Recently in The "no-sex" class Category
Photo by Flickr user Gnarls Monkey. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Alexa Stanard of RHRealityCheck.org says
Michigan women with health insurance can find themselves paying up to $65 a month for a prescription to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. Meanwhile, their insured male counterparts can pick up a free prescription for Viagra.
Read the quote in context here.
This is *so* not to single out the excellent Alexa Stanard but I'm going to go off the beaten path here and ask if we can all, all of us, just get over the idea that a) contraception and b) Viagra each benefit one but not both sexes?
Yes, we can maintain our respective "no-sex" class narratives: that only men but not sex-indifferent women are interested in erections; that women, but not obligate-sex-seeking men, are concerned only about pregnancy and/or contraception. We can even find plenty of instances where those stories play out. But do we want that to be *the* narrative? Really?
Because preferences for Mars/Venus story lines notwithstanding, there's *absolutely* no different policy response necessary, no less a "gotcha" frame for disparate attitudes towards bridled vs unbridled sex, no less flipping hypocrisy, nor betrayed failure grasp basics of health policy: the problem is just as large when framed in terms of availability of free Viagra for hetero** couples but very expensive hormonal contraceptives.
In fact, when you put it in couples terms the contrast is even more stark, and starkly regressive: Federal policies and insurance coverage encourages high-pregnancy-risk pharmaceuticals and discourages high-pregnancy-responsibility pharmaceuticals. Which is about right anyway.
Coverage should extend, at equivalent, levels to both contraception *and,* when necessary, erectile dysfunction not because, pill-wise, some people still think "pink is for girls, blue is for boys" but because for many couples the lack of both is an obstacle to their sexual lives together.
Question for women readers who's hetero partners are old and/or ill and/or prostate-surgery post-op enough to need Viagra: does it benefit only him? Question for men readers who's hetero partners are young enough to still need contraceptives: does it benefit only her?
[** And let's not even start with all the heteronormative assumptions. --fl]
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?
[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]
Funny how often "not feeling safe" is mistaken for "modesty." Hmm. Gee.
[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]
Belle de Jour, who seems to be actively blogging again, channels the dominant "no-sex" class paradigm so I won't have to.
...one thing I am rapidly learning is that outside the world of the call girl, it is a truth universally acknowledged that men need to be made to feel as if they've battled for every last sexual favour granted them, no matter how usual. Read the quote in context here.
Remember it's *men's* paradigm -- a point she brings home nicely in a footnote
* Lest you think I'm laying all blame for this state of affairs at the doorstep of women, I feel obliged to clarify - certain men encourage this behaviour. I've known men to walk away from a sexual dynamo only to end up panting at the feet of a frigid hag by choice. Clearly, in some minds, girls who have less sex must have pussies that are lined with gold. If you're one such chap, here's a free clue: the M1 still goes north regardless of how many people drive on it, 'kay?
That sounds about right. We created it, we enforce it (sometimes *very* brutally), and in classic no-win-situationism we then blame *you* for it with words like "gatekeeper," "frigid," and then saying we're "scoring" or "getting lucky" when (miracle of miracles we imagine) we "get" sex!
(As usual I don't know why people keep blaming *feminism* when the real problem, over and over and over, is so clearly *anti-feminism.*)
[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]
I spend most of my time talking about the *descriptive* elements of the dominant "no-sex" class paradigm: men's irrational but persistent conviction that women are "fair game" for leverage for sex because they have no authentic sexual agency and thus no interest in sex independent of those who seek to "get" sex from them. But there's another side, a *prescriptive* side where various personal, social, and legal punishments are designated for women who *fail* to meet the class expectations created for them.
Case in point? Laura Woodhouse of The F-Word Blog
Yup, once again the onus is being placed on women to prevent rape, with men entirely absent from the equation, this time in the Malaysian city of Kota Bharu:
Authorities in Kota Bharu have distributed pamphlets recommending that Muslim women do not wear heavy makeup and loud shoes when they go out to work in restaurants or other public places. [...] The goal of the modesty drive was to prevent rape and safeguard the women's dignity, said a spokesman.
Policing women's appearance and pre-emptively blaming them for rape in one fell swoop? Ten patriarchy points for you, sir.
I think looking at these declarations as warnings *against* rape is missing the point. I think instead they serve the functional purpose of *authorizing* rape as a tool of punishment for transgressors.
So I'm afraid that while Feministe is possessed perhaps of more generous expectations when she says of the same municipal circular
If the Kota Bura Municipal Council is actually interested in preventing rape, perhaps they should focus on the rapists.
I'm afraid the Council *really isn't interested* in preventing rape, they're interested in *using* and *encouraging* it as a form of social control of women.
And I think, by the way, that this is a *very* big deal. When wretched jerks say of an assault victim "well, she was asking for it" I suspect what they mean is "*we* were asking for it." Time to start calling them on it.
%#)!*&$
Photo by Flickr user rainspoo. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Yet another thread in the tangled knot of the "no-sex" class paradigm. Back in March of last year, while describing a rendezvous in a hotel that really does charge by the hour, The Ethical Slut said of her partner at the time...
Chuckles being a sweet 26-year-old, he only lasted about 3 minutes. When I told him that maybe he should hold back on cumming, he looked at me strange and said, "Why would I do that?" Ah, children are so cute.
Chuckles evidently somewhat made up in frequency what he made up in duration but still... when you hear about guys who think sex is all about them, or who thinks that sex is just something for guys *for women too* well, that's what I'm talking about.
"Why would I do that?" Woof!
Sungold of Kittywampus has an interesting post up about reconstructive surgery after breast cancer vs. prostate cancer. I'd like to excerpt the whole thing but I'll pull out the relevant bits as best I can.
According to Nate Jenkins at the AP, the state of Nebraska has decided that there's no need to help men who are struggling with erectile dysfunction. It already stopped Medicaid payments for Viagra and related drugs when the federal government did the same in 2006. Now it's excluding penile implants from Medicaid coverage as well.
From patient accounts that I've read, the erection resulting from the implant feels natural and pleasurable to both partners. Most of the men who have an implant wonder why they didn't get the surgery sooner.
...
[A]part from the cringe factor, this is what they're up against:
State Medicaid director Vivianne Chaumont said the change is consistent with a federal rule, approved in 2006, that barred the federal government from spending Medicaid dollars on erectile dysfunction drugs including Viagra. Nebraska followed suit a few months later and changed its rules to keep state Medicaid money from being spent on the drugs.
The federal government will still help pay for penile implants in states that choose to continue covering the procedure under their Medicaid plans.
Medicaid is meant to pay for the medical necessities of needy people and “sex is not medically necessary,” she said.
Do I even need to enumerate what's wrong with this? ...
The ruling is also blatantly sexist. The state Medicaid program covers breast reconstruction, as most private insurers are required to do in accordance with federal law. Where's the difference? Again, from the AP:
Chaumont, who moved to Nebraska about a year ago to take her current position, said she didn’t know why the decision was made to cover breast reconstruction under Nebraska Medicaid but added that it didn’t strike her as unreasonable.
“I don’t think breast cancer has anything to do with sexual dysfunction or sexual impotence,” she said.
I'm always uncomfortable when breast cancer and prostate cancer get pitted against each other. Both deserve adequate - no, generous - funding. It should never be a zero-sum game. And in this case, there's no conceivable reason to cover one but not the other. Breast cancer has effective advocates. Prostate cancer remains largely in the shadows. That's the only real difference.
...At bottom, Chaumont is enforcing the idea that sex is optional and probably downright icky or evil. That sex is not for people who are aging or ill (even if an increasing number of prostate cancer patients are in their 40s and 50s). That sex is not a part of mental health. She doesn't give a shit that their partners suffer nearly as much from the loss of marital "delight." But what gave her the right to impose her own anti-sex views on Nebraskans who've had the double bad luck to be both poor and seriously ill?
