Recently in The No-Sex Class Category
Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that's me.) Used under a Creative Commons license.
Dodai of Jezebel says
Something Once Regarded As Exotic Has Become Commonplace
"According to the first academic, peer-reviewed studies of vibrator use, it is nearly as common an appliance in American households as the drip coffee maker or toaster oven."
By coincidence at almost the exact moment she posted her piece I was reviewing a photo I'd taken in the Electricity Hall at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History during our recent family vacation in Washington, D.C. The photo was of a bunch of early American home appliances. Among them were now-100-year-old fans, toasters, waffle irons, and mixers from the turn of the 20th Century. But, oddly, no 100-year-old vibrators.
Which might not sound like much of an omission.
Except that, as Rachel Maines meticulously detailed in The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)
The electrification of the home proceeded rapidly after the introduction of electric lights in 1878, and predictably, women were significant consumers of electric appliances. The first home appliance to be electrified was the sewing machine, in 1889, followed in the next ten years by the fan, the teakettle, the toaster, and the vibrator. The last preceded the electric vacuum cleaner by some nine years, the electric iron by ten, and the electric frying pan by more than a decade, possibly reflecting consumer priorities.
...
A one-liner in the June 1908 Review of Reviews ... cautions readers against "imprudence" and "excess in action" when using vibrators...
...
Women were advised [in advertising] that the "American [brand] Vibrator ... can be used by yourself in the privacy of dressing room or boudoir, and furnishes every woman with the very essence of perpetual youth."
Source: Pgs.100-103
Oh yeah, and
During the first two decades of [the 20th Century], the vibrator began to be marketed as a home appliance through advertising in such periodicals as ... Modern Woman, Hearst's McClure's, Woman's Home Companion, and Modern Pricilla. The device was marketed mainly to women as a health and relaxation aid, in ambiguous phrases such as "all the pleasures of yought... will throb within you." When marketed to men, vibrators were recommeded as gifts for women that would benefit the male givers by restoring bright eyes and pink cheeks to their female consorts. ... An especially versatile vibrator line was illustrated in the Sears, Roebuck and Company Electrical Goods catalog for 1918. [An] advertisement headed "Aids That Every Woman Appreciates" shows a vibrator attachment for a home motor that also drove attachments for churning, mixing, beating, grinding, buffing, and operating a fan."
Source: Pgs 19-20
In other words, contrary to Dodai's sources as appliances go the electric toaster predated the vibrator but not the coffee maker.
The slip-up seems natural because just a few years later Freud came along and the 2500 year old practice of treating "hysteria" massaging the vulva to the point of "hysterical paroxysm" was replaced by... talk therapy to treat "frigidity" and "nymphomania," leaving women between roughly 1925 and 1975 largely in the lurch.
Echidne of the Snakes has a lovely, and in this case illuminatingly literal example of the male worthiness fetish
This was how getting married was described in a recent radio program I listened to: The woman shows that she is proud to wear the man's name! He's worthy!
The comment was made by a man...
The worthiness trap is one more necessary outcome of the Two Rules of Desire. Rule #2 says it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. Consequently he can't just have sex with women he has to earn it.
Meanwhile, over here in the real world, I'm... pretty sure that neither the most "good natured girl" nor the most avariciously cold-eyed "golddigger" nor anyone else either proximal or distal to those two poles considers herself, her sexuality, or her reproductive future with a partner as his reward.
---
Aside: Rule #1, by the way, says it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to express sexual desire, is equally critical to the worthiness trap. Since men indoctrinate themselves to believe sex must be earned, a woman who's interested in a man just because being a human being and all she happens to be horny at the moment isn't any fun at all. She's "cheap." "Easy." Not even a whore (who at least had the decency to require payment) but a slut.
Charming little system we've created here.
"He's worthy" my ass.
[Still on family vacation till next Tuesday morning. Still next to no time to write even though there's lots to talk about. --fl]
Susie and Aretha Bright have an occasional advice column at Jezebel and cope nicely with a correspondent who's having a first-hand collision with a highly recognizable component of the "no-sex" class paradigm.
Dear Aretha & Susie:
I've been in a relationship for over three years, and for the past year we've been talking about getting married. Since these conversations started, my boyfriend started to expect different things of me sexually. He gets upset if I use "dirty" words like cock, pussy, or fuck. He said, "The mother of my future children doesn't talk like that."
We're having less sex, and the sex we do have is more vanilla. I like vanilla sex, but I would like it more frequently. I'm afraid that he isn't seeing me as a sexual person anymore. If we do get married, I wonder if this will lead him to cheat. One of the things that I liked about our relationship before, was that we had a great sexual connection- and he told me over and over how important sex is to him. So if he can't get it from me, will he look elsewhere? Help!
—Unhappy Angel in the House
The standard narrative has it that women are always the ones who lose interest in sex... typically because her partner "wears her down" with endless solicitations caused by his "naturally higher" libido.
That's the descriptive part of the paradigm -- the one of the expectation setting elements whereby men are indoctrinated to believe that, except maybe for that lusty, anomalous single moon after sex begins where honey flows smoothly, women would just never think about sex if their partners weren't perpetually bringing it up.
And yet here the proscriptive mechanism is pretty clear: side B of the paradigm is that inside it men believe women shouldn't be interested, shouldn't be eager, shouldn't be creative, shouldn't be ready to say "yes."
Rule #1 of my unfortunately non-cynical Two Rules of Desire is that it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable that women should have sexual desire. The descriptive part says it's inconceivable. The proscriptive part says it's intolerable.
I say it's incomprehensible. Not least because it causes so much misery and ill will in both victims and authors of the ideology.
Incidentally, Susie's advice begins pithily: "I wouldn't want him to be the father of my children..." Aretha's conclusion is equally blunt: "Anyone who says "The Mother of My Children Doesn't ..." - Deal breaker."
My advice, for Unhappy Angel in the House, anyone else who's had her experience, and for you for when it happens to you is to confront the issue straight up! Say "You know, story has it that 99% of couples wind up with the man wanting more, more adventurous sex than the woman does. I don't want to be one of those couples but when you say crap like 'the mother of my children, blah, blah, blah' I get the strong feeling you do! We need to talk about that because I don't feel that way, I don't want to feel that way, I don't want you trying to make me feel that way, and guess what? I'm actually pretty sure you don't want me to feel that way."
I'm pretty sure that conversation doesn't happen often. If it does I still don't think it happens often enough.
Susan Frelich Appleton of Washington University School of Law has an interesting paper in the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice called Toward a 'Culturally Cliterate' Family Law?. Amazingly (for an academic paper) you can download and read the whole thing. Here's the abstract.
Toward a 'Culturally Cliterate' Family Law?
Susan Frelich Appleton
Washington University School of LawBerkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice, Vol. 23, 2008
Washington U. School of Law Working Paper No. 09-05-02Abstract:
Sexual desire and sexual activity long have played central roles in family law, rationalizing its rules, informing its policies, and animating any number of calls for reform. Since the 1970s, gender equality has also become a salient value in family law - purporting to correct legally imposed double standards of the past. Yet, despite the conceptual centrality of sexual desire and sexual activity, family law says nothing explicit about sexual pleasure. And despite the salience of gender equality in contemporary family law, the field remains preoccupied with performances that produce heterosexual men's orgasms while ignoring or rejecting women's interest in orgasmic pleasure. As a result, family law today is marked by fundamental omissions and inconsistencies.This paper attempts to begin to fill the gap and to explore the incongruities. It builds on Susan E. Stiritz's Cultural Cliteracy: Exposing the Contexts of Women's Not Coming (published as a companion piece) and examines the relevance of Stiritz's analysis for family law. According to Stiritz, "'©ultural cliteracy' denotes what an adequately educated person should know about the clitoris, which is that it is a culturally despised body part because it is an obdurate reminder of women's independence and power and supports women's liberation." Stiritz tracks the role of the clitoris and women's sexual pleasure through history, compares past and contemporary anatomical understandings of the clitoris, and then demonstrates through empirical studies, based on courses she has taught, how cultural cliteracy can empower women and bring new insights to the reading of women's texts. She calls for the integration of "adequate understandings of the clitoris" into a variety of different discourses, including law.
