Recently in Relationships Category
There's a common refrain amongst a certain type of anti-feminist that complete gender equality would ruin the chances of "low status" men to find partners, because they'd all be drawn to the higher status men and... I guess... what?... remain celibate if they couldn't find a high-status partner? Meh.
Anyway, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon points out that a) it's already that way *without* gender equality and b) it's self-humiliating to make that claim in the first place.
Interestingly, male dominance actually has a positive sexual value for ugly men, one that even the worst chauvinist will admit -- when women are dependent on men for our financial and social survival, we have to value things like men’s jobs, salaries, and connections more and their physical attractiveness less when deciding on mates. Ugly dudes would see their stock devalued on the sexual market in a equal society. They’d face the same obstacles women who don’t fit our social beauty standards face.
With this in mind, I have to conclude that the “feminists are just ugly women” argument is a combination of projection of anxieties and self-flattery---it’s tempting to think that Gloria Steinem just really wants your cock and can’t have it, so she’s forced to be a feminist. That anyone can hold such a ridiculous fantasy without immediately dying from shame is one of the many benefits of male privilege.
In other words *if* one believes the sexual scarcity model for "low-achievement" men (as opposed to the pickiness model) then those "low-status" men will lose out whether or not we have social, political, economic, and power equilibrium between men and women. So anti-feminist arguments to the contrary aren't just invalid they're the... um... opposite of self-serving.
Photo by Flickr user sicoactiva. Used under a Creative Commons license.
JR of SilkenVoice echos Bitchy Jones and other independently sexual women who look at the world in one more Onion-style 'Cosmopolitan' Institute Completes Decades-Long Study On How To Please Your Man** way to please one's male partner. (See, especially, the exchange in the last few seconds of that video.)
Recently I overheard a conversation between two women with whom I am acquainted, a conversation that ended with: "....and he forgot to take out the garbage two weeks in a row! So that's it. No sex for a week." I shook my head. I said. "Oh, I'd handle that very differently." She said "Oh?" I said "Yes," and then waited. She took the bait. She said, "What would Kay do?" I grinned and said, "I'd tell him we were going to have sex morning and night every day for two weeks." "That's not a punishment!" she exclaimed. "Really?" I said and arched an eyebrow. "I didn't say he could cum." That shocked her speechless. Hee hee. She said it here.
Yup. Even *if* it was a good idea to sexualize punishment why on earth pick the method that most thoroughly cements every conventional gender stereotype in the book? And *definitely* if one was going to use sex for punishment why punish one's self as well as one's partner?
[** Onion link va Dr. Petra Boynton. --fl]
Anthony McCarthy of Echidne of the Snakes perhaps inadvertently shines a light on a classic "no-sex" class assumption.
You get used to filtering out commercials during the evening news but once in a while one breaks through your defenses. At the tail end of a Levitra commercial Sunday they included sudden deafness as a reported side effect. Sudden deafness now joins the list of announced effects of taking whoopie pills...
...the most interesting question is how far geezers, themselves, are willing to go to achieve rock hard erections into their late senescence. Would they accept having their head fall off, one wonders? Would they miss it? I’ve got to listen more closely tonight to hear if death is a reported side effect of aphro-geeziacs, by name or not. The answer may have already been reported.
A bit of desk clearing though. "Geezers?" "Late senescence?" "Aphro-geeziacs?" Sheesh, ageism much? Also, you don't have to be geriatric to have problems with erections. Prostate cancer survivors, diabetics, men with heart disease, and men with untreated (and sometimes treated) depression experience it long before they're "senescent," and sometimes even before their hair thins or grays. But I digress...
So! I've mentioned elsewhere that I think it's unfortunate that medication like Viagra is assumed to exclusively benefit men, or that contraceptive pills exclusively benefit women. McCarthy's post reminded me of those strongly-gendered assumptions about the two medications and then, with his "whoopie pills" characterization, gave it a nice nudge forward. Check it out!
- Language of erection pills: frivolously facilitate (men's) sexual enjoyment, i.e. "whoopie." Because, you know, inside the "no-sex" class paradigm only heterosexual men enjoy sex. Their heterosexual partners merely endure it.
- Language of contraceptive pills: virtuously prevent (women's) pregnancies. Because, you know, inside the "no-sex" class paradigm women's interest in sex begins and ends at pregnancy.
But are women always and only interested in contraception only so they won't get pregnant while passively lying back and thinking of England? And are men really always and only interested in erections for own pleasure? Sure, sometimes (and for those sometimes thank goodness for modern sensibilities about divorce.) But always? Only? The dominant paradigm says so. Why support it?
As I said in that previous post, for most heterosexuals both contraception (especially earlier in life) and erection medication (especially later in life) are as much for *couples* as for individuals.
---
Quick question about Viagra and similar drugs: It looks like there really are a lot of unpleasant side effects and it sounds like they're not all that rare either. So are they really consumed as recreationally as pop culture seems to think they are?
Oh Noes! Teh Pill! It affects Woemenz Nozez! ZOMG!**
Because you know what windup little smell-driven automatons women are. Because without that nasty Pill bollixing your nostrils you'd all go back to sticking with your partners no matter how big an asshole they turned out to be. Better outlaw them pills then.
Whatevs.
Actually, I heard about the study, or maybe something along the same lines, some time last Winter, before it got picked up and politicized as some kind of reason women shouldn't be allowed to take the pill. Instead fellow classmate brought it up during her student research presentation on the effect of scent on sexual arousal.
The way she told it was that non-pregnant women are often more attracted to the smell of men who are genetically unlike them, but when they are they prefer the scent of men they're more closely related to. She said that since hormonal birth control simulates pregnancy that going on the pill can alter one's preference for the scent of one's partner.
That actually made sense, and a number of women in the class nodded and said they'd noticed something like that when going on or off the pill during a relationship.
But here's the deal: neither the presenter nor anyone who nodded their heads indicated it was a particularly big deal.
Which suggests, as with the stupid oxytocin-burnout argument for (only women, naturally) avoiding multiple partners***, the scent-preference-altering phenomenon, even if it does exist, can't be all *that* strong, right? I mean think about how the 'winger vision's supposed to go
A) Non-pregnant women like the way unrelated men smell, so
B) They form lifelong, abstinenet-till-marriage, monogamous-afterwards relationships with these unrelated men, and
C) Become pregnant, whereupon according to these theories
D) Their scent preferences just as they would during pill-induced artificial preference change meaning... what?
E) While they lose interest in these genetically heterodox-scented partner for the duration of their pregnancies?
Except, well
F) I don't think it works that way. Or
G) If it does it's not a very strong effect, because
H) Pregnant women would always avoid their genetically heterodox-scented husbands and hang out with their genetically "homodox"-scented male relatives, which
I) We don't, um, actually see because
J) Scent isn't the only attraction criteria in the first place, nor
K) Even if scent *was* the only criteria items A-I suggest it couldn't be terribly determinative because, y'know, most people stay together
L) Whether they're pregnant, or on the pill, or not
[** In other words a *lot* of people have been commenting on the peculiar conclusion anti-contraceptive types have drawn about a very small, not-even-all-that-recent study about hormonal contraception and scent. --fl]
[** The claim is that repeated oxytocin release with multiple partners causes women to burn out on romance. The fly in that ointment is that pregnancy releases a gazillion times more oxytocin and yet after birth most women a) continue to harbor romantic feelings after birth and b) consider having additional children. Part b being, for me, the bigger deal breaker. If a little too much oxytocin is supposed to make one unable to form romantic attachments ever again then lots more of the same stuff ought to make women disinclined to get pregnant again or, especially, disinclined to love subsequent children. And not to put too fine a point on it, in most cases where we encounter women burning out on romance or childbearing the reasons tend to be a lot more clear cut than hormone-receptor exhaustion. But I digress... --fl]
Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, an early John Edwards supporter, reacting to the evidently large number of 'wingers needling her about it suggests that
[T]hey suck and are horrible people who really, really hate women, in no small part because they’re stuck in a self-perpetuating no sex/misogyny loop.
Read the quote in context here.
Having no access to Pandagon server logs I can make no independent assessment of those who are pinging her with trackbacks. I *can* say, however, that her point about the self-perpetuating no-sex/misogyny loop rings a bell.