What's next? Will the state of Nebraska refuse to subsidize walkers or canes on the theory that walking is not a medical necessity? You can stay alive without walking, chewing, seeing, or fucking. And you can survive for decades without using your higher brain functions, including logic and empathy, as Chaumont's decision proves. It seems that even thinking is not a medical necessity.
I've been interested in medical side effects that inhibit libido or sexual function, especially in men, for quite a while. Our narratives of men as the "sex class" are so pronounced that, as Sungold says, men who suffer such calamities often vanish from sight. (By some accounts the Bible forbids them going to church!) There's even a pretty strong tradition, thoroughly embedded in the "no-sex" class by the way, that Viagra and penile implants are of interest only to men and that their partners have no, zero, none investment in their partner's sexual functionality. And as I've mentioned elsewhere several times recently the issues is further complicated by sexist/ageist bias: menopausal women who are still interested in sex have been standing objects of derisive humor for generations.
Anyway, great post by Sungold about a topic we really should be having a lot more conversations about.
Hugo Schwyzer, feminist, takes to task Kathleen Parker, anti-feminist.
"Boys and girls are hard-wired differently, which one notices as soon as the little critters become mobile. Although there are exceptions, girls can sit and focus for long periods and boys need to move around more. In fact, brain research shows that multitasking stimulates the pleasure center of women’s brains, hence 42 years of NOW. The men’s movement has been in gestation for 15 years and hasn’t begun to quicken yet. Ultimately, letting men be men means not insisting that they be our best girlfriends."
I wonder how Kathleen Parker explains the feats of memory undertaken by Torah students for three millennia, who do relatively little moving around and learn with dutiful exactness? Or how the Chinese civil service survived nearly as long with a nearly all-male membership, made up of fellows who spent hours not only committing the law to memory, but learning how to shape complex characters? How could they have done these things, when it is so “natural” for boys and men to be easily distracted and in need of constant physical exertion?
Actually I think the men's movement has had a hard time getting off the ground because we've been fiddling with a variety of unproductive or counterproductive goals and hampered a *great* deal by the "worthiness trap" dilemma of thinking we can only "get it" when approve. And possibly "reward" us with sex. Which is almost exactly the opposite of what I'm pretty sure we need to be doing. Which would have a lot to do with getting over the whole alienated conceit that sex is a reward, a counter, a sign of approval, or "getting lucky" or a 'score" for anything and, instead, recognizing that it's just something our partners want to do because they enjoy it too.
Remember, "entitlement" is nothing but an uncorroborated belief that you've done something that, in *your* opinion, warrants someone else "rewarding" you for it.)
The hoot about the interview Schwyzer quotes, by the way, is that it comes from a Father's Day post by the equally extreme right-wing blogger Kathryn Jean Lopez on the National Review Online interview. The lead paragraph?
It’s Father’s Day this weekend, in a land where men are underappreciated, disrespected, and under attack. Kathleen Parker is here to save them, with her cultural wakeup call, Save the Males: Why Men Matter. Why Women Should Care. She recently took questions on her new book from NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez.
Source: I don't like linking to those people.
So us master-gender men "hard wired" to be impulsive thugs? And anti-feminists are supposed to be on *our side?* Sheah, right. Save the males indeed!
Photo by Flickr user millie!. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Too-long ago now the Australian Government's Australian Institute of Criminology published a then-comprehensive study of the state of prostitution in Australia. ("Working girls : prostitutes, their life and social control" by Roberta Perkins, ISBN 0 642 15877 0, Canberra : Australian Institute of Criminology, 1991, Australian studies in law, crime and justice series.)
In the you-probably-want-to-read-it chapter "Pimps and patrons : the "boys" in the business among statistics about full-time vs. part-time work there's one paragraph that's just packed full of useful information (emphasis mine.)
Taking the estimate for "professional" prostitutes in Sydney in a given week (p. 17) and the average number of clients per woman also in a week, we find that approximately 30,000 men visit these women each week. Of course, some prostitutes may see the same man, if he is in the habit of moving about among prostitutes quite frequently, while, on the other hand, a number of men visit prostitutes as little as only once in their lifetime. Also, a number of tourists see prostitutes when they visit Sydney. But, to simplify for the purpose of a statistical guide, if we take the 30,000 men as visiting prostitutes only once a week and all of the men are Sydney residents, we can estimate that about I in 40 Sydney men, or 2.5 per cent of the male population aged 15-64 years, visit prostitutes a week. (The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated population for Sydney at 30 June 1988 was 3,594,400. Approximately half of this number were males. The percentage of males between the ages of 15 and 64 years in the Australian male population was 65.8 per cent, or approximately two-thirds of all males. Thus, 30,000 clients of prostitutes a week in a Sydney population of 1,196,133 males aged 15-64 years is about I in 40 men). Four decades earlier Kinsey and his colleagues (1948, pp. 249-59) found that about two-thirds of all American men had visited a prostitute at least once in their lifetime, and 15 per cent to 20 per cent were regular visitors. Gagnon and Simon (1972, pp. 222-3) claim that there were drastic declines in clientele in the 1960s and 1970s due to the growth of permissiveness in the so-called "sexual revolution". But rather than a sudden "revolution", Kinsey and his co-workers visualised an "evolution" of sexual permissiveness throughout this century. In their study of American females 14 per cent of women born prior to 1900 had experienced pre-marital coitus, compared to 39 per cent of those born after 1900 (Kinsey et al. 1953, pp. 298-302). AIDS too has been held to blame for "killing" the sex business, and indeed there was a rapid decline of up to 50 per cent of client turnover in the few years following the public hysteria on AIDS. But this appeared much more catastrophic than it actually was, because all it did was speed up a process of decline that has been evident for at least a quarter of a century but probably began in the 1920s.
Read the quote in context here.
The one I really wanted to take away is the two highlighted statistics that, at least for two cultures that are... roughly comparable (Australia and the U.S.), the percentage of prostitution customers to non-customers has dropped maybe ten-fold in the last 40-50 years. I'd say that sounds almost exactly right based on my conversations with men from older generations. I'm pretty sure that today, in Australia and the U.S. as well as much of the rest of "western civilization" a majority of men "lost" their (heterosexual) virginity with prostitutes whereas today an even greater majority first have sex with a friend, classmate, or other social peer.
I mention this because, you know, I talk about paradigms a lot, specifically the "no-sex" class paradigm of women (as perceived by men) involves pretty strong denial of autonomous, let alone independent-of-pressure-from-men sexual interest, I think it's a good time to point out that paradigms are usually invisible until underlying circumstances change enough that the core assumptions no longer sufficiently explain reality.
Think I'd have recognized the "no-sex" class theory if all but 14% of women were still valued exclusively for the integrity of their hymens? Not a chance. Think the stupid "virgin/whore" groupthink has any relevance if barely 14% hold out to wait till marriage?** No way. Think a gigantic obstacle to further progress is pushing men to move out from behind the curve they're leaving themselves behind on that? You bet!
So. Another quick question: For all lip service paid by certain parties, who's done more to undermine the foundation of prostitution, feminists or the Souther Baptist Convention (scroll way down) with their passionate denunciations of *both* "sex trafficking" (by which they mean only prostitution forced and unforced) *as well as* even more passionate opposition to economic, social, political, personal *and* reproductive* and *sexual* autonomy and agency for women? (And yes as a matter of fact I *am* still cheeved.)
