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

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

Source: Em & Lo

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

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

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

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

So I've been thinking a lot (a lot) about issues of consent, of sexual abuse, of "gray areas," of stereotypes and assumptions, and, especially, about accountability. Last summer, here on this blog, at No Seriously, What About Teh Menz, and in various comment threads around the intertubes, I started digging deeper into what I saw as just one or two incidents of violent sexual assault I experienced as a child -- one at age four at the hands of a ~12-year-old neighbor girl, one around age 14 at the hands of a ~17-year-old neighborhood bully.

The more I've been digging into it the more I've come to realize that, you know, I grew up in a culture that was pretty rife with sexual abuse -- enough so that I only really registered the above-mentioned incidents. But the kid who was the closest thing to a best friend in elementary school? Duh, let's see, he and his sister were foster kids who's father taught them all about "corn-holing" and "fuck-rubbers?" Gee, only this summer did it occur to me to wonder why they were foster kids? The core of the new-to-town teens I hung out with in late high-school and after I dropped out but before I left home? The variously emancipated and/or runaway boys and girls who at times seemed voraciously sexual(ized) but spoke in fluent 70's-era "sexual liberation?" The ones who's attitudes and behaviors deeply influenced much of my own early sexual aspirations? It only recently occurred to me that a contemporary assessment would be that they'd been groomed to the nines both by adult influences. And speaking of grooming and sexual abuse, how about the handful of distinctly predatory adult "youth counselors" (inside a much larger group of entirely decent, appropriate ones) who advocated boundary-crossing in ways that, while not necessarily unsound advice overall, nevertheless advanced their own "hands on" agendas with various "promising young people?"

Let's not even talk about the barkingly predatory "pre-date-rape" alcohol, cocaine, and Quaalude drenched college music bar culture I lived and worked in where it seemed at the time to be perfectly "cool" for more experienced bar patrons and bartenders to take over-intoxicated young men and women home to "crash." Where what this year would be called morning-after gaslighting was considered just helping the erstwhile partner get "perspective."

And all that's got me wondering where have those early influences left me!?!?! What else has been done to me? What else have I let happen? What else have I done in all earnestness? What impact have I had on others?

It's been bugging me a lot. Sort of a hard, fast replay of the old Will Rogers line, which I cite frequently, that "it's not what you don't know that'll hurt you, it's what you know that just ain't so."

Anyway, while I could launch into how my latest runaway train of thought about consent and assumptions has been accelerated by Clarisse Thorn's controversial but excellent exploration of forgiveness vs. accountability in On Change and Accountability, or how it was set rolling by Rachel Hills' Best of 2010: “But women don’t rape!”: sexual pressure, rejection and the male sex drive discourse, and how at the moment I'm feeling a bit like the only people one should really trust in sexual situations are the meticulous negotiation fetishists in the kink community (for instance see item #4 in Andrea Zanin's Expectations of Dominance: Picking Through the Tangle.) But I'm still not feeling completely collected about it, and besides, at the moment I'm feeling all Maslow's hammer about unstated assumptions that can interfere unspoken and even verbal consent... and so at this point any conclusions I draw are likely to be, um, over the top.

So instead I'd like to point out this cute little 2004 video short Jason Reitman and his then-partner Michele Lee called "Consent." It's not perfect (the text "romance deserves better than this" at the end of the credits is a little ambiguous) but it nicely captures how little we're able to communicate with simple yeses, nos, and you-want-tos.

YouTube link via Caitlin.

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

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

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

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

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

Cut that shit out. Like now.

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

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

And actually, strike that maybe.

Source: Red No. 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Coke Talk says

[Q] If I am unhappy in my relationship, why do I feel more miserable over the prospect of ending it?

[A] Because you mistakenly think that ending it is failure.

Source: Dear Coke Talk

First of all no, this isn't about my personal life. :-)

Second of all, though, I think this is a really, really important point about relationships.

First (didn't I already start counting once?) there are better ways than duration to measure the quality of a relationship. In the trivial sense a "fling" can be a complete relationship. For that matter so can a one-night stand. Or even a brief flirtation across a reservation desk. In the more enduring sense a relationship can be complete when you've both achieved the goals you hoped to meet together and there's nothing else you need to do with each other that couldn't better be done either alone or with someone else.

There are better ways to measure relationship failure than by when it ends. "Till death do you part" can be either "it seemed like only yesterday that we first met" or it can be spent looking at actuarial tables with the same longing intensity that high-school students look at the classroom clock.

And not to put too fine a point on it, what is for many people one of the most domestic relationships, the ones we have with our children, nevertheless effectively end after 18-20 years. This doesn't mean love fades. It does mean, though, that it changes dramatically from the complete melding when they first move in to bittersweet happiness that comes when they move away.

That we generally continue speaking to our children, continue to love them, continue to share feelings for them... unless of course they linger on or we try to hold them back. This ought to be the best indicator that romantic love needn't end either in death or anger nor feeling of failure.

Nor does it mean that a relationship fought for or clung to is a relationship that's succeeding.

Second, just as we are not our work, neither are we our relationships. Karl Marx and Carrie Bradshaw notwithstanding this is a terrible error of categories. We are people, as are out children and partners. Relationships and work are things.

Though I'm not sure she'd have thought of the child perspective I remain envious of the way Coke Talk can say the same thing in a single sentence.

Sigh.