Traveling as I am through the rural and small-town midwest I've had occasion to encounter, closely or very peripherally, all manner of people of all ages, classes, various races, religions, and nations of origin, and social statuses and all I can say I don't think any of them, regardless of status, seem to have had any trouble finding partners or reproducing. At all.
Which I think puts a serious kink in the proposition that "low status" men are necessarily doomed to lives without partners or children.
Misogyny, on the other hand, knows neither class nor status. In fact the only benefit status and class seems to confer on misogynists is the ability to buy one's way, at least temporarily, into something that looks like relationships. That and the ability, maybe, to try and convince others that relationships like their are supposed to be desirable and/or the norm... or that it's anything but women's "gold-digging" that's responsible for men's sexual unhappiness.
In a piece subtitled "Why does it take a cliché to draw attention to the problem of fathers' rights?" Dahlia Lithwick of Slate makes the vivid point that our fondness for the stereotype of the dramatically aggrieved ex-husband seeking greater custody of his children interferes with reforms of divorce and custody proceedings that really ought to be, and maybe need to be, taken up.
I recognize the allure for some men of the man-pushed-till-he-snaps narrative. My husband rents those movies, too. But for every Clark Rockefeller and Darren Mack, there are dozens of nonviolent fathers who believe that the mere fact of their divorce should not result in an arrangement in which they pay for the right to see their kids on alternating Sundays. If the family-court system is ever going to improve, we need to hear their stories, not these endless tales of kidnappings and murder. Much of what's wrong with family law today lies in warmed-over stereotypes of men as fundamentally unsuited to caring for children. Lionizing Clark Rockefeller or other violent, lawless fathers will not promote fathers' rights or fix the family-court system. It merely perpetuates the same outdated ideas about fatherhood and fathers that have tainted the family-law system for too long.
The rest of the article is pretty cool. You'll find it here.
That seems about right. Of course I'm a father and I have a hard time with poorly examined stereotypes so of course I'd encourage that sort of destigmatization, where the Alex Baldwins, and Clark Rockerfellers become non-poster-boy icons of divorced fatherhood in favor of, you know, the more representative, um, majority.
But the general point seems pretty important for so-called "sex bloggers," who -- I'm pretty confident an assessment of court records would show -- differ from non-bloggers only to the extent that they publish rather than don't publish their experiences and opinions.
And yet thanks to current case law, in need of reexamination or not, bloggers in general and "sex bloggers" in particular are extraordinarily at risk of what I'd like to (arrogantly) deem the Figleaf Principle: twitting about sex obstructs discussion of substantive issues.
This can play two ways, by the way. First, upon discovery a judge officiating a custody hearing may be much more inclined to act on a motion that includes salacious allegations of sex clubs or bisexuality than on one that includes allegations of more substantive issues such as means of support or management of substance dependencies. And second, alarm over salacious allegations may distract supporters from what may be more seriously substantive ones.
Both concerns, I might add, are justified. An "otherwise" blameless divorced mom who supplements her income by anonymously reviewing sex toys in the privacy of her own home *should not* be at risk of losing custody. A couple involved in BDSM *should not* be able to wave their floggers or rope burns at each other in court. And a judge *should not* be swayed by the "scandalous" nature of a custodial parent's sexuality, *especially* if said sexuality in no way infringes on his or her parenting. But on the other hand *we* shouldn't let acceptance of a good party organizer enable his or her drinking problem. Nor should *we* let our admiration for this or that leather master enable his or her tendency to abuse the owl-shit out of acolytes.
Lux Alptraum of Boinkology notes another dent in our (extravagantly age-ist) narratives about "immutable" gender roles.
When an older man pursues a younger woman, it’s considered normal. When an older woman pursues a younger man, she’s a bit of a novelty. But that may not be the case for much longer: in the world of online dating, at least, women over 50 pursuing younger partners is par for the course. She said it here.
Purely anecdotal evidence digression: Some time last year, I think, I got curious about all those online dating sites and signed up for a bunch of them. Most of them were for pay, and even more were about straight-up find-a-life-partner match making, and I quickly let most of the trial accounts lapse. OkCupid, on the other hand, seems almost more like a social network site than a dating site (though plenty of people on the site date) and it's free so every now and then I check to see who their system thinks would be interesting to me or I to them.
I mention this because OkCupid gives you a little list of who's been interested enough in you to check out your page. And that's relevant because I'd say that roughly half the people who've been checking me out or otherwise indicating interest (via other contact features) have been older and half younger.
Various dominant narratives about gene-based or hormone-based gender interest would have it otherwise but I *still* think it's got a lot more to do with being human-based. In other words *humans* when given a chance have a broad array of interests, except when that array is carved away by expectation and/or indoctrination.
Another anecdote: While I enjoy generally enjoy being a reluctant but sincere monogamist, last weekend while browsing the street-fair style booths alongside Vancouver's Jericho Beach Park I was briefly but very nicely chatted up by an older woman, born some time in the 1940s or perhaps early 1950s, with beautiful, naturally turned-white hair.
At one point afterwards I felt a bit silly for thinking "Hmm, if I were younger, and still single..." Except that when I was younger and still single I was still blinded by ageism. And I shared the general opinion that men and women are "over the hill" between maybe age 25 and 35 where except for a couple of mostly male icons they generally stop getting romantic roles in movies and photographed for fashion magazines. And I might have been horrified by the idea of "people with wrinkles having sex," even if they happened to be cute wrinkles. But mostly when I was younger I was indoctrinated to believe "elderly ladies" "outgrew" interest in romance, let alone lust.
All of which leads me to question one bit of Alptraum's very nice post: is it really a novelty that older women are expressing interest in younger men, or is it that we just hadn't previously noticed? Or cared? Or *permitted* it?
Festival-audience hula-hoop dancers photo by figleaf
Just a quick note: My partner and I spent the weekend in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada this weekend. Had a lovely time. I brought my laptop but never really got it out. Sorry for dropping off the map like that but... did I mention we had a lovely time? The Vancouver Folk Music Festival is just such a great reason to go, and once you're there there are maybe eight million other great reasons to hang out from delightful parks to elegant hotels to astonishingly varied international cuisine to shockingly (for a Yankee) tolerant and diverse and yet... gorgeously healthy, open, welcoming, and generally prosperous. With enough clear downsides (homelessness, a currently hot Mob war, Mob interference with sex work that includes trafficking and coerced workers) that you don't mistake what's good about the place for magic.
Photo by Flickr user edwardoneill. Used under a Creative Commons license.
In my post about the perversity of sex as a chore a while back I mentioned what a joyless hassle sex can be for couples that are actively *trying* to get pregnant, especially when they're having a hard time. About halfway through writing that post I started an aside about the MRA/anti-feminist relationship model where men are obliged to providing economic security and in return men are obliged to provide sex.
Very conveniently for me, in comments L recounted her experience with voluntary obligatory sex. It didn't sound fun.
My husband and I tried for roughly 6 years to have a child. THis included different combinations of temperature-taking, intercourse-timing, medications both oral and injectable, invasive testing, twilight anaesthesia, tears, frustration, and failure.
It included very little joy, between the aforementioned failure and tears, as well as the mechanization of sex. Reading this post made me remember the online cycle-plotting software I used, wherein you marked every day you had sex. with (your choice) a heart or a smiley face.
That heart or smiley face was pretty much the only choice we were given (in day-to-day terms) in the progression of impregnation attempts. Whe we should or could do it, or when I got to go under anaesthetic for an "egg harvest" or how many days of bedrest was required post-embryo transfer was determined by number-- dates on the calendar, blood tests.
Ah, you've provided a convenient (at least for me, I'm not sure how YOU feel about it, figleaf) forum for me to exorcise a little of the anger I still hold, 3 years on. I guess it's implicit in my rant that I find what Ellie called "statistics-driven sex" to be pretty much repellent. For us, it WAS product-oriented. The fact that we were ultimately cheated out of the desired product isn't really even germane to my reaction... at least I don't think it is.
Anyway, I guess I'm skeptical as to whether numbers-driven sex can ever, in any way, make the numbers-cruncher happy. To me, the delight, the joy of being able to have sex when and only when we want to is something I could never throw away, because I've been on the other side and it sucks.