The old line of thinking in Western Civilization at least, going back as far as Saint Augustine at least, has been that a certain number of women in every generation must be sacrificed on the "fallen" alter either as prostitutes or "sluts," to protect the "purity" of all the rest by absorbing the bulk of the tarnishing effect of sexual congress with us "superior" men. And as it seems to be turning out, women aren't in fact tarnished at all by sex but (especially when they can make their share of the decisions and not just rely in their partners***) sometimes outright glow. And when they don't glow what are the two or three leading reasons why not? Men still invested in the ____-class paradigm; men raised to believe their cocks are so filthy they can corrode "decent" women with a single push; men so alienated from women and sex they imagine the androcentric antics provided in porn and with prostitutes is supposed to be "good" sex.****
I mean, seriously, in Saint Augustine's day what passed for popular entertainment was bear baiting and watching other people get burned at the stake, and what passed for medicine was swallowing mercury and bleeding to "balance the humors." Even in Kinsey's day what passed for popular entertainment was boxing, oompah bands, and Reader's Digest and what passed for transportation were cars you had to stand in front of and crank. So what makes us think their ideas about *gender* were so all-fired smart compared to the directions we're heading in now?
If the Southern Baptists *and their admirers* really wanted to end exploitation of the involuntarily prostituted as much as they claim they do then they're going about it almost exactly wrong?
[** And amidst of that transition, by the way, were women more or less respected or more or less economically, politically, socially empowered overall in 1908 compared to 2008? Or even 1978 to 2008? For all the fuss about the 3rd-wave of feminism, when it came to sex 3rd-wavers made the then-nearly-unthinkable proposition that men weren't necessary for the existence of women's sexuality (as anti-feminists proposed), nor were other women the preferable substitutes (as proposed by 70's-era separatist "rad-fems") because *every* human's sexuality resides in *them individually* and not in the presence or absence of her (or for men his) partners. --fl]
[*** So gee, just exactly what useful information did men bring home for their "pure" partners when, as in Kinsey's day, they went (or their fathers took them!!!) to prostitutes to "learn" what to do? --fl]
[**** And, as always, if you're sure this characterization doesn't include you congratulations! But pass the word along. --fl]
Photo "Stoicism" by Flickr user Pulpolux !!!. Used under a Creative Commons license.
You've probably noticed one of my mini-crusades is getting men to notice their partner's interest in sex tends to go *beyond* satisfying them. And that I've also posted a fair amount about how for the last 150 years, at least, doctors have done a lot to promote that idea (even though for nearly 2000 prior more than half their work, and income, came from treating women for "hysteria," which was cured by massaging the "pelvis" until she "achieved hysterical paroxysm.")
Oh, and worse, for the last few months I've been talking offline with a number of women who's partners have survived prostate damage (which often destroys the nerves and/or tissue involved with erection and orgasm) and they're all pretty bitter about the attitudes they're getting from doctors, family members, and even partners when they ask if their partners will ever be able to have sex with them again. Because a lot of people evidently think they're being, oh, selfish and uncaring, or that "as women" (and usually by the time someone's husband has prostate surgery they mean "as *older* women") they ought to be relieved to be done with sex.
I haven't posted as much about it but some years ago I took medication for situational depression and like you and a *lot* of other people it threw a wrench in my libido. Or not so much that (I was still interested and it still felt nice) as being able to have an orgasm. That had consequences for me, sure, but the ramifications affected my partner as well.
So anyway, when Anastasia of Sexualité talked about her healthcare provider's discomfort with a medication he's giving her it made me want to break out in hives.
He then asked me if I was having any side effects from the current dosage. I told him that I yawned a lot during the day. He said that was a normal side effect….
“And then there’s my libido. That practically doesn’t exist. Lucky I don’t have a sex life.”
...his face reddened, “Apart from that…”
"Apart from that?" WTF?!?!? For all the reasons I've listed above it's really troubling when caregivers aren't comfortable dealing with it when they've put else's libido in the cupboard.
Just to be clear it's not that I think everyone should have some pre-determined libido, it's that I don't think *anyone* should be able to determine that for someone else. And it's not that I think everyone should have some baseline sex life, it's that for a lot of men and women and any partners they might have a suppressed libido or extinction of capability is not a trivial side-effect.
Caregivers who can't get over their squeamishness really ought to find work in garden shops or real-estate instead. They'll be happier and their former patients will almost certainly be *much* happier.
And by the way, anyone else find themselves in the same situation where they've been stonewalled (maybe "blush-walled" is a better term?) over their own, or their partner's, post-care libidos?
[Please note: I'm *not* saying doctors or other healthcare providers are bad. I know other doctors who take libido-hampering side-effects very seriously in both their male and female patients. So it's the "modesty" factor, not the medical factor that continues to bug me. --fl]
My *real* problem with prostitution, by the way, has nothing to do with morality, or some arrogant assumption that not just some but *all* women who do it are enslaved, or some property-based, dependency-based assumptions about monogamy and fidelity, or because I somehow agree with the (egregious) tradition that in order for most women to be deprived (virgins/madonnas) some women must be debased ("whores.")
No, what really bugs me about it is the assumption we men have that we're such loathsome bags of shit that we have to pay people to have sex with us. That the sex we want to have is so loathsome and perverted that no one would want to do it with us without bribery.** Add the pathetic belief that "good" women would never do that sort of stuff, or if they would it would have to be with someone else with a bigger (a.k.a. "worthier") penis or income, or if they did it with us during courtship it was "just to keep us interested" and all that so-on-and-so-on. (Oh, and throw in the notion that *if* one of our partners *would* do such things with us at all, let alone do it cheerily, let alone initiate it all on her own, then she must be some kind of "whore" and we're back to brooding over the "no-sex" class paradigm all over again... but I digress.)
Could there be prostitution if we men didn't believe we were the despicable scum of the earth? Sure! Would it at all resemble prostitution as perceived today? Hard to imagine.
Would we all, men and women, just generally have healthy, happy, diverse, uncomplicated, and appropriate to each individual sex lives if men got over the idea that their partners were slumming out of love (spouses) or commercial gain (prostitutes)?*** Hard to imagine not.
[** Can't find the reference but something like 95% of all commercial heterosexual transactions worldwide involve only vaginal intercourse, fellatio, or "hand jobs." Yes, lots of other acts can be purchased from prostitutes and some of it is, but even with 31 flavors including, I think, at least one new "flavor of the month" a month Baskin-Robbins still sells mostly... vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream. --fl]
[*** And, correspondingly, if didn't feel corresponding pressure to "settle." --fl]
In her post entitled Don't Call It Rape, Echidne of the Snakes discusses the case involving Tory Bowen, the alleged rape victim who was not allowed to use the word "rape" in her testimony. Echidne quotes from a recent article in the Kansas City Star:
But a judge prohibited her from uttering the word “rape” in front of a jury. The term “sexual assault” also was taboo, and Bowen could not refer to herself as a victim or use the word “assailant” to describe the man who allegedly raped her.
The defendant’s presumption of innocence and right to a fair trial trumps Bowen’s right of free speech, said the Lincoln, Neb., judge who issued the order.
The comments posted by Echidne's readers reflect the range of reactions in the feminist blogosphere to this case and other publicized rape trials. Legal professionals and those acquainted with the criminal justice system are not troubled by the language restrictions. Readers who do not have the knowledge of law and the rules of evidence are outraged that the alleged victim was virtually silenced and the charges against the alleged assailant were dropped. Echidne and her readers should be commended for discussing this emotional topic without the sorry spectacle of vitriol and name-calling, such as taunts of "rape apologist," for any commenter who spoke in favor of the language restrictions.
In June 2007, Figleaf wrote an insightful post about this case, The No-Sex Class: Disquieting Conversations About Rape, citing the criticisms made by Dalia Lithwick of Slate and Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon. Since there have been so many developments since June, 2007, here is a summary for those unfamiliar with this case.