In response, this paper focuses on family law as a promising site for integrating cultural cliteracy into legal discourse. Part I introduces the project and its challenges. Part II explores the central role of sex in family law, with emphasis on how family law seeks to channel sexual desire into monogamous marriage and how this effort to manage sexual activity plays out, given the pervasive silence about women's sexual pleasure. This analysis, in turn, exposes significant inconsistencies, challenging the coherence of family law’s own stated policies, including its simultaneous preference for monogamous marriage, acceptance of no-fault divorce, and commitment to gender equality. Part III turns to contrasting ways to make family law more culturally cliterate, specifically, allowing individuals to learn what they can from popular culture versus undertaking affirmative government efforts to promote such knowledge, through educational programs. Part III next looks beyond educational programs to suggest how respect for women's sexual pleasure might prompt rethinking several specific aspects of family law, including divorce grounds; civil actions for sexual harm; and the legal treatment of various supports, interventions, and protections that facilitate sexual pleasure, from sex toys to reproductive autonomy. Part IV concludes with a deeper look at the prospect of a culturally cliterate family law, including the fundamental paradoxes that it might pose.
Keywords: clitoris, sexual pleasure, women, orgasm, marriage, channeling, monogamy, family law, gender equality, feminist theory, sex education, divorce, torts, sex toys, reproductive autonomy, contraception, abortion
Source: Social Science Research Network. Follow the link to download the full document here.
Yes it's hard-core academic feminism. No I haven't had time to read it all (I've got to finish cooking supper.) Yes it gets off to a very nice start
[T]his project, which began as a modest and largely conservative attempt to accept family law largely on its own terms while making the case for attention to women’s sexual pleasure, ultimately exposes profound paradoxes that merit analysis.
...if family law were to rescue women’s sexual pleasure from popular culture, our understanding of such pleasure would no doubt change. Would such “legitimating” efforts impose confining regulation, in turn defeating the individuality, diversity, and spontaneity necessary for the sexual pleasure that animates the enterprise? Can cultural cliteracy survive family law?
Finally, and again paradoxically, if we take modern family law on its own terms (in the sense of conceding, purely for purposes of analysis, its central objectives and ideals), then we must come to the conclusion that this field— which has sex as its conceptual core, which seeks to channel sexual desire into monogamous marriages, and which proclaims commitment to gender equality— would be far more coherent if it could achieve what Cultural Cliteracy establishes that women should be entitled to expect: sexual self-efficacy and sexual pleasure. Yet, this effort to make modern family law more coherent and more successful might well prove to be family law’s own undoing, subverting the stated objectives that provided the starting poCan family law survive cultural cliteracy?
I'll be interested to see if she gets into some of the assumptions about gender and desire that Bob & Susan-Yager-Berkowitz confront He's Just Not Up for It Anymore: Why Men Stop Having Sex, and What You Can Do About It
Via Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors
Anna N of Jezebel has two (trending?) posts that raise a pretty interesting question if you believe men are motivated primarily by horniness.
In 1967, sociologist Eugene Kanin said that for frat brothers,
"A successful 'snow job' on an attractive but reluctant female who may be rendered into a relatively dependable sexual outlet and socially desirable companion is considerably more enhancing than an encounter with a prostitute or a 'one night stand' with a 'loose' reputation."
Translation: getting a "nice girl" to have sex with you, possibly by any means necessary, is better than having sex with a slut.
Along the same lines (and citing the post above) she also says
Thanks Twitter, for bringing us first #liesgirlstell, and now trending topic #urahoe, in which users list ways to determine if a woman is a "hoe."
...
"SmackurFavRappa: #urahoe if u have known me less than 7 days & u already want it"
Because someone who is attracted to you and want to have sex with you must be a "hoe." Nice girls are reluctant and require extensive convincing.
Trust me when I say how aware I am that men really get horny. Often. Yup. Quite horny. Quite often. In fact... :-)
But that's not what the gentlemen Anna N quotes are saying. What they're talking about is what they choose to do about it. And the answer doesn't appear to be "do something about it with someone who wants to do something about it with you."
Which, when you think about it, suggests something else coughnosexclasscough might be at work. (Remember, if you're indoctrinated to believe women aren't naturally, normally into sex then you'll have a strong tendency not only to seek women you perceive as uninterested but also avoid "sluts" who, because they aren't uninterested must have something wrong with them. Bogus much?)
Twisty of I Blame The Patriarchy gets the concept 100% right but gets the terminology 100% backwards. Talking about the desperately no-win situation young women find themselves in when they send naked pictures of themselves to young men
A woman’s social status is inexorably tied to the manner in which her sex is used by men. It’s impossible for her to express sexuality precisely right, because the sex class is not sovereign over itself. It’s subject to dudely whim. The expression of a woman’s sexuality is purely a matter of dudely interpretation.
That's actually a pretty succinct way of defining women not as the sex class but as the no-sex class, a class of individuals defined as having sexual interest or desire of their own, and therefore available for the projection (sexualization) or predation (transactional or coercive extraction) of a facility they themselves do not have (or better not have) any use for themselves.
The no-win part being, as Twisty points out, that when her boyfriend (who, as a member of the real sex class is expected and required to be perpetually in lust and to be emotionally and psychologically unaffected by having it) forwards said photo to his classmates the girl is expected to either kill herself, in which case she's dead, or not to kill herself, in which case she's a slut. The boyfriend of the girl who dies is expected and required to be unaffected by the outcome of his action because a) he's just a life support system for a dick anyway and b) what do you expect: boys will be boys.
In fact the third option might be that a sexually assertive girl sends photos, the immature, unprepared boy is developmentally unequipped to handle it and so he behaves as childishly as possible, diverting a sexual overture he's actually not prepared to handle into a bonding experience with his equally immature peers. The girl, who may be further into sexual development but not immune to the peer pressure adolescents exert on each other, acts not out of sexual shame, which she might not feel, but instead of the plain old extraordinary alienation and pain adolescents of any gender feel when they're singled out, bullied, and betrayed by those they believe to be peer supporters.
The latter narrative won't fly, of course, not because it's more sympathetic to boys (it's not, particularly, despite my passionate belief that boys are too-often sexualized before their ready) but because it's sympathetic to girls (who are condemned if they express autonomous sexual agency and damned to become chattel or prey if they don't.)
The only reason I can think that Twisty would persist in incorrectly calling women the "sex class" would be that a) that's how some really, really old dead people first labeled women and b) because she'd have to confront the fact that by insisting that women withhold sex from men -- even those who want1 to have sex with men, either eternally or at least until men agree to the terms of this leverage-for-sex strike -- she's perpetuating rather than subverting the dominant no-sex class paradigm.
One consequence of her incorrect use of terminology is that she sees patriarchy as inescapable -- which in turn is a consequence of her endorsing a stance for women that both aids and comforts the patriarchy.