Hmm. "Anger?" "Repellent?" "Product-oriented?" "Cheated?" Sound familiar? Of course! It sounds like the terms used by both sides in the aftermath of so many "traditional" anti-feminist marriages. (Where "aftermath," sadly, doesn't always mean "divorce." *Especially* in "traditional" marriages.)
Hmm... *funny* about that, eh? And yet that he's-a-wallet/she's-a-receptacle model is the anti-feminist idea? How's *that* been working?
Kit Roskelly has a "Kink 101" article up at the F-Word. The article is pitched at the perfect level for feminists who are concerned, but not deadset-convinced, that BDSM violates feminist principles. If you're kinky, feminist, and sick to death of having to argue about this issue, Roskelly's article is not for you. But if you're on the fence, it's worth checking out.
I'm not a kink expert by any means; I just like to whack my boyfriend with things, like to be whacked with things, and have attended a few kink events. Most of what Roskelly says strikes me as true and helpful; I especially like "feminism should not have a prescriptive stance on female sexuality" and "Consent is an absolute requirement of sexual interaction". You could nitpick about the safewords (you don't need to say 'red light' if you have some other way of communicating that things are going really really wrong, and you should probably agree on a safe tap before anybody stuffs anything in anybody else's mouth) but the basic idea of safewords is pretty sound. Both partners need a way to say, "stop" and be taken seriously.
I have one substantive criticism of Roskelly's article. (This criticism is not new. Trinityva, who writes at SM Feminist and The Strangest Alchemy, has made this point repeatedly; my favorites are here and here.) Twice in her article, Roskelly urges kinky feminists to be mindful of the social context in which their desires arise. But what does mindfulness entail, exactly? Are we supposed to seek the reasons for our kinky fantasies and desires? At this point, I don't think anybody really knows what causes people to have one set of sexual tastes rather than another. And if you did know what caused your sexual desires, what would you do with that information? Learning that your rape fantasies are the result of childhood trauma wouldn't necessarily eliminate your rape fantasies.
There are things in the neighborhood to be mindful of. Are you really satisfied by the kinky sex you're having, or are you doing it because you feel pressured? (And being in the dominant role doesn't mean that you're necessarily satisfied by the sex; submissive people can be very good at manipulating their partners into indulging fetishes they don't really get off on, in a way that's not reciprocal. Bitchy Jones' kinky sexism category has a depressingly large number of examples.) It's also a good idea to reflect on how your expression of your desires affects other people. Does the person next to you faint at the idea of needles? If so, it's not very respectful to play with needles right in front of them. Does the event you're organizing have pictures of naked women, and only women, on the walls? If so, you may be alienating some of the women who attend. In my experience, BDSM people are already more mindful about this stuff than average, but extra reminders never hurt.
I'm on board with mindfulness if it's meant to apply to actions. But what's inside your head is yours.
Photo by Flickr user wockerjabby. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Amanda Marcotte, writing at RHRealityCheck.org says of the (religiously motivated) "365 Nights" program where (at least some) couples try to have sex every night for a year (or, in a milder version, for "101 Nights")
There's a point to all this. Mandatory sex is part of the larger tendency of our culture to see sex as something that needs to be tightly regulated. Not that it's bad for couples to make sex a priority. In fact, that seems smart to me. But why does everything have to be about measurements and controls?
Read the quote in context here.
There's a similar trend, in porn, in letters to Penthouse (which, according to a Susie Bright interview with a former editor, really are written by readers), in some circles of mostly-youthful "sex positive" types, and the occasional sex blogger, to tally (usually women's) orgasms during sex.
It's not an altogether bad thing. Years ago I used to reflexively count phone poles, parking meters, and stair steps on long walks to or from campus. On those rare occasions I to be in a thunderstorm I still count the seconds between flash and thunderclap. But it's not particularly useful either, not really useful enough to keep track of once you get to your destination, or go inside.
And when it comes to orgasms (oops, a pun) it's always seemed a lot more interesting to just have, or help with, the next one or, when everyone's on a roll to do what you can to make one merge seamlessly with the next.
Unless it's a really big deal to have one at all but even that's a lot more about whether one or the other did or didn't at all. (Years ago I took an orgasm-suppressing anti-depressant for situational, well, depression, and under those conditions it was a pretty big deal for my partner at the time, and of course me.)
I also think programs like 365 are a bit of a thumb in the eye of partners who are struggling to have children. Especially for those who believe, or are told, that conception is more likely when the woman comes. (Especially since the evidence isn't very compelling.) For my friends who've been through it there was always plenty of keeping track, diligence about days, and orgasm, but... not so much enthusiasm.
The whole point, as recounted expressly by those friends, is that when sex and even orgasms become a duty they stop being fun. (It's what's behind the point that consent is only the *ground floor* and not just a green light for sex.)
I guess the bottom line is that sometimes it's actually fun to keep informal tabs of numbers, as it was for me in my parking-meter-counting days. What matters more than, well, tabbed columns of numbers, though, is to be *mindful* about sex the way we're mindful of non-sexual things in our lives with our partners, lie birthdays, favorite places to eat or visit.
Sex can feel very, very nice.
If you do it one particular way, with a particular kind of person, during particular days of your or your partner's menstrual cycle, assuming you or your partner are old enough but not too old to ovulate or inseminate then, yeah, you can also reproduce.
Oh, unless by "sex" you mean only "penis-in-vagina intercourse to male ejaculation between ages 15 and 25, or as long as both of you are still 'hawtt' enough that someone else would want to watch." If you mean that then yeah, you get a lot of reproduction that way.
But that's a pretty limited definition of sex.
An *extravagantly* limited definition.
That doesn't mean a lot of people don't enjoy PIV intercourse, or even that they shouldn't. It just means it's a bit of a framing trap to assume it's about, or even *mostly* about reproduction.
[Note: I'm on vacation in what may be very limited internet service so this is a pre-recorded and (I very much hope!) a self-publishing post. I may not have much opportunity to reply to comments but you're comments are still very welcome. I'll reply as soon as I can. You're some of the best commenters in the blogsphere so you're always welcome to respond spiritedly but respectfully to each other's comments while I'm away. --fl]
Red of The Red Sneaker Diaries reviewed an (almost -- turns out you've got to be hetero) very-cool sounding sex game that doesn't just facilitate sex, it facilitates exploration and communication about interest, boundaries, and adventurousness.
Sex Is Fun comes as an unassuming deck of cards. The cards divide into twelve piles – six for the guy, six for the girl (yes, that is the one negative to this game – it’s for a heterosexual couple – no two ways about it). The piles are all different topics: “Pillow Talk”, “Touch Test”, “Oral Action”, “Sex Play”, “Kinky Action”, “Act It Out”. Game paly is very simple. The first to go picks a card and acts on it, then the other player reacts, and a point is assigned based on the outcome. The preverbal ante can be upped by playing an “I Dare You” or “Prove It!” card, upping the number of points on the line. At the end of the game, most points wins. Simple really. I’ve said it before, simple is sexy.
Read the quote, and find links to the game vendor's site, here.
The solution, it seems to me, isn't so much to lament it's heterocentrism as to encourage them to develop sequels and/or extensions. (Hey, it works for games for children such as Killer Bunny and Carcassonne so it can work for games for adults as well.) And in terms of serving customers who could use it most? Tell me there's one relationship expert who can say (with a straight face and any credibility) that straight people need less work on real adult communication about sex than people of other, perhaps more necessarily aware, persuasions and I'll back down. :-) Seriously, even if it's only the first step it sounds like a step in a good direction.
Quick follow-up on this post about whether women prefer jerks. Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon raises another problem with the spread-your-seed evolutionary "justification" for contemporary male promiscuity
...there’s the weird implication that having more sexual partners=having more offspring, which is actually anti-true nowadays (it’s easier to talk someone into having kids if you stick around), and I’m skeptical if it ever was a better strategy than actually cultivating relationships.
Read the quote in context here.
Ok, so I still think Marcotte, like Jill Filipovic have the better argument (jerks are more likely to lie about how often they "score") but let's play with this idea a little further.