October 31, 2004
The date of the alleged rape of Tory Bowen by Pamir Safi. Safi and Bowen were strangers before meeting on the evening of October 30, 2004. Bowen claims that a date-rape drug was administered to her and she has no memory of what occurred that evening or during the night. When she woke up on the morning of October 31, she was naked, in a strange bed and Safi was on top of her, performing penis-vagina sex.
November 2006
The first trial began October 23, 2006 and ended November 6, 2006 with a deadlocked jury. Prior to the first trial, Judge Jeffre Cheuvront granted a defense motion to bar prosecutors from eliciting testimony or making arguments in front of jurors using words like “rape,” “sexual assault kit,” “victim” and “assailant.” Furthermore, the jury could not be told that these specific words were prohibited from the testimony.
At the trial Bowen testified for nearly 13 hours. She was quoted by the JournalStar.com: “They’ll (jurors) think I’m choosing to use the word, ‘sex,’” she said. “I had to pause (at the first trial) and think, re-navigate (how to say what happened). ... Jurors won’t find me credible because I’m pausing to find the words.”
July 12, 2007
Lancaster County District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront, in a ruling from the bench, declared a mistrial in the second trial of Pamir Safi, immediately prior to jury selection. His reason was that the extensive publicity that the case received made it impossible for the defendant to receive a fair trial.
September 2007
Tory Bowen filed a lawsuit in Lancaster County against Judge Cheuvront, claiming that Cheuvront's banning of the words rape, sexual assault, victim, and assailant from the first trial in 2006 violated her right of due process and free speech. U.S. District Judge Richard G. Kopf dismissed Bowen's lawsuit as frivolous and wrote that there was no evidence the trial judge acted in bad faith.However, in a footnote Kopf took issue with the wisdom of the state judge’s decision. "For the life of me, I do not understand why a judge would tell an alleged rape victim that she cannot say she was 'raped' when she testifies in a trial about rape," he said.
January 2008
Prosecutors for the state of Nebraska dismissed the charges against Pamir Safi before a third trial due to the trial judge's ban on language and limits on evidence, including prior rape allegations against the defendant.
April 2008
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision by a U.S. District Judge Richard G. Kopf to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Tory Bowen against Judge Cheuvront for violation of her right to due process and free speech resulting from Cheuvront's ban of rape and other related terms from Bowen's testimony. The appellate court upheld the decision on procedural rather than substantive grounds, citing that since a summons was never served on Judge Cheuvront, the court had no jurisdiction. Since the criminal charges against Pamir Safi were dismissed in January 2008, the issues in the case were moot. Lawyer Wendy Murphy of Boston, who represents Bowen, stated that she plans to file a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court.
I presented the detailed chronology of this case for a specific reason. Unlike many bloggers who have written about rape trials which received national attention, I do not believe that the banning of words such "rape" or "victim" is proof, in and of itself, of the judicial system's bias against women and/or rape victims. The limitation of language is intended to protect the defendant's right to a fair trial. One of Echidne's readers, Karen Marie, offered this lucid explanation.
I have been typing Massachusetts Superior Court trial transcripts for over 25 years and I can explain to you very simply why this apparent "outrage" is not really such an outrage.
"Victim" is a highly charged word, it presupposes, preassumes "victim" status. Refer yourself to the concept of presumption of innocence, which is the principle that a person can only be found guilty through credible evidence.
We are all aware of the many unfortunate people who are wrongly convicted of emotionally-charged crimes (or because they are from a currently unpopular ethnic/religious group).
It is important that the level of emotion be tamped down in legal proceedings so as not to unfairly prejudice the jury against the defendant.
Thus, in Massachusetts the term "the complaining witness" is used in place of "victim."
"Rape" in a court is a legal term with specific essential elements which must be proved in order to find a defendant guilty. to allow a complaining witness to say "he raped me" jumps the intervening evidentiary requirements. what the complaining witness is asked to do is describe precisely what acts the defendant committed -- i.e., "he stuck his penis in my vagina," "he touched my breast," etc.
To do otherwise, to allow the use of emotionally-charged language would harm us all. the law, rules of evidence and procedure are there to protect all of us, and especially important in highly emotional cases where the mere fact of being arrested and charged leads many to assume WITH NO EVIDENCE that they in fact committed the crime.
Just think how you would feel if you were charged with a crime and at your trial the prosecution were allowed to present its case through incitement of emotion to overcome jurors' ability to evaluate the credibility of evidence in deciding whether you are guilty or not guilty.
ALL of the rules of law MUST apply to ALL defendants, regardless of whether there were seventeen eyewitnesses or none. Even if seventeen people SAW someone get raped by someone else, the same rules must apply and the state cannot be permitted to jump those intervening steps and produce evidence to prove "each and every essential element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt."
Even after over 25 years, those words still make me very proud to be a citizen of this country.
The title of this post, The Troubling Language of Rape, was the name of a conference held by the Judicial Language Project of the Center for Law and Social Responsibility at the New England School of Law. The Judicial Language Project, which was the subject of a post by Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors, aims to identify language in judicial opinions that implies that victims willingly participated in the violence or were responsible for the violence. For example, a defendant was convicted of ten criminal counts including sexual assault, rape and kidnapping. The appeal that was filed contained the words "engaging in vaginal intercourse" or "engaged in sexual activity." The defendant was an adult male and the victim was his 8-year old granddaughter whom he sexually abused over a two year period.
According to the JLP analysis, the term "engaged" implies the child was participating and lessens the defendant's responsibility for his coercion of the child. The language that the court should use is precise: "forced penetration of the child's sexual organ." And because it is precise, the language places sole responsibility for the act where it belongs: with the defendant.
Professor Elizabeth Wood wrote about the need for this precision of language in her post entitled, Why We Need More Explicit Sex Talk in Courtrooms. Her point is that, as uncomfortable as we may be with explicit descriptions of sexual acts, we cannot afford to be vague or use euphemisms in a court of law.
It is no wonder that the story of this case and Tory Bowen's ordeal was picked up by so many feminist blogs. Since I have not read transcripts of the trial, I do not know whether Ms. Bowen was required to substitute vague terms such as "sexual intercourse" for "rape," or if she could use precise language to describe the fact that she was unconscious when Safi penetrated her vagina with his penis. Both Tory Bowen and her attorney, Wendy Murphy, were listed as presenters in the agenda for the JLP conference and, I would be very interested in reading their presentations so as to understand what Ms. Bowen could and could not say in court. But until I do, I will withhold judgment and outrage. And I urge my fellow bloggers to do the same.
Photo "Pickton pig farm #1" by Flickr user SqueakyMarmot's. Used under a Creative Commons license.
S.M. Berg of Genderberg, an anti-pron/prostitution blogger who may have been speaking tongue in cheek solidifies an idea I've been mulling over since I first started recognizing that the dominant male paradigm holds women not in the sex class of classical feminism but instead in the "no-sex" class, from which, thanks to your passive disinterest in sex, your sexuality must be somehow leveraged or else it will go *completely* unused (oh yeah, and *men* are the sex class wherein we're reflexively, instinctively, compulsively, and animalistically incapable of controlling our libidos.)
Berg's idea, in brief, is that we need to improve the world's johns.
The old prostitution paradigm sees prostitution as a women’s problem and thusly suggests fixing women as the solution. Identifiers of the old paradigm that circles around prostituted women are: permits for prostituted women, STD & AIDS checks for women, condoms for women, panic-buttons for women, bad date lines for women, unions for women, government registries for women, “whore college” for women, etc. In my less gracious moments I call proponents of this Victorian, women-as-moral-gatekeepers attitude towards prostitution the Build a Better Whore Brigade, and in generous moods I call them sex worker rights lobbyists.
Can't argue with anything but the last clause of the last sentence.** Oh yeah, and the term "prostituted" bugs me but as it turns out we'll get to that in a minute. Next Berg says
The average age of entry into Portland [Oregon] prostitution is 13-years-old not because there’s a lack of adult prostitutes here, but because Portland johns frequently, willingly choose to rape 13-year-olds.
