fewer past-year partners but did not differ in lifetime sexual partners and age of first sex. Fewer pledgers than matched nonpledgers used birth control and condoms in the past year and birth control at last sex.

CONCLUSIONS. The sexual behavior of virginity pledgers does not differ from that of closely matched nonpledgers, and pledgers are less likely to protect themselves from pregnancy and disease before marriage. Virginity pledges may not affect sexual behavior but may decrease the likelihood of taking precautions during sex. Clinicians should provide birth control information to all adolescents, especially virginity pledgers.

In particular the bit about 82% denying having ever pledged five years later is kind of... interesting. Wonder what the difference is between those who admit and those who deny pledging? So do I! But I'm not going to cough up the extortionate subscription price to look behind the federally-funded-but-somehow-still-for-profit firewall the publishers erect only because for some reason it's legal.

Image via Bacchus of the generally NSFW ErosBlog: The Sex Blog

I'm not exactly sure what the date is for the comic shown here -- I'd say it's a comic from the early 1950s, when both cars and drive-throughs were pretty new.

But there's something not... exactly timeless about the representation of genuine but oblivious aloof women in the face of clearly interested, and clearly much older men that's just...

I mean... the images represent adult women not early teens, whose physical development sometimes begins before cognitive registration of sexuality. Nor do their posture or facial expressions present them as stupid or incapable or even excessively/paternally sheltered. Or even (as compared to, say, wait staff at "Hooters" style restaurants today) as sexually accessible.

Instead the implication is that they're completely failing to register their own allure despite what appears to be continuous daily sexualized but non-sexual contact with myriad interested men.

No-sex class much?

Update: I think I probably should have been way more clear about that last point: I'm not saying actual people would be as naive about the impact of their appearance as the women represented in the cartoon. Instead I'm saying the cartoon was part of a tradition that represented women to men as that naive. And did so at least in part because that reinforced men's expectations of women. It certainly would have been the context for the intended humor of that particular punch line.

I'm really looking forward to attending the second Sex 2.0 conference in the Washington, D.C. area early next month. Here's the press release.

WASHINGTON, D.C. - April 27, 2009. Now in our second year, Sex 2.0, a one-day unconference, will take place on May 9, 2009 in Washington, D.C. Sex 2.0 will focus on the intersection of social media, feminism, and sexuality. How is social media enabling people to learn, grow, and connect sexually? How is sexual expression tied to social activism? Does the concept of transparency online offer new opportunities or present new roadblocks — or both? Sex 2.0 is an unconference, which means that sessions will be informal conversations organized by people attending the event. Session leaders with some knowledge in a subject area facilitate conversations among the participants.

Sessions will include: “Internet Advocacy for Sexual Freedom” with Ricci Joy Levy of the Woodhull Foundation; “Polyamory in Media’s Spotlight” with Anita Wagner; “Craigslist Red, Craigslist Blue: Why we should dismantle the “internet red light district” with Melissa Gira Grant and Joanne McNeill; “Kick Ass Twitter Apps” with Cunning Minx; “Revenge Porn” with Maria Diaz; and “Sex Writing Beyond Erotica, Beyond Porn” with Jack Murnighan, Nerve.com editor-at-large. The keynote speaker will be Nikol Hasler, creator of the Midwest Teen Sex Show (http://midwestteensexshow.com). A complete list of sessions may be viewed at: http://sex20con.com/2009-schedule/sessions/

Sex 2.0 will be held in a Washington, D.C. hotel. (To ensure everyone’s privacy, location information will be email once you are registered). It will offer five conference rooms, a lounge (with free WiFi), vendor area as well as space for various sex-positive outreach groups to set up informational displays and tables.

The event is managed by volunteers and funded by sponsors. We are pleased to have SEXTOY.com as our presenting sponsor this year. SEXTOY.com has been focusing on building a relationship within the blogger community with the recent start-up of its sex toy reviewer program. SEXTOY.com is honored to be the official sponsor for Sex 2.0 and looks forward to a mutually rewarding relationship with the blogger Community. Two SEXTOY.com associates will be attending Sex 2.0 this year: Erik Van Riper and Domina Doll; who both look forward to meeting everyone, attending the talks and participating in discussions. Sex 2.0 is also pleased to have community sponsor Bound Not Gagged (www.boundnotgagged.com), hospitality sponsor Kimberleecline.com and technology sponsor PosAlt.com supporting this years conference.

While the event itself is on Saturday, May 9, there are participant-organized meetups, outings, and parties being planned for Friday night and Saturday evening, as well as a Sunday brunch. For more information, visit the Sex 2.0 website at www.sex20con.com or follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/sex20con.

Source: Press Release

The workshops all look interesting. Some of the ones I'm particularly looking forward to include "The Evolution and Democratization of Sex Writing," "Gender & Technology: How technology influences hegemonic sexual awareness and vice versa," "Sex Writing Beyond Erotica, Beyond Porn." And obviously, and especially, "Internet Famous but Conference Shy?"

If you're going to be there I look forward to either meeting you or seeing you again.

Via Pandagon and plenty of other sources some bozo says the average age men are marrying is now 28. Which is historically high. (In America, in the 19th or 20th Century anyway -- average age of marriage for men in even more patriarchal and class/caste-centric societies where brides have to be outright purchased is often higher. But I digress.)

Which would be fine. That's news. Having waited till my mid-30s to marry I'm not too rattled... especially since I had long-term cohabited with partners before marriage. As have many, many other perfectly ordinary men and women since the 1970s.

What makes him a bozo, though, is the complaint he staples on.

If men weren’t pulling women along with them on this upward swing, I wouldn’t be complaining.

Read about the quote in context here.

Riiiiggghhhtttt. If us men would just stop pulling women along with us he wouldn't be complaining. Yup. If we'd just stop wearing baseball caps backwards and jacking off to Girls Gone Wild blooper reels and started popping the question a little sooner why them women would just drop out of grad school, drop out of their career tracks, give up economic and social independence and just go all Samantha in that Sex in the City movie on us.

No, I haven't read the article so I don't know what his reasons are. And for that matter I haven't even read most of the rebuttals. And mostly it's because with a conclusion like that he's just gonna be on the wrong foot the rest of the way through.

There could be great reasons for why women should all go back to marrying early. (Though I doubt it.) And he could even provide all sorts of non-coercive, non-gender-roll-enforcing policy suggestions to encourage couples to marry younger. (Even though he "wouldn't be complaining" about men marrying later surely he wouldn't object if the younger women he wishes were marrying were marrying men who were also younger.)

Unless he's just flat out complaining not that men are marrying later, and "pulling women along," but instead complaining that the age gap between men and women are narrowing. Because, reading a little further into Amanda's post, that might be the crux of his complaint.

The age gap between spouses is narrowing: Marrying men and women were separated by an average of more than four years in 1890 and about 2.5 years in 1960. Now that figure stands at less than two years. I used to think that only young men—and a minority at that—lamented marriage as the death of youth, freedom and their ability to do as they pleased. Now this idea is attracting women, too.

And sure enough, further down (darn it, I really wasn't going to get into this but now I'm actually reading further) he's quoted as saying

Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you’re fully formed. We learn marriage, just as we learn language, and to the teachable, some lessons just come easier earlier in life.

But, as Amanda points out, there's that bit about him not complaining that men are marrying later and later, which means, in her words this time

I’d suggest that Regnerus, especially since he advises that only women marry young and therefore that they marry men significantly older, is not saying that people should be formed by marriage.  He’s saying women should be.  And the form that forming will take is obvious---the more malleable you are, the more likely you are to give into the pressure to be the support system for you husband, to give up your hopes and dreams to support his.

And really, you can take the rest of it from there -- Amanda does a wonderful job explaining just how low this guy's willing to sink. (Here's that link again.)

But...

But...

What I want to know is whether he's really blaming men for "pulling women along," or if he's just so mired in male-centrism that he simply can't think about women in terms that aren't all about men.

Call it the non-sexual version of "consent vs. decision maker" that I go on about a lot. It's not about women making decisions to defer marriage in order to, say, their own marks in the world. It's about men failing to ask for their consent to marry.

I mean, seriously. I still say you don't have to read past that sentence to know everything you need to know about the entire rest of the piece.

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution passes along a heart-wrenchingly strong case for community support for intentional family planning. And/or an even stronger case for the consequences of not having or even actively resisting intentional family planning.

Why does the music from Cape Verde sound so sad?

Might one reason be recurring famine?:

Despite its name, Cape Verde is an arid landmass with minimal agricultural potential.  The excess mortality associated with its major famines in unparalleled in relative terms.  A famine in 1773-76 is said to have removed 44 percent of the population; a second in 1830-33 is claimed to have killed 42 percent of the population of seventy thousand or so; and a third in 1854-56 to have killed 25 percent.  In 1860 the population was ninety thousand; 40 percent of Cape Verdeans were reported to have died of famine in 1863-67.  Despite a population loss of thirty thousand, the population was put at eighty thousand in 1870.  Twentieth-century famines in Cape Verde were less deadly, but still extreme relative to most contemporaneous ones elsewhere: 15 percent of the population (or twenty thousand) in 1900-1903; 16 percent (twenty-five thousand) in 1920-22; 15 percent (twenty thousand) in 1940-43; and 18 percent (thirty thousand) in 1946-48...

...such death tolls imply extraordinary noncrisis population growth.  For instance, if the population estimates for 1830 and 1860 are credited, making good the damage inflicted by the famine of 1830-33 would have required an annual population growth rate of about 4 percent between 1833 and 1860 -- despite the loss of a quarter or so of the population in 1854-56.

That is all from the new and noteworthy Famine: A Short History, by Cormac O Grada.

Read the quote in context here.

Ye-ikes! I mean, yes, in the classic Keyensian economic sense in the long run (and sometimes short, as between 1940 and 1948!), with or without family planning the population was able to stabilize. But... but... unless one careens past mere stoicism in the face of suffering into outright fetishization of it then contraception in the certainty of episodic limited resources is a very, very moral choice. The sadness of Cape Verde music might be lost to us, but if Cowan's hypothesis stood up the human cost to produce it has been appalling.

(For the record his hypothesis might not stand up. Mass starvation was not unique to Cape Verde, and between the 1500s and the 1900s cities around the world were routinely decimated, and worse, by diseases like yellow fever, cholera, typhoid, and plague. But whereas family size management can't do much to mitigate pestilence cycles, at least not directly, it can make a very large difference in managing the impact of cyclical famine.)

While asking intelligent questions about the effect of The Beauty Myth on asexuals, Ily of asexy beast quotes an interesting red-flag raiser by Naomi Wolf

"We see that, sanctioned by the culture, men's sexuality simply is. They do not have to earn it with their appearance. We see that men's desire [or lack thereof--ily] precedes contact with women. It does not lie dormant waiting to spring into being only in response to a woman's will. (156)"

Read other quotes, and Ily's actual post, here.

I'm actually going to gently push back at Wolf's assertion. Because I think she's buying into the role assigned to men inside the no-sex class paradigm: that of the innate, obligate sex class.

Having a lot of contact with middle-school students through my own child's membership therein I've gotta say that it sure doesn't look like men's desire is all that innate. Nor even, since girls have always tended to enter puberty before boys, am I certain men's desire precedes women's.

Instead I'll go with two observations. First, that, as members of the sex class men certainly have the cultural wind at their backs when it comes to entry into sexuality. Though it might be more accurate early on to call it their sexualization. Second, there's that business about older men being attracted to younger women, and possibly younger women being attracted to older men. Which, at least in the middle-school phase of life tends to make a lot of sense: boys simply aren't as sexual as girls the same age (though, I've mentioned, they may be sexualized.)

Older men's sexual desires certainly do precede those of younger girls. And so it's easy to see where Wolf (and the entire rest of the planet) might have made her mistake. But this may have more to do with cultural and chronological circumstance rather than an innate, obligatory, class-assignment characteristic of men.

Finally, and this relates, I think, to Ily's point about asexuality, if we assume as Wolf does that men are innately sexual, in a way that precedes sexual contact, then... well... we're not exactly going to go looking for moments when it might begin. Or moments before it begins. Nor are we likely to examine what... well... unexamined influences on boys' emergent sexuality. Nor are we likely to inquire into ways to consciously influence its emergence.

Try on the idea that going back at least as far as old Victorian fantasies like A Man With a Maid or Dangerous Liaisons the notion of women's sexual consent has been, perversely, sexualized! In the sense that the "thrill of the chase" (see, for instance, Amanda's post) is part of the, well, thrill. Certainly for (many) men, and probably for (some) women as well.

Meanwhile, unfortunately and perhaps often tragically, the decision itself has not been sexualized. (Hard to sexualize something that's scarcely acknowledged, and certainly not emphasized.)

---

Hmm... You know, when I first started bringing this up a number of commenters had a hard time with the distinction between deciding and consenting. Some of this was due perhaps to me not explaining clearly enough that it wasn't about "deciding" vs "deciding to consent," which certainly would have been circular and therfore meaningless. Instead it was about "consent" vs. deciding to want to have sex. (Which, among other things, decouples the standard no-sex class idea that women only respond sexually to requests.)

It occured to me while composing the first part of this post that perhaps it would be clearer if I said the emphasis should be on the (usually) woman's choice to have sex. In other words the moment where it becomes her intention to have it. As opposed to speaking in terms of a concession to have sex be had with her.

Speaking for myself, anyway, while I think choice is an excellent word it already has a canonical meaning related to reproductive self-determination. Agitation for which is itself a subset of the need I've been agitating for: to respect the decision maker rather than the result of her decision as it relates to parties other than her.

In comments on this post Nekobawt said

the trouble is getting people to see sex workers as people instead of "just whores." i almost think hitmen are higher on the social scale than sex workers are. "sure he kills people for a living, but at least he ain't a prostitute. that's REALLY low!"

i was trying to explain this to a coworker, and she responded with "yeah, i guess i see what you mean, though i would never personally be desperate enough to stoop low enough to be a prostitute."

sighs never mind that it's that attitude that just continues the whole dehumanization process.

Yeah, Nekobawt's coworker's attitude is what made it so easy for Philip Markoff to go ahead and murder Julissa Brissman instead of, say, run away when she resisted his robbery attempt. I mean, he knew she wasn't going to call the cops, but if he's like pretty much everyone else who preys on prostitutes he figured anyone who could "stoop so low" wouldn't be terribly missed. And, y'know, if he'd murdered her in a flop-house or along an airport row instead of a fancy hotel in Boston she might not have been. Since most prostitute murders, robberies, rapes, and assaults aren't noticed... at least until the body count becomes to embarrassingly high to ignore.

Weekend blogger Hortense of Jezebel says

Each day, more information is filtering out regarding Philip Markoff, the 22-year-old medical student accused of being "the Craigslist killer." Most of that information, good and bad, is coming from those who knew Markoff personally.

...

Naturally we begin to cast characters in such a story: here, we have a "clean cut" accused murderer and his "blonde bombshell" fiance, a perfect storm of Lifetime movie scandal, intrigue, and beauty: these educated, seemingly "normal" people, the public exclaims, aren't supposed to be in a situation like this! How strange! How creepy! How do we make sense of such a thing?

...

Whether or not Philip Markoff is guilty, the fact remains that when a story like this breaks, everyone's memories spill out in order to create a composite picture of the man in the handcuffs; we are constantly seeking the signs, the defense, the point at which we should have, could have, must have seen something. We are so hardwired to view people in a certain light that we'll shift our thinking to suit whatever purpose makes us feel a little safer, a little more aware.

Read the quote in context here.

I can't find the link but that last line echos something Audacia Ray said last week from an inside/sex-worker perspective. But Hortense's larger point seems first that we use stereotypes as a framework when we're trying to piece together insufficient information. And that's actually great -- stereotypes are really good for that. But what she also says

We live in an era where you can't afford to hesitate: the court of public opinion is swifter and more damning than ever, thanks to our rapid methods of communication, and the accused often find themselves in a weird state of media hysterics, with both supporters and detractors rushing forward to tell their version of an as-yet unsolved story. With each detail released about "the Craigslist killer," the media storm grows, as we are, for some reason, drawn to the darker sides of one another, desperate to know what happened, and how, and if there was anything that could have stopped such a tragedy.