Yeah, that's *always* been an issue for me. Humans evolved a *really* long time ago compared to even our "dawn of history" sensibilities (as recently as 40,000 years for Homo Sapiens S. to maybe a million or so for people so genetically similar you'd probably notice only superficial differences like hair or skin.) And of the "uncontacted peoples" who most closely resemble our really pre-historic ancestors there's enough differences in social/domestic organization that you can't really characterize one as more "evolution-based" than any other.
Oh, except that family organization tends to be, um..., matrio-centric in the sense that no matter how they tend to be treated by other men they tend to form cohesive networks of support with each other such that they're not particularly *economically* dependent on specific men. That doesn't mean you can't have, or don't have, or should or shouldn't have patriarchy -- it's obviously pretty prevalent! Instead it's that generally speaking the oh-so-important-to-sociobiologists, decision-driving survival of offspring probably had *waaaaay* more to do with one's relationships to other women (one's owns or one's "in-law's") and perhaps her brothers or brothers-in-law, fathers or fathers-in-law, and so on than her specific father-of-all-her-children partner. And *if* you were going to go dragging in species similar to ours that's more what you see anyway.
So what? So the point is that *if* women have a magical "genetic" preference for bad boys (as opposed to a more social/intellectual/decision-making-agent aversion to used car salespersons, phone-bank fundraiers, NiceGuys™ and other poseurs) then it might be something more along the lines of "the less outside interference the better." Which, if you consider that the biggest threat to women and children seems to be the men in their domestic lives, makes a lot of sense!
Bottom line? "Bad boy" behavior doesn't have to be a *male* survival technique. Facts on the ground suggest it *could* be a way of signaling that *if* pregnancy results from a tryst with a "bad boy" the woman can be confident he won't be as likely to stick around to be a health- or life-threatening burden on the mother and her kinship group.
So, any anti-feminists still want to keep playing this game?
Photo "Better the Devil You Made" by Flickr user mafleen. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Jill of Feministe says of the recent "jerks get laid more often" research meme...
Unfortunately, this study is being interpreted as “women like assholes.” Well, no. Let’s think this one through: This isn’t about how often someone gets laid, it’s about how many sexual partners someone has — those aren’t the same thing. If you’re in a relationship, chances are you’re sleeping with fewer people than a sexually active single person (yeah, there’s cheating and there are open relationships, but generally, couples at least attempt to be monogamous).
...
I know it’s easy to forget that sometimes women have sex just to have sex and not because they actually like you that much, but it happens. It’s not always a matter of bad boys wooing vulnerable women into bed and then leaving them; it’s often two people who are both interested in just sex picking each other and calling it a day. Of course, there are no doubt some women who are suckered in by narcissistic jerks; there are also some dudes who are suckered in by narcissistic jerks (just as a Nice Guy). But sex isn’t always a trick men play on women.
What kind of men women choose to partner with is probably a better indication of what women actually like.
I think why people link this to the "women like jerks" notion is that long-term relationships not withstanding it really is often the case that more "nice guys" than jerks are likely to leave a party alone... but as Jill points out that's not the same thing.
Also consider that a) contrary to maybe men's expectations the opposite of "party girl" isn't so much "buff dude with car and job," it's more like "unencumbered man who's not going to overly complicate your life" and b) what makes you think "nice guys" aren't jerks? They're they ones pretending they just want to show you their etchings and read Playboy or Maxim or whatever for "the articles." A "bad boy" might be a bad *choice* but at best you know he's whispering sweet nothings. At best prospective partners of NiceGuys™ have to parse whether the whisperings are sincere... assuming things ever get to the whispering stage. The problem with NiceGuys™ being that, like phone solicitations from alumni associations, charitable groups, and progressive political action groups, no matter what the *say* they want, you can be pretty sure that before the end of the conversation you're going to get the "by the way we're asking for..." shift of topic.**
I think the tricky part about the "girls like goons" meme is that NiceGuys™ and actual nice guys imagine the answer is to themselves behave badly when, I've noticed, the *real* value of "bad boys" vs "nice guys" is straightforwardness.
[** The fundraiser call analogy might be extended further if you realize that, whether the caller knows it or not, the bulk of fundraising efforts go to... more fundraising. Compare this to the "self-esteem" building "requirement" for men to obtain multiple partners and you see that no individual contribution (a donation to the caller, sex wth the suitor) produces much in the way of actual benefit to the contributor and... eww! --fl]
Matthew Yglesias, discussing Lisa Belkin's New York Times article on gendered task sharing, raises a perplexing issue
[T]he evidence from gay and lesbian couples does suggest that despite some specialization, you tend to get closer to 50-50 than heterosexuals do:
"Lesbian couples also have a more equal division of housework. Rothblum found that it is only heterosexual mothers who do the lion’s share of housework for the family each week — between 11 and 20 hours for her survey respondents. Lesbian parents, gay parents and heterosexual fathers all look the same on paper when it comes to cooking and cleaning — they all report doing between 6 and 10 hours a week.
Among other things, that result suggests a certain amount of "leveling down" in terms of housecleaning in gay couples with both partners acting more like a heterosexual man than like a straight woman.
I gotta say that's been my first, second, and third-party experience as well. Anecdotally I've noticed a differential between the lesbian vs. straight moms at my children's elementary school. I've also noticed that 6-10 hours a week estimate applies to non-romantic, non-parent male/male and female/female roommates too.
Point of reference though: even the difference between 6 hours and 10 hours is kind of huge. (Huge *especially* considering that just, say, just a one-plate difference in "time to do the dishes" tolerance means that the less tolerant person will wind up doing the dishes most of the time despite an on-paper fractional absolute "laziness" difference.)
If the number for partnered heterosexual women jumps from the same 6-10 to 11-20 hours per week while her partner's doesn't then unless someone's really been drinking the "whistle while you work" cool-aid then conflict is going to seem inevitable.
So anyway, what's going on that combined chores for same-sex parenting couples add up to 12-20 hours while opposite-sex couples run closer to 17-22? It can't be as easy as "dads are deadbeats" because what would that make same-sex couples?
It *could* be as easy as "dads are patriarchal slave-drivers" who demand that their *hetero* spouses kick in an extra 5-10 hours a week more than they would for a same-sex spouse. It *could* be that same-sex partners tend to live in smaller houses, or condos or apartments and so there's just less work overall. It *could* be that decades of indoctrination with Barbies and E.Z. Bake Ovens, plus maybe Martha Stewart's "good things" mentality, holds hetero women to higher (possibly self-imposed) standards than their gay or lesbian counterparts. It *could* be that compared to gay men and lesbian women straight men start generating a lot more tasks that they then refuse to take responsibility for. It *could* be this or it could be that but while there's no question that there's *something* going on, *I* don't know what it is, and even after years and years of discussion I still haven't heard of a non-guess/non-theory explanation.
And by the way speculation like this doesn't help either.
[O]ne parent — almost always the wife — has parenting or housekeeping standards that the other cannot (or will not) meet. Dad dresses the children wrong and diapers them wrong and sends inadequate thank-you notes and leaves the house a mess. This may look like a cranky power struggle, Deutsch [Francine M. Deutsch, a psychology professor at Mount Holyoke and the author of "Halving It All: How Equally Shared Parenting Works." --fl] says, but the dynamic, which sociologists call “gatekeeping,” also reflects social pressures.
Women, she says, know that the world is watching and judging. If the toddler’s clothes don’t match, if the thank-you notes don’t get written, if the house is a shambles, it is seen as her fault, making her overly invested in the outcome. Many women will also admit to the frisson of superiority, of a particular form of gratification, when they are the more competent parent, the one who can better soothe the tears in the middle of the night.
But that doesn't particularly make sense given that you'd expect lesbian parents to *both* be affected if it was external judgment or a matter of one-upping each other, and if that was it you'd expect to see a bigger disparity between chores done in lesbian households compared to gay households.
So...?
According to a daily pundit summary by BarbinMD of Daily Kos,
E.J. Dionne hopes that Barack Obama’s speech on fathers and responsible parenting won’t be dismissed as a political ploy, saying that, "It actually matters that a presidential candidate is taking the costs of fatherlessness seriously."
Are we going to have to wait till *next* father's day, though, before somebody needs to get the word out that being a father isn't just a duty, nor is it only some kind of "wages of sin" for fucking? Because *especially* if you actually get in there and *father* your children instead of just dropping in by bungee for the suppertime be-good presentation and (Chris Rock was off by one on this) the "big piece of chicken."