Except for that one quibble, and its consequence, I agree with her about most stuff.
_[1 Not that every woman wants to have sex. Another consequence of the stupid no-sex class paradigm is that society is unable to distinguish between members of the no-sex class it doesn't want having sex, and members who themselves don't want to have sex... either at the moment or ever... with men... or with anybody all. The no-sex class construction makes it easier to discern the difference. --fl]
Thomas, writing at Yes Means Yes Blog explains why an abstinence-only counselor assaulting a young woman is a textbook example of the no-sex class paradigm in action.
What he’s done is in a sense hypocrisy, but there is a core consistency. He’s urging young women to say no. He’ll keep telling them to say no, while he sexually molests them. He may even see nothing wrong with his behavior ... and he is probably very upset by any woman’s display of actual sexual agency.Say no; get raped. As long as women have no voice in how their bodies are sexual, he’s happy.
Yup. When you think about it sexual assault is almost the purest expression of women's sexuality inside the dominant paradigm: you're not supposed to want it, it "ruins" you to have it, you're coached to decline it, therefore it's "best" or "most natural" to be forced into it.
My only quibble with Thomas would be that while there might be no internalhypocrisy in a 31-year-old abstinence counselor assaulting a 16-year-old girl there is hypocrisy... not to mention total breakdown of predicate logic... in the idea that women must be taught to be naturally chaste.
If it were natural it wouldn't need to be taught. If it's not natural then there must be an agent making the decision when to and when not to. And with whom. And if there's an agent his or her decision must be respected. Since Rule #1 of the Two Rules of Desire says it's both inconceivable and intolerable for a women to feel sexual desire, it's inconceivable and intolerable for her to have agency at all. Thus the no-sex class emphasis on women having "natures" rather than intention or agency. With the result that a counselor thinks nothing of assaulting someone he's teaching to not have sex.
One of the evening activities after Sex 2.0 (Twitter tag #sex20con) this evening was a screening of award-winning porn, including Matinee, directed by Jennifer Lyon Bell, from the Cinekink 2009 event. Here's a synopsis of Matinee from Cinekink
Actors Mariah and Daniel play lovers every night, but their onstage romance lacks spark. One slow afternoon, they discover that today's matinée performance will make or break both of their careers. Daniel wants to make big changes, and Mariah starts to wonder: are Daniel's suggestions reasonable? Or has he lost track of the boundary between actor and character? Rushed to the stage, in front of a live audience, they must figure it out together.
I came in late and, because the room was very crowded, I didn't stay long. And so I don't know much about the premise or plot. But the one sex scene I saw was in my opinion a real eye-opener.
The female lead leads! Every step of the way she's the active party. The point of view focuses on both of them but she's the one doing the foreplay, stroking him hard, eating him, unwrapping the condom, pulling him toward her, guiding him into her. Even when he's on top she's actively moving up against him as much as he's moving into her.
They separate before either of them come. She climbs on top of him. He holds himself this time, but more to hold himself steady as engulfs him. Once they're joined he leans back and she moves. As she gets more excited she reaches down and rolls her own clitoris.
Again they stop before either of them come. She rolls back. Their hands join over her vulva. He strokes her to a well-acted but persuasive rather than porn/theatrical orgasm. Rather than jump to the next scene there's a really nice enactment of the pause for "aftershock" care.
There were a lot of highly non-vanilla people present and I didn't think the film was well received (they may have just been really rowdy, or else perhaps the into scenes, which I didn't see, were unbearably hokey.) But I thought from a gender-role perspective its hetero/vanilla veneer made it all the more transgressive. She put the condom on him even before she began to eat him. The pace and tempo was in regular-intercourse tempo rather than the conventional hyper-porn bippity-bippity-bip pace that, I think, is pitched more for the tempo of male masturbation. There was no money shot. No calling anyone a bitch or grimacing out "give me your fat rutabaga you big stud." At least while I was there she came and he didn't. In fact except that there was nudity, PIV penetration, and couple of porn-style moans and groans it missed most of the tropes I remember driving me to give up on video porn.
That last bit is kind of interesting: any bumpkin in porn can cough out a money shot, and many do. The standard routine is, roughly, that the director gets all the shots he or she needs, all the positions, acts, and angles, and then they stop everything re-arrange the shoot, and the actor stands or kneels and quickly wanks out an ejaculation. Usually on somebody else's body or face. Whee! Just how I always want to finish when I have sex (but, to be fair, it probably helps the target-male customer identify since at that point he's probably masturbating too.) What's different about Matinee is that she has the "money shot" using only his hands -- considerably more difficult even for porn actresses to produce in male actors (given how rarely they do it instead of him.)
An important point that I probably wouldn't have picked up on if I hadn't been watching with other, perhaps more porn-savvy viewers: I get the impression is more of a masturbation aid than representative sex. And so, I think, maybe the stylized, 7-minute naked-step-aerobics of "real" porn is more effective for people who use it to get off than the stuff regular people do. (Sort of like you might enjoy seeing a whole top-chef episode worth of effort to prepare your meal even though you probably wouldn't want to cook under that kind of pressure yourself every evening.
But by and large? Although personally I like a little more turn-taking when I have sex it was all in all the kind of slow comfortable, cuddly, orgasmic screw I'd thoroughly enjoy spending a matinee-long afternoon doing with a partner.
Anyway, cool scene in what looked like a cool movie. (The Cinekink jury evidently agreed. They gave Matinee the award for best narrative short.
Replying to a comment of mine about orgasm fetishes, of Miss Calico, who occasionally works as a professional dominant, raises a paradoxical point (emphasis mine.)
I think I have been extra, super put off by the post-’70s reactive feminist stuff because so many submissive men fetishize it. I mean I’ve literally had men come to me and tell me how they were “raised by feminists to be submissive to women”. (What does this entail? Lots of humiliating them, telling them how they can’t please a woman, and kicking them in the balls, apparently. Because not being pleased is ever so pleasing to me.)
Um. Yeah. All the feminists I know raise their boys to be submissive. Because, you know, that's all feminism is about, right? Yup. Oh wait!
There's only one way to be heterosexual in this world: one partner has to be dominant, the other has to submit; if the man can't be top in a relationships the only possible alternative is to be the bottom. Feminism is about women not always being submissive, therefore feminism must logically be about men becoming subs.
Or...
Maybe they're full of it. Maybe they're just making shit up.
Because... you know, even long before I started figuring out my relationship to feminism I knew a lot of feminists. Many of the women in my hometown church called it "women's lib," and a few, now in their 70s, 80s, and even 90s, still do. Many of my early partners would listen to feminist musicans and talk about whether they would "come out" if the musician did. In college there many, many feminist women including a noticeable handful of stereotype-embodying, Birkenstock-and-wool-sock wearing, man-hating, political-lesbian, turkey-baster-self-inseminating separatists. I know feminist programmers, feminist document handlers, feminist bloggers, feminist minister, feminist lawyers, artists, athletes, parents, and even feminist sex workers. Many or most of my partners both sexual and otherwise have been somewhere between Shulamith Firestone quoting to "I'm not a feminist, but" feminists. And yet... and yet...
Y'know? Sex with feminists is pretty much like sex with anyone else. Events leading up to sex are often decidedly different since if it's going to happen there's often a lot less bullshit to wade through (compare and contrast what worked and didn't work for Holly) but since when did "steers clear of assholes" equal "demands submission?"
Image via Bacchus of the generally NSFW ErosBlog: The Sex Blog
I'm not exactly sure what the date is for the comic shown here -- I'd say it's a comic from the early 1950s, when both cars and drive-throughs were pretty new.