When we're faced with a) personal concern and b) tight, high-pressure media cycles we run the (very real) risk of mixing stereotype as temporary framework while we assemble facts... with stereotype as templates for which facts are gathered and placed depending on whether or not they fit our stereotypes. That, on the other hand, is not really great. Or, I should say, it's great for opera, but it's terrible for trying to understand ourselves and others and our places in the world. (Sometimes, by the way, I swear the cable news networks make up their little scrolling chirons, icons, and flash-backgrounds and then send reporters out to find quotes that match them. I obviously don't accuse Fox in that accusation -- I don't believe they've ever seriously claimed they do journalism.)

Anyway, it's a cool, cool post. Not least because we don't just confuse opera and real life in major news events. When we're not careful the same mechanisms lead us to cast similar roles inside our relationships with family, co-workers, and even partners.

TheGiantSquid of Research Blogging - All Topics - English says

Men with infected scrotums less desirable to women!

Stating the obvious, but still nice to have the data. Ours being a shallow society, the 'marriageability' of somebody with a filarial hydrocele (only click if you're not eating your breakfast and you have a strong stomach) is probably not that high. The severe impact on sexual function, as well as the obvious cosmetic challenges, make them low on the list of potential suitors for young ladies.

Read the quote in context here.

Despite the light tone of the introduction the post itself is about a serious issue in India and other tropical countries where filariasis (which in extreme cases results in elephantiasis) is chronic.

What the researchers in this study did is ask the community how they felt about people with hydroceles. The results are unsurprisingly sad. 94% of wives of patients were dissatisfied with their sexual life, and that these men are overwhelmingly the 'last choice' for marriage. 94% of the patients themselves reported sexual frustration, with 88% reporting severe pain during intercourse. The morbidity of this disease is clearly profound, and most of the sufferers don't have appropriate psycho-social support groups to help them out.

The illness is a disability. Sufferers, and their partners, have psychological and social issues and not just medical ones.

Debauchette responds to further "benevolent" dehumanization of sex workers.

"I’ll stop posting quotes from sex workers stating they have agency when folks stop telling them they don’t." - spreadmagazine

This is my biggest pet peeve, the relentless assumption that anyone who chooses sex work, in any form, must be mentally handicapped, damaged, child-like, and otherwise incapable of making intelligent and fully rational decisions about their own lives. It’s such a fucking Rorschach response, these people who project their own anxieties and fears about sex and commerce and sexual commerce all over our bodies.

She said it here.

The Rorschach barb is actually pretty well taken because it applies equally well to uninformed sympathizers and detractors alike. A "libertarian" belief that anything between consenting adults isn't just virtuous but rational income maximizing can be no less brutally detached than a serial predator's, a conservative's, or a paleo-feminist's, or too many customer's belief that prostitutes are necessarily sub-human thralls.

For that matter, because sex work is highly stratified, segmented, and because it's illegal also adversarially information-opaque you probably want to be careful about Rorschach effects even if you're reasonably well informed.

The barb about projection of anxieties is also pretty interesting. I had a minor ephiphany earlier today while reading about genuinely barbaric treatment of lowest-class sex workers in cultures where, well, lower-class all kinds of workers are treated barbarically. And because I've at least learned that when I have that reflex it's a good idea to question whether they might also apply in non "barbaric" cultures like mine I wound up with the little epiphany that based on everything from "ladies auxiliaries" to "women's work" to "feminine complaints" to daddy/daughter chastity pledges to door-holding to who can "legitimately" carry condoms our society's assumptions about the subhumanity of "whores" isn't really all that different from our nominally more affirmative but actually highly custodial attitudes towards "virgins" and "Madonnas."

Diva of Debauched Domestic Diva notes a current law that one suspects has slightly, um, gendered origins

Did you know that in New York you can be stopped by the police on the street and if you have condoms on you they can be used as evidence that you were soliciting sex for money? Neither did I but I learned about it last night. SWP is working to try to get that law changed and that is what they are about. When Andrea Ritchie spoke last night and said this I thought to myself about the condoms I had in my pocketbook. I like to practice safe sex. I'm a huge advocate about sex safe just as I think all of us should be but I also should not be at risk for something just for the simple fact I carry condoms.

She said it here.

It's hard to imagine this law ever being invoked against men, given that as far back as World War II U.S. soldiers were routinely provided with condoms, and given that for much of the time since it's been practically cliché for men to keep a condom in their wallets "just in case" (a bad idea by the way.) And I don't know how old the law is (I'm assuming Giuliani-era or earlier) but one has to assume they didn't imagine that women who aren't sex workers might be brazen enough to have "just in case" considerations of their own.

And to be fair that's not too big a stretch. If the law dated back to, say, the 1970s before either health concerns about the Pill or HIV became well-known (and when the line in sex-education circles was "condoms are better than nothing... but only barely) it might have been the case that only women sex-workers would routinely carry condoms. Who knows?

But jimminy crickets, if the law is still on the books that's a bug not a feature.

Sungold of Kittywampus has a beautiful post about sex work, the recently murdered 'sexy massage' worker Julissa Brissman, erstwhile sex-worker prosecutor Eliot Spitzer, and social attitudes about all of the above... and all framed neatly with appropriate and still-fresh quotes by Emma Goldman from 99 years ago.

The whole post is great but a one paragraph description of her student's discussion nicely summarizes the fallacy of pseudo-innocence: the state of believing one's self above or removed from a problem while benefitting from or outright contributing to it. (Emphasis mine.)

About half of my students worried about the moral consequences of legalizing prostitution. They thought it sent the message that adultery was okay. They feared previously faithful men would be snared on the streets. They fretted that more women would be drawn into the profession. Most of them weren’t any more comfortable with decriminalization as a solution, even though most of them also recognized that prostitutes would be safer if they weren’t hiding from the law.

She said it here.

Never mind that former Governor Spitzer was able to indulge his... probably non-fetishistic, adulterous thrill of non-negotiated sexual choking only because he knew the women he hired could not report him to police, social service agencies, or even his family without facing even bigger repercussions themselves. Never mind that the escort service he booked them through may also have been complicit in providing insufficient preparation for the employees they sent to him.

And never mind that Julissa Brissman is very publicly dead only because (emphasis mine)

Prosecutors believe Markoff launched his robbery spree to finance a gambling habit and preyed on those offering erotic services because he thought they wouldn't report the crimes.

Source: New York Daily News

The great thing about Sungold's paragraph is that it can be put back into classroom discussions and essay questions with an invitation to unravel the hidden assumptions that permit "moral" concerns about sending hypothetical "messages" to trump what one would think were much deeper, and more deeply held moral concerns about protecting the lives and safety of actual people.

Megan of delivers the goods on the story that gendered promiscuity/monogamy is genetically determined.

The idea that men try to impregnate as many women as possible while women try to hold on to a provider is derived from fruit fly behavior. Its applicability to humans is becoming increasingly questionable.

There's a ton more here. Go read it.

Bottom line: the sociobiological/ev-psych model of promiscuous men and monogamous women holds up quite well in (very contemporary in evolutionary terms) locations where... well... promiscuity in men and monogamy in women are either tolerated or encouraged. In other locations not so much.

If you're an adult you can click for a possibly not-safe-for-work image.

Before New Zealand passed it's Prostitution Reform Act, which very generally decriminalized small/independent sex work while regulating brothels, legalization advocates frequently pointed to Holland's approach. While the Dutch were less punitive and at least nominally more "progressive" than, say, Australia or, worse, Nevada (both of which primarily benefit brothel owners at the expense of actual sex workers) I didn't think they were that great. The big issue was that prostitution there was, and presumably still is, legal only for Dutch citizens and possibly documented immigrants. That did nothing for the fairly large proportion of undocumented, illegal population of sex workers, subjecting them to the same dangerous twilight working conditions predatory traffickers, pimps, cops, and customers as illegal sex workers in, say, the U.S.

Overall New Zealand's law was a big improvement but, it turns out, they share the same unfortunate citizen/immigrant distinction Holland does.

Laura Agustín of Border Thinking on Migration, Culture, Economy and Sex explains (emphasis mine)

Many rights activists who back this legal model are not aware of a protectionist clause enshrined in the legislation: only New Zealand citizens and some, not all, migrants with permanent residency may work in its sex industry. This means no work permits are available for people who might want to go to New Zealand to work in a brothel or other sex business, or independently. Spokespeople for the law claim this clause prevents sex trafficking.

For those interested in sex work rights and theory, this is not coherent. New Zealand’s law can be called both decriminalisation, a policy that says sex work is socially acceptable, and regulation, which says sex work can be made safe and rational. Therefore, if jobs are available, it is logical to allow people from outside to come do them. If the jobs have not been made subject to quotas because there are not enough openings to satisfy all the ‘natives’ that want them, but ‘foreigners’ are still prohibited, something odd is going on.

She said it here.

"For those interested in sex work rights and theory, this is not coherent." That sums it up rather nicely. The problem is that by definition trafficked people aren't just in the country illegally, their work situation is involuntary. (Even when the nature of their work isn't.) Therefore, far from improving the lot of migrant sex workers, legalizing sex work for citizens but not illegals (or, for that matter, keeping "illegals" illegal) means that just as in Holland those sex workers who migrate or are trafficked into New Zealand have fewer options and less latitude to pursue them.

My point, as always, not being that prostitution is just the greatest, most sensiblest industry on the planet and so it should be all hunky-dory and legal like. Instead it's that if we're going to have prostitution and other forms of sex work, and for better or worse we do, and if it can be reasonably argued that sex work can be subject to illegal coercion, peonage, and appropriation of earnings, and it can, then making sex work per se illegal, as we do, or worse, legal for citizens but not for migrants, which New Zealand, Holland, and other states do, makes life harder for those workers rather than easier, more dangerous rather than safer, and more rather than less subject to coercion, extortion, and exploitation... in other words less subject to trafficking.

Making a rare slip while correctly condemning arguments in the strip-search-for-Motrin case at the Supreme Court, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, confuses "what patriarchy says it's ok to do to boys" with "what it's not ok to do to anybody." First some excerpts (emphasis mine.)

The court was looking at the case of 13-year-old Savana Redding who was traumatically strip-searched ... because some little brat who was actually caught with drugs on her claimed, falsely, that Redding had ibuprofen on her.

---

One of the major problems with lack of female representation in Congress and the courts is that even when men are generally liberal and try to get it, the boys club mentality seems to set in and infect their ability to act like compassionate adults who grasp that women are full human beings instead of slightly comical pieces of meat.

...

"Nobody but Ginsburg seems to comprehend that the only locker rooms in which teenage girls strut around, bored but fabulous in their underwear, are to be found in porno movies. For the rest of us, the middle-school locker room was a place for hastily removing our bras without taking off our T-shirts."

...

One wonders if a boy had been required to pull his penis out of his underwear and shake it in front of the teacher if that would have seemed different than the practice of using public urinals to Breyer. I think it’s quite likely. What’s traumatic about strip searches and sexual assault isn’t that someone touched or saw something previously untouched or unseen. It’s the horror of having someone use your nudity and your sexuality as a weapon to degrade and humiliate you.

She said it here.

Amanda gets so close to the point... before buying into the patriarchal frame that only middle-school girls are insecure, humiliated, indoctrinated, or adversely affected by body modesty. Particularly in middle school.

It's commonly held that gender is created by construction. I'd like to make the bold assertion that in fact gender is created through demolition. You take whole, complete, and perfectly ordinary human beings, look at their pee-pees, and then start discouraging everything that doesn't fit your expectation of "masculine" or "feminine."

What Amanda misses, as do Justices Breyer and Ginsberg, as does almost everyone else, is that middle-school boys don't exactly begin life as paragons of locker room bravado either. I remember extremely well the ashen faces of my fellow 7th-grade boys in our first day of gym in what was then called Jr. High when we were handed 12 × 18 inch terrycloth tea towels and informed that we'd be "stripping down" for showers. Nor, today, can you tell me that the claims of most of the 6th-grade boys in my son's class that layering their street clothes over their gym shorts in the morning is just a way to "save time before gym." Because, seriously, they all look like they back in diapers!

The difference is that body shame and modesty in girls and body indifference or arrogance in boys does not happen naturally. In each case the differences are carved away from normal/neutral. Beginning generally some time just before or during middle school. Which is, of course, the period of time under discussion in the

And so to answer Amanda's rhetorical question about whether it would be different if middle-school boys were made to shake out their underwear the answer is yes and no: No, because such treatment is humiliating for any child since that's the age we really begin to develop consciousness of bodily self and therefore we're vulnerable when attention is drawn to our bodies. Yes, because that's also the point where class imposition begins, with girls as the no-sex class are indoctrinated to experience not just natural vulnerability of body space but damage by forced nakedness, and... boys as the sex class are indoctrinated not just to ignore an equally natural vulnerability in their nakedness but indifference to... or even outright pride or aggression in... their nakedness!

Sigh.

Another commonly-held assumption outside of feminism is that "equality" is the goal of feminism, because gender "equality" can only mean "everybody gets treated like men are treated now." And considering the unmitigated crap we put girls and women through that degree of equality would certainly seem like an improvement. But whereas carving off the same half of humanity from both men and women constitutes equality in one sense, we'd still be talking about equality of damage, of amputation, of systematic disempowerment. Not equality of potential, nor equality of possibility.

Just to be clear this post is not about "whut about Teh Menz." It's not about "but men get hurt too." Typically when one encounters "whut about Teh Menz" it's an attempt, usually by men, to derail scrutiny of sexist imposition on women by raising usually disproportionately milder red herrings. Instead this is a plea to critically examine the way we indoctrinate not boys or girls but children, how we groom them, humiliate them, and exploit their uniform vulnerabilities so that they can grow up to play the NiceGuy/Rapist/Virgin/Whore roles that are critical to the soap opera of patriarchy.

I used to make these belts years ago. They were popular then with musicians because the no-buckle Celtic-knot style design didn't scratch up their instruments. I couldn't find my old belt so I made a new one.

Nowadays even non-musicians might appreciate its... aesthetics.

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

More like this here.

So the other day in a book store, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Love in the Time of Colic: The New Parents' Guide to Getting It On Again by Heidi Raykeil and Ian Kerner. I didn't have time to look at it closely, but I'm familiar with Raykeil's work so I looked it up when I got home.

And since I'm interested in sex, relationships, and parenting I'm perpetually meaning to write more about the nuts and bolts of, well, love in the time of colic. And diapers. And sibling rivalry, And conflicting soccer-league schedules. And so on. And since the reviews were generally positive I added the book to my shopping cart.

Here's a screen dump of the page I got back.

Screen capture by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that's me!) -- Click for larger image.

Line #1: "Customers Who Bought Love in the Time of Colic: The New Parents' Guide to Getting It On Again Also Bought:" Raykeil's earlier book, Confessions of a Naughty Mommy: How I Found My Lost Libido, Stacie Cockrell's Babyproofing Your Marriage: How to Laugh More and Argue Less As Your Family Grows, and another Kerner book, Passionista: The Empowered Woman's Guide to Pleasuring a Man

Well that's cool. I don't know much about the Cockrell or Kerner's books but they sound like nice suggestions considering my new choice. So that's fine, good suggestions.

Line #2: "Customers Who Shopped for Love in the Time of Colic: The New Parents' Guide to Getting It On Again Also Shopped For:" Sex Recharge: A RejuvenationPlan for Couples and Singles by Kerner again (hmmm, one begins to notice a trend), Eve Kingsley's Just Fuck Me! - What Women Want Men to Know About Taking Control in the Bedroom (A Guide for Couples), and Valerie Davis Raskin's Great Sex for Moms: Ten Steps to Nurturing Passion While Raising Kids

Hmmm... again I don't know the books so even if I might not buy them they do sound even racier! Good, good, I'm a sex blogger, right, not to mention a healthy, lusty parent so those titles at least sound libidinous and libertine-ious.

But then there's line #3: "Customers Who Bought Items in Your Shopping Cart Also Bought:" Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR Fourth Edition (Text Revision) from the American Psychiatric Association, James Morrison's DSM-IV Made Easy: The Clinician's Guide to Diagnosis, and I guess for some actual light reading, Malcom Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success

Looking through my actual shopping cart I'm not exactly sure what would have prompted not one but two DSM-IV-related suggestions. And it's not that I'm specifically opposed to diagnostic and statistical manuals that might be somehow related to relationships, sexuality, or parenting. But...

This is the sort of thing that could cement one's reputation as a prudish libertine. :-)

Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey that's me!) Used under a Creative Commons license.