Because it's not all duty you know.
Lux Alptraum of Boinkology links to the NYT article about same-sex relationships that's been making the rounds and says (italics mine)
Apparently, without the expectation of gendered roles and responsibilities (no husbands or wives), same-sex couples are more egalitarian:
...
And, perhaps as a result of this, the more egalitarian same-sex couples were better able to communicate and resolve conflict than their heterosexual counterparts. All of which has some researchers thinking that maybe problems in heterosexual relationships aren’t due to inborn differences — maybe they’re more about how we’re taught to act in relationships.
I live in the part of town and my children go to a public magnet-type elementary school where work-away moms and stay-at-home dads are pretty standard features at parks, mid-day coffee shops, school field trips and the like. And as a stay-at-home parent I have direct experience as well. Oh yeah, and I also used to work in an area of content management technology with a higher than usual percentage of women (former teachers) who substantially out-earned their partners (often still teachers.) And... yeah, even then there's still a lot of constructed gender stuff going on (about which more later) there's even more *situational* stuff going on.
By situational I mean things like the work-away parent comes home exhausted and dying to just unwind and/or get centered on not-work again colliding with the home-all-day parent who's been up to his or her neck in children, diapers, and so on. Whoever it is that spent 30-90 minutes cooking has to yell, sometimes repeatedly, for everyone to come to come eat while it's hot, and as little as 10 minutes later to yell at all the retreating backs to "come carry your dishes to the sink." And then there's coming down the stairs after putting the kids to bed, or (if you fell asleep with them again) coming down to make coffee in the morning and realizing your partner (again male or female) who was "just going to catch up on email first" didn't finish cleaning up dinner after you cooked. The point being that from the away-parent's perspective they really are contributing, and they're always contrite when you call them on it, and there's *nothing gendered about it at all!* That's what I mean about it being situational.
Now there are some areas where gender really does come into play, but once you get the hang of it it's usually pretty clear what people mean when they say gender's a social construct and not innate. And because this is nominally a sex blog and the endlessly repeated but never absorbed "amazing discovery" that gender might be constructed ticks me off, the most flippant example I can think of is that I'm pretty sure not even the most devout stay-at-home father has ever said "there's nothing sexier than a woman doing the dishes." Nor, conversely, have I ever heard a work-away woman say "there's nothing sexier than a man helping me review a Declaration of Conformity document stating that the radio-frequency emissions limits on my workgroup's product are within the FCC Part 15 rules." Even though those are probably similarly onerous, thankless tasks they're *gendered* tasks and therefore subject to a vast array of cultural, social, historical influences. But, again since the "nothing sexier than housework" response almost never shows up in egalitarian or swapped-role households there's no reason to believe there are any *biological* influences.
I could go on but since I get it, and Alptraum gets it, and since I'm not surprised that non-hetero couples would get it really all anyone really needs to say to the researchers from the Times article is "try a little role leveling or reversal yourselves some time." Sheesh!
In his book, Coming to our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, John Kabat-Zinn describes this revealing scene of a group of very busy adults.
I once led a mindfulness workshop at a business conference in Chicago. About fifty people in suits showed up. I opened our time together by suggesting that we simply sit together for a few minutes with no instructions and no agenda. I suggested that we let go of whatever expectations and stories we were bringing into the room about the workshop and why we were there (after all, something brought them there, no one was in the room by accident), put down our coffee cups and newspapers, and just take a few minutes to allow ourselves to feel how things were for us in that moment, however they were. A few people started crying.
In the conversation afterward, I asked what the tears were about. One executive said, "I never ever do anything without an agenda." Heads nodded in agreement. Just the words, "let's sit without an agenda," were liberating, releasing dammed-up feelings of grief they didn't know they had.
The people in that conference room may have been masters of hiding those damned-up feelings of grief from themselves, but I wonder how successful they were in hiding them from their children. When the topic of teen suicide is discussed, the causes typically cited are drugs, the influence of fatalistic song lyrics, bullying and the never-ending pressure for grades. One cause that is often ignored is the despair that young people experience when they look at the lives that their parents lead. A teenager will hear his father angrily rehash the office politics, see the weariness in her mother's face from the long hours at the job, mark the hours his parents spend staring vacantly at the television, and ask, "Is this what my life will be like?""
That sense of despair is what I recalled when reading a post written by Her of Desire X entitled, Generation-Y. Coming of age in the late 1980's, Her is, by her own account ...a woman without a generation. Or maybe just without a cause. The radicalism of the 1960's came to Her in a watered-down version from teachers, erstwhile hippies, who
...waxed poetic about Abbie Hoffman. Our response, isn't Abbie a girl's name? The Black Panthers, The White Panthers. Was it the Chicago Seven or Eight? Had to remember that for the test.
In this post, Her gives us a snapshot of her mother who, in her own rebellious youth, was anything but watered-down.
My mother drove across country in a VW bus packed full of hippies, Grace Slick's White Rabbit blaring out of the window, scaring all-fuck out of the Provincials, swearing that the only way to truly change the world was to get naked and perform an impromptu, ad lib, acid induced version of Major Barbara on the courthouse lawn, and then get arrested for public indecency and inciting a riot. When her father drove cross country to post her bail he found that she had changed the name of the father in Major Barbara to his name. He looked at his daughter, standing in a holding cell with her hippie friends, wearing only a jacket that someone had given her and, staring straight into her eyes, said unflinchingly, 'I do not know this woman. This is not my daughter.' She swore she had seen the world with New eyes through a glistening ball of liquid on the end of a medicine dropper. She marched on Washington. She went to Woodstock. She was turned on, tuned in, and dropped out.
It is that firebrand quality that Her treasures in a friend destined for Berkeley and a major in Women's Studies:
I loved her because she loved my mind. I adored her because she called me brilliant. She was a radical, a rebel, a warrior: a simulacrum of my mother in her youth.
When Her announces that she wants to attend Berkeley, her firebrand of a mother objects, calling the university ...Berserkly from the drugs and craziness she had experienced there during her past.. But Her is determined. She begins writing a paper that will not only cure her generation of complacency, but her mother as well.
There were also some old photos of her tucked haphazardly into shoe boxes and pushed to the back of her closet. One in particular had always been my favorite, she was smiling, dressed in hippie beads, a brown mini-skirt and moccasin boots, her long blond hair a tangled mess. A too-big Army camouflage jacket was draped over her small shoulders. She had a joint in one hand and was making a peace sign with the other. She was beautiful, angelic, but her eyes were fierce, intense. She was happy. When I see this photo I'm always reminded of Raymond Carver's Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year. I've wanted my whole life to meet this girl. To know her. To be her friend and companion in chaos.
But when Her's mother reads the paper, Her does not catch a glimpse of that beautiful girl in the photograph. She is face to face with a woman who is ..pleased. Not excited, not enflamed. Her does not go to Berkeley:
Life took some turns for me that sent me in other directions.
I won't rehash it. What followed has already been written.
The Church of Coke Whores 1
The Church of Coke Whores 2
Be warned. The Church of Coke Whores offers only one sacrament: Extreme Unction.
I referred to Her's mother as a firebrand, which is defined as someone who deliberately foments trouble. But it is the word's second meaning that I had in mind: a piece of wood that has been burned or is burning. How long can one woman remain on fire if she does not have the support of others? For many of the women who came of age in the sixties, who were responsible for raising children in the seventies and eighties, there was little support for that rebel flame in the home or the corporate workplace or the university. Little support but a ready supply of misogyny, as the poet Sharon Olds found when, in the ninth month of pregnancy, she arrives for the review of her dissertation. The men who will review Olds' dissertation may have been so courteous as to offer a pregnant woman a seat on a crowded subway train. But they show no such compunction for the jabs they deliver to Olds' other child, the one she fleshed from experience and learning.