But there's something not... exactly timeless about the representation of genuine but oblivious aloof women in the face of clearly interested, and clearly much older men that's just...
I mean... the images represent adult women not early teens, whose physical development sometimes begins before cognitive registration of sexuality. Nor do their posture or facial expressions present them as stupid or incapable or even excessively/paternally sheltered. Or even (as compared to, say, wait staff at "Hooters" style restaurants today) as sexually accessible.
Instead the implication is that they're completely failing to register their own allure despite what appears to be continuous daily sexualized but non-sexual contact with myriad interested men.
No-sex class much?
Update: I think I probably should have been way more clear about that last point: I'm not saying actual people would be as naive about the impact of their appearance as the women represented in the cartoon. Instead I'm saying the cartoon was part of a tradition that represented women to men as that naive. And did so at least in part because that reinforced men's expectations of women. It certainly would have been the context for the intended humor of that particular punch line.
While asking intelligent questions about the effect of The Beauty Myth on asexuals, Ily of asexy beast quotes an interesting red-flag raiser by Naomi Wolf
"We see that, sanctioned by the culture, men's sexuality simply is. They do not have to earn it with their appearance. We see that men's desire [or lack thereof--ily] precedes contact with women. It does not lie dormant waiting to spring into being only in response to a woman's will. (156)"
I'm actually going to gently push back at Wolf's assertion. Because I think she's buying into the role assigned to men inside the no-sex class paradigm: that of the innate, obligate sex class.
Having a lot of contact with middle-school students through my own child's membership therein I've gotta say that it sure doesn't look like men's desire is all that innate. Nor even, since girls have always tended to enter puberty before boys, am I certain men's desire precedes women's.
Instead I'll go with two observations. First, that, as members of the sex class men certainly have the cultural wind at their backs when it comes to entry into sexuality. Though it might be more accurate early on to call it their sexualization. Second, there's that business about older men being attracted to younger women, and possibly younger women being attracted to older men. Which, at least in the middle-school phase of life tends to make a lot of sense: boys simply aren't as sexual as girls the same age (though, I've mentioned, they may be sexualized.)
Older men's sexual desires certainly do precede those of younger girls. And so it's easy to see where Wolf (and the entire rest of the planet) might have made her mistake. But this may have more to do with cultural and chronological circumstance rather than an innate, obligatory, class-assignment characteristic of men.
Finally, and this relates, I think, to Ily's point about asexuality, if we assume as Wolf does that men are innately sexual, in a way that precedes sexual contact, then... well... we're not exactly going to go looking for moments when it might begin. Or moments before it begins. Nor are we likely to examine what... well... unexamined influences on boys' emergent sexuality. Nor are we likely to inquire into ways to consciously influence its emergence.
Try on the idea that going back at least as far as old Victorian fantasies like A Man With a Maid or Dangerous Liaisons the notion of women's sexual consent has been, perversely, sexualized! In the sense that the "thrill of the chase" (see, for instance, Amanda's post) is part of the, well, thrill. Certainly for (many) men, and probably for (some) women as well.
Meanwhile, unfortunately and perhaps often tragically, the decision itself has not been sexualized. (Hard to sexualize something that's scarcely acknowledged, and certainly not emphasized.)
---
Hmm... You know, when I first started bringing this up a number of commenters had a hard time with the distinction between deciding and consenting. Some of this was due perhaps to me not explaining clearly enough that it wasn't about "deciding" vs "deciding to consent," which certainly would have been circular and therfore meaningless. Instead it was about "consent" vs. deciding to want to have sex. (Which, among other things, decouples the standard no-sex class idea that women only respond sexually to requests.)
It occured to me while composing the first part of this post that perhaps it would be clearer if I said the emphasis should be on the (usually) woman's choice to have sex. In other words the moment where it becomes her intention to have it. As opposed to speaking in terms of a concession to have sex be had with her.
Speaking for myself, anyway, while I think choice is an excellent word it already has a canonical meaning related to reproductive self-determination. Agitation for which is itself a subset of the need I've been agitating for: to respect the decision maker rather than the result of her decision as it relates to parties other than her.
Megan of delivers the goods on the story that gendered promiscuity/monogamy is genetically determined.
The idea that men try to impregnate as many women as possible while women try to hold on to a provider is derived from fruit fly behavior. Its applicability to humans is becoming increasingly questionable.
Bottom line: the sociobiological/ev-psych model of promiscuous men and monogamous women holds up quite well in (very contemporary in evolutionary terms) locations where... well... promiscuity in men and monogamy in women are either tolerated or encouraged. In other locations not so much.
If you're an adult you can click for a possibly not-safe-for-work image.
Making a rare slip while correctly condemning arguments in the strip-search-for-Motrin case at the Supreme Court, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, confuses "what patriarchy says it's ok to do to boys" with "what it's not ok to do to anybody." First some excerpts (emphasis mine.)
The court was looking at the case of 13-year-old Savana Redding who was traumatically strip-searched ... because some little brat who was actually caught with drugs on her claimed, falsely, that Redding had ibuprofen on her.
---
One of the major problems with lack of female representation in Congress and the courts is that even when men are generally liberal and try to get it, the boys club mentality seems to set in and infect their ability to act like compassionate adults who grasp that women are full human beings instead of slightly comical pieces of meat.
...
"Nobody but Ginsburg seems to comprehend that the only locker rooms in which teenage girls strut around, bored but fabulous in their underwear, are to be found in porno movies. For the rest of us, the middle-school locker room was a place for hastily removing our bras without taking off our T-shirts."
...
One wonders if a boy had been required to pull his penis out of his underwear and shake it in front of the teacher if that would have seemed different than the practice of using public urinals to Breyer. I think it’s quite likely. What’s traumatic about strip searches and sexual assault isn’t that someone touched or saw something previously untouched or unseen. It’s the horror of having someone use your nudity and your sexuality as a weapon to degrade and humiliate you.
Amanda gets so close to the point... before buying into the patriarchal frame that only middle-school girls are insecure, humiliated, indoctrinated, or adversely affected by body modesty. Particularly in middle school.
It's commonly held that gender is created by construction. I'd like to make the bold assertion that in fact gender is created through demolition. You take whole, complete, and perfectly ordinary human beings, look at their pee-pees, and then start discouraging everything that doesn't fit your expectation of "masculine" or "feminine."
What Amanda misses, as do Justices Breyer and Ginsberg, as does almost everyone else, is that middle-school boys don't exactly begin life as paragons of locker room bravado either. I remember extremely well the ashen faces of my fellow 7th-grade boys in our first day of gym in what was then called Jr. High when we were handed 12 × 18 inch terrycloth tea towels and informed that we'd be "stripping down" for showers. Nor, today, can you tell me that the claims of most of the 6th-grade boys in my son's class that layering their street clothes over their gym shorts in the morning is just a way to "save time before gym." Because, seriously, they all look like they back in diapers!
The difference is that body shame and modesty in girls and body indifference or arrogance in boys does not happen naturally. In each case the differences are carved away from normal/neutral. Beginning generally some time just before or during middle school. Which is, of course, the period of time under discussion in the
And so to answer Amanda's rhetorical question about whether it would be different if middle-school boys were made to shake out their underwear the answer is yes and no: No, because such treatment is humiliating for any child since that's the age we really begin to develop consciousness of bodily self and therefore we're vulnerable when attention is drawn to our bodies. Yes, because that's also the point where class imposition begins, with girls as the no-sex class are indoctrinated to experience not just natural vulnerability of body space but damage by forced nakedness, and... boys as the sex class are indoctrinated not just to ignore an equally natural vulnerability in their nakedness but indifference to... or even outright pride or aggression in... their nakedness!