[A] new john-centric paradigm is needed because prostitution legalization has failed to protect children and women from men’s violence. Legalization should have resulted in decreased male violence against women, decreased sexual slavery, decreased child prostitution, decreased drug dependency, and decreased STD & AIDS. Legalization has not borne out these theorized promises in places like Germany and The Netherlands, where politicians who originally supported legalization have since changed their minds because organized criminals continue to control prostitution despite legalization.
Again a mere quibble: any account of prostitution in Europe that doesn't take into account it's tantamount-to-racism xenophobic distinctions between native and immigrant and, especially, undocumented and too-often involuntarily trafficked immigrants. The laws are shitty, the natives are shitty, the anti-prostitution activists there are shitty... but above all the customers who generally knowingly frequent trafficked/undocumented prostitutes because they're less expensive are shitty. And while I'll actually quibble all day about the dire unsuitability of prostitution models in, especially, Western Europe, we're now looking at two counts: too many men really are paying for 13-year-olds in Portland (and the rest of the world) and too many men really are knowingly frequenting coerced prostitutes in Europe (and the rest of the world.)
Oh, and elsewhere in the blog Berg quotes a Vancouver Sun editorial
It's a terrible indictment of our society that prostitutes are 40 to 120 times more likely to be beaten, raped or killed than the general population.
And Vancouver (even more than Seattle and Portland) has had it's share of beaten, raped, and killed prostitutes.
But here's where a major, *major* quibble with the prospect of licensing only customers comes in: it's not just customers who rape, rob, beat up, and turn their backs*** on prostitutes. In fact even (and *possibly* especially) if the prostitutes don't have pimps there are ordinary mafia "protection" types, corrupt police who shake prostitutes down for sex to avoid arrest, suburban "bum thumpers" who recreationally prey on vulnerable street people including subsistence prostitutes, and, of course, thanks to their vulnerability especially in the face of their need to avoid detection and arrest prostitutes are the primary victims of serial murderers (who've killed up to 400 between, roughly, Vancouver and Portland since the late 1970s.)
So licensing johns? Eh, you might have to license a hell of a lot more men (and, face it, they're virtually all men) than that.
And that ultimate quibble brings home Berg's final point
We need to unstick from the idea that men’s desire for sex is an immovable force of nature so uncontrollable that all we can do is “fix” prostituted women to withstand the frequent violence johns inflict. ...Men’s violence is not about prostituted girls...it’s about communities confronting the male privilege that lets them get away with abusing prostitutes or any women.
As always when I raise this point, if you're a sex-worker with only great clients and has never in his or her life has ever felt endangered by customers or non-customers, or if youre a customer who's never been abusive well... obviously none of this applies to you. And congratulations, by the way. I know there really are some of you out there. Although *somebody* killed those sex-workers in Vancouver and fed their bodies to pigs. *Somebody's* shaking down prostitutes in exchange for "protection" either from other criminals or from arrest. And *somebody* really is beating the black eyes and limping walks out of the subsistance/street prostitutes I occasionally see when I'm driving from my nice urban-neighborhood home to the nice, practically antique shopping mall with its Target and Nordstroms and California Pizza. I'm pretty sure it's not their moms.
The point being that licensing, legalizing, and even lauding sex workers really does go only so far, as does training women to avoid sexual survival situations at the hands of men. At *some* point you've got to begin outreach to um, men/us/you/me. Because *to the extent* we have a right to sexual self-expression at all, and to the extent some men really prefer prostitutes to other partners, we also have rather *high self-interest* in encouraging self-responsibility in ourselves and our peers. We typically perceive ourselves as the primary victims of "sexual scarcity." And yet we're also the primary *contributors* to the conditions that *create* the real scarcity (of trust, for instance, or sense of safety, for another, of peer-respect, for a third, and the list goes to at least 104) that's responsible for the perception of *sexual* scarcity.
(Via Louise Livesey at The F-Word)
[** The going line amongst anti's is that it's clinically and possibly genetically impossible for women to participate in sex-worker rights advocacy. (Sorry Dacia, Amber, Ren, Elizabeth, etc., etc.) --fl]
[*** Why I'm given to understand that even anti-prostitution activists contribute to the de-humanization of prostitutes by resolutely announcing as far and wide as possible that such individuals practically sub-human thralls with neither agency nor self-sufficiency nor (speaking of Victorians!) the gumption nor decency to avoid their fates... and whereas I'm sure most anti's aren't outright gleeful any time a new prostitute turns up robbed, hurt, or killed I'm also sure they appreciate the extinction of another human being more for the rhetorical weight than the, you know, cost to humanity. --fl]
Echidne of Echidne of the Snakes reviews a review of a 50's-era instructional called On Becoming a Woman: A Book for Teenage Girls that, um, makes a strong case for the theory of women as the "no-sex" class.
A girl's reasons for petting are not so much for the physical pleasures she receives, as is true in the case of a boy. Her reasons are somewhat secondhand in that she derives her satisfactions from bringing pleasure to her boyfriend. It is not that a girl is repulsed by petting, but rather that her greater pleasure comes form assuming that by petting she is endearing herself to her friend and thus improving her social status. It is natural for a girl to enjoy expressions of affection and to feel complimented when her friend tells her that he wants to be close to her because he loves her.
It may be said, then, that a boy's principal reason for petting is physical; a girl's, emotional.
Now Echnine adds two pithy points to the obvious problems of the book being, um, wrong.
The writer, one Harold Shryock, M.A, M.D, obviously had lots of first-hand experience on the trials and tribulations of womanhood. Fascinating that becoming a woman seemed to require a handbook, because everything the book suggests is pretty much assumed to be automatic by today's conservatives and anti-feminists, whether of the religious type or the evolutionary psychology type.
Actually if Shryock's experience was anything like my grandfathers (a pediatrician/author who also wrote a 50's-era sex-ed book for girls and another for boys) the actual author may have been *Mrs.* Shryock. (My grandfather's book is pretty schlocky too but family lore has it that my grandmother rewrote and sometimes outright wrote a lot of his work.) As for the need for a handbook to spell out what you claim comes naturally? Doc, logic much? (I think Germaine Greer's "The Female Eunuch" is a wonderful extended demolition of *that* particular fantasy.)
But anyway, if it ever comes to pass that we should find ourselves petting I think I'd sort of hope we each got a little bit of both sides out of it -- the physical pleasure of arms around necks, mouths exploring mouths, each partner's breath growing short in the other's ears or against each other's necks, hands exploring breasts and cocks, asses and vulvas, lips and tongues finding friction in frictionlessness... as well as the emotional satisfaction of each partner bringing satisfaction to the other and endearing ourselves to each other. Because, hey, why should anyone have to, let alone *want to* settle for halves when everyone could instead have, and give, as much as each desired?
RenegadeEvolution having declared this "female desire week" based on Laura's concern about too many women and not enough men in erotic photography, after the "continue reading" break I've posted the three most frequently viewed photos from my Flickr photostream.
Photo by Flickr user Artiii. Used under a Creative Commons license.
This is all apropos of nothing, and a bit silly to boot, not that that ever seems to stop me. Anyway, it's about a little bug in abstinence-only policies.
Ok, so... When I was taking that coordinated women's-studies/interpersonal-communications/sex-education course last winter one of the great lectures we got was on the (as the professor put it) symphony of hormones in the menstrual cycle. One of the points she mentioned was that there are certain spike-y points in the cycle where libido tends to be a lot higher, and that, for a lot of women, that's when they're more likely to be in a "go for it" mood.
This is sort of rhetorical but does anyone here have that experience either for themselves or their partners?