When I walked into the seminar room
with my dissertation, our son floated in out
before me, treaded water in,
almost nine months old, upside-
down, sucking his thumb. My advisor
had called my thesis original,
richly metaphorical, and so
free of footnotes--I secretly thought
I might win something. But he didn't show up,
and the Chair of the Department had a pillar of mail
and a wastebasket by his leg -- for two hours,
he disemboweled. Two other men were
muttering to each other out the sides of their mouths
and doing their hard har, har,
har. I cited my advisor for his
encouragement, I described the yards
of file cards, the research, but after five minutes of their
jokes and smirks, I saw they meant
to flunk me. I drew my powers together,
120 pounds of me,
40 of the pregnancy
and 7 of my baby. Two hours later,
they asked me to leave the room for an interval
and they voted: Fail, Fail, Fail,
Fail, and You Can't Do That--
the one woman. When I lumbered back in,
our son's sweet palate may have wrinkled up
at the taste of fear's sour effluent--
who was polluting his waters? (Rip)
They wanted (Rip) a dissertation
absolutely new, without one
word (Rip) of this one--except
"the" was all right, and "and." How much
time shall we give her, gentlemen? How about
--nine months? Har, har
har. My cervix bent, for a moment,
with intimate, private hurt. I said,
Thank you. I thought, if you have hurt my child,
if you have curdled my milk with that, I will find you, and I will kill you.
And at that, my son's hair stood
on end, in the saline.
"The Defense" from Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds
I do not know if this scene is what Her's mother imagined when she read that fledging dissertation. But she had learned that an impromptu performance of Major Barbara could not change the fact that the world has little use for firebrands or brilliant girls. Perhaps being pleased rather than enflamed was the way that Her's mother tried to protect her child. Unfortunately, there is no way to protect a child, except to show her how to recognize danger, when to pick her battles, and that being a good little girl is the worst danger of all.
References:
Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, by John Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., Hyperion, New York, 2005. ISBN: 0-7868-6756-6 (Quoted text: page 447)
"The Defense" from Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2001. ISBN: 0-375-40742-2 (Quoted text: pages 8-9)
I've mentioned elsewhere that the last chapter of Mary Roach's Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
But while the book ultimately heads off on an, um, tangent Roach says the researcher's actual methods and observations were pretty valuable. You may recall from my earlier post that M&J observed sex between hundreds of couples with (in Roach's dry parlance) all combinations of "one, two, or zero penises between them." They observed both long-term partners and people who agreed to be assigned to each other at random.
Now just a note from Roach on who, exactly, signed up since almost any time you talk about sex research someone or other will mention self-selection bias. -- "Basically anyone who signed up as a Masters and Johnson volunteer -- gay, straight, committed or not -- tended to have, as they say, 100 percent orgasmic return. Because really, why would people who knew themselves to be iffy responders volunteer for this project?" Not to mention the common criticism of M&J that they were, as Roach summarizes, "the mechanizers of sex, obsessively focused on 'effective stimulation,' reducing passion to a series of impersonal physical manipulations." All well and good, yes -- self-selected, fairly consistent sexual responses so... what might the variables be and what of interest (to non-homophobes anyway) might have come out of the research?
Well, actually there were some interesting results, *especially* so if you've ever wondered what's so special about heterosexuality anyway. Well, how about..
...ultimately the team set aside their stopwatches and data charts and turned a qualitative eye upon their volunteers. What emerged were two portraits. There was efficient sex -- skillful, efficient, goal-directed, uninhibited, and with a very low "failure incidence."
...
But efficient sex was not amazing sex. The best sex going on in Masters and Johnson's lab was the sex being had by the committed gay and lesbian couples.
Source: Bonk; pg. 301
Ok, that's interesting, but wait, there's more (emphasis Roach's)
Not because they were practicing special homosexual sex techniques, but because they "took their time." They lost themselves -- in each other, and in sex. They "tended to move slowly ... and to linger at ... [each] stage of stimulative response, making each step in tension increment something to be appreciated ..." The teased each other "in an obvious effort to prolong the stimulatee's high levels of sexual excitation."
Ok. At this point I'm going to say you should just go buy the book, because there's a ton of interesting information, funny and often very personal anecdotes, great analysis, and a wonderful and, I think, successful effort to humanize sex research while, where appropriate, gently criticizing the obsessions and shortcomings of the researchers... and making clear as well just how difficult everyone from government to grant review boards to family members make life for researchers. It's also got this wonderful section, that I'm going to quote a lot of because it just says so much about heterosexual sexual assumptions.
So, go buy the book, m'kay? Now, where was I?
Another difference was that the lesbians were almost as aroused by what they were doing to their partner as was the partner herself. ... Masters and Johnson's heterosexuals failed to grasp that if you lost yourself in the tease -- in the pleasure and power of turning someone on -- that that could be as arousing as being teased and turned on oneself. "Not only were committed lesbians more effective in satisfying their partners, they usually involved themselves without restraint... far more than husbands approached their wives." ...
The straight man, in most cases, "became so involved in his own sexual tensions that he seemed relatively unaware of the degree of his partner's sexual involvement. There were only a few instances when the husband seemed fully aware of his wife's level of sexual excitation and helped her to expand her pleasure... rather than attempting to force her rapidly to higher levels of sexual involvement.
Ok, so that's not too surprising. The whole idea behind "foreplay" isn't to *heighten* anybody's enjoyment but instead to prepare the woman for more satisfactory penis-in-vagina intercourse. Same, of course, with the baseball bases metaphor for seduction: nobody goes to bat hoping to spend an eternity at first... record books don't dwell for long on those who linger longer at second... and if anyone but the third-base coach has spoken fondly about that position sports writers have failed to record it. (3rd-base coaches, incidentally, are most often seen in highlight reels frantically urging runners to speed towards home.)
Gay and lesbian couples, freed of the assumed inevitability of PIV intercourse, evidently took more time in the M&J labs to not just enjoy *finishing* (not forcing anyone rapidly anywhere) but to enjoy *getting there.*
Not that we can lay all the blame on heterosexual men.
The same criticism applied to straight women: "This sense of goal orientation, of trying to get something done... was exhibited almost as frequently by the heterosexual women as by their male partners." They ignored their husband's nipples and just about everything else other than his penis. Meanwhile, the homosexual men lavished attention on their partner's entire bodies.
...
"Rarely did a wife identify her husband's pre-orgasmic stage ... and suspend him at this high level of sexual excitation..."
Roach says M&J noted that heterosexuals have a disadvantage since they have to do a little more guessing about what their respective partners might enjoy in the way of physical stimulation -- the old "it takes someone with a clitoris to know what to do to someone else's clitoris" line. (Cough, bullshit, cough, cough.) Roach, more politely, agrees.
But the empathy gap is not insurmountable. One has only to speak one's mind.
It's not so much, says Roach, that gay men or lesbian women had shared anatomy, they just seemed more comfortable talking about sex than the straight people in the study.
Masters gives the example of the heterosexual men's finger insertions: "Though many heterosexual women evidenced little pleasure... and were obviously distracted by [it]... only twice did they ask their husbands to desist."
Wild, huh? All possibly a bit more obvious in retrospect than back in the late 1970s, but here's what kills me: Masters and Johnson undertook their study in order to better understand homosexuality in order to better understand how to "cure" it. And consequently they blew what might have been a much bigger story that would have fit wonderfully with a revolutionary narrative that at the time of publication was only just emerging: sex is more than scoring; sex is more than intercourse; women can act as well as be acted upon, men can be acted upon as well as acting; and heterosexuals don't have all the answers.
So... following up on my previous post about someone finally recognizing that not all men are interested in sex (or, more accurately since the original report was from relationship counsellors, as interested as their partners.)
What do you think the impact on heterosexual relations might be if up to, say, 15% of men who *didn't feel like it* but felt like they had some sort of destiny to fulfill or "universal" standard to try and live up to? How likely to encourage sexual self-expression in their partners or, perhaps, latch on instead to "conventional wisdom" that erotic desire in women was "unnatural?"
Part of the problem of living in the closet -- any closet -- isn't that *you* live a lie, it's that your decision forces *others* to live your lie with you.
Photo by Flickr user pichenettes. Used under a Creative Commons license.
I don't ordinarily get so excited by a post that I gabble incoherently in comments, hashing everybody's names and posting addenda and corrections, but I was pretty jazzed when Debbie of Body Impolitic mentioned a pretty interesting article from the UK's Guardian about men and sexual desire that challenges a ton of stereotypes about men.