Sigh.
Another commonly-held assumption outside of feminism is that "equality" is the goal of feminism, because gender "equality" can only mean "everybody gets treated like men are treated now." And considering the unmitigated crap we put girls and women through that degree of equality would certainly seem like an improvement. But whereas carving off the same half of humanity from both men and women constitutes equality in one sense, we'd still be talking about equality of damage, of amputation, of systematic disempowerment. Not equality of potential, nor equality of possibility.
Just to be clear this post is not about "whut about Teh Menz." It's not about "but men get hurt too." Typically when one encounters "whut about Teh Menz" it's an attempt, usually by men, to derail scrutiny of sexist imposition on women by raising usually disproportionately milder red herrings. Instead this is a plea to critically examine the way we indoctrinate not boys or girls but children, how we groom them, humiliate them, and exploit their uniform vulnerabilities so that they can grow up to play the NiceGuy/Rapist/Virgin/Whore roles that are critical to the soap opera of patriarchy.
Bill of Portland Maine, of Daily Kos, discusses a complaint by retired military officials concerned about repeal of the Clinton Administration's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy against same-sex orientations in the military. Bill systematically dismantles arguments against service by LGBT people. In the process he casts light, yet again, on another dire obstacle on the road to understanding... and therefore dealing with... the real vs. mythical nature of sexual assault. Here's Bill:
On to the next stupid point:
Team cohesion and concentration on missions would suffer if our troops had to live in close quarters with others who could be sexually attracted to them.
Good lord, not that old chestnut. God help the clumsy heterosexual soldier who drops the soap in the shower, because the gays will be swarming over him like ants at a picnic.
I still think male homophobia is driven by Rule #2 in the Two Rules of Desire: It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. That and the "no-sex" class corollary that men, as the sex class, are innately, reflexively, bestially, and inescapably obliged to attempt sex no matter how inappropriate or undesired.
And if that were true then yeah, maybe men completely disinterested in other men would be at high and perpetual risk. And yet, in (inconceivable and intolerable) violation of both the rules of desire and the no-sex class paradigm, gay men would much rather have sex with men who would much rather have sex with them.
For men mired in the ideology of the no-sex class paradigm this is as incomprehensible as being asked to, I dunno, go swimming in an accordion. This would be thanks in no small part to Rule of Desire #1: it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire. Since according to this cultural convention heterosexual men are indoctrinated to believe they must always somehow impose themselves on innately, reflexively, angelically, and inescapably disinterested partners... it's natural for them to imagine gay men must always force themselves upon straight men.
Which brings me to the next point in Bill's post:
A congresswoman said Thursday that her "jaw dropped" when military doctors told her that four in 10 women at a veterans hospital reported being sexually assaulted while in the military.
...
Looks to me like maybe we should keep heterosexual male soldiers out of the military, since they're the ones who have trouble keeping their peckers in line.
See... here's a tangible demonstration in at least nine parts of how anti-femininsm hurts everybody, not just women. How it denigrates men as well as women. How it scab-picks dysfunction open rather than healing it.
These generals fear "helpless, defenseless" men will be to terrorized of Teh Gay Assault that they won't be able to enlist, let alone function... even though the risk of actual assault from actual gay servicemen is not at all high. And yet they disregard the evidence (let alone heroic sacrifice) of women who enlist and serve despite what might as well be certainty** they'll be sexually assaulted? And not by the "enemy" but by fellow soldiers! It's not like it's exactly a secret. And yet women still take that chance in order to serve their country. But the generals imagine men would or could not? Charming little inversion of heroism we've got here.
So. Contempt for men? Check. Contempt for women? Check. Military brass degrading military preparedness through hidebound thick-headedness? Check.
Next question: does anybody think that maybe a system that both procedurally and doctrinally protected soldiers from unwanted predation a) protect not only female but male service members? And might it not also increase service cohesion, performance, and retention the Generals are all in a bunch about? Impossible to see why not.
Just one more way ignoring gender realities in favor of gender mythology undercut everybody.
[Yes, technically a 25% doh! 40% chance of something isn't "certainty" but... how many people would walk into a dark alley where there was a one in four chance they'd be assaulted? Or even just walk into a restaurant knowing 25% doh! 40% of customers got food poisoning? Uh-huh. Thought so. --fl]
Erotica author Kristina Lloyd of Erotica Cover Watch reflects on the cover of a new fetish/erotica anthology and muses on the seeming inviolability of Rule #2. (Emphasis hers.)
The various blurbs to Best Fetish Erotica add to the book’s list of fetishes the phrase ‘ - nothing is off limits!’ or describe the stories as ‘taboo yet tantalizing‘. Well, clearly something is off limits: men! The desire for a male body is a taboo too far for erotica covers.
She reflects as well on the formal meaning of the word of "fetish."
The word ‘fetish’ is frequently used to mean ‘kinky sex’ rather than obsessive devotion to an object or activity. However, this anthology (out next month), does seem to be true to its word with stories featuring ‘corsets, girdles, high-heeled feet, cross-dressing, rubber balls, spanking, fast cars, voyeurism, masochism, knives and plushies’. So it’s a book about desire for weird things but, as per usual, the cover falls into the idea of desire being solely represented by desire for women’s bodies meaning once again, we get a cover image of a woman, irrespective of the book’s content.
...
[D]oesn’t it look like a paraphilia when there are two sexes and the focus is entirely on one?
I'm trying out a new scheme for making the "Continue reading if..." photos even more optional. My old scheme kept them off the main pages but showed them on the click-through-to-comments page. This displays them in an entirely separate window. I keep meaning to stop posting them altogether but dang it, but I started posting them in the first place in part out of the same frustration Kristina Lloyd expresses at Erotica Cover Watch: despite considerable interest, erotic representations of heterosexual men are... well... poorly represented.
If you're an adult you can click here to see a possibly not-work-safe image.
Let me know if the new scheme works for you.
If more evidence were needed that Holly of The Pervocracy is the real, solid deal and not "a rich white heterosexual American 'privilegebunny' who luxuriates in what you imagine is an oppression-free bubble." A-hem. Anyway, tackling yet more vapidity in Cosmopolitan -- a column about "Guy Truths They'd Tell If They Had The Guts" she says (emphasis hers.)
"Threatening to revoke sexual privileges is both cruel and unfair and leaves us no equal measure of recourse."
Hurrr, funny joke, I know, but still. My body isn't like the community pool that you can visit any time the door isn't locked, it's not something left open by default and occasionally closed as a punishment, it's attached to a goddamn person. The thing a lot of guys don't seem to get is that for a woman to not deny them sex, she has to have sex too. Giving a guy "sexual privileges" doesn't amount to handing him a key and walking away, it means her whole naked body is going to be wrapped up in his and that's awfully unpleasant to be doing if you don't actively want it yourself.
Now that I think about it, there's that respecting permission to have sex without respecting who's _giving permission_ again.
---
So that's the "sexual privileges" part. The "hurr, funny joke" being the "no equal measure of recourse" part. Because, you know, women being the "no-sex" class and all it's just impossible that women could ever be horny independent of an initiating man. Tradition says hetero men must initiate. So a woman who's horny when a man's not, or, even more unthinkably, horny for him when he's not horny for them, is going be invisible to him. (More sound at your back, dudes.)