Hey, this is fun! I think I've mentioned that years and years ago I went through a formal apprenticeship and became a journeyman leatherworker. Just a year or two later, though, punk and the new wave hit popular culture and fashion took a huge turn away from natural materials towards and in fashion, basically, black first became the new black. Say what you will about Elvis Costello or the Talking Heads (I say I think they rock) but they didn't carry a lot of hand-tooled leather accessories. :-) So after flirting very briefly with the next next-new-thing, tattooing, which though a logical next step didn't appeal to me, I put away my tools and went to college after all.

Then last week a fellow northwesterner, Red of (slow to load?) Red Sneaker Diaries, reviewed a handmade paddle from a southeastern craftsperson and I finally decided it was time to, literally, dust off my old tools and see if I still remembered anything I used to know.

The short answer would be it's like riding a bicycle for the first time in 30 years: I still know how but boy am I wobbly. And I'm really short on materials (just a couple of colors of dyes, finishes, and dressings.) And my fingers are so sore from braiding it hurts to type. Oh yeah, and since I don't have any designs, and I actually didn't do much braiding at all way back when there's a lot I'm going to have to learn or relearn. But wow is it fun!

So far, in addition to a lot of puttering, putzing, and refamiliarizing with tools and techniques I've braided six feet of rope, a short whip with a wound leather core, and an alpha-code version of a belt that closes with a kind of Celtic knot instead of a buckle that we used to make a lot of for, mostly, acoustic guitarists who didn't want the backs of their expensive instruments scratched up. There's still a lot to learn -- how to finish the ends of braids for one thing, and the right size and shape for the head of the belt. And wow do I have a ton more work to do to recover my staining and dying chops. But, again, wow is it fun!

Many accused of statutory rape claim two things - 1) that the girl consented and 2) that they thought she was older. The first is unimportant - if the girl is underage, it's still rape. But in the US, there is a special defense clause which allows defendents leiniency if there is reasonable evidence they "mistook" a younger girl for one of consenting age. Many times lawyers claim that a girl's makeup or guy's consumption of alcohol impaired the offender's judgement of her age. As an excuse, it's pretty common among men charged with all varieties of sex with a minor. Well, researchers wanted to see if those factors really had an effect on how men (and women) estimated a girl's age. The results are clear: alcohol had no effect on a man's estimate of a girl's age, and makeup had little.

Read the quote in context here.

There are some half-hearted attempts to but... but... but... from her commenters but overall the conclusion is the more "real world" you make the tests (adding voice or conversation, for instance) the less likely it becomes to legitimately mistake a child for an adult.

And does this have bearing on anything? Why yes, I believe it does!

The study Lynn based her post on acknowledged a fairly consistent age overestimation of roughly two and a half years. Which might make the error plausible for older underage sex workers. But... given that a) ignorance of the law is no excuse and b) a generally accepted age of first-entry into sex work is closer to 13 than 15.5 I'm feel even more attached to my strong preference for prosecuting customers of prostituted children and/or child prostitutes for child sex crimes instead of the far more lenient laws intended to police hiring sex-working adults. (Obviously I think hiring, or being, a non-coerced adult sex worker shouldn't be a crime at all. Hiring a child, however, especially in the face of the finding Lynn reports, ought to be prosecuted with chilling ruthlessness.)

Apropos my 4/20 pot/booze day post.

"It's unpleasantly like being drunk"
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"You ask a glass of water."

This is an excellent example, by the way, of a set-substitution incongruity joke as outlined in John Allen Paluos' Mathematics and Humor: The Study of the Logic of Humor.

Found at the bottom of the page (not in a post) at Christie Lynn's Observations of a Nerd.

Jessica Van Sack, O’Ryan Johnson and Edward Mason of The Boston Herald report that the so-called Craigslist killer who seemed to be preying on sex-workers, has been arrested.

A clean-cut Boston University medical student preparing to wed a blond beauty was charged last night as the notorious Craigslist killer, cops said, announcing a bombshell break in a case that has attracted national attention.

...

The Craigslist killer is believed to have preyed on women advertising erotic services on the popular Web site. Boston police say Markoff is responsible for the violent robbery of a Las Vegas hooker at the Westin Copley April 10, the brutal April 14 murder of masseuse Julissa Brisman, 26, of New York City, and Thursday’s attack on a lap-dancer in her room at the Holiday Inn Express in Warwick, R.I.

They said it here.

So late this morning I was trapped in front of cable television and some talking heads on Fox were discussing the case. One said the motive appeared to be robbery. Another asked why target sex workers? Another answered that there are the following considerations:

1) "Remember, sex work is illegal so [the robber] would know they'd probably be carrying cash."

2) The robber appeared to be timing his attacks for late in the evening when, at least on average, the sex workers would have already seen multiple clients.

3) They'd probably have the cash on them because... something like... they can't just go around making bank drops with all this unreported income.

And finally

4) He knew they couldn't go to the cops.

I would add that if you were going to go that route you'd look for independent, non-escort-service, non-pimped sex workers. Booking agencies evidently take credit cards so I'm assuming escorts typically carry only tips. Pimps are allegedly a lot more attentive both about the customers they send their workers to and about collecting the cash.

So! We all just love keeping sex work illegal because, you know, prostitutes are victimized. And yet... and yet... as the talking head said, the only thing stopping the victims from taking cards themselves, from making frequent bank drops, from doing better vetting, from having more open presence with hotels is that the non-booked, non-pimped work they arrange through venues like Craigslist are illegal.

As I usually say, charming little system opponents have worked out for themselves: they help create the system of exploitation and then they click their tongues and shake their heads and say "told you so" when their system works.

%#_(*@!

It seems simple enough, but there is a problem: the selective pressure would just be on the males. ... Females, who don't engage in these contests, would probably have shorter necks than males. If little to no sexual dimorphism can be seen in living giraffes it is unlikely that sexual selection was the main cause for the evolution of the modern forms.

What Mitchell and colleagues found was there were virtually no differences between males and females in terms of body size, neck length, and leg length that could be attributed to sexual selection. There was one interesting minor difference, though. The zoologists found that female giraffes had proportionally longer necks compared to foreleg length than males when the sexual selection hypothesis would predict that males would have longer necks. Both sexes also had necks that grew faster than the rest of their body, cutting down the idea that males "invested" more in their necks than females.

Simply put, the "necks for sex" hypothesis fails because there is no evidence of sexual dimorphism in giraffes that would result from male-male competition. The competitions between male giraffes are a consequence, rather than a cause, of neck elongation. Giraffe necks became elongated for some other reason.

He said it here.

None of this says there's no such thing, period, as sexual selection of course. Just that sexual selection is just one of a variety of pressures animals experience. But wait, there's more.

The debate over giraffe necks illustrates the pitfalls of trying to figure out past evolutionary pressures based almost solely upon living animals (and just one living species, at that). Studies involving the benefits of having a long neck to feeding or intrasexual competition might be informative, but what giraffes do now might not tell us much about what caused their ancestors to evolve long necks. We should not confuse what an organ is used for now with what led to its origin: they are not always the same.

Yeah. A common but logically fallacious argument often raised by anti-science/anti-evolution types is that you can't evolve, say, flight because what selective benefit might almost-but-not-quite wings provide? The (fighting) necks for sex hypothesis seems to be suffering from a similar fallacy: it's not clear why giraffes have long necks; they fight with their necks; they must have evolved long necks so they can fight; QED.

As it happens I'm semi-agnostic on this: necks could still be sexually selected because, say, there's some quirky signaling gene in giraffes that make them think long necks are just sexy, period, and so the longer the better in both sexes. Or it could be that there actually is a "necks for sex" fighting advantage but the genes under pressure happen in a critical location on a no-X, non-Y chromosome. The point being, though, that, as with "intermediary" wings in not-yet-flying animals, the long necks evolved for something else entirely that made it difficult for male giraffes to fight by, say, charging at each other and butting heads the way a lot of other ungulates do.

(Via Research Blogging)

Kink In Exile tackles head on the masturbation question that's been percolating around the intertubes (and, obviously, in real life) recently

Someone did in fact ask why it might be hard for some people to orgasm with a partner if most of their orgasms have been through masturbation. I should first clarify that question to say “…if they can masturbate to orgasm successfully.”

...

The way people masturbate is often different from the mechanics of partnered sex. You may have learned to masturbate in an environment of secrecy and so you do it quickly, but find that partnered sex doesn’t allow you to reach that tempo. Or maybe you find an angle from which to approach your own genitals that feels soo good, but is harder to do with partnered sex. Your body gets used to the way you’ve been getting it off and expects that kind of contact; you change things up, don’t go fast enough, or don’t hit the right spots and suddenly it doesn’t work. Keep in mind also that many women can’t orgasm from vaginal penetration alone. So what do you do? Pay attention to how you masturbate, how your partnered sex looks and what physical differences exist there in. You can then try masturbating in a way that is more reflective of partnered sex or adding toys to partnered sex to make sure you’re hitting all the right spots.

She said it here.

There's been a fair amount of conversation lately about the merits and demerits of masturbation as it relates to partnered sex. Given that masturbation is now effectively mainstream… as is conversation about sexual function and dysfunction… it’s a good time to talk about integrating solo and partner sex competency instead of imagining they are or should be separate.

At least for women back in the 1970s Shere Hite announced a strong correlation between learned masturbation position and, I think, orgasms during intercourse. (Darn it I’m probably going to have to look it up now.) Anyway, I distinctly remember her saying something about women who learned to masturbate in face-down or curled-up, upper-legs-crossed positions having difficulty and thinking yeah, that could be a problem. Although that was so long ago now that rear-entry intercourse was still largely considered a (demeaning, intimacy-avoiding) kink.

I had a little epiphany about sex and masturbation a couple of years ago, based on remarks from someone who said she never got off on intercourse and so she’d wait till her partner was asleep and then masturbate really surreptitiously. That experience was probably more unusual for men but since the advent of Prozac and other anti-depressants many men need a manual override to have orgasms during partner sex as well. There’s also, as you hint, a bit of a subculture among young men (at least) who might fantasize madly about whoever they’re oriented to… but in practice prefer the pace and, possibly, the auto-focus of masturbation. Oh, and finally, there are any number of people in kink who don’t care for or who even actively dislike, say, being beaten black and blue _while it’s happening,__ who nevertheless get off hard in anticipation, on recollection, or both. So my epiphany was that we ought to get over the idea that we ought to reconsider not just the 70's notion of "simultaneous orgasms" as ideal but the idea that intercourse is the "right" way to have orgasms at all.

The key, though -- one that Hite missed or disregarded in her post -- is that just because you develop one set of neural pathways to orgasm (through this position or that sensation) it doesn’t mean that’s the only way you'll ever be able to do it. The obstacle, at least physically, is that it can take almost as long to grow the nerve pathways as it did to learn the first way. That’s fine if you mix it up while learning (something Betty Dodson talked about at least in her workshops.) It’s harder if you learn on the sly, if you’re uncomfortable or in denial about doing it at all, or if you get the idea (from porn, say, or bible-study classes) that it’s supposed to be this way instead of one’s own way. Or, preferably, ways.

None of this is to say orgasms during partnered sex is bad (in fact, as they say in the blogosphere, "heh.") It's just that as Kink In Exile points out, if you're pretty good at having them by yourself, and if neither you nor your partner are brow-beaten and/or drum-beaten into being embarrassed that it might be so. And while I'd never make promises, who knows? Given that expectation stress and performance anxiety are major buzzkills, not worrying about it might even improve one's odds with one's partners.

See also:

• The Masturbation Industry from Noli Irritare Leones
• Why Am I Boner Kryptonite from The Beautiful Kind
• It Was Bound to Happen from Secret Lovers Lane
• And No, I Accuse! from Skin::filter()
• And most recently, Did You Come? from Calico

If you're an adult you can click here to see a probably-not-work-safe image.

In a post titled "Let's Play 'What's Wrong With This Headline'" Historiann says (all emphasis hers.)

OK, kids–here’s today’s challenge:  “Couple, their 3 kids found dead in Maryland home.”

Who or what might have killed an entire family?  Was it carbon monoxide?  Botulism?  World War II ordinance discovered in the sandbox too late?  (I’m humming the Jeopardy theme while you click and read.)

Time’s up!

If I were the grandparent who discovered my daughter and grandchildren murdered by my son-in-law, I sure as heck wouldn’t like the news dubbing the murderer and my daughter a “couple,” and the senseless slaughter of my grandchildren as being “found dead” instead of “murdered by their father.”

Read the quote in context here.

Yeah, while not everyone's as thrilled about the 50th anniversary of Strunk and White, this particular form of passive construction is getting a little stale.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that (statistically speaking) is that in less than a week they'll have another chance to practice headlining the next such story using active construction.

Seriously! If the mainstream can't even accurately describe what's happening how on the big blue marble are they going to be able to address it? As Historiann put it in her piece

Why isn’t this considered a national public health emergency? Where are the ad campaigns encouraging people not to keep guns in their homes, and urging men to seek counseling if they take their anger out on their family members? (Hey–it’s worked so far with drunk driving and smoking–maybe not so much with the anti-drug campaigns.)

The irony is that the murderers almost invariably believe owning firearms protects "their" wives and children from... strangers!

%@*$#!

My city's former chief of police, Norm Stamper, (he resigned to take a position with the Obama administration) has a nifty article in Huffington Post comparing marijuana and alcohol from a health, cost, and most importantly a police-activity point of view. (Emphasis mine.)

Alcohol contributes to acts of violence; marijuana reduces aggression. In approximately three million cases of reported violent crimes last year, the offender had been drinking. This is particularly true in cases of domestic violence, sexual assault, and date rape. Marijuana use, in and of itself, is absent from both crime reports and the scientific literature. There is simply no link to be made.

Over the past four years I've asked police officers throughout the U.S. (and in Canada) two questions. When's the last time you had to fight someone under the influence of marijuana? (I'm talking marijuana only, not pot plus a six-pack or a fifth of tequila.) My colleagues pause, they reflect. Their eyes widen as they realize that in their five or fifteen or thirty years on the job they have never had to fight a marijuana user. I then ask: When's the last time you had to fight a drunk? They look at their watches.

All of which begs the question. If one of these two drugs is implicated in dire health effects, high mortality rates, and physical violence--and the other is not--what are we to make of our nation's marijuana laws? Or alcohol laws, for that matter.

He said it here.

By odd coincidence I quit smoking dope and drinking booze when I was 21. I had a good excuse: I was so stoned from a New Years from "how high is high" competition involving bong hits, whiskey shots, and tabs of LSD that when someone asked what my New Year's resolution might be I smirked and slurred "I'm going to quit smoking dope, quit drinking, and hitch-hike to California." Everyone, including me, had a good laugh. But maybe seven hours later, even though I had a job and a place to live a hundred miles to the east and didn't know a soul in California, there I was, bleary eyed and poorly dressed for the weather, on a west-bound interstate exchange somewhere in rural Tennessee with my thumb out. I only stayed in California for a couple of months but I've scarcely drunk nor smoked since. (Be careful what you wish for!)

And so I ought to be able to say, using a rustic Tennessee aphorism, that I have no dog in the pot vs. potables fight. But I do. So do you. Domestic violence, date rape, stranger rape, unsafe or unprotected sex, misused or neglected contraception, uncalled for provocation, robberies, muggings, and murder tend to involve alcohol at an extraordinary rate...

Oh, and sometimes the victims have been drinking too. What, you didn't think I was about to start blaming victims did you? Yeah, victims are often drunk, and sometimes helplessly or recklessly drunk, but... and correct me if I'm wrong... but I'm given to believe that the distinguishing characteristic of victims is the presence of a perpetrator. And perpetrators are overwhelmingly likely to be measurably drunk. (I'll go one step further and say the likelihood of victims being drunk has waaaaayyyy more to do with their proximity to other drinkers than anything intrinsic to their own insobriety. Call me a rebel here.)

Meanwhile pot? I dunno. Pot makes you dumb and say "wow" a lot, but based on first, second, and third-hand experience people spend a heck of a lot more time regretting things they do but wanted to while high than actually regretting things they did. Whereas with alcohol? Um, not so much.