So maybe part of the story is, as Peter Bell would have it, that “men and women are more sexually similar than they think.” Maybe when married men are as readily “available” to their wives as wives have historically been to their husbands, the power dynamic shifts. Maybe it’s not so much that wives know how to ask for what they want as that husbands are in unmapped territory. Before, their penises told them whether or not they were “ready” for sex at any given time; now, it’s much more complicated.
The article in question, Why men are telling their wives 'not tonight', tries to make sense of a growing number of couples coming to relationship counsellors to deal with low-male libido imbalances.
'Men used to come to us with impotence - now known as erectile insufficiency - but Viagra has sorted some of that problem,' said Peter Bell, Relate's head of practice. 'What we have is a lot of men who say, as women did in the Fifties: "I can have sex, but I don't want to. It's not rewarding".'
Bell says that around half the men he is now seeing admit to a complete lack of libido. Ten years ago, he said, such complaints were unheard of.
It's pretty clear from the article that the men in question aren't particularly masturbating more, using porn, having affairs, or otherwise taking their sexual outlets elsewhere. They're just (to borrow a familiar slur) "drying up."
Just for the record I'm pretty sure that Viagra's making a difference in the reporting increases: what could once be begged off as impotence must now be confronted as loss of libido.
In fact there's one very telling line from one interviewee that I hadn't really thought about before.
The curious thing is that I can get erections, and I don't fancy or fantasise about other women. It's just that, over the years, my desire to have sex with anyone at all has faded.
There's always been this assumption going the other way that, as Debbie puts it...
In a purely physical sense, human women are effectively always “ready” for sex. For tens of thousands of years, it has been physically possible to have penetrative sex with a woman regardless of her emotional or mental state or willingness to participate.
But here's the trick: I'm pretty sure most men have noticed, at least in their youths and every morning for almost everyone else, that erections aren't always directly related to arousal. (If you haven't reviewed your Masters and Johnson lately erection for men is one of the earliest, and therefore least "committed" signs of arousal, corresponding to the point of initial lubrication in women rather than clitoral erections that, according to M&J, begin much further into arousal.) And so, sort of contrary to received wisdom, I'm wondering how many men have been able to sort of hide in plain sight their lack of interest behind their mechanical erections?
So! I've got a ton more to say about what this might mean (much of which, incidentally, I've been able to say only speculatively before) but I'm going to stop here for now.
For now I just want to say how nice it feels to find a little evidence to back up my strong, strong belief that men are no more automatic, reflexive, base-line-always-ready "sex class" members than women are inevitable, prim, lie-back-and-think-of-England members of the "no-sex" class. And that's exciting to me because while "Doctor" John Gray plus everyone else back to Aristotle can claim that men are from Mars and women from Venus, I've come to realize that in fact the differences we do have are grounded almost entirely in circumstance rather than biological, gender, or evolutionary imperatives. And incidentally I think that's a big deal because, well, frankly the status quo kind of sucks.
Because who, exactly, is served by a negative-sum system that severely screws women over in order to... prevent men from reaching their full potential either? If the only thing holding it up is lies about inevitability, and those lies start falling apart then...
Hugo Schwyzer says
I had a similar conversation recently with an old friend, my age (and Dana’s). Single again after a twelve-year marriage, she’s recently been repeatedly “hit on” by her daughter’s soccer coach — a handsome lad in his late twenties, well over a decade her junior. My friend is flattered and physically attracted, but said essentially the same thing Dana did: she has no desire to be anyone’s mother, teacher, or babysitter. “I’m not here to give anyone experience”, she says.
...
Because I post so often on older men, younger women, I periodically get notes asking me to address the reverse: older women, younger men. There are a number of reasons I don’t post on the subject. ... Bottom line: I don’t see older women pursuing young men at the same rate that I see the reverse.
Not to put too fine a point on it but thanks to long-standing traditions having nothing to do with age one doesn't really see that many women of *any* age pursuing men. So it stands to reason you don't see older women (*especially* older women who'd have grown up even more indoctrinated than younger ones) pursuing younger men.
As for whether Hugo's friend would really have all that much to mother, teach, babysit, or "give anyone experience," to someone in his 20s that's, um, just as incredibly arrogant and "othering" as the older men who imagine they could do likewise to young adult women. So it's just as well that she declined.
And I want to be really clear here. I'm not calling that attitude "reverse sexism," I'm calling it just plain old sexism as in "to discriminate against an individual for their failure to adhere to the attributes, characteristics, and roles tradition designates as appropriate."
Because seriously, it's not enough for men to get over disdaining women who are taller, better educated, more intelligent, funnier, better compensated, more aggressive, and older if women aren't comfortable getting over complementary biases against shorter, less educated, less intelligent, less funny, more poorly paid, less assertive, or younger men.**
And just to be clear, I'm *not* flaming anyone here***. The thing about uncovering previously unexamined reservoirs of bias is that nobody needs to apologize or introspect. Not Hugo's friend and certainly not Hugo. But it does need examination.
[** And while I might be repeating myself, if you're really an exception then I'm obviously not referring you. --fl]
[*** Ok, maybe Maureen Dowd. As I've mentioned elsewhere. But since there are only about five single men older, richer, taller, smarter, and more influential than she is and because she thinks it's *feminism's* fault she can't find a "suitable" partner, I think she's a special case. --fl]
So following up on my previous post about assumptions about BDSM-dominant women and the "no-sex" class, I said I thought one reason most standard male fantasies** about sex with "dominatrixes" is that genital contact is either withheld altogether (orgasm denial is a perhaps suspiciously-under-the-circumstances popular theme) or it's doled out fairly grudgingly after being "earned" through feats of humiliation, pain, or expense. And even then the male sub is often "permitted" to have his orgasm without contact with her (or at least sexual contact with her*** -- there's a bit of a cliché in written porn that the sub ejaculates into on, say, the dom's shoes.
Via the startlingly interesting Almost Magic of Sometimes Almost Magic, Bitchy Jones, who's a little sick of life in the "no-sex" class pigeonhole, raises an obvious objection:
One crucial thing was over looked in this race to elevate women to bossiness. To escape the oppressive tyranny of PIV sex and let women be in charge. They failed to notice that it wasn’t being penetrated itself that was submissive. It was just that all femininity was equated with submission - that everything a woman did in sex had been made to look as if it was a priori submissive.
But there is no way that such simple basics – being the hole or the plug – are on their own submissive or dominant. It only has further meaning in context.
Sometimes it feels like femdom is a big mirror. You hold it up to the world and you see all kinds of yukky beliefs reflected by and clear. Like that bit in the Snow Queen or something.
But that’s the fact. Way back in the past when they invented misogyny they decided that women were lower status and thus had the low status role in sex. He had the mighty phallus – she had the dirty needy hole. You can see how femdom later thought, hey, lets flip this shit. Let’s make the guy be called slut for wanting and be filled. But those things aren’t really submissive. Having something pushed into your body that feels amazing is only submissive because someone decided that the female role in sex was a submissive one.
You don’t need to put the guy on the bottom because he is the bottom. It misses the fucking point. Fucking. Which is the point. Which feels good. Which doesn’t have an innate power exchange embedded in it.
Really. It just doesn’t.
Much as it is a big shame for those of us who like temporary sex-based status difference pretences, sex, done right, is pretty much fun for fun. It’s equal. You cannot humiliate someone just by fucking them.
"Having something pushed into your body that feels amazing is only submissive because someone decided that the female role in sex was a submissive one."
See! That's what I'm talking about! We can talk all day long about gender equality in the workplace, in public life, at home, and even in relationships but we gotta talk about what gender equality means in bed too. Because while sex isn't the most important thing about gender relations (and yes, I'm aware that sounds sort of ironic) it *can* be a pellucid little reservoir of unexamined gender-superiority assumptions. Might as well start airing it out.
And it's not as though failing to look at this stuff has no consequences. Like the conceptual blinders that kept early primatologists from seeing that female rhesus monkeys initiate 80% of sexual contact, much of our rhetoric, many of our assumptions, the lines of discourse we permit ourselves, even avenues of medical research and treatment (while I'll get to in a couple of posts) are affected.
Hands don't "submit" to a pencil when we pick it up. Mouths don't "submit" to the ear of corn when we bite into it. Then neither do vaginas "submit" to penises any more than penises "submit" to vaginas. So...