Anyway, arms-length, nose-holding sexual theorizing from ivory towers and remote Texas ranches is great and I wouldn't give it up for the world. But it can only take you so far. Holly brings equal certainty, and clarity, home from the front lines. And you can't go far without that either.
In comments to this post about recognizing consent as decision making instead of just an answer Emily (not to be confused with fellow commenter Emily H) had a wonderful example.
You know, this is what really bothered me about marriage proposals and about being in that period in my life where becoming engaged was at issue for me and my (now) husband.
I wanted to make a DECISION, together, about whether we should get married. He likes the trappings of tradition, and totally didn't understand why I was so frustrated by his wanting to go through the ritual of elaborate "popping the question" orchestrated event.
Sorry if this is too much of a tangent, but I think that "decision" not only leaves more room for agency on the part of women, but also leaves more room for a mutual decision that is discussed and agreed upon rather than a "proposal" and "acceptance" or "rejection."
I think that's not a tangent at all! She's right that there's more to this than just about abstractly "acknowledging women's agency" and then continuing to doing exactly what everyone's done before. Which, in the tradition Emily's now-husband wanted to follow, boils down to one party effectively running out on stage with rehearsed lines and waiting to see what the audience response is going to be.
Instead working to recognize and respect the decision makers (both of them) there can instead be space for conversation instead of judgment. Resulting in what Thomas Macaulay Millar points out in Yes Means Yes is negotiation as the creation of something new. As opposed to an act of consumption... the use and/or possible re-use of people as supplies or demands.
In one of my earliest posts about moving attention past respect for consent (legal and otherwise) as a result to respect for the decision maker I said
There's a certain sexual coercion implicit in the word "consent" in that when pressed for an answer the choices are "yes" or "no," and thus one is obliged (at least socially) to disclose some information about one's sexual state.
Consider that when pressed for a decision social convention permits one _three_choices of answer rather than just two: yes, no, and it's none of your business.
And in comments Sungold of Kittywampus raised a reasonable concern:
And maybe a second core problem is - as you phrase it - "when pressed for an answer ..." when in fact no one should be *pressed.* They should be *asked.* And if they demur, we're back to no, at least at that particular moment in time.
Sorry about the disjointed comments, but I'm starting to see why you've got one post after another on this issue. It's like untangling a very large, very knotted ball of yarn.
It's taken me a while (a consequence of trying to articulate a newly-developing conviction about a tangled issue) but I think "when pressed" is highly relevant.
Because not to put too fine a point on it "consent," especially as it's discussed in legal terms, really only comes into play when one is either pressing or feeling pressed. A reason, incidentally, why I think it's *especially* critical to move the focus past consent to respect for the decision maker. Because almost by definition pressure implies disrespect for and even objectification of the decision maker... which necessarily then presses the matter back to the firewall of consent.
This is why I think consent is a critical concept for equality of power in sexual relationships. But not insufficient.
Holly of The Pervocracy, who (and I mean this in the very best sense) is in contention to be the Twisty Faster of the "3rd-Wave" plays agony aunt for a limp doodle who... asks for it. (Bold emphasis mine.)
my girlfriend dumped me because i had sex with her on the second date wat the fuck PS YOU SOUND HOT
any tips for next time
If things only got to two dates, she wasn't really your "girlfriend," was she? Unless she became your girlfriend and then retroactively dumped you because of the second date, that would be weird. Although regardless of timing, "because I had sex with her" is a rather messed-up reason, because she hopefully also agreed to have sex with you.
...
My biggest advice for next time is not to think of someone as your "girlfriend" until you're a bit further along than that. Up until the fifth (or so?) date it's kind of a probationary period in which a relationship can just fail to coalesce. Also, don't have sex with a new date unless she's way into it. Not just consenting but all over you. This girl may feel that you pushed her even if you asked and she said yes; next time hold back until she's asking for it.
(You think I'm joking when I say Holly and Twisty have a lot in common. I'm not. Even though each has spoken harshly of the other they're both strong, clear, and rather fierce voices for a vision of power and humanity that transcends their tactical and strategic differences. But I digress...)
Holly's correspondent makes it sound as though no decisions were made at all between him and his erstwhile partner. He "had" sex with her. She may (one hopes) or may not have consented. But there's no indication that he thought of himself as deciding he wanted to have sex (we're typically raised to treat it as a foregone conclusion.) Nor is there even a hint that she might have decided to have sex with her (we're typically raised to believe that would violate both the dominant paradigm's Two Rules of Desire.)
When we talk about the importance of "obtaining consent" or "affirmative consent" or even "obtaining enthusiastic consent" what we're mostly talking about is based on an assumption of an eager man seeking to extract something from a less eager woman. It's assumed to be a negotiation about her giving something up and him getting it. And maybe about whether or how she's willing to give it to him. But any conversation on those terms has a) already extracted something from her prior to the extraction of sex, b) fails to consider there are actually two sexualities in play -- hers and his, and c) doesn't leave room for the possibility that her interest in sex might be independent of his. Oh yeah, and d) putting it in terms of consent limits her into the role of "gatekeeper." Instead of, like, a participant in a social, interpersonal exchange. Oh right, and e) where consent is viewed entirely as granting or withholding a favor, which in social-convention "can't hurt to ask, can it"** terms makes it withholding if she says no.
Except, you know, sex... real sex... isn't a favor to be unilaterally requested and unilaterally granted or withheld. Nor is a request for consent something that appears out of thin air. To the extent that consent is meaningful and observable it is and needs to be a mutual decision made by all parties involved.
Which is why I keep harping*** about how next step up from respecting consent is to talk in terms of respecting the decision maker.
The lame doodle comes across sounding like the sexual interaction went something like this: I decided I wanted sex with her and she consented but now for some reason it's not working out. He's sitting there wondering "hey, that consent was around here somewhere, what did I do with it?"
[** Actually, as students in Karen Rayne's college class said, it doesn't hurt to ask but... it often hurts, or at least it's frequently uncomfortable, to answer! --fl]
[*** Ok, the other reason I keep harping is because I'm still working out the details. Apologies if you feel dragged along. --fll]
Well this is a pleasant surprise! The next blog post I read after posting about respecting the decision maker was sex educator Dr. Karen Rayne's post about telling her college class about a middle-school sex-ed activity on... practicing consent. Check it out. (Emphasis mine.)
The other day in my college class, we were talking about developmentally-appropriate sex education at different ages. I mentioned this middle school activity on how to say “No” that I do with my middle school students. The students are broken up into two equal groups: A and B. The first time through, randomly-drawn students from Group A ask randomly drawn students from Group B out on a date, and the Group B students must respond first with a “Yes” and then with a “No”. (Yes, this means that sometimes girls are asking out girls and sometimes boys are asking out boys and sometimes it’s a cross-gender thing.) The group talks about the clarity of both the question and the response. Was it clear that the person asking was talking about a date and not just a friendly outing? Was the person who responded clear about their level of interest? Particularly when declining a date, people are prone to giving an excuse about why they are not available at that particular time or for that particular activity which can extend hope for another time/activity. Instead, we work with the middle school students on clearly stating their romantic interest in the asker, while being as kind and gentle as possible. After we’ve gone through the class this way, we switch and Group B asks and Group A responds with a yes and a no.
My college students immediately were focused on the activity itself rather than the developmental stages of sex education. One student said, “Oh my god, you’re making the world a better place.” Another student said, “I still don’t know how to say no without making up an excuse!” Of course we put our discussion about age-appropriate sex ed on hold and talked about how to say no.