One thing that's pretty interesting about pot, by the way. An amazing number of women have told me they first figured out how to have multiple orgasms... or sometimes to have orgasms at all... while high on pot. As for men? Well, speaking only for myself, despite smoking pot heavily during the most sexually active years of my life I honestly don't believe I ever had sex while high. Not "I can't remember." Just that I tended to have other priorities. Like listening to music on headphones and talking with people about rolling another bone, bro. Alcohol? Yeah, I'm sure it boosts some people's orgasmic potential but overall alcohol... especially frequent or heavy use... plays a very large role in "erectile dysfunction" in men, comparable dysfunction in women, and overall very high level of dissatisfaction among partners due to it's clinical suppression of active (as opposed to "oh whatever") libido.

Anyway, I'm not saying people shouldn't drink, although I sincerely wish they wouldn't. And I'm certainly not saying I wish people smoked pot instead.

I'm just saying that if everybody stopped smoking pot tomorrow society would barely register it. If everyone stopped drinking tomorrow society would noticeably lower need for police, medical, and social-services.

Hmm... I'm trying to find a non-curmudgeonly way to close this post. I guess I'll just say that, at least for April 20th, if you're going to drink at all drink bong water... um no, still curmudgeonly... happy April 20th.

(Via Jill at Feministe.)

Hortense of Jezebel has some good news

Several states have begun taking steps to better protect teenagers who end up in prostitution rings, treating the teen prostitutes not as criminals, but as victims of abuse, and charging their pimps with human trafficking.

Prosecutor Nancy O'Malley, who wrote California's sexually exploited minors law, tells Christina Hoag of the Associated Press: "This is an institutional shift. It's about getting people to shift their attention and judgment from the minor and seeing what's beyond this criminal behavior." Several other states, including New York, are following suit, offering rehabilitation programs rather than jail time for children caught up in the sex trade.

She said it here.

The thing is there's a bit of a chicken/egg problem with legalizing adult sex work: because it's currently a criminal enterprise criminals have considerable latitude to not engage in activities that ought to be legal but also to engage in acts that decidedly shouldn't. Yet resistance to legalization is high precisely because of the corners criminals cut. Corner cutting, incidentally, that legal or decriminalized sex workers would be unlikely to tolerate were it legal and non-jeopardizing for them to complain. But I digress.

The real point is that conflicting social priorities have tended to treat prostitutes in general, and child-prostitutes in particular as nominal victims but actual criminals (see item #1 in the Two Rules of Desire. Especially since victims of child prostitution are generally seen as especially "broken" since they've already had Teh Sex and all.) Anyway a move to instead treat child-sex laborers as actual victims is pretty welcome.

The next step in that direction, of course, would be to prosecute pimps and customers with (generally overreactive but in this case laudably and, even better, enduringly punitive) child-sex and child-exploitation offenses. As it currently stands sex with a minor tends to be "washed away" if the child is a sex worker. Turning that on its head where prosecutors disregarded the sex-work angle and simply started putting customers on life-long, wherever-you-live sex-offender registries would have a marvelously "chilling" effect on customers who currently needn't worry at all about age.

Anyway, if you're anti-sex-work you should be fine with that. And if you're pro-sex-work you should be fine with that too. Any time the question of legalization comes up the anti-sex-work side raises the child-prostitution issue. The best thing the decriminalization/legalization side could do is take the issue away from their opponents with vocal support for initiatives like Nancy O'Malley's.

Warning: Curmudgeon alert

So someone finally showed me the Susan Boyle video that's been making the rounds lately. She's a 47-year-old Scotswoman, a choirist, who wound up on one of those mean-people "talent show" programs that are so popular these days. You know, the ones where instead of risking having the bad taste to enjoy a performer's actual performance they show cool people's faces during the performance so you can tell if you're making the right choice? Oh, and to make sure you aren't confused they mug horribly if they don't think you should like a performer, and smile and gently shake their heads as if in wonder so you'll know you should like the performer too.

Anyway, Boyle's got the sort of great, room-filling voice that's prized by show-tune impresarios, opera conductors, and choir directors. She's also not beautiful the same way people who are paid to look cool on TV are beautiful.

And so everybody mugged awfully when she walked out on stage, and mugged worse when she said she wanted to sing a love-affirming song. And then she began singing and was really good so all the cool people stopped mugging and started smiling and gently shaking their heads. The live audience was so impressed by the switch to smiling and head-shaking that they all stood up and started cheering.

After the performance the smiling head-shakers said a bunch of condescending bullshit.

Anyway, since I hadn't seen it I hadn't registered any of the previous online commentary, but Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors sums the whole thing up rather nicely. Here's a snippet.

When Simon tells Susan Boyle she is a “little tiger” I really wanted to throw up. She rolls it off with a lot of equanimity and class. The only thing that makes watching the portions of the video clip in which the judges are speaking tolerable to me is the utter joy the entire experience seems to bring to Susan Boyle.

She said it here.

There was a program in the 1970s called the Gong Show. It too was a talent show with a panel of judges. One difference was the judges weren't paid to be cool. Another difference was that the judges had buttons on their desks that would ring a big gong that signaled that they were rejecting the performance or...

...the performer.

Which is what I thought about when I saw the program staffer's reactions before, during, and after Susan Boyle's performance.

Perhaps not surprisingly I couldn't find the exact clip from the Gong Show I was looking for. The one that reminded me so closely of the "cool people's" performance as Boyle sang.

Instead, here's a clip of the same performer from an episode several months after the first. The intro by the host is significant. "Right now let's bring back a terrific lady..."

Her name is Bobby Tremain.

The reason I couldn't find the first clip, and why I'm not surprised, is that the first time 'round one... or maybe more than one of the judges let her get about one verse into the song... maybe as far as when she started playing and tap dancing, and they rang the gong.

Why? I don't remember who the nobody daytime "celebrities" were back then (anymore than I've heard of the daytime celebrities hired to be judgmental about Susan Boyle) but the one who stands out in my memory had Paul-Linde-fey kind schtick and he explained that he rang the gong because "that poor woman, that poor little old lady, I didn't want her to die up there!"

There was much chittering, not all of it enthusiastic, from the audience. The host's plastic smile never faded. Ms. Tremain was pretty speechless but clearly disappointed.

There was considerable outcry from the non-studio audience, however, and so they had her back. And let her finish. Three years later Tremain one the over-eighty tournament on another game show, Tic-tac Dough.

I bring all this up because Tremain, like Boyle, was talented, energetic, and enthusiastic. And like Boyle she didn't fit the stereotypes of the judges who, in both instances, made their judgments based their preconceptions that people who look like X should be expected to do only Y.

I'm not ashamed for having watched The Gong Show because I was a very young and the two broadcast-only alternatives were worse. There are many more channels today, and many more choices of programming. I would be ashamed if today I watched whatever program it is that Boyle transcended. For one thing I'm a big boy now. For another I have my own sense of taste. For another, having been an amateur performing musician and singer I appreciate how much work goes into even the least praiseworthy performance. And so I have no patience for trained monkeys paid to mug or gently smile and shake their heads based on their preconceptions, their prejudices, and possibly anticipation of bananas from their producers after the show. I have to say I might watch the show if they had gong buttons on their desks like the old show... it would be amusing to watch the cool people try and master the technology to push them.

%@#*&!!!

Bill of Portland Maine, of Daily Kos, discusses a complaint by retired military officials concerned about repeal of the Clinton Administration's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy against same-sex orientations in the military. Bill systematically dismantles arguments against service by LGBT people. In the process he casts light, yet again, on another dire obstacle on the road to understanding... and therefore dealing with... the real vs. mythical nature of sexual assault. Here's Bill:

On to the next stupid point:

Team cohesion and concentration on missions would suffer if our troops had to live in close quarters with others who could be sexually attracted to them.

Good lord, not that old chestnut. God help the clumsy heterosexual soldier who drops the soap in the shower, because the gays will be swarming over him like ants at a picnic.

He said it here.

I still think male homophobia is driven by Rule #2 in the Two Rules of Desire: It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. That and the "no-sex" class corollary that men, as the sex class, are innately, reflexively, bestially, and inescapably obliged to attempt sex no matter how inappropriate or undesired.

And if that were true then yeah, maybe men completely disinterested in other men would be at high and perpetual risk. And yet, in (inconceivable and intolerable) violation of both the rules of desire and the no-sex class paradigm, gay men would much rather have sex with men who would much rather have sex with them.

For men mired in the ideology of the no-sex class paradigm this is as incomprehensible as being asked to, I dunno, go swimming in an accordion. This would be thanks in no small part to Rule of Desire #1: it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire. Since according to this cultural convention heterosexual men are indoctrinated to believe they must always somehow impose themselves on innately, reflexively, angelically, and inescapably disinterested partners... it's natural for them to imagine gay men must always force themselves upon straight men.

Which brings me to the next point in Bill's post:

A congresswoman said Thursday that her "jaw dropped" when military doctors told her that four in 10 women at a veterans hospital reported being sexually assaulted while in the military.

...

Looks to me like maybe we should keep heterosexual male soldiers out of the military, since they're the ones who have trouble keeping their peckers in line.

See... here's a tangible demonstration in at least nine parts of how anti-femininsm hurts everybody, not just women. How it denigrates men as well as women. How it scab-picks dysfunction open rather than healing it.

These generals fear "helpless, defenseless" men will be to terrorized of Teh Gay Assault that they won't be able to enlist, let alone function... even though the risk of actual assault from actual gay servicemen is not at all high. And yet they disregard the evidence (let alone heroic sacrifice) of women who enlist and serve despite what might as well be certainty** they'll be sexually assaulted? And not by the "enemy" but by fellow soldiers! It's not like it's exactly a secret. And yet women still take that chance in order to serve their country. But the generals imagine men would or could not? Charming little inversion of heroism we've got here.

So. Contempt for men? Check. Contempt for women? Check. Military brass degrading military preparedness through hidebound thick-headedness? Check.

Next question: does anybody think that maybe a system that both procedurally and doctrinally protected soldiers from unwanted predation a) protect not only female but male service members? And might it not also increase service cohesion, performance, and retention the Generals are all in a bunch about? Impossible to see why not.

Just one more way ignoring gender realities in favor of gender mythology undercut everybody.

[Yes, technically a 25% doh! 40% chance of something isn't "certainty" but... how many people would walk into a dark alley where there was a one in four chance they'd be assaulted? Or even just walk into a restaurant knowing 25% doh! 40% of customers got food poisoning? Uh-huh. Thought so. --fl]

Piny of Feministe hits back at the stupid "it's ok to use sexist slurs if the target is conservative" idea.

I thought I’d talk a bit about the “Ann Coulter is a tranny” thing, and why it’s transphobic. It’s based on a bunch of transphobic ideas. Trans women all look alike. Trans women all look like men. Trans women all look totally different from “real” women. Trans women are obvious, and oblivious to their inability to blend in: cis people are much more perceptive about gender cues than trans people: trans women are delusional. Trans women are ugly and pathetic. Women who look like trans women are ugly and pathetic.

Read the quote in context here.

Um. Yeah. Whether Coulter is or isn't is sort of beside the point. The point is if you "know better" than to sexualize someone on your side of the aisle but not to sexualize an opponent then you don't know better.

Also, mocking a transsexual is approximately as funny as making fun of a diabetic (who needs hormones -- insulin in this case -- to be healthy), of someone who needs glasses (who needs prosthetics to function comfortably), or someone who wears or wore orthodontic braces (who had medical intervention to correct the way their body did or would have otherwise grown without intervention.)

Also, "trannie?"

What Amber Rhea of Being Amber Rhea said

And you wonder why I’m so passionate about decriminalization of prostitution and destigmatization of all sex work? You wonder why I get such a stick up my ass about self-identified feminists who don’t support decrim? (Yes, there are plenty who don’t support it, and that fact absolutely boggles my mind.)

A sex worker who had advertised on Craigslist was murdered in Boston two days ago.

She said it here here.

The first reports to come out said the woman was a massage therapist doing outcalls to a local hotel. Which isn't that uncommon for hotels, at least in resort towns and areas where licensed massage practitioners have an active presence. Often hotels have arrangements with massage therapists where they offer the service, the hotel books them, arranges the fees, often even automatically adding the fees to the guest's bill. The hotel usually takes a cut... or, more accurately depending on the hotel, charges the customer extra. The hotel may also suggest an appropriate amount that the customer should tip their body worker.

And so it would be very unusual for a massage therapist to be attacked, let alone murdered, by a customer in a hotel. Not unheard of -- it is a risk for LMTs who do either in- or out-call work. But in part because the work tends to be aboveboard the risks are pretty low.

Now it's sounding more like the victim was a sex worker. Who may or may not have listed herself as a massage therapist. But sex work is illegal. And because hotels don't book sex workers the way they book body workers, it sounds like the victim made her arrangements with her assailant independently. And because sex work is illegal her case is complicated because it would have been illegal for her, and her customer though less so, to record any details of her appointments. A fact her assailant must have known he (it's almost certainly a he) could take advantage of. And did.

And in that respect he was just like every other predator who targets sex workers.

One bitter irony here, of course, is that because prostitution is illegal, sex workers who work with pimps are marginally safer than those who, as the victim appears to have been, work independently. The irony being that if sex work was like massage therapy, i.e. legal, there would be no need for secrecy or pimps to insure her safety.

Say what one will about sex work (and I'll say I'm not crazy about the way it's so often constructed as "paying her to leave" after sex), keeping it illegal exacts far more toll on those who do it than would legalizing it.

Erotica author Kristina Lloyd of Erotica Cover Watch reflects on the cover of a new fetish/erotica anthology and muses on the seeming inviolability of Rule #2. (Emphasis hers.)

The various blurbs to Best Fetish Erotica add to the book’s list of fetishes the phrase ‘ - nothing is off limits!’ or describe the stories as ‘taboo yet tantalizing‘. Well, clearly something is off limits: men! The desire for a male body is a taboo too far for erotica covers.

She said it here.

She reflects as well on the formal meaning of the word of "fetish."

The word ‘fetish’ is frequently used to mean ‘kinky sex’ rather than obsessive devotion to an object or activity. However, this anthology (out next month), does seem to be true to its word with stories featuring ‘corsets, girdles, high-heeled feet, cross-dressing, rubber balls, spanking, fast cars, voyeurism, masochism, knives and plushies’. So it’s a book about desire for weird things but, as per usual, the cover falls into the idea of desire being solely represented by desire for women’s bodies meaning once again, we get a cover image of a woman, irrespective of the book’s content.

...

[D]oesn’t it look like a paraphilia when there are two sexes and the focus is entirely on one?

I'm trying out a new scheme for making the "Continue reading if..." photos even more optional. My old scheme kept them off the main pages but showed them on the click-through-to-comments page. This displays them in an entirely separate window. I keep meaning to stop posting them altogether but dang it, but I started posting them in the first place in part out of the same frustration Kristina Lloyd expresses at Erotica Cover Watch: despite considerable interest, erotic representations of heterosexual men are... well... poorly represented.

If you're an adult you can click here to see a possibly not-work-safe image.

Let me know if the new scheme works for you.

Well, glad that's over.

Very good!

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

Reflecting on some boneheaded insensitivity to transgender issues raised in the L-Word final season Ily of asexy beast makes a connection to the way she's often treated as an asexual, and comes to an insight with even broader applications towards orientation, identity, as well as the (inappropriate, unwanted) utility well-meaning others assign can assign to you.

Once I started on this train of thought, I realized that a large proportion of the unwanted things people say when we come out are actually attempts to make us feel better. Maybe this is obvious, but since I tend to assume everyone knows the same things I know, it took me awhile to figure out. Being told "You're just a late bloomer" is supposed to give us hope, as is "You just haven't found the right person yet." If the other person can convince us that asexuality doesn't exist, we're supposed to find that a huge relief. Uh...no. Someone with little understanding of asexuality might think it's a negative thing, and assume that we want to be talked down off the edge of identifying as such.

She said it here.

Good points. We tend to do a lot of that, to a lot of people. Ily mentions her exasperation upon being told when she mentioned her asexuality "But! Straight men would want to date you!" Yes, no doubt that's true. Goodness knows enough gay women are told the same. As trans men and women are told "you're fine just the way you are." As men expressing emotion are told to "suck it up." As children are told "you'd be prettier if you tied your hair back." All well-intentioned, sure, but intentioned far more for the consolation of the beholder than for the "consoled."

In an earlier post I twigged the anti-feminist conceit that men would be better off without feminism by pointing out that uber-anti-feminist Afghanistan isn't exactly a male paradise. A bit after I posted that I ran across Twisty Faster's perfectly accurate (but not, in this case, terribly relevant) point that patriarchy might be more genteel than places like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan but is still well-entrenched in places like Texas or Washington State.