Another thing she mentioned, and I've heard a lot of other women mention as well, is that by replacing the normal hormone fluxuations hormonal contraception also eliminates the go-for-it feeling as well with the result that while you *can* have intercourse more often without fear of pregnancy you're not necessarily as *interested.*
This isn't as rhetorical: have you noticed that either in yourself or with a partner?
So anyway, to the extent that's a known side effect of hormonal contraception it wouldn't have been considered much of a problem when it was being developed and introduced 50-odd years ago: men were still considered mostly interested in sex while, as disengaged members of the "no-sex" class, women were considered to be mainly concerned with, or concerned with avoiding, the resulting pregnancies, and so affects on women's libido just wasn't as much of a concern. (Given the still-primative state of social attitudes towards consent, even consent in marriage. Still a fuzzy concept for some people by the way!)
Nowadays not so much, sure, but there you go, right? Anyway, I was thinking that *if* anti-feminists weren't so male-centric about sex it seems to me that they might be a little less wiggy about opposing hormonal contraception about women. Because (from an *abstinence-only,* "just say no" point of view) something that on average flattens out women's libidos ought to be a *good* thing, right?
Photo by Flickr user boatmik. Used under a Creative Commons license.
If we are to believe anything said by Philip Weiss at all we are to believe that after he tells his wife he wants an open marriage the following exchange occurs.
"Okay. Let’s have an open marriage. And I have to be out Wednesday night."
I said, No thanks.
I have no particular reason not to believe him but no matter it's a self-nomination for official No-Sex Class Poster Child of 2008.
Sungold of Kittywampus explains what the trouble is
Weiss lets us know why he's so frantically tempted to sleep with women who aren't his wife. And it's not just that they're younger, tattooed waitresses whom he imagines - delusionally! - might be interested in his man-meat. No, he makes abundantly clear how he views his own wife: as a sexless middle-aged secretary-cum-organizer who mocks him and refuses to grant him the freedom that any French wife would give her husband.
In other words it's not that he just wants to sleep with other people, he wants to because his partner's "just so dried up" and everything.
And here's the pernicious no-sex class effect: when it turns out she's *not* "dried up," not sexless, not a drudge, who *will* grant him freedom on one little where-has-he-heard-that-before, sounds-vaguely-familiar-doesn't-it condition? He totally hits the brakes.
I mean, look at him! He spends his whole essay constructing all these wishes, and wish fulfillments, and sociobiology, and outright denigrations (gee, wouldn't it be cool if a mistress wasn't any more expensive than a waitress) and he chucks it all up because his partner wants some of that too?
In other words it's not *just* his position on male desire, right? Because if it was then he'd have no problem with her desire. But he *does!* And rather than let them both be happy doing what *he spends the whole fucking essay saying he wants worse than anything* he'd rather stay miserable as long as it keeps her miserable too.
Welcome to the dominant paradigm where the idea is to sleet royal danger and suffering down on women in order to... keep ourselves only *relatively* less miserable! (For our next cunning plan let's drill holes in the bottom of the boat so we won't have to bail so much.)
Update: Doh! Of course! In comments Snowdrop Explodes of A Femanist View points out that
I think it's not about "keeping her miserable" as such, but it's a secondary effect of the "No-Sex Class" paradigm.
Because, remember, women don't have sex because they enjoy it. Therefore, if she wants to have sex with someone other than him, it's because she wants romance with someone other than him.
The assumption is that a man can have "no-strings-attached" sex that doesn't mean anything beyond having a good time, but when a woman has sex it has to mean something deep and emotional.
Mr. Weiss' reaction is then one of "OMG she might run away from me and I'll lose my housekeeper/whore" - because she's going to find someone else and (because it has to Mean Something, and women are supposedly predisposed to monogamy anyway) and leave Mr Weiss to be with the Other Guy.
Pretty brilliant. And it's not to say that *only* men have that "well I can trust myself to have flings but my *partner* might fall in love with their other person should they try it." Instead it's that it's an *institutional* reflex in men because, as SnowdropExplodes puts it, *we're* indoctrinated to believe your motivation *has* to be something other than horniness. Oh yeah, and I'd add that since you're so evolutionarily "hard wired" to be monogamous that *if* you've got any interest in someone else it *has* to mean you can't be interested in us any longer. Treacherous, eh?
That doesn't change my conclusion, by the way -- nobody said the decision to make everyone miserable had to be a *conscious* one. But then if it was a conscious decision would we deliberately be striving so hard to produce such negative-sum outcomes? Which is why I think men could be persuaded to make common cause in subverting it.
Photo by Flickr user fmarq. Used under a Creative Commons license.
The Reverse Cowgirl pithily corrects Philip Weiss's biology-laden male-infidelity apologetic
Men cheat because they can.
Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon expands on *why* those sorts of biological-imperative explanations are so full of shit
Women cheat nearly as much as men. This is not an unknown fact.
...I’m always shocked at people who act like adultery is basically a male-only temptation, because who the hell are men cheating with? Prostitutes, sometimes. That might be enough to explain the gap, sadly. But I suspect—especially in our day and age where the older-men-preying-on-younger-women model has had a wrench thrown in it by feminism—that mostly men who cheat do so with peers. Which would probably be mostly equally married women.
...
To be fair, he quotes a feminist who points out that women pay a higher price for infidelity than men, so are more motivated not to cheat. I’d point out that the price women pay goes down the less financially dependent they are on men, and if we could ever get accurate numbers on cheaters, it would be interesting to see if the already smallish cheating gap closes.
The problem for sociobiologists and their evolutionary psychology brethren is that economics-based explanations *really do* explain the behavior of men and women better than genetics do: for instance a genetics solution would have be be more complex to account for differences in gendered behavior in the face of changing social and economic status whereas such an answer is built into an economics-based solution. And please not that's not to say there couldn't be selective pressure for infidelity, just that such a theory would have to account for the fact -- unlike the standard sociobiology narrative -- that both sexes are, in fact, faithful or unfaithful in nearly equal proportion.
Photo by Flickr user Maproom Systems. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Dana Stevens of Slate.com's The XX Factor crystalizes the problem with Philip Weiss's "no-sex" class paradigm-cementing New York magazine article
...what Weiss tries to frame as a radical rethinking of marriage amounts to a code of conduct so familiar as to be reactionary. Hey, what if we lived in a world where, because of their struggles with monogamy, men were subject to a less restrictive set of sexual expectations than women? And what if, instead of working as, say, waitresses, young women could fashion alternate careers for themselves as professional "mistresses"? What if sloppy think-piece writers could conflate the practices of "empowered" courtesan-bloggers like Debauchette or the polyamorous authors of The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities
with the sequestration and abuse of 14-year-old girls by the FLDS cult? Oh, wait, we're living in that world already.
Pretty definitive take down. There's really not much to add though I do have two words if you want a nice alternative answer that doesn't really depend very much on gender and even less on sociobiology and *does* include space for multilateral rather than unilateral libido and agency: Esther Perel
Columbia News Service reporter Amy Crawford, writing in The Island Packet Online has a *very* readable article on the state of male contraception. Towards the end she asks, and answers, an important question that raised a question of my own.
Are men ready for [male contraceptives]? Definitely, say researchers. In a 2002 survey of 9,000 men on four continents, more than half said they would use male hormonal birth control. Male hormonal birth control methods appear to have lower risks of side effects than female methods, which can be dangerous for some women, according to Swerdloff.
So! Should we say half of men surveyed on four continents said they *would* take hormonal contraceptives, or should we say half *wouldn't?* Since I tend to be pretty optimistic (though I do have my dour moments) you'd think I'd see the finding as glass-half-full. Ok, and I do think that's pretty good news considering there have been loudly and clearly stated expectations that men would *not* for maybe 50 years. So... actually don't call me optimistic yet, call me curious.