By shifting attention from the yes/no consent response to the decision behind the response Rayne makes the excellent points that a) it's harder than it looks to do it well but also b) it's a learnable/teachable skill.
I'd add that the discomfort a lot of us feel saying no hints at the depth behind my simple assertion that "it's important to respect the decision; it's critical to respect the decision-maker." For instance we're not exactly encouraged to respect ourselves enough as decision makers either.**
---
Note #1: "I still don't know how to say no without making up an excuse!" Wow. Show of hands if, like me, you still feel at least a little uncomfortable in situations (not just sexual ones) where you're going to have to say decline a request or invitation. Further into her post Rayne briefly discusses other problematic ways to say no.
Note #2: I love that Rayne disregards gender when pairing her students. And that she has them role-play both asking and responding. First, obviously, because it really doesn't matter what genders are involved, and second because it's really important to model that gender doesn't matter. But also because it's important to model that if gender doesn't matter, sexual preference can, and so early role-playing communicating yeses and nos takes some of the "unthinkability" of certain situations and creates more space for later answers to reflect how you actually feel instead of how you think you're supposed to feel. And finally, it models courteously saying yes or no instead of freaking out when someone of an unexpected orientation or sex (or age, ethnicity, class, clique, whatever) asks.
Note #3: I don't want to oversell decision-making as a difficult thing. A decision doesn't have to be difficult before one respects the decision maker. Nor does making a decision have to be mysterious and intuitive. As Rayne points out it can be learned. In fact, now that she mentions what she's doing the biggest mystery for me is why it hasn't been taught before now.
Note #4: Finally, the fact that people feel obliged to prevaricate, make excuses, or just waffle when they decline gets to my point about the coerciveness inherent in any conversation where the desired result is "consent" or "not consent." (And it still bugs me that we tend to say "not consent" instead of... whatever word would be the correct opposit to that front-loaded question.)
---
[** This will sound obvious to anyone who's experienced personal-safety training but in predatory situations players, bullies, and users selectively assess victims for vulnerability and low self-respect a.k.a. low self-esteem. --fl]
A shorter version of what I've been trying to say about the issue of consent.
We've been spending a lot of time (necessarily in the historical and current legal and social systems) emphasizing the importance of respecting the decision. That's great. And, even if at a glacial pace, people are learning to at least deploy the language of respecting that.
The next step is emphasizing the importance of respecting the decision makers! In a system that often only grudgingly acknowledges that objects of sexual desire are human beings we haven't been doing a lot of that.
It's important to respect the decision; it's critical to respect the decision maker.
Another thing about putting the emphasis on deciding instead of consent. Maybe the most important.
There's a certain sexual coercion implicit in the word "consent" in that when pressed for an answer the choices are "yes" or "no," and thus one is obliged (at least socially) to disclose some information about one's sexual state.
Consider that when pressed for a decision social convention permits one three choices of answer rather than just two: yes, no, and it's none of your business.
And by the way, I think the two examples illustrate what I've been trying to say about how thinking in terms of consent allows the person asking to place the question outside the person who's asked, whereas thinking in terms of a decision locates it where, and with whom, it belongs.
In comments to my post about the no-sex class and consent SnowdropExplodes of A Femanist View raised some wonderful, perfectly legitimate concerns about my argument that for equality of power in relationships we need to move even further past a principle "enthusiastic consent" to the (in my view) even more critical principle of "the decision."
In particular he was concerned when I said "...the implication is that sex is something one person wants and the other person has to agree to.**"
So here's how he sees the situation
It seems to me that it is possible to decide "I will say yes if X asks me to have sex", and also, "I will ask X for sex", but to decide "I will have sex with X" seems to put X's willingness or otherwise to have sex (with me) as irrelevant. This, needless to say, is troubling to me.
...
Consider two people, X and Y, who might want to have sex with each other. There are for each person, three possible states: a) Active desire for sex with the other person; b) willingness to have sex with the other person; c) desire not to have sex with the other person. If XcYc then obviously there is no need for anything to happen. Similarly, if XbYc or XbYb then there is no need for any communication of decision or consent, because neither side actively wants sex so sex isn't going to happen (NB XbYc and XcYb are equivalent by symmetry). That leaves the situations (assuming symmetry again) where XaYc, XaYb and XaYa. Obviously, if XaYc then any sex between X and Y is rape by X. If X asks Y for sex, then Y will say no. If XaYb then X can decide to ask Y for sex, can decide not to ask Y for sex, or can not-decide (and thereby not ask). If XaYa then both X and Y each have these options.
If XaYb and X decides to ask Y for sex, then Y (being willing but not desiring sex) will make a decision "yes, I will have sex with X" (which equates to consent) or "no, I will not have sex with X".
If XaYa then either X asks Y for sex or Y asks X for sex or neither asks for sex (which means that both go disappointed!) If X asks Y for sex, then Y will almost certainly decide to have sex (since Y is also eager for sex with X)but this still qualifies as "consent". If Y asks X for sex, then X makes the decision to have sex (because X also is eager for sex with Y).
In no case can the decision to have sex be made without reference to the other person, because it is impossible to know whether the other person has also decided to have sex - and in fact, the other person may never have considered the possibility but be perfectly willing (in a pleasure-taking way) to do so. The decisions are "Do I want sex? (and if so, with whom?)" "Will I ask for sex? (and if so, whom shall I ask?)" "If asked by person X, will I say yes to sex?" "I have been asked - so do I want to have sex with the person asking?" The decision is never "will I have sex?" until someone else indicates their willingness to have sex with me.
While it is possible to make a decision about one's own desire for sex, and how one relates to that (i.e. whether one will ask or not-ask, and how one will answer if asked) it is not possible to make a decision about sex itself without reference to someone else's consent.
It seems to me that what is being argued for is a form of language that we might call seeking a concordance for having sex as opposed to consent to having sex, but I think the OP seems to skate over how that concord could be achieved. Someone always has to raise the possibility of sex, and the other person then has to agree or not. The sex may then be negotiated so that both/all partners know what exactly is being agreed to, and that is much more of a mutual decision together, but it still requires an initial "will you...?" answered by "yes". That, to my mind, is summed up by the word "consent".
Everything he says about consent being the result of individual and mutual decision-making is true. In fact it's absolutely, wonderfully true. And well thought out with many or most of the bases covered. But because it's true I think it supports my point.
All that consideration... all those different cases with subscripted X's and Y's... demonstrate that the decision leading up to the result we call "consent" (in common, non-legal terms) is, um, non-trivial. And in a gender-mad society that assumes enthusiastic male initiation and reluctant female response, boiling it all down to a simple "will you" answered by "yes" or "no" de-emphasises the process. And the respondent!
Which is why I think it's so important to shift attention away from the end result and on to the process for deciding it. Because saying "consent" is sort of like saying "apples come from the store." True enough if you're in court answering the simple question "where did you get the apples." But not the same thing at all as saying "where they came from!"
[** In this context "has to" means "has to reply," not has to agree to. Fortunately that doesn't bear on SnowdropExplodes' argument. --fl]
"Pat, did you get consent from Jan?"
vs.
"Pat, did Jan make a decision?"
This puts the emphasis not on whether Jan said "yes" but on whether Jan had exercised agency.
---
"Jan, was Pat too drunk to consent?"
vs.
"Jan, was Pat too drunk to make a meaningful decision?"
If "consent" and "decision" were synonymous the answer to the two questions would always and unquestionably be the same. And yet...