Anyway, in my post I'd linked to a disgraceful law originally backed... but now backed-away-from... by U.S. supported Afghan President Karzai designed to make life suck even worse for, particularly, religious-minority Afghan women.

Megan of Jezebel cuts to the heart of something I only alluded to...

Of course, Mohammad Asif Mohseni, the law's primary architect, disagrees, and wants us all to butt out of it.

"The Westerners claim that they have brought democracy to Afghanistan. What does democracy mean? It means government by the people for the people. They should let the people use these democratic rights," Mohseni told reporters in the capital, Kabul…

Mohseni argued that women and men are very far from equal in today's Afghanistan and should not be treated as such. He pointed out that many rural women are illiterate and would not be able to find work if they were asked to provide some of the family's financial support. Men are typically the breadwinners in Afghan households, expected to provide for their wives and children.

"It is not possible for all women to pay the same amount of money as men are paying. For all these expenses, can't we at least give the right to a husband to demand sex from his wife after four nights?" he said.

Yes, since women are prevented from education and working — by the law Mohseni wants, in fact — they should give it up as recompense for their living expenses.

She said it here.

Exactly! Whatever else one can say about the culture relative to others, there's no denying that thanks in large measure to cultural norms Afghanistan has terribly low opportunity rates for women (Megan cites a local who says that at 13% Afghan women have the lowest literacy rate in the world.) Not surprising since the Afghan equivalents of Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin routinely incite their cohorts to murder female school children and their teachers. (Twisty's right that the Malkins and Becks of the 1st world lack differ only in their lack of opportunity rather than of means or motivation to do likewise here.)

But look at the self-referential result! Mohammad Asif Mohseni feels sorry for the poor men who must work twice as hard because... their wives are forbidden to work at all. To them their anti-feminist paradise is no paradise at all! And yet the solution he proposes is... to make things even worse! Worse for women, obviously, but remember the motivation for making it worse for women is the evidently sincere believe the system is so bad for men! The assumption being, evidently, that if you keep digging you'll eventually come out at the antipodes and you'll be on top. Meanwhile the men might be slightly less deep than women but everybody's still in a hole! That men, complaining bitterly all the while no less, are actively digging.

A more obvious solution would be to stop digging at all and begin climbing out instead. A lesson as valuable for men and women outside of Afghanistan as in.

...sometime ago, an inside contact on these things told me that a big part of this “offensive” content problem is the simple fact that wingnuts buy a lot of “adult content”, and that makes it so that people who buy an item that is tangential - say, a very floridly illustrated bible - get recomendations for all sorts of bondage-themed novels and the like.

It isn’t that the search engines are recommending things that are inappropriate - it is that the people who buy certain things tend to buy certain other things that are solidly adult content.

Ms Kate on 04/14 at 08:01 PM

She said it here.

Ouch! The reference, in case you missed it, being to last month's red-state/on-line porn report.

---

I originally meant to stop here but after sleeping on it I realized that minus the delightfully snarky wingnut porn/religion angle Ms Kate's hypothesis doesn't sound that far off.

People do order a lot of erotic material online in areas where eyebrows would be raised if local vendors sold it... let alone if local residents purchased it.

I think I've mentioned that during the whole eBay craze I had some friends who resold clothes from yard sales. They stumbed across a huge stash of very large women's shoes from an out-of-business shop and put them online... and they were snapped up almost instantly. They tracked down more such shoes and... they were instantly snapped up. Eventually they actually ordered new extra-large shoes made and for several years did a booming business. It actually took them a while to realize their primary market was midwestern and southern cross-dressing men who socially couldn't afford to buy them for themselves in local stores.

The other day a somewhat skeptical Rachel Kramer Bussel mentioned a rumor she keeps hearing that Barnes & Noble hates erotica. Which, if true would be funny since I'm pretty sure the big reason for their leap to national prominence over much larger and better-established vendors in the then-mail-order days was that unlike anyone else they included the sort of erotica titles (from "anonymous" Victorians to specialty fetish to Mapplethorpe coffee-table photography) that... you can find in their stores today. (They also, years ahead of their time, carried LGBT titles including LGBT erotica.) Which, again, must have helped lower the reluctance threshhold... or the blunt availability threshold... for thousands or millions of readers.

Anyway, given the possibly natural tendency for the shy and embarrassed to pay "I just read it for the articles," it's probably fairly common to order somewhat thematically-similar "straight" titles associated with the erotic materials for "oh there must have been a mix-up in my order" excuse making if I was designing a "you might also like..." or "people who bought this also bought..." feature for an on-line bookstore I'd probably add tweaks to make sure kids who selected the 80's hit "Indiana Jones" presented with the 80's schlock-porn hit "Indiana Jane."

Doh! I just realized why this line of thinking seemed so familiar!

A while ago I ordered a Tony Comstock video, Heather Corinna's S.E.X, and Pamela Drucker's cross-cultural adultery report Lust in Translation and Amazon suggested that people who bought those titles also bought... Tracey Rihll's Catapult: A History (Weapons in History)! Which at the time I saw as completely, 100% random... but maybe not.

I'm not saying that's what Amazon did, just that I'd probably do that if I was coding out suggested sales. Although evidently unlike Amazon I'd also give users a chance to opt in or out.

Echidne of the Snakes says

An early item on the murder at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Mich., described it like this:

A WWJ reporter on the scene says a male student appears to have shot a woman, then turned the gun on himself at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Mich.

WWJ reporter Pat Sweeney has information that it was a lover's quarrel in which the gunman shot his girlfriend, then himself.

Emphasis mine. Using that term appears to be very bad journalism. Was there evidence of a quarrel? Note that 'a quarrel' is not the same thing as a man walking in and killing a woman with a gun. At least to me it means something different.

She said it here.

I'm... pretty sure in most cases like this the topic of these kinds of "lovers quarrels" are about how restraining orders don't do much to protect the lives or safety of those who request them in the face of someone who's delusional and obsessed about "our chances of making this work."

When I was in my 20s I rode the city bus to college. A few stops from mine a guy got on the bus, asked for a return-trip transfer, and as he walked past me towards the back I remember thinking he looked kind of stressed. Just a few minutes after we all got off the bus he went into the cafeteria and shot to death a girl he'd gone out with, once, maybe a year before.

When I was in my 30s I worked with an aggressive, grudge-bearing, and not as hot-shot as he thought he was intern. One weekend he mentioned he was going back to his hometown. He didn't show up for work on Monday. On Tuesday one of his other officemates showed up ashen-faced saying he'd shot to death a young man who was going out with "his girl." Who he'd actually never gone out with at all but had been obsessed with for, again, more than a year.

In each case they'd intended to kill themselves afterwards but for various reasons they both failed.

I'm sure sometimes, somewhere, someone kills a lover in a genuine "lovers quarrel" from time to time. But I'm also sure that the "sometime" isn't in the middle of the day and the "somewhere" isn't a college classroom. Especially when the "with something" isn't a shotgun.

In the bitter irony department? The shooter would most likely be highly gratified to have his one-victim rampage described in Romeo and Juliet terms. Whereas his victim might have felt like she was in something closer to Alien.

The reporter and possibly his sources almost certainly was trying to avoid the situation in Virginia a few years back where what appeared to be a no-big-deal/routine "lover's quarrel" turned out to be prelude a campus-wide massacre. But considering the classic stalker's state of mind "lovers quarrel" is exactly, exactly the wrong turn of phrase.

As of a couple moments ago both Leslea Newman's Heather Has Two Mommies: 10th Anniversary Edition (Alyson Wonderland) and Heather Corinna's S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College have had their Sales Rankings restored at Amazon.com. I haven't checked any of the other books that were delisted over the weekend but, since I'm pretty sure this really was a language-based rather than a prejudice-based error I'm pretty confident it's a general rollback.

I'd say "click those links, confirm the ranking is still there, and then help drive their sales ranks even higher... and help make up for sales losses over the weekend... by buying copies." Except I'd have to add that as an Amazon Affiliate I'd be getting a (fractional) cut. (I'm not saying don't buy from Amazon in general, at all. I am reluctant to appear eager to benefit financially.)

You can just support the authors and Powell's Books, instead of the authors and me, if you buy Heather Has Two Mommies here and S.E.X. here. Or you can support the authors and Barnes & Noble, instead of the authors and me, if you buy Heather Has Two Mommies here and S.E.X. here. Or you could check Indiebound.com for an independent bookseller near you and support the authors and a local business.

And as long as I'm drawing still-more general lessons from perfectly reasonable points Matthew Yglesias says (emphasis his)

...this idea that all critics of Obama’s policy are being smeared as racists seems extremely popular on the right.

And that, in turn, is just part of a more generalized phenomenon in which you virtually never see a conservative get worked up and personally outraged about an actual instance of racism but the slightest hint of “political correctness” run amok drives many conservatives into a rage.

He said it here.

You see a lot of that with gender issues where men say "yeah, well this or that hurts men too." But other than harumphing over feeling singled left out? Not much.

The funny thing is that anti-feminism really does hurt men as well as women. It really does stunt and truncate men's lives as well as women's. And the best we can usually do is blame feminism for it... as though men's lives are so much healthier, happier, sexier, or longer in feminism-free Afghanistan.

In her "Abbreviated Pundit Roundup," BarbinMD of Daily Kos quotes columnist Bob Herbert on what's actually a narrow point in a much broader context.

Murderous gunfire claims many more victims than those who are actually felled by the bullets. But all the expressions of horror at the violence and pity for the dead and those who loved them ring hollow in a society that is neither mature nor civilized enough to do anything about it.

Read the quote, and follow the links here.

Ironic that I should think that a narrow point for something that claims victims so far even from the echos of the sounds of gunshots. I think I've mentioned how mere fear of "city" violence led family of a friend to move to ex-urban "paradise." And how consequently their daughter who year after year was left to her own devices for hours after school thanks to her parents long, long commutes. And how, imagining herself perishing of boredom she wound up perishing instead of massive injuries under the wheels of a logging truck in a car full of intoxicated, unsupervised teenagers like herself. So yeah, in a sense murderous gunfire truthfully claims far more victims than those who are actually felled by the bullets.

For all that, Herbert's point remains narrow. Murder is not the only useless, self-perpetuating, desperately unnecessary tragedy to empty life of meaning for victims, their loved ones, and even those who will never know them.

There are enough such tragedies to fill 10,000 Russian novels. On April 8th, President Obama took formal steps to acknowledge and officially recognize one kind of these... trivialized and calculatedly misunderstood too often considering it's scope and impact... by declaring April as Sexual Assault Awareness month. Good for him.

Blogging reporter Andrea James of the 148-year-old, now all-online Seattle Post-Intelligencer says

Amazon calls mistake 'embarrassing and ham-fisted'

Amazon.com has offered a response to the AmazonFail fiasco.

Because there's so much attention to this, I'll offer spokesman Drew Herdener's comments unfiltered:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

She said it here.

There have been a number of conspiracy theories going around the web, all of them plausible. According to actual Amazon people, what happened was an employee was dinking around in code used to filter raw porn (which Amazon catalogues and/or resells) from their more regular fair. The employee, at the company's French subsidiary, evidently plugged in some keywords that sounded good to him and... since Amazon worldwide is effectively driven by a single database... he wiped out 50,000 plus titles worldwide instead of whatever handful he'd meant to wipe out in French.

Oops.

I learned web programming from a moonlighting Amazon employee. Over the years I've worked on commercial websites with several former Amazon employees. And, of course, I've developed or contributed to several dozen database-driven websites (including this one) and so... wow, does that local-change-goes-global story work for me.

Add that to their admission, from an official spokesperson, that they were embarrassingly ham-fisted about the whole thing, start to finish. And while I'm not at all above rubbing their noses in it if they don't clean it up pretty darn quickly, professional courtesy and acute personal awareness of how bloody easy that sort of thing can be when the internal goal is as much interconnection of data as possible means I'm strongly inclined to forgive them. Not forget, forgive.

Because, seriously, it's not something they, or we, ought to forget. Because this was a nice preview of what happens when you do forget! I've been as guilty as anyone of just defaulting to Amazon links, and I'll make an effort moving forward to remember other book vendors as well as Amazon just because of the perils of eggs in one basket.

But I'm also very inclined to forgive in the technical sense of seeing wrong, or being wronged, but making an affirmative act out of not retaliating for what Occams razor says pretty much had to be a complex to unravel but ultimately simple (and, um, easy to make, though I won't say how I know except that years ago I caught mine sooner than they caught theirs) error.

I wanna see those Sales Rankings restored though. Soon.

(Via Hortense at Jezebel.)

One Amazon.com link I will post, however, is this post from Heather Corinna on her Amazon book page for S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College.

Is this book (or its author) too gay for an Amazon?
3:01 PM PDT, April 12, 2009, updated at 4:41 PM PDT, April 12, 2009
My book, like many, many others, has recently been deranked by Amazon.

In other words, it is no longer listed in the sales ranks with other books of its subject or genre, no matter how good my sales are, or if my sales are above others who are currently listed. As well, my book, as is the case with many others, is not currently listed anymore in the subject heading appropriate to it. That deranking can massively impact us as authors, and also can impact consumers, particularly those who are trying to seek out material on a subject broadly without knowing what books are available by title or author. And with books that serve any sort of marginalized population or subject matter, finding them offline is often tough. Deranking books like mine further marginalizes the already marginalized.

The books this primarily appears to have impacted are those by gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender authors, young adult or children's books addressing sexuality, some sexuality books in general (including reference books), as well as some feminist titles. Some of the titles recently deranked besides mine include: James Baldwin's, Giovanni's Room, Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, E. M. Forster's Maurice, Various, I Do: an anthology in support of marriage equality, Alex Sanchez's Rainbow Road, The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students, Kate Bornstein's Hello Cruel World, Milk: A Pictorial History of Harvey Milk, Dan Savage's The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant, The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability: For All of Us Who Live with Disabilities, Chronic Pain and Illness, [Jessica Valenti & Jaclyn Friedman's] Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, Ruth Bell's Changing Bodies, Changing Lives: Expanded Third Edition: A Book for Teens on Sex and Relationships, Jessica Valenti's Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters, Toni Weschler's Cycle Savvy: The Smart Teen's Guide to the Mysteries of Her Body, Ellen DeGeneres: A Biography and many, many more.

At this time, there is no clear statement from Amazon as to what, exactly, is going on. However, one author, writing in, received the following reply:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage

The trouble with that reply is that there is PLENTY of very explicilty "adult" material which has NOT been deranked, and we don't need to guess much about if it is or isn't adult when we simply look at some of the titles: Girls Gone Wild: Girls on Girls, Surrender the Booty 3: The Search for More Arse, Jenna Jameson: Ultimate Collection, Girls Kissing: Volume One, Ron Jeremy: The Hardest Working Man in Showbiz, Candy Girl: A Year In The Life Of An Unlikely Stripper, Hot Babes…

My book is intended for young adults, and is GLBT-inclusive, and penned by me, a queer author. It is not salacious, it is not pornography: it is a sexuality, sexual health and relationships reference book. Heather Has Two Mommies is a supportive and classic children's book about gay families. Hello, Cruel World is a suicide prevention book (which just happens to be written by a transgender author). That's a short list, but the point is, many of the books that have been deranked are not adult books at all, nor adult or salacious material, but what nearly all of them, so far, do seem to be are tagged or labeled in some way as GLBT, or as books addressing sexuality in a non-heteronormative or gendernormative way.

To give you an idea of how this deranking has impacted a given subject you'd search for, take a look at the current list for books on homosexuality.

You'll perhaps notice a prevailing theme, and see that if I were looking for books on how what is WRONG with homosexuality, I'd find exactly what I needed there. But if I were merely researching to topic as a whole -- or, horror of horrors, did not want to read what was wrong with me and why I needed fixing -- I'd find a strange lack of well-rounded material on the subject, including some of the most cornerstone books on or about homosexuality. Huh.

This obviously isn't about adult material. It seems painfully clear what it is likely about, and all we can hope is that a) we're wrong in seeing what we are, or that this is some kind of glitch Amazon will fix immediately, and/or b) that if we're not wrong in our perception of this event, Amazon realizes that, even for a private business who has the right to discriminate however they choose, this kind of discrimination is wrong.