Does anyone have any idea how that 50/50 number adds up for women and hormonal contraceptives? It's not at all necessary for one sex to take a pill, or not, just because the other does, or doesn't. And the two aren't directly comparable anyway for 10,000 reasons including, oh, say, one's been available for maybe 50 years and the other's not; one's known to cause quite a rash of side effects and nothing is known of the other; and one's known to keep the pill-taker from getting pregnant and the other will similarly protect the pill-taker's *partner.* So it's almost an apples to oranges comparison...
But I'd still like to know. Because even if I can't use the figure to tell if the male contraception glass is half empty or half full that information *would* help me understand whether half that loaf is better than none. I'd rather know that than the sum of everyone's optimism and pessimism anyway.
---
It's a cool article, by the way, explaining what the biggest problem with a testosterone/progestin combo pill (it already works pretty much flawlessly and side-effect-free for 85% of men but... it takes three months to figure out whether any one individual is in the 85% camp or the 15%.) Crawford also nicely explains how another promising candidate interferes with, basically, vitamin A uptake in sperm cells, preventing them from developing normally but otherwise not interfering with other (known) bodily processes. It's years out but could be very helpful... it's also non-hormonal and, at least in lab mice, completely reversible. There's also the (unexplained in the article) prospect of special underpants?!?! Which maybe work by fiddling with testicle temperatures, which in turn is known to kill sperm? There are other, more promising sounding possibilities as well. All in all a great article. (Even if, as usual, we still have to *wait!* And, of course, no word on whether U.S. insurers would cover it.)
Photo by Flickr user mtsofan. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Sexual "awakenings." Ok, so inside the dominant paradigm it's almost a foregone conclusion that women will just go lumping along through life, pressing wildflowers and talking about her feelings, and maybe vaguely dreaming of the day their prince will come... until someone, generally a man, comes along and "awakens" her sexuality.
Things are bound to have changed by now but at least back in my youth such "awakenings" were a staple of the earthier romance novels. Often a good bodice had to be sacrificed, often accompanied by a solid "how dare you" and a couple of furious slaps... that are quickly followed, one way or another, in more detail or less, by "getting it." Eternal gratitude, plus exquisite china patterns, followed.
But gee, Ms. Inconspicuous of The Seduction of Infidelity says it's not that simple
Some women find themselves "awakened" to their sexuality--going through life on a low-libido kind of keel, only to experience a sort of sexual renaissance later in life.
Others remain on the same level forever--either low, average or high. As long as I can remember, I've been a sexual being in some way, shape or form
So... predictable figleaf pattern here would be for me to wax all poetic or wroth or something about women and the "no-sex" class, but I'm going to ask instead where the notion comes from that, as members of the sex class, men just automatically come activated right out of the box.
I ask because while I don't remember a specific "oh yeah, that was it" moment I have a couple of other, very distinct ones including an invitation when I was six from a girl around my age who coaxed me to explore behind an old building in our neighborhood. Another was the not-quite-innocent-but-close realization that if the women's swimsuits in the Sears catalog said "pull up briefs" it implied they could also be pulled down. And another moment, in my early twenties when a partner said "if you keep kissing me like that you can have me," and again in thirties, when a partner put my arms to my sides and said "I'm doing this."
So... thing is I couldn't pick just one of those... or one of the other "awakenings" that kept springing to mind while I was getting supper ready. And I couldn't pick one because, really, I'm pretty sure even the earliest ones I can remember aren't *the* awakening, nor do I think the first one was probably much of a big deal.
But here's the thing: each one of those things wasn't so much an awakening as a *reawakening.* A new window opening letting in more light, a new door opening to a corridor of discovery. Sometimes I found them myself, other times I was shown.
Feel free to call my bluff on my next assertion but... I'm guessing that to the extent someone's sexuality gets "awakened" it's probably an experience similar to mine, and not so much like the fabled "Oh Captain Kirk, what is this thing your people call 'sex?'" moment.
Of course I really *am* inviting you to call my bluff. I just saw that snippet from Ms I., and thought it sounded familiar, and thought I ought to ask. So. Opinions? Did you have a moment where you've felt "awakened?" Was it a one-time deal or was it for you, as it was for me, more of a series of reawakenings?
Photo by Flickr user JoeBehrPalmSprings. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Lynne Murray of Body Impolitic says of the 2002 documentary entitled Searching for Debra Winger directed by Rosanna Arquette.
Arquette interviewed “older” actresses, who are essentially an endangered species in Hollywood.
...
As the actresses in Searching point out in amusing, though crazy-making examples, getting a part or not getting a part will often depend on whether the male decision maker deems them as “fuckable.”
Daryl Hannah came close to the issue when she talked about how, when she played the mother of a teenager, she was required to wear an ugly brown wig and flour-sack-style, shapeless dress. Her question was, why can’t mothers of teenagers look like the beautiful, blondes at the table? Well, yeah, some do. But the deeper question is why is only blonde and thin is deemed desirable at any age? Whoopi Goldberg addressed this question with total candor. “Aunts are cool. Aunts fuck,” she said. “Grandmas fuck.” To quote Jan and Dean, “Go Granny, go!” It was well worth watching the DVD just to hear Whoopi Goldberg’s comments.
It's kind of a good question, eh? It's not even that it's stupid or short-sighted to pigenhole actresses so narrowly. (Murray's post quotes from The First Wive's Club, "There are only three ages for women in Hollywood - Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.") It's also (excuse me for being crass and seemingly single-minded) stupid and short-sighted to pigenhole the definition of "fuckability." Or even "babe." (And at least nobody in the article mentioned the risible "cougar," which seems to mean someone who's still interested in sex even though she's old enough to buy her own car and not just drive one.)
Photo by Flickr user mac42. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Kink in exile, who works for international charity groups and moonlights on the side as a sex-worker recounts a funny-on-the-surface, scary-underneath anecdote
A while ago I was working in a private show booth at a peep show. I had a guy come in with a special request.
...
"Dominate me." It wasn’t a command; more like a whispered plea. ... How do you dominate someone through a glass wall?
...
But as soon as the guy’s orgasm was over he turned beet red. He practically burrowed into the wall while trying to simultaneously put his pants on, shove a very generous tip into my box, and apologies for making me do that. Pants on, he ran out of the both faster than any customer before or since.
It breaks my heart that anyone would be so ashamed of their desires. I swear, I want to take them home like lost puppy dogs.
The relationship between sex workers and customers is far more complex than most people give them credit for. On the one hand if one felt sex work was a bad idea one might feel irked that the guy, no matter how shy or how sincere his apology, sought to pay someone to do something *he believes* was demeaning to her. But then you might miss the opportunity to be justifiably compassionate for someone so benighted he can't imagine women wanting to be sexual, let alone sexually dominant *without* unless someone pays them to be. The point being that while it's pretty great that Kink in Exile was there for him *his* homelife, the place where all that baggage surely remains packed, may not be much fun for him... or his partner or partners.
Anyway, I think people get the idea I'm hostile to sex work in general, and maybe prostitution in particular, because I say things like that about customers. But the thing is I'm *not* hostile to it, I'm just aggravated, concerned, and impatient with it's *overall current state.*
Which involves too many circumstances like Kink in Exile's where someone already deeply conflicted comes in, requests and receives a particular activity, and then rushes out the door ashamed (maybe ok) and *apologizing* for... requesting and receiving the activity. So I'm going to repeat, without focusing too narrowly on that one individual, what's the overall consequence of customers who feel that conflicted?