...what other "facts" are we just pulling out of the air? What are the consequences? It makes sense that people like Jones -- women who are BDSM power-exchange dominants -- can be pretty cool resources.
[** Just to be clear, I'm perfectly aware that men and women who practice d/s may have far more nuanced relationships. --fl]
[*** When there *is* sexual contact with her it's often something to do with the "ordeal" of forced oral sex. Which seems like a funny kind of "ordeal." --fl]
[*** Hat tip for the link to the startlingly interesting almostmagic of Sometimes Almost Magic. --fl]
The Associated Press's Jennifer Dobner, via The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says the recent raid on the "Yearning for Zion" Ranch in El Dorado, Texas, has prompted polygamists to start talking more to the press.
Plural-marriage families exist mostly in the shadows, said Mary Batchelor, a co-founder of Principle Voices, a polygamy advocacy group. She said families typically don't speak publicly for fear they'll be prosecuted for bigamy or lose their children to state authorities. "It's scary, but ultimately, we decided to speak up and let the chips fall where they may," she said.
Technically I believe they're talking to the press because defense lawyers for their (sometimes literal) masters are instructing them to, but in all events it's probably not a bad thing that they're coming at least *partly* out of the "shadows" (a.k.a. closet) to talk about what, exactly, it is they do.
And can I just say I think it's probably a good thing for the same reason I think prostitution should be more openly discussed? Because what happens in the shadows has this ugly, festering, stinking, soul-sapping, child-abusing, incest-begetting, human-trafficking, other-crimes-ignoring tendency to stay in the shadows.
Because there's nothing *intrinsically* wrong with "plural marriages." Assuming they're really just plural -- i.e. *anyone* can marry multiple people and not just privileged, overbearing, dictatorial child-abusing, minor-daughter-swapping "family patriarchs." And assuming they're really marriages, with all the restrictions -- i.e. can't be your 12-year-old cousin even if your brother owes you for that business loan; i.e. all partners have a right to *affirmative* consent to marriage; i.e. *all* partners are legally and socially completely equal in the eyes of both state and church, with full intra-family "votes," full inheritance rights, full community-property rights, and so on. Oh yeah, and full legal recognition under the law.**
Instead, as we've seen with this 100-year-old cult that's not just in Texas but *all over* the intermountain west, we see the same behavior we see with other pandemic forms of "victimless crime" such as illegal immigration, prostitution, and cannabis production: constant erosion of respect for other laws and mores, an inability to work with police to curtail that erosion, and a "big umbrella / inner sanctum" dynamic where practitioners can be swayed to tolerate increasingly egregious behavior as long as it's in the approximate domain that unites them.
The point being that *if* "sister wives" were able to go to talk to police and child-services groups without having their *own* children taken away from them they might be less inclined to tolerate when their husband brings home "cousin wives," "niece wives" and "early-middle-schooler wives." Or when he starts beating them for not letting him "excommunicate" their middle-school age sons or swapping away their daughters to other men old enough to be their grandfathers.
(It's the same with illegal vs. legal farmworkers who are more able to report illegal spraying, or illegal vs. legal street prostitutes who are in a better position to report when prostituted children, trafficked sex workers, or violent predators appear in their areas.)
---
Oh, and since it's *very* easy for readers to balk when someone talks about the benefits of legalized polygamy let's make sure we clearly define our terms.
See, for instance, Dw3t-Hthr commented in an earlier post
The problems rest with exploitative patriarchal polygyny. And heavily with the 'exploitative', more moderately with the 'polygyny', with the patriarchal being one of them things.
The fact that every discussion of polygamy I've seen assumes that it will be polygynous, as if women are incapable of desiring multiple partners, is one of those things that I get Sarcastic about on occasion. There's a lot of "women are the intrinsically monogamous class, only men will have an interest in polygamy if it's legal, thus polygamy will exploit women by giving them all fractional men" subtext of a lot of these discussions.
Yet another area where the dominant paradigm elephants its way into the discussion. (And why do I suspect further contemplation of "plural marriages," the idea of which still personally vaguely creeps me out, would yield further otherwise unnoticed paradigm-driven assumptions?)
[** In other words (sorry Rick Santorum) just like *anyone* else who wants to get married provided they're of age and of legal "sound mind and body." --fl]
So a subscriber review of the 2006 French film Lady Chatterley
Very Dull and slow. Lacks drama and substance. And the character were not attractive at all.
All absolutely true. Also completely irrelevant.
Hippolyte Girardot plays Clifford, Lord Chatterly, left invalid after service in World War I. Marina Hands is Constance, the eponymous Lady who's pretty but in the way of ordinary people, neither polished nor plucked nor permed. Meanwhile Jean-Louis Coullo'ch Parkin, the rawboned, vital, but neither young nor particularly handsome gamekeeper.
The movie takes *forever* to get anywhere. Not just the "good stuff" but *anywhere!* It gets there gorgeously, sure, such that anyone not waiting for the "good stuff" won't mind. Which, it turns out, is marvelously appropriate for conveying the impact of circumstantially *enforced* membership in the idealized "no-sex" class on a human woman. If the paradigm were valid then Constance should have been in paradise! A wealthy, accomplished, companionable-enough but physically incapable husband who's infirmities allow her her own bedroom, her own books, her needlepoint by the fire, her walks in the woods...
...her anguished reflection on her naked body in the mirror
... her sitting unmoving, sometimes for hours, her crossed hands curled limply in her lap...
...and eventually her failure to get out of bed at all...
Ok, maybe not so ideal but nevertheless all but her sister tacitly or openly remind her how right things are for her.
Actually I don't remember it in the movie but generally one addressed such problems in the old day by observing that young women often pine for...
...children. Because, you know, according to the paradigm even when women *do* want sex they want it for *something else.*
At any rate, this sets the scene for Constance's encounter with Parkin -- seen from a distance not at all the naked god of wood and vine bathing outside his cottage the way he's usually given to us in movies. Instead he's only naked to the waist, a huge, solid, torso, not Fabio handsome but able to stand unaided, unwounded, and, since he doesn't see her, unaffected by her.
And while Constance is clearly affected by Parkin's presence, but as she walks away she gasps for breath not from passion but from having grown utterly, nearly fatally weak from her passive, theoretically idealized, empty life.
And still the movie takes its time for her to slowly, slowly rebel against the role that was created for her by her culture.
The movie is as it should be. Dull and slow, with characters not attractive at all.
But scarcely without substance.
I'm not sure you'll find the film at Blockbuster but it's available on Netflix. You'd probably need to be in the mood and since, with such slow pacing landscape photography plays a pretty critical role, you'd want a pretty good screen to watch it on. That said I recommend it for the meditations of the first hour if nothing else.
Kink in Exile says in two paragraphs what... "official manhood" has pretty much skipped as crazy talk for the last 4,000 years because we were all too busy theorizing about what them damn women want to, um, pay attention when repeatedly told to our faces I mean ask listen. (Emphasis mine.)
My problem has never been with the giving or receiving of gifts. I enjoy giving gifts and I’m pretty sure that all of my favorite jewelry was either a gift or a family heirloom. My favorite toys are certainly my favorite because they carry a particular attachment to someone who gave them to me, or in some cases made them for me. No, no, my problem is with the expectation that this is an arrangement in which men get sex and women get stuff.
Women enjoy sex. Believe it or not, my payment for a hot scene is, in fact, a hot scene. Like every other person, I have likes and dislikes. There are plenty of things that I don’t think are hot that I do at work because I have bills to pay like everyone else. There are also plenty of things that I have driven through 400km of mountain roads with a chicken on my lap and no air conditioning in the fucking jungle to do on my day off. And being human, there are things I thought were gross till I did them and discovered they are in fact hot. But the bottom line is that when I go on a date I am looking for sexual gratification, not a new car.
Crazy talk I know, but if empiricism isn't your bag you can always derive the same conclusion from the maxim that feminism is the radical proposition that women are people. Because, you know, *people* tend to do things like have sex because they want sex, and appreciate a gift, or not, in the spirit it was given. And, not to put too fine a point on it, people tend to *love* people because they're *lovable* and not because those people give them stuff that proves them "worthy."