To keep up with what's been going on, you can see the twitter feed #amazonfail here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=amazonfail

The following open letter is also very informative: http://booksquare.com/open-letter-to-amazon-regard ing-recent-policy-changes/

I put a letter into Amazon early this morning myself, but have yet to get a response.

Why am I blogging this here? In part because I'd hope, as an author Amazon feels comfortable making a profit from, the least I can do is voice my concerns right here, where my book lives at Amazon. But also, because until this is cleared up, and we all have some explanation and the matter is rectified -- and I'll adapt this post if and when it does -- I'd prefer consumers bought my book somewhere else, where we're all as sure as we can be a company isn't engaging in sexual discrimination.

Again, not ok at all. If they're serious, and we'll see how serious they are, then screw them.

Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that's me!) Used under a Creative Commons license.

So I've been thinking about (finally) writing a book. Weird to think that if I wrote it about how to make money off of date-raping drunk young women my Amazon.com sales rank might shoot up to 1,404, but if I wrote about date rape in the context of the Two Rules of Desire in the no-sex class paradigm my Amazon sales rank might be... well, you might expect it to be a lot lower. Turns out, though, that evidently as of some time today it would more likely be... non-existent! Wiped out. Erased. Expunged.

From Twitter (Links with "twurl.nl" are URLs that are automatically shortened to fit Twitter's 145-character post limit.)

Audacia Ray: http://twitpic.com/37ur0 - #amazon has dumped sales ranking for "adult" books. and all the info/reviews about Naked on the Internet are GONE

Audacia Ray: It's not just "adult" themes but also LGBT books. I hope there's a good explanation, but I fear there isn't http://twurl.nl/w2y2dz

Audacia Ray: I'm trying to believe that the #amazon erasure of Naked on the Internet has to do with biz of remainders (its almost 2 years old)

Audacia Ray: But books older than mine have listings w/covers/reviews on #amazon even if out of print, like Carol Queen's 1995 Exhibitionism for the Shy

Audacia Ray: So fucking bizarre. my book's page is back, its in stock. sales rank is indeed missing. http://twurl.nl/7yd2vz

There's actually quite a lot of buzz about this (at least a little while ago @AmazonFail was the #2 search item on Twitter.) I've singled out Dacia because a) her book is about sex, not a sex book, b) because her posts capture the general sense of surprise so well, c) because she's pretty cool, and because I've been meaning to link to her last not one but two wonderfully reflective posts for a day or two.

(Update Speaking of cool people, see also Heather Corinna's take on this.)

Other books recently gone missing from Amazon's Sales Rank and other metrics (gee, wonder why the following links all go to Barnes & Noble pages? Gee, wonder why there are no links to Amazon pages in this post?)

Miriam Kaufman, Fran Odette, and Cory Silverberg's The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability : For All of Us Who Live with Disabilities, Chronic Pain, and Illness unranked on Amazon.com

Heather Corinna's S.E.X. : The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College unranked on Amazon.com

Audacia Ray's Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration unranked on Amazon.com

The Joy of Sex: The Timeless Guide to Lovemaking unranked on Amazon.com

Meanwhile, over at Amazon.com you can still find sales ranks for Girls Gone Wild: Girls on Girls (2008) Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,404 and other charming works.

About that last one? The "one of these things that's not like the other ones?" The one that Amazon hasn't suddenly stopped sales-ranking? Here's a nice "customer review" of this instructional video

66 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The New Girl-on-Girl - Barely Legal, February 18, 2008
By Jenifer M (Orange County, CA, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)
What started out as girls flashing their tits (for a free Girls Gone Wild T-shirt) - has more recently evolved into a bellwether of female sexuality (in the new century) - that captures some of the freshest and most spontaneous girl/girl action you'll find in any video series today.

These aren't actresses performing on film - but real girls, being sexy - and doing what just comes naturally. Sure, you'll still see young women flashing, hiking their skirts, or completely baring their souls (or the physical equivalent) - just for the fun of it! But you'll also find babes who (instinctively) know their way (exploring) around their friend's feminine form - and who feel just as comfortable doing so - as they would around their own.

You'll also find lots of girls kissing (another GGW trademark)

[Quick note about GGW: if you think that last bit was about me being "down on porn" then stop it. Porn's not the point. This is about consistency, fairness, exercise of sound judgment, commercial competence, and abiding contempt for knee-squeezing twittery. --fl]

Yeah, so if you want to see "documentary" footage of legalized, commercial date rape of drunken "real girls" no problem. If you're a sexual human being with, say, disabilities... or just in need of honest ideas... and want advice or inspiration? Amazon appears to be snubbing the kind of authors and works you probably care most to read.

I'm sort of hoping the overreactions aren't called for. But... at the very least it seems pretty awkward. If it turns out to be true I'll remove all references to Amazon.com from my website (including the book ads in my right-hand column) and swap in links to Powells Books or Barnes & Noble.

Which, if it was just me wouldn't be a very big deal for Amazon at all. But then if it turns out to be true I'd probably recommend everyone else I know remove their references as well. (Even that might not be such a big deal for Amazon because... while I'm going to wait a little bit a heck of a lot of other people online aren't waiting to de-link them at all.)

If more evidence were needed that Holly of The Pervocracy is the real, solid deal and not "a rich white heterosexual American 'privilegebunny' who luxuriates in what you imagine is an oppression-free bubble." A-hem. Anyway, tackling yet more vapidity in Cosmopolitan -- a column about "Guy Truths They'd Tell If They Had The Guts" she says (emphasis hers.)

"Threatening to revoke sexual privileges is both cruel and unfair and leaves us no equal measure of recourse."

Hurrr, funny joke, I know, but still. My body isn't like the community pool that you can visit any time the door isn't locked, it's not something left open by default and occasionally closed as a punishment, it's attached to a goddamn person. The thing a lot of guys don't seem to get is that for a woman to not deny them sex, she has to have sex too. Giving a guy "sexual privileges" doesn't amount to handing him a key and walking away, it means her whole naked body is going to be wrapped up in his and that's awfully unpleasant to be doing if you don't actively want it yourself.

She said it here.

Now that I think about it, there's that respecting permission to have sex without respecting who's _giving permission_ again.

---

So that's the "sexual privileges" part. The "hurr, funny joke" being the "no equal measure of recourse" part. Because, you know, women being the "no-sex" class and all it's just impossible that women could ever be horny independent of an initiating man. Tradition says hetero men must initiate. So a woman who's horny when a man's not, or, even more unthinkably, horny for him when he's not horny for them, is going be invisible to him. (More sound at your back, dudes.)

Anyway, arms-length, nose-holding sexual theorizing from ivory towers and remote Texas ranches is great and I wouldn't give it up for the world. But it can only take you so far. Holly brings equal certainty, and clarity, home from the front lines. And you can't go far without that either.

in this post about Freud and polymorphous perversity in adulthood I made an offhand comment related to my feelings about why, whatever their subjective experience might be, children shouldn't be sexualized or otherwise pushed to be sexual before, well, adulthood.

In the aside I said

I think (obviously for someone with my blog title) it's more appropriate to encourage sexual expression in adults after we've gone through a lot of healthy identity formation. One of the problems with children, ironically, is that because they're polymorphous they're more easily manipulated down convenient-for-adult narrow pathways (gee, sound familiar?)... as opposed to organically developing their own.

I said it here.

Since the post was actually about something else I didn't really think about it till Jha of Rebellious Jezebel Blogging called it to my attention in comments.

I like the way you put this. Somehow, whenever I try to talk about comprehensive sex education for kids, either I get the told that I'm expecting kids to have sexual expression too young, or that sex shouldn't be a priority anyway. It's kinda mind-boggling.

She said it here.

Yup. And by the way it's not as easy as it looks. This is one of the reasons I take my hat off every time I think about how hard Heather Corinna works to keep things safe but neutral at Scarleteen and in her writing for young people.

It's not just about sexual trauma in childhood, though the world overflows with adults who will never enjoy their own sexuality thanks to an adult who enjoyed it for them... for a day, or a week, or a year... before they were ready. It's that growing up is complicated. The complex soup of sex identity, sexual preference, sexual orientation, interpersonal negotiation with peers, critical faculty development, and hormone-surge processing, body-image adjustment (compounded by, um, profound body changes), and reconciliation of gender construction messages with subjective reality takes a really long time! All that and differential physical and psychological development rates and timing for boys and girls. And physical "readiness" can precede actual emotional or developmental readiness as well.

Which is not to say that it's not appropriate to try to influence children's sexual development before they're ready to be sexual on their own. With sports it's fine to tell a child "if you're going to play you should be familiar with the rules and wear appropriate equipment but wait till mineralization in your shoulders and knees before playing X" and with sex it's fine to say "if you're going to be sexual you should be familiar with the rules and wear appropriate equipment" as well. So comprehensive sex education, as designed and taught by competent authors and instructors, is just fine.

Beyond that? It will always be fiendishly hard to separate one's own, um, interests from genuine pedagogical concern, therefore for entirely pragmatic reasons it will always be best to give young people room to let their own sexualities emerge.

In comments to this post about recognizing consent as decision making instead of just an answer Emily (not to be confused with fellow commenter Emily H) had a wonderful example.

You know, this is what really bothered me about marriage proposals and about being in that period in my life where becoming engaged was at issue for me and my (now) husband.

I wanted to make a DECISION, together, about whether we should get married. He likes the trappings of tradition, and totally didn't understand why I was so frustrated by his wanting to go through the ritual of elaborate "popping the question" orchestrated event.

Sorry if this is too much of a tangent, but I think that "decision" not only leaves more room for agency on the part of women, but also leaves more room for a mutual decision that is discussed and agreed upon rather than a "proposal" and "acceptance" or "rejection."

She said it here

I think that's not a tangent at all! She's right that there's more to this than just about abstractly "acknowledging women's agency" and then continuing to doing exactly what everyone's done before. Which, in the tradition Emily's now-husband wanted to follow, boils down to one party effectively running out on stage with rehearsed lines and waiting to see what the audience response is going to be.

Instead working to recognize and respect the decision makers (both of them) there can instead be space for conversation instead of judgment. Resulting in what Thomas Macaulay Millar points out in Yes Means Yes is negotiation as the creation of something new. As opposed to an act of consumption... the use and/or possible re-use of people as supplies or demands.

Via Matt Yglesias, Michelle Goldberg of TAPPED of declining populations in many 1st- and 2nd-world countries...

...the societies where birthrates have plunged to dangerous levels – Russia, Catholic countries like Poland, Spain and Italy, as well as Japan and Singapore – are all places that make it very difficult for women to combine work and family. In countries that support working mothers, like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and France, birthrates are basically fine – they’re either just at replacement, or shrinking in a very slow, totally manageable way.

...

Tory MP David Willetts, in a very smart 2003 report on the threat low birthrates pose to Europe’s pension systems, wrote that “feminism is the new natalism.”

Read the quote in context here.

Yglesias says while he's pretty skeptical that declining populations really is a problem

Not only do conservatives think low birthrates are a problem, but the smarter brand of liberals recognize that family policies that are necessary for reasons of justice and equity are probably the best solution to the problem. So everybody wins!

He said it here.

(...and to make a giant Matt-fest link farm out of this post here's why he thinks the transition might be graceful.)

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has an interesting hypothesis about who among married or marriage-inclined heterosexuals does and does not support gay marriage.

The interesting question is why there is so much opposition to legal gay marriage (which I favor).  You can cite various evil opponents and their evil motives, but there are many good people who aren't all that enthusiastic about the idea.

...

I have a simple hypothesis about the cross-sectional econometrics.  If you take the heterosexual couples who engage in the practice which is sometimes "associated" with male gay marriage, I predict those couples will favor legal gay marriage to an astonishingly high degree.  Their marriage is already "affiliated" with that practice, and so the notion of legally married gay men (and the practices which go along with that) does not constitute an extra and unwanted affiliation for their marriage ideal.

He said it here.

In a way it doesn't matter exactly which "practice which is sometimes 'associated' with male gay marriage" he means. Although since he's being so indirect I assume it's something like fellatio or maybe ass play instead of more obviously common-to-both practices such as setting up wedding-gift registries at Target or working in the yard on weekends.

But if it doesn't matter what practice he means it remains a good point. Even if they were generally tolerant and of good faith, couples that believed sex should be strictly limited to PIV intercourse when and only when reproduction is intended might also be anywhere from baffled ("but why would they want to have sex if they can't reproduce") to outraged. And meanwhile even conservative hetero couples who aren't adherents of the _other_ Victorian fetish (missionary/PIV-only/reproduction-only/lights-out/female-orgasm-denial) *aren't* baffled by the appeal and so are more sanguine about the prospect of other people wanting to do it too. Whatever the mysterious "it" turned out to be.

Just because it's logical doesn't mean its true. But as hypotheses about social attitudes go it's testable with off the shelf data gathering and analysis methods.

---

Note: it's possible I'm just being oblivious and everyone else but me knows what "'associated' practice" Cowen's talking about.

---

Update: See also the eternally pragmatic Matt Yglesias "...the more people see gay equality in practice, the less frightening it looks." Which supports from the other direction my hunch that those mysterious "associated practices" really will turn out to be things like shared interest in gift registries and yard work.

In one of my earliest posts about moving attention past respect for consent (legal and otherwise) as a result to respect for the decision maker I said

There's a certain sexual coercion implicit in the word "consent" in that when pressed for an answer the choices are "yes" or "no," and thus one is obliged (at least socially) to disclose some information about one's sexual state.

Consider that when pressed for a decision social convention permits one _three_choices of answer rather than just two: yes, no, and it's none of your business.

I said it here.

And in comments Sungold of Kittywampus raised a reasonable concern:

And maybe a second core problem is - as you phrase it - "when pressed for an answer ..." when in fact no one should be *pressed.* They should be *asked.* And if they demur, we're back to no, at least at that particular moment in time.

Sorry about the disjointed comments, but I'm starting to see why you've got one post after another on this issue. It's like untangling a very large, very knotted ball of yarn.

It's taken me a while (a consequence of trying to articulate a newly-developing conviction about a tangled issue) but I think "when pressed" is highly relevant.

Because not to put too fine a point on it "consent," especially as it's discussed in legal terms, really only comes into play when one is either pressing or feeling pressed. A reason, incidentally, why I think it's *especially* critical to move the focus past consent to respect for the decision maker. Because almost by definition pressure implies disrespect for and even objectification of the decision maker... which necessarily then presses the matter back to the firewall of consent.

This is why I think consent is a critical concept for equality of power in sexual relationships. But not insufficient.

Holly of The Pervocracy digs in hard not just to Cosmopolitan for propagating destructive myths but the actual myths:

...There's an article on home security for women living alone that basically comes off as "you fool, a woman can't live alone, she'd be a babe in the woods!" (Naturally, it doesn't even mention guns. This is a magazine for women, sillypants!)

Plant something thorny, like a small cactus or rosebush, in front of your windows to keep Peeping Toms or potential thieves at a distance.

I'm pretty sure thieves don't care if they have to destroy a little bit of landscaping, and as for peepers, maybe you should just close your curtains when you take your clothes off.

20 percent of all violent crimes occur in the victim's home--more than in any other venue. The greatest number of rapes and sexual assaults (33 percent)... happen in the victim's home as well.

That's because you're massively more likely to be assaulted or raped by someone you know. These statistics don't represent home invasions, they represent truly shitty boyfriends, and there's nothing you're going to plant in front of the windows to get rid of those.

She said it here.

It's a killer point that shows up in Yes Means Yes as well: women are taught over and over (there are whole cable networks just for that <cough>Lifetime<cough>) that scary happens out in the world. Jessica Valenti doh! Jill Filipovic puts it bluntly, and accurately:

Women are more likely to be victimized in their home or in the home of someone they know, whereas men are more likely to be victimized in public. ... And yet it is women who are treated to "suggestions" about how to protect themselves from public stranger assaults.

Source: Yes Means Yes, pg. 23.

And not to put too fine a point on it, cactus bushes? Rose bushes? Seriously? And when they recommend getting a dog they suggest precisely the cutsie but useless little lapdogs they say guys hate (and would admit if they "had the guts" and ever "told the truth." Undercut much, Cosmo?) Seriously? I know, and how about putting an ottoman somewhere in the living room for burglars to trip over Dick Van Dyke style!!! Yeah, that'll work! Then you'll be safe!