One hopes they're enormously thankful that someone's out there who can accomodate their particular hot buttons, and one is sure that often that's exactly how they feel. But... there's also a very strong tendency for people, once their arousal hormones subside, to feel loathing not only for themselves but the people they feel "enable" them. This is how the serial killler Gary Ridgeway felt about the prostitutes he initially hired, then hired and murdered, and then possibly just murdered. The point being not (obviously) that conflicted customers become serial killers of prostitutes but that the continuum of conflicted feelings can extend in directions other than gratitutde.
So when I say I'm impatient with sex work as it stands I mean I wish it was legal enough, and customers and the friends, family, and acquaintances of customers, were mature and well-informed enough that people recognized that sex workers -- like psychiatrists, dentists, proctologists, and other health providers -- are trained and able to meet possibly embarrassing needs of their clients without themselves being being embarrassed or degraded. I'm *not* saying it's the responsibility of sex workers to councel, educate, or even engage customers in order to promote a better understanding. I *am* saying I'm aggravated, concerned, and impatient that such understanding is not in evidence (as evidenced by, for instance, Kink in Exile's customer.) And I feel that way because I believe the status quo puts sex worker's lives, safety, and legal freedoms at risk.
And here's another element of the equation with that customer I'm concerned about. If he leaves, ashamed and apologetic, and believing he's just paid someone to demean herself for his gratification (which, remember, wasn't Kink in Exile's experience of it) then what, exactly, is going to be his sexual, let alone emotional, relationship with his partner at home?
We already know "whore" is a pretty common put-down for women who don't fit, especially, men's ideas of women's sexual propriety. (Remember the flip side of the "no-sex" class paradigm: women not only *aren't* naturally sexual but *shouldn't* be!) So what if this guy accidentally let's slip his "filthy secret" and his partner says "Oh sweetie is that all? No problem... now touch your toes." To be honest that would be wonderful and they'd live happily ever after. But... also to be honest... I don't see it happening. First because he *clearly* doesn't think it's appropriate in the first place, and second because he can go pay already "sullied" peep-show operators or maybe "pro-doms" to take that hit.
My point is, over and over again, that it's not a *problem* that there are people... mostly but not exclusively women... who will indulge their customer's fantasies and/or urges. In fact there's nothing wrong with that at all. Nor, for that matter, is it a problem that men who know exactly what they're doing and don't have any conflicts would hire prostitutes either. Instead my point is it's *exactly a problem* that there are customers like Kink in Exiles. It's a problem that many customers -- too many -- are like hers.
Am I even saying that if it's detected it's the sex-worker's responsibility to work to alter a customer's negative, two-faced, and incorrect attitudes not only towards them but towards other, non-paid partners in his life? Not necessarily.
I *am* saying, however, that too much of the indirect, "collateral" harm done by prostitution in the world is done because too many customers, and too many people who see themselves as "too good" to become customers, have those dangerously, amounts-to-misogynistically alienated attitudes.
Sure only "whores" have sex willingly? So much more reason to lacerate your daughters with FGM. Sure "whores" are already impure anyway? So much more reason to choose one of them when you're looking for someone to rob, rough up, rape, or serially murder. Feel conflicted about "out of the ordinary**" sex with women? Well then if hiring a "free" woman gives you too much of the willies then how about a nice *really* "out of it" target like an substance-abuser/subsistance prostitute? Or a trafficked one? You already feel horrible about yourself so... why not go whole hog?
Bottom line is that I feel absolutely unambiguously that prostitution (as opposed to involuntary sexual slavery... or any kind of slavery) ought to be legal because I believe that's the best way to protect *all* sex workers (and not just all the *other* kinds of sex workers *except* prostitutes.) But I agree with... a subset of sex-work opponents that *merely* legalizing it won't solve the underlying social problems that leave us with customers running away in shame, relieved that the "good" women in your life have been "spared."
Unlike anti-sex-worker activists I just happen think the solution is to get rid of the attitudes, not the sex workers. (In fact anti-sex-workers often *contribute* to the problem by characterizing sex workers as drones, slaves, and indeed never naturally interested in "kinks," as well as characterizing customers as *already* irredeemable evildoers. Instead of hung-up bozos.***)
[** Remember, despite all talk of desperate customers seeking "unusual" services, for too many customers what counts as "unusual" is... oral sex, hand-jobs, and maybe anal intercourse. Sure, Kink in Exile's customer was a little further across the lane markers but... not so much further over that he should have felt so conflicted. Which is, again, why I consider it a warning sign.) --fl]
[*** If you as a customer, or your personal customers, are not hung-up bozos then good for you, you're obviously not who I'm worrying about. On the other hand who I *am* worrying about is making *your* life a heck of a lot harder. --fl]
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...
Photo by Flickr user John Kannenberg. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon says
Oh man, Abstinence Clearinghouse has started a blog, presumably so people can write about all the sex they’re not having. It’s brilliant, like almost like it’s a parody, except it’s not. I loved this post.
Virginity is an asset that holds its value well.
...
And if you hang onto your virginity, unlike other assets, it pretty much is guaranteed to lose its value over time. Though it’s a result of unfair prejudice, the reality is that the older the virgin, the more people tend to classify the virginity as a social awkwardness to outright weirdness. Most virgins over a certain age feel their virginity is an albatross. Even if you’re holding onto it for religious reasons, there’s a point where you choice drifts from “cute example of religious devotion” to “eccentricity bordering on antisocial levels of self-righteousness, perhaps masking deep insecurities”.
Yeah, I sort of have to agree with Marcotte's question and... I'm sort of wondering why the Abstinence Clearinghouse doesn't have a whole section celebrating 30-year-old, 50-year-old, and life-long virgins. Because sort of by (their) definition the longer you hold out the better.
John Ruskin kept his virginity from February 8, 1819 all the way to January 20, 1900 yet a search of Abstinence Clearinghouse yields nothing! Thoreau isn't found either, but maybe that's because he only made it 44 years (before dying, not before having sex.)
Image source: Wikipedia.What stuns me, though, is that they completely ignore John Harvey Kellogg (he of corn flake fame) kept his virginity for *91 years,* including more than *forty years* of marriage! Kellogg was a tireless advocate for abstinence. According to his Wikipedia entry
He warned that many types of sexual activity, including many “excesses” that couples could be guilty of within marriage, were against nature, and therefore, extremely unhealthy. He drew on the warnings of William Acton and expressed support for the work of Anthony Comstock. He appears to have gone beyond his own advice, since though he and his wife were married for over forty years, they never had sexual intercourse and had separate bedrooms all their lives.
I mean, here's a guy who's said to have worked on Plain Facts about Sexual Life, a major, best-selling pro-abstienence tract *on his honeymoon!* If *anyone's* virginity held it's value well then surely it was he!!! And yet they totally turn their backs on him!
Oh wait, all the people I've mentioned were abstinent *men!* Nobody values chastity in men because nobody's willing to *pay* for male virginity.
Seriously, I grew up in the south where there were (and are!) still "dry" counties where the sale of all beverages containing alcohol. Consequently those counties also have "moonshiners," who make money (sometimes *huge* money) smuggling and selling alcohol into those dry counties. And ya wanna know a secret? If those counties dropped their own private prohibitions then moonshiners would be off the gravy train and so... they make darn sure the most abolitionist ministers in those counties get the biggest donations, with little notes saying "keep up the good work, Reverend."
And that's what folks like the Abstinence Clearinghouse are really up to as well -- trying to keep a tradition from previous centuries alive in order to reward one set of people (men) with access to an artificial scarcity (one-time-deal sex with women.) And for people who are into that it's a *seriously* good deal -- men who buy in get something of (artificial) value, women who buy into it get "bonus" economic points, *everybody* who buys into it gets to claim virtue points. And, of course, women who don't conform and therefore undercut the "market" get to be sluts and (tellingly) *cheap* whores!
What bitter, cynical expectations of human beings -- women and men -- they have. What bitter, cynical expectations of women and men they *create!*
%#!@$%!