Oh, and do complete the circle of gender obliviousness, let's not forget the countless "home security service" ads pitched, hard, on men's programming about how your hot-looking but down-home wife is by herself in your big house with all the glass windows and no curtains and she's lovingly wiping invisible crumbs off the some-kind-of-expensive-substance counter and there's a man behind her, and because she's cleaning the kitchen with no lights on it's too dark for her to notice, and he's got ropes, or an ax, and he's really big and the music's getting all dumm-dumm-doom-y... and... oh if only you hadlocked her inside a secure perimeter before you went... wherever it was in that big SUV and/or first-class plane seat and you keep dialing and dialing to warn her about the big guy who's right behind her right now only she's deaf and... and...

And meanwhile on average women are safer when there aren't men there to protect them. Because as I'm pretty sure Holly can confirm as an ambulance-company employee, the number of 911 calls about home-invasion injuries is dwarfed by the number of plain old-fashioned domestic violence calls.

The point here isn't that men are violent brutes, by the way. In fact almost none of us are and (not to sound too much like the constable in Pirates of Penzance) most of the time those who are violent brutes aren't being violent (gimmie one more second here before you press 'fail,' I've got a point here.)

The point here is that the gender modeling we have for women and men isn't just about watching threats that are fairly low-probablility. It's that we're narrating gender plot lines that leave us unprepared for much more real, much more high-probability problems: domestic violence, domestic sexual assault, acquaintance rape, and date rape.

The point is we're not narrating scripts for detecting, assessing, communicating ("if he had the guts to tell the truth" indeed!), mitigating or resolving issues while they're still precursors to conflict and not triggers for committing or failing to confront violence and sexual assault where it happens -- in generally familiar locations with perpetrators and victims who are generally very familiar with each other.

And that's seriously bad. A moment ago I asked for patience after making the possibly wild assertion that even violent men aren't violent most of the time. If this was a "whut about teh menz" post one could jump into a little victim-blaming and talk about avoiding triggering and all the crap I'm... pretty sure would be the closest Cosmo would come to addressing domestic violence issues.

I'd like to propose instead that rather than coaching each other and ourselves to go tiptoeing around trying not to trigger violent outbursts we consider that a lot of our gender narratives are so wound up with stranger-danger distractions and interpersonal relationship obliviousness denial that when men, and women, run out of script we don't always improvise, um, competently. Or safely. So I'd like to figure out how to model responding to freaky, high-cortisol-level situations a little less often in favor of preparing people for the situations they're more likely to wind up in... and in trouble in.

Making up not just fear-mongering stories as Cosmo, home security and, say, firearm vendors do but making up highly gender-enforcing stories about insecure women helplessly "protecting" themselves with cute prickly window boxes, and about insecure men wish-fullfilling violent preemptive-revenge and "protector" fantasies on their way home from work doesn't just get in the way of solutions, they're part of our problem.

I found some interesting referring pages in my server log this evening that link to not just one but two posts. I'm not sure how significant it is but it looks like the editors of the New York Times online edition have added Real Adult Sex to their Blogrunner news aggregator which in turn generates related links to news items on their main site.

Screen dump by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that's me!) Posted under a Creative Commons license.

I'm not sure what it means but it was a heck of a shock to see a referrer that said just "www.nytimes.com!" Anyway, for approximately the same reason I rubberneck at the big buildings in New York and say "golleeey, lookie thar" I've stuck a screen dump of the NYT topics page below "continue reading..." (If it happens again I'll send a copy of the screen dump to my mom.)

Wow, two cool new developments for my blog.

First, I got to be a guest Wise Guy (this week's "straight married guy") at Em & Lo's Sex. Love. And Everything in Between (emphasis theirs)

Advice from three of our guy friends. This week they answer the following: “Does sleeping with a guy on a first date really ruin my chances for a future relationship with him? What if it’s obvious we really like each other, the chemistry’s great, we have a lot in common, and we’re both horny?”

...

Straight Married Guy (Figleaf): I don’t think first-date sex together ruins your chances but it does change them.  You know the critical little “voice in your ear” that says “Hold off: good girls shouldn’t ruin their ‘reputations,’” even when you’d rather not wait?  Men get that too.  Only ours says “Go for it now: losers never get another chance.” Neither “voice” is telling the truth but they can have an effect anyway.  Sometimes when we have sex right away the social pressure those “voices” represent get in the way of everything else we might feel about each other. So for both men and women I think it’s worth it to wait at least for the rest of your feelings catch up. And since when did horny have a shelf-life anyway?  Even waiting a few days (three days, not three dates) gives you both time to talk, a chance to take showers and sleep on it in your own beds, a time to decide what you really want instead of what you think you should do, and… time to get your respective bedrooms tidy and kitchens stocked for intimate guests.

*I* said it here.

I'll be in their wise-guy rotation every month or two.

Oh, and by the way, I was at the original Babeland store the other week killing time while one of my children was taking a carpentry class at a nearby school. After looking at all their hardware I sat down and started thumbing through books on their shelves. As you probably know Babeland sells a lot of sex toys so at random I pulled down a book that said Sex Toy. It was cool, informative, and matter-of-fact. I hadn't registered the authors when I picked up the book but turns out it was by... Em & Lo! If I feel awkwardly self-conscious plugging a bit of my writing on their site I don't at all mind plugging their site, or books.

Repeated experiments demonstrate that there appears to be no gracious way to photograph one's self in the pair of old silk boxers from back before one lost roughly 45 pounds years ago that one discovered under a giant pile of clothes one has been meaning to take to a thrift store for a very long time.

This is not why I don't ordinarily wear boxers, or briefs, but it's not helping make the case that even black silk boxers with little red hearts on them are ever a good idea.

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

More like this here.

Twisty Faster of I Blame the Patriarchy digs up a howler of a sociobiology-oriented "research" article from the BBC.

Chimpanzees enter into "deals" whereby they exchange meat for sex, according to researchers.

It goes without saying, since “male” is always the default, that by “chimpanzees” the article means male chimpanzees, and that by “sex” it means “copulation.” Female chimpanzees do not, apparently, exchange meat for sex. Their role is not active. The females passively accept meat from males whereupon they are adjudged to be under an obligation put out over the long term. The article portrays them as recipients of male largesse and as receptacles.

Read the quote in context here.

After various not-inappropriate fulminations Twisty quotes the author committing a classic fallacy of appeal to (self) authority.

This has got me really interested in humans,” [said researcher/chimp voyeur Cristina Gomes]. “I’m thinking of moving on to working with hunter-gatherers.”

Tempting as it is to flame the implicit racism in the idea of "moving on" to hunter-gatherers and skip straight to the part about how a primate researcher qualified enough to make credible pronouncements about chimpanzee sex-for-food behavior has no more qualifications to study humans than a veterinarian would be qualified to treat people.

Heck, let's skip that part too and go straight to the part where people who call themselves scientists ought to think twice before anthropomorphizing animals in ways that confirm dominant paradigms about human society.

Stephanie Coontz, who was and is a radical Trotskyite and hard-core radical feminist professor at the school I went to, used to tell her students that the difference between science and propaganda is that propagandists look for evidence that supports what they believe while scientists look for evidence that disproves what they believe. By her criteria Ev-Psych flunks the “it’s science” test stem to stern.

Not to try to get too (lower-case) twisty about it or anything but of course people who are so indoctrinated with patriarchy they think their justifications are scientific are going to assume that offering of food and/or sex has to be some kind of proto-prostitution. They can’t help themselves! Same with the original BBC article's, um, wrong claim that female chimps don’t hunt. It doesn’t fit patriarchal ideology so they say it doesn’t happen. (It’s hard to Google for counterexamples at the moment because so many knee-squeezingly twittish sites are talking about this Christina Gomes character’s work but if you scroll down far enough you start seeing actual scientists saying they’re not only perfectly capable but innovative and sophisticated at it.**)

Anyway, what really chaffs my armpit hair is that while everybody’s running around trying to prove that we’re all helpless against patriarchy because monkeys, or ducks, or microscopic parasitic worms do it too they’re missing the chance to look for different metaphors in animal behavior we could, I dunno, use to subvert patriarchy.

I mean… if one is going to bother anthropomorphizing why not say female chimps decide that males that can hunt are just less boring? Or smell better? Or remind them of their mothers who brought them food when they were little? I mean, sure, patriarchy can’t see anything but hapless females and male coercion but… last I looked that was a problem with observer bias, not what might actually be going on.

[** Consider that researchers studied chimps for generations before noticing they ate meat at all, let alone killed and ate meat, let alone involved it in mating behavior. So... exactly what are the odds the first recorded instance of a female chimp improvising a spear to stab and fish out hibernating squirrels is the first time a female chimp has done it? Small? Or really, really small? --fl]

Via Miriam at Feministing

I would just as soon be tied in a burlap sack and tossed off a bridge as married, but I'm gonna be pissed off if this all comes to naught. And ecstatic if it doesn't.

Vermont artist and blogger Alison Bechdel, graphic artist and blogger.

I haven't mentioned the battles for and against universal marriage lately because still I feel kind of ambivalent about what the real whys and wherefores of linking it to the legal system might be.

But whatever the original purpose might have been, the subset of people allowed to exercise a legal right to marriage benefit from literally hundreds of thousands of public and private statutes, policies, provisions, and conventions.

And so while I'm personally rooting for the possibility that California will strike down all civil recognition of marriage in favor of, well, civil unions**, I'm really glad to see Iowa, D.C., and now Vermont doing the really, very, affirmatively right thing. More please.

[** I still think people who want to go through secular or non-secular wedding ceremonies should do so. And it's even ok if some secular adherents want to limit who they _spiritually_ sanction with marriage. I mean for heaven's sake we let them sanction all sorts of other whacky, and even regressive stuff. I just don't get, at all, what business it is of the law to let secular authorities have discriminatory veto power over couple's individual and civil rights. --fl]

Late last week there was a list circulating in libertarian circles about illegal markets that would stimulate the economy if they were legalized. The items were... predictably libertarian: gambling, drugs, immigration, and the handful of sex-work tasks (gay prostitution in Nevada, prostitution everywhere else) that aren't or aren't yet legal. Matthew Yglesias says he might support some of the proposals but doesn't think they'd have the effect economic-oriented advocates of legalization claim. (Emphasis his.)

With regard to things like drugs and prostitution, bringing some transactions that are already happening into the above-ground economy would certainly boost our GDP measurements. But these are transactions that are already happening. Shifting them from the illicit to the licit economy doesn’t actually change the fact that there are already people in America earning a living as prostitutes or pimps or drug dealers.

He said it here.

That sounds about right. In fact my instinct would be that given the extraordinary margin between the real cost of drug production and black-market prices, legalization would _strongly_ contract their component of real GDP. (Ear nose and throat doctors pay $7/gram for cocaine; even eye-popping cannabis bud costs only dollars a pound to grow.) That's actually a good thing: the biggest drug dealers on the planet are convenience-store clerks dispensing tobacco and alcohol but, surprisingly, none of them can afford Glock *bullets* let alone Glocks, few of them can afford car fresheners let alone cars, and as far as I know no child, anywhere, past maybe age 4 sees 7-11 clerks as glamorous, romantic, let alone emulatable role models. Drug-dealing themes are a major component of popular media. Convenience-store clerks have two movies Clerks and Clerks II. (But... but... even then the drug dealers in the two Clerks movies, Jay and Silent Bob have four movies about them!) But I digress...

I can't be sure how much legalizing the rest of adult sex work would change the economics, but like Yglesias I think it would mostly shift numbers from the off-the-books ledger to on-the-books. Otherwise? On the one hand I'd imagine pimping would evaporate -- legal bodyworkers like massage therapists and chiropractors somehow manage to stay healthy, wealthy and wise without them. And without the "opportunity cost" of arrest and jail time, not to mention the threats of unreportable rape, robbery, assault, murder, and police shakedowns sex workers could change when and how often such work was performed and therefore possibly what they would charge and/or what customers would be willing to pay. Again, though, it seems pointless to speculate without sounding like a bad case of Male Answer Syndrome.

But really, in the case of both drugs and sex work, my interest isn't really in the direct economics at all but the potential for risk and harm reduction: if a drug habit cost only dollars a day instead of tens or hundreds the *vast* amounts of collateral losses of life, property, and security would be mitigated, and if a drug habit cost only dollars a day gangs would have very little incentive to have turf wars period let alone turf wars over schools and parks. Similarly if sex work was legitimized there would be diminished opportunities for pimps, serial killers, corrupt cops, and whatever fraction of customers are dishonest or violent to abuse sex workers. Oh yeah, and to put the two together, to the extent that pimps and traffickers actually do use addictive drugs to enthrall involuntary sex workers, the availability of legal drugs at dollars a day would undercut that little avenue as well.

And to touch briefly on the other mainstream libertarian issue, as researcher and author Laura Agustín says over and over international and national migrants often accept sex work when they might ordinarily not because a) social and economic opportunities at home are so bleak the work seems worth it compared to the alternative of staying home b) because they migrate without documentation they have few opportunities for other employment, also c) once they become illegal migrants they're often at the mercy of the same pimps, criminal customers, corrupt cops, and twilight conditions that make life so perilous for illegal domestic sex workers.

My points being, then, that a) regardless of economic arguments drugs, sex work, and immigration are socially entangled and b) our decisions to keep them illegal keep increase that entanglement and keep the activities closeted in ways that obstruct use of social as opposed to law-enforcement policies.

Dana Goldstein says (emphasis mine.)

For a great history of the engagement ring, check out this Meghan O'Rourke Slate piece from 2007. The rings originated as a sort of down payment on a girl's virginity. By requiring suitors to cough up major dough for the privilege of calling themselves betrothed, the wealthy -- who prized virginity -- hoped to discourage men from proposing just to get in a girl's knickers.

Today, it's pretty appalling to think about what the "two months' salary" metric means when the average American family holds about $8,000 in credit card debt alone.

Read the quote in context here.

Hmm... so loosely translated abstinence till marriage in the "good old days" of traditional family values actually meant something a lot closer to "abstinence roughly until engagement." With, evidently, enough blurring of lines that it was felt necessary to effectively post a bond saying that you _really were_ planning to get married instead of just fool around.

I dunno. Doesn't actually sound as all-fired halcyon and romantic... or virtuous... as proponents of tradition make it out to be.

Heather Corinna of Scarleteen provides a cool answer to a fairly troubling question from a young man who says he can no longer have intercourse with his partner because, he says, "I think about what I'm doing I feel like I'm stabbing her, or performing some kind of violent act on her."** In the process she introduces what I think is a really, cool, really effective new euphemism for intercourse.

I think it might help if you made some adjustments to the way you think about intercourse and sex as a whole.

You use the word penetration, and talk about what you're doing as stabbing or a kind of invasion. I also hear you saying that sex is something you are doing to your partner or on your partner rather than with your partner, or as something you are doing together. You frame sex -- as many people do, unfortunately -- as something you have, rather than as something people actively and jointly do or create.

Physically, metaphysically, and often emotionally and intellectually (sometimes even spiritually), sex is about people and their bodies interlocking in any number of ways, and about BOTH sets of genitals (or other parts), both bodies, both people being actively engaged, doing something together, not about one person doing something to, on or at the other.

I know that can be quite the mental headstand when there are so many ideas and presentations of intercourse as men forcing themselves into women, as vaginas or vulvas as somehow passive and only penises as active, and with heterosexual sex, as what men do to women, how men dominate women, but those ideas come more from political agendas and sexism -- and reactions to inequality and those agendas -- than they do from what is really happening with intercourse or other sex when any two (or more) people are sharing an experience that is mutually wanted, about mutual pleasure and real connectivity.

She said it here.

Interlocking, huh? It's a really great alternative to the someone-has-to-be-topping-the-other ways of saying it like penetration or engulfing.

Another nice thing about "interlocking" is it's not heteronormative. Nor, for that matter, is it particularly genital-specific. One can interlock any number of ways.

Mmm, interlocking. The word of the day is interlocking.

---

See also:

- the rest of Heather's post for the rest of her gentler-than-he-may-deserve attitude adjustment.
- an earlier Scarleteen post about the Etiquette of Entry

[** Buying into the idea that penetration is by-definition injuring doesn't seem that different from not caring whether or not it hurts. --fl]

Best TMI-Tuesday meme question ever!

"1. Have you ever had a sexual experience with the opposite sex?"

Via B is for blog and others.

Some participants have been taking the question in stride. Other reactions range from amused to confused. Which is great because it's really a very straightforward question.

Not that I'm casting stones. At all. Somewhere deep in one of my memorabilia boxes I've got a little button, one that was already old when I got it from my first gay friend in the 1970s. It says "how dare you presume I'm heterosexual?"

I semi-panicked when he offered it to me and sputtered "But... but... I don't need that, I am heterosexual!"

He just held it out and kept looking at me without saying anything.

Finally I got his point. And took the button.

It's not a trick question: while I may have only had experience with the opposite sex that's not everyone's experience.

Not everyone is heterosexual.
Not everyone is sexually experienced.
Heck, not everyone is sexual, period.

Getting that button all those years ago subtly altered my entire outlook on sexuality. It didn't perfect it (um, obviously) but yeah that was the moment I realized there world is larger than my subjective experience of it.

Holly of The Pervocracy, who (and I mean this in the very best sense) is in contention to be the Twisty Faster of the "3rd-Wave" plays agony aunt for a limp doodle who... asks for it. (Bold emphasis mine.)

my girlfriend dumped me because i had sex with her on the second date wat the fuck PS YOU SOUND HOT
any tips for next time

If things only got to two dates, she wasn't really your "girlfriend," was she? Unless she became your girlfriend and then retroactively dumped you because of the second date, that would be weird. Although regardless of timing, "because I had sex with her" is a rather messed-up reason, because she hopefully also agreed to have sex with you.

...

My biggest advice for next time is not to think of someone as your "girlfriend" until you're a bit further along than that. Up until the fifth (or so?) date it's kind of a probationary period in which a relationship can just fail to coalesce. Also, don't have sex with a new date unless she's way into it. Not just consenting but all over you. This girl may feel that you pushed her even if you asked and she said yes; next time hold back until she's asking for it.

She said it here.

(You think I'm joking when I say Holly and Twisty have a lot in common. I'm not. Even though each has spoken harshly of the other they're both strong, clear, and rather fierce voices for a vision of power and humanity that transcends their tactical and strategic differences. But I digress...)

Holly's correspondent makes it sound as though no decisions were made at all between him and his erstwhile partner. He "had" sex with her. She may (one hopes) or may not have consented. But there's no indication that he thought of himself as deciding he wanted to have sex (we're typically raised to treat it as a foregone conclusion.) Nor is there even a hint that she might have decided to have sex with her (we're typically raised to believe that would violate both the dominant paradigm's Two Rules of Desire.)

When we talk about the importance of "obtaining consent" or "affirmative consent" or even "obtaining enthusiastic consent" what we're mostly talking about is based on an assumption of an eager man seeking to extract something from a less eager woman. It's assumed to be a negotiation about her giving something up and him getting it. And maybe about whether or how she's willing to give it to him. But any conversation on those terms has a) already extracted something from her prior to the extraction of sex, b) fails to consider there are actually two sexualities in play -- hers and his, and c) doesn't leave room for the possibility that her interest in sex might be independent of his. Oh yeah, and d) putting it in terms of consent limits her into the role of "gatekeeper." Instead of, like, a participant in a social, interpersonal exchange. Oh right, and e) where consent is viewed entirely as granting or withholding a favor, which in social-convention "can't hurt to ask, can it"** terms makes it withholding if she says no.

Except, you know, sex... real sex... isn't a favor to be unilaterally requested and unilaterally granted or withheld. Nor is a request for consent something that appears out of thin air. To the extent that consent is meaningful and observable it is and needs to be a mutual decision made by all parties involved.

Which is why I keep harping*** about how next step up from respecting consent is to talk in terms of respecting the decision maker.

The lame doodle comes across sounding like the sexual interaction went something like this: I decided I wanted sex with her and she consented but now for some reason it's not working out. He's sitting there wondering "hey, that consent was around here somewhere, what did I do with it?"

[** Actually, as students in Karen Rayne's college class said, it doesn't hurt to ask but... it often hurts, or at least it's frequently uncomfortable, to answer! --fl]

[*** Ok, the other reason I keep harping is because I'm still working out the details. Apologies if you feel dragged along. --fll]

Holly of The Pervocracy, driving home the point that patriarchy is a co-ed enterprise that demeans everybody it gets anywhere near, says

Today I was fixing a piece of big metal equipment, squatting next to it with pliers and a wrench and a lot of stupid-frickin-thing-argh grumbling. Cute Coworker was nearby, sitting down and doing paperwork. A total stranger, a woman, walked by and saw us. "You're just letting her do that?" she asked CC.

(No, she wasn't kidding. She even came over to me and asked if I was "okay.")

She said it here.

Note the interloper didn't just belittle CC's masculinity, she belittled Holly as well by implicitly assuming she wasn't just incapable of but injured by having to be mechanical.

See also: Britni Danielle on a DJ opining that it would be funny if Rihanna covered Britney Spears' "Hit Me Baby One More Time."

In an (appropriate, all things considered) bit of meta-meta reflections on the media's treatment of former Wall St. prosecuting Eliot Spitzer, Digby of Hullabaloo says of ongoing twit-vs-substance questions about his presumably-former employment of expensive sex workers...

...it's disgusting that Spitzer "has to" answer questions about his sex life at this point. They didn't file any charges, he's resigned from office and I don't htink think the public really gives a damn. Certainly, they could acknowledge the scandal and then move on rather than insisting on grilling him about the details. It is gratuitous and embarrassing to everyone watching as well as the man himself. But it is typical juvenile media behavior, replete with the usual nauseating spectacle of middle aged men giggling over some other man's sexual foibles. Ugh.

Eliot Spitzer is an expert on the financial crisis and he shouldn't have to subject himself to the media's puerile curiosity in order to share that expertise with the public. In a sane world, he would be working in an official capacity to straighten out this mess, but because he had unsanctioned sex he is now relegated to the sidelines --- mostly because the press can't seem to stop acting like a bunch of Jonas Brothers fangirls whenever a story makes them feel funny down there.

She said it here.

Incidentally one needn't be anti-prostitution to feel white-lipped fury about Spitzer's peccadilloes. Whatever one feels about hiring sex workers I don't see how it would be possible to respect anyone who a) zealously prosecuted in public precisely the kind of sex workers he b) zealously employed privately.

So. Having neutralized the knee-squeezy question we can turn to Digby's point that, sexual peccadilloes/hypocrisy notwithstanding, Spitzer is unquestionably qualified to be a big, fat, capable, and most importantly feared stick to match any carrots offered to Wall Street titans as incentive for them helping us out of the financial mess they've gotten us into.

It also raises a (hypothetical but illuminating) question... sort of a reverse of the Appeal to Celebrity fallacy: would you be willing to see economic collapse if the only person who could prevent the collapse had frequented sex-workers? (Or, if you prefer, had prosecuted sex-workers and/or maybe just frequented and prosecuted them?)

Well this is a pleasant surprise! The next blog post I read after posting about respecting the decision maker was sex educator Dr. Karen Rayne's post about telling her college class about a middle-school sex-ed activity on... practicing consent. Check it out. (Emphasis mine.)

The other day in my college class, we were talking about developmentally-appropriate sex education at different ages.  I mentioned this middle school activity on how to say “No” that I do with my middle school students.  The students are broken up into two equal groups: A and B.  The first time through, randomly-drawn students from Group A ask randomly drawn students from Group B out on a date, and the Group B students must respond first with a “Yes” and then with a “No”.  (Yes, this means that sometimes girls are asking out girls and sometimes boys are asking out boys and sometimes it’s a cross-gender thing.)  The group talks about the clarity of both the question and the response.  Was it clear that the person asking was talking about a date and not just a friendly outing?  Was the person who responded clear about their level of interest?  Particularly when declining a date, people are prone to giving an excuse about why they are not available at that particular time or for that particular activity which can extend hope for another time/activity.  Instead, we work with the middle school students on clearly stating their romantic interest in the asker, while being as kind and gentle as possible.  After we’ve gone through the class this way, we switch and Group B asks and Group A responds with a yes and a no.

My college students immediately were focused on the activity itself rather than the developmental stages of sex education.  One student said, “Oh my god, you’re making the world a better place.”  Another student said, “I still don’t know how to say no without making up an excuse!”  Of course we put our discussion about age-appropriate sex ed on hold and talked about how to say no.

She said it here.

By shifting attention from the yes/no consent response to the decision behind the response Rayne makes the excellent points that a) it's harder than it looks to do it well but also b) it's a learnable/teachable skill.

I'd add that the discomfort a lot of us feel saying no hints at the depth behind my simple assertion that "it's important to respect the decision; it's critical to respect the decision-maker." For instance we're not exactly encouraged to respect ourselves enough as decision makers either.**

---

Note #1: "I still don't know how to say no without making up an excuse!" Wow. Show of hands if, like me, you still feel at least a little uncomfortable in situations (not just sexual ones) where you're going to have to say decline a request or invitation. Further into her post Rayne briefly discusses other problematic ways to say no.

Note #2: I love that Rayne disregards gender when pairing her students. And that she has them role-play both asking and responding. First, obviously, because it really doesn't matter what genders are involved, and second because it's really important to model that gender doesn't matter. But also because it's important to model that if gender doesn't matter, sexual preference can, and so early role-playing communicating yeses and nos takes some of the "unthinkability" of certain situations and creates more space for later answers to reflect how you actually feel instead of how you think you're supposed to feel. And finally, it models courteously saying yes or no instead of freaking out when someone of an unexpected orientation or sex (or age, ethnicity, class, clique, whatever) asks.

Note #3: I don't want to oversell decision-making as a difficult thing. A decision doesn't have to be difficult before one respects the decision maker. Nor does making a decision have to be mysterious and intuitive. As Rayne points out it can be learned. In fact, now that she mentions what she's doing the biggest mystery for me is why it hasn't been taught before now.

Note #4: Finally, the fact that people feel obliged to prevaricate, make excuses, or just waffle when they decline gets to my point about the coerciveness inherent in any conversation where the desired result is "consent" or "not consent." (And it still bugs me that we tend to say "not consent" instead of... whatever word would be the correct opposit to that front-loaded question.)

---

[** This will sound obvious to anyone who's experienced personal-safety training but in predatory situations players, bullies, and users selectively assess victims for vulnerability and low self-respect a.k.a. low self-esteem. --fl]

A shorter version of what I've been trying to say about the issue of consent.

We've been spending a lot of time (necessarily in the historical and current legal and social systems) emphasizing the importance of respecting the decision. That's great. And, even if at a glacial pace, people are learning to at least deploy the language of respecting that.

The next step is emphasizing the importance of respecting the decision makers! In a system that often only grudgingly acknowledges that objects of sexual desire are human beings we haven't been doing a lot of that.

It's important to respect the decision; it's critical to respect the decision maker.

Another thing about putting the emphasis on deciding instead of consent. Maybe the most important.

There's a certain sexual coercion implicit in the word "consent" in that when pressed for an answer the choices are "yes" or "no," and thus one is obliged (at least socially) to disclose some information about one's sexual state.

Consider that when pressed for a decision social convention permits one three choices of answer rather than just two: yes, no, and it's none of your business.

And by the way, I think the two examples illustrate what I've been trying to say about how thinking in terms of consent allows the person asking to place the question outside the person who's asked, whereas thinking in terms of a decision locates it where, and with whom, it belongs.

In comments to my post about the no-sex class and consent SnowdropExplodes of A Femanist View raised some wonderful, perfectly legitimate concerns about my argument that for equality of power in relationships we need to move even further past a principle "enthusiastic consent" to the (in my view) even more critical principle of "the decision."

In particular he was concerned when I said "...the implication is that sex is something one person wants and the other person has to agree to.**"

So here's how he sees the situation

It seems to me that it is possible to decide "I will say yes if X asks me to have sex", and also, "I will ask X for sex", but to decide "I will have sex with X" seems to put X's willingness or otherwise to have sex (with me) as irrelevant. This, needless to say, is troubling to me.

...

Consider two people, X and Y, who might want to have sex with each other. There are for each person, three possible states: a) Active desire for sex with the other person; b) willingness to have sex with the other person; c) desire not to have sex with the other person. If XcYc then obviously there is no need for anything to happen. Similarly, if XbYc or XbYb then there is no need for any communication of decision or consent, because neither side actively wants sex so sex isn't going to happen (NB XbYc and XcYb are equivalent by symmetry). That leaves the situations (assuming symmetry again) where XaYc, XaYb and XaYa. Obviously, if XaYc then any sex between X and Y is rape by X. If X asks Y for sex, then Y will say no. If XaYb then X can decide to ask Y for sex, can decide not to ask Y for sex, or can not-decide (and thereby not ask). If XaYa then both X and Y each have these options.

If XaYb and X decides to ask Y for sex, then Y (being willing but not desiring sex) will make a decision "yes, I will have sex with X" (which equates to consent) or "no, I will not have sex with X".

If XaYa then either X asks Y for sex or Y asks X for sex or neither asks for sex (which means that both go disappointed!) If X asks Y for sex, then Y will almost certainly decide to have sex (since Y is also eager for sex with X)but this still qualifies as "consent". If Y asks X for sex, then X makes the decision to have sex (because X also is eager for sex with Y).

In no case can the decision to have sex be made without reference to the other person, because it is impossible to know whether the other person has also decided to have sex - and in fact, the other person may never have considered the possibility but be perfectly willing (in a pleasure-taking way) to do so. The decisions are "Do I want sex? (and if so, with whom?)" "Will I ask for sex? (and if so, whom shall I ask?)" "If asked by person X, will I say yes to sex?" "I have been asked - so do I want to have sex with the person asking?" The decision is never "will I have sex?" until someone else indicates their willingness to have sex with me.

While it is possible to make a decision about one's own desire for sex, and how one relates to that (i.e. whether one will ask or not-ask, and how one will answer if asked) it is not possible to make a decision about sex itself without reference to someone else's consent.

It seems to me that what is being argued for is a form of language that we might call seeking a concordance for having sex as opposed to consent to having sex, but I think the OP seems to skate over how that concord could be achieved. Someone always has to raise the possibility of sex, and the other person then has to agree or not. The sex may then be negotiated so that both/all partners know what exactly is being agreed to, and that is much more of a mutual decision together, but it still requires an initial "will you...?" answered by "yes". That, to my mind, is summed up by the word "consent".

He said it here.

Everything he says about consent being the result of individual and mutual decision-making is true. In fact it's absolutely, wonderfully true. And well thought out with many or most of the bases covered. But because it's true I think it supports my point.

All that consideration... all those different cases with subscripted X's and Y's... demonstrate that the decision leading up to the result we call "consent" (in common, non-legal terms) is, um, non-trivial. And in a gender-mad society that assumes enthusiastic male initiation and reluctant female response, boiling it all down to a simple "will you" answered by "yes" or "no" de-emphasises the process. And the respondent!

Which is why I think it's so important to shift attention away from the end result and on to the process for deciding it. Because saying "consent" is sort of like saying "apples come from the store." True enough if you're in court answering the simple question "where did you get the apples." But not the same thing at all as saying "where they came from!"

[** In this context "has to" means "has to reply," not has to agree to. Fortunately that doesn't bear on SnowdropExplodes' argument. --fl]

Mathilde Madden of Erotica Cover Watch unloads on the cover of an erotic novel about male prostitution called Gigilo. Which, naturally, has a line drawing of a headless woman in panties and high heels with a line drawing of part of a bemused-looking Chippendale-type man reflected in a mirror.

Read the quote in context here.

And why, Madden asks rhetorically, might the publishers (authors usually have no, zero, none say in the matter) have fronted a book about male prostitution with a nearly-naked woman in heels?

I think the most obvious reason for Gigolo having a woman on the cover (other than just the usual old sexist shit that a book cannot actually be about sex unless it has a woman on the cover) is that most people might assume that a book about a male prostitute would be about him servicing guys. And, really, who are the people who are going to be put off by a book being about servicing guys? Yep, straight men. So really, it is the same old shit, this woman is there just to reassure straight men that this book will not make them gay.

Yet again sexiness and products about sex have to be feminised for the straight guy appeal even when the book is actually about a man making himself a sexual product.

Madden's particularly irked by this cover because she once wrote a book about male prostitution and while that cover had no men either it had... not one but two women on the cover!

Other points she makes in the post, like, say, the evident importance of headless women for publishers, make the whole thing worth a look.