---
"Jan, did you consent to sex with Pat after the kegger?" "I don't know... I guess I could have been more clear about it... I blame myself!"
vs.
"Jan, did you make a decision to have sex with Pat after the kegger?" "No."
Gee, there was a "gray area" around here just a minute ago!
---
It's not that consent isn't important -- as a factor for determining guilt or innocence, permission or transgression in a society that's still desperately mired in the more... medieval doctrines of English Common Law. It's just that by itself it's not enough to encompass the complexities of our relations with each other or to understand how we arrive at them.
Several years ago I quoted a woman named Scarred who spoke bitterly about the "pickup-artist" conceit that women are "gatekeepers" and therefore have all the power in sexual relationships.
PUAs/symps are going on the delusion that women have the "sexual power." He mistakes a woman's right to say no to men who approach her as being in control of the dating scene. ... If someone is limited to having to pick or refuse advances and not allowed to make advances as well, that person or persons does NOT have the "sexual power."
I mentioned her very briefly in yesterday's post but the dilemma she raises seems like an entire artifact of using consent as the frame for sexual dynamics.
It doesn't occur to men that they make a decision to ask. It doesn't occur to men that women might have made a decision about what they want before being asked. It doesn't occur to men that by convention women are only able to consent or not consent only after she's asked. And, most importantly in terms of what doesn't occur to men, it doesn't occur to men that women's decision to have sex could happen independently of them!
And finally, in the frame of consent it doesn't occur to men that for women the decision they're making isn't whether or not to bestow consent (which would just be begging the question) but whether or not they want to have sex. (Remember, consent is predicated on an assumption they pretty much don't.)
My point being that while consent is necessary for equality of power it's not sufficient. Most men, and maybe some women, need to get that sex is an active decision and not just a passive response.
[Note: Revised somewhat for clarity and to weed out excess asterisks. --fl]
I've been writer's-blocked over this for more than a week, but I'm starting to have a real problem with the notion of "consent" as the be all and end all of heterosexuality. Qualifying with "enthusiastic consent" is even creepier.
It's not that I want to chuck the whole idea of consent. In the context of a legal tradition going back to the Code of Hamurabi, the legal principle of consent is unquestionably critical. But critical in the same way the principle of contracts is critical: a bedrock factor when things go wrong. But when you want to keep things from going wrong then, just as one needs more than a principle of contracts in business, I think one needs more than a principle of consent in sexual relationships.
What I've been struggling over is articulating the disempowering downsides of framing everything in terms of "consent." Things like "consent" implies passivity rather than participation... a granting of a favor, in other words. Things like "consent" being a synonym for "yes" and therefore the nearest opposite being "not consent" or "declining consent," where the implication is that saying no to someone else is denying them. Things like "consent" being a response to someone else's initiative and not a independent act. All of which, I think, contributes to an atmosphere where, despite pages, chapters, books, statutes, dissertations, and legal decisions we still wind up with so-called "gray areas" where, for instance, victims blame themselves afterwards instead of blaming the perpetrators. In other words I've been struggling with dissatisfaction over the limits of "consent" in the context of abuse of consent.
So since I'm stuck on that I'm going to go back to the other huge problem I've got with consent, the one that kick-started my recognition that the dominant paradigm makes women the no-sex class. It's not a problem with the whether or wherefore of consent, it's a problem with the when.
Consider that there's not just one way to give consent but two. When someone asks "would you like to have sex" one can say
1) Now that you mention it, yes, I consent.
But one might also answer
2) Yes, I consent -- I've been waiting for you to ask.
Consent is given in both cases, and under the law they both mean the same thing. But! One of these things is not like the other one. At all. Because in the second (and, one imagines, more common) case the decision to consent was made before the request is made!
One can only consent to something in the face of a request for consent. That's great if you buy the heteronormative assumptions that men don't just initiate sex but men also want sex whereas women** would rather say no. But in real life the timing, the "when," can be out of sequence.
In the heteronormative universe of the no-sex class and its Two Rules of Desire, there's no possibility that the decision to consent could come before the request!
If consent is the only tool you can run into (absurd) solutions like "well, if she wanted to consent why didn't she ask him to ask her for it?" Which would be silly, of course. A more sensible way to be "non-gender" about it would be to say "well, she should just ask him for consent." It would all even out that way.
But...
Ok, I said I wasn't going to get into questions of abuses of consent but... the thing, no matter who's asking for consent the implication is that sex is something one person wants and the other person has to agree to. But all requests for consent locate the action outside the person who's asked. Which, when you think about it, is just more of the same old heteronormative assumptions... maybe just with a "gender neutral" twist.
In fact, though, "consent" is a result of an act... a decision to say yes or no. But we don't talk about it that way.
The thing about a decision is it occurs independently of any other individual. It occurs independently of any request. And more to the point, even when there is a request, a decision occurs before consent or non-consent is communicated.
Which is why I'm starting to believe, strongly, that it's really, really important to start moving even further past the importance of consent in favor of the importance of decision.
---
Oh, and another thing: when you get down to it, except maybe inside the no-sex class mentality sex isn't the result of a request that's accepted. It's a mutual decision! And as long as we talk in terms of consent we miss that rather important point.***
So. While there's a lot more I could say... and would if I thought I could talk coherently about it because I think it's really, really important... I'm going to stop here.****
[** I discuss all this in terms of men asking women because for better or worse almost all conversation about consent is heteronormative. --fl]
[*** Remember, the no-sex class paradigm designates men as the "sex class," the class that rather than implicitly distaining sex is implicitly *obliged* to be sexual. And so inside the no-sex class mentality men there's no room for men's decisions to have sex either: we're simply failures, or, worse, not "real men" at all, if we don't. Just something to keep in mind. --fl]
[**** I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant yesterday and my fortune cookie said "You are open and honest in your philosophy of love." Didn't say anything about clear or concise though so... right again! :-) --fl]
Via Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors, The U.K.'s Times Online: "Are women sexually liberated, or just confused?" demonstrates the confusion between what in the 1960s were called, respectively, women's liberation and the "sexual revolution."
Fifty years ago, in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir described womanhood as a socially constructed activity; today, after several waves of feminism, and a recognised right to contraception, sexual pleasure and all that, we still find our sexuality defined by pop music, glossy magazines, advertising and pornography.
Dr Petra Boynton, a sex psychologist, sees the very commercialisation that makes us seem so free as the reason we’re not satisfied. “The scented candles, the lingerie, the stuff — it doesn’t explain how anything works, it just presents a dream,” she says. “Sex has become mandatory, competitive and commercialised. Vested commercial interests suggest it could be great, if only you had their product."
...
Boynton was invited to go on GMTV recently. “They wanted to do something about empowering women [sexually]. I said: ‘Let’s talk about the clitoris.’” They didn’t like that, “but they were having a pole-dancer on”. No wonder we’re paranoid...
Yesterday I expanded on Sungold's point about the separation between feminism and the "sexual revolution" that began in the 1960s to clarify that while they came into public consciousness around the same time the former, feminism, was about increasing women's opportunities in all dimensions while the latter was almost entirely oriented around increasing women's opportunities to... consent** to sex when men initiated it. (Or, as more conservative factions inside and outside feminism might put it, to decrease opportunities to decline it.)
What I didn't get much into was that Sungold was prompted to write her history in response to a young woman who says feminism is bad because she thinks men are icky aliens and wants no part of the casual sex and hook-up culture she blames *feminism* for! (Blaming *feminism* for hook-up culture? Um... Amy009 meet Twisty Faster. And *seriously,* even though she's currently still in the "I just want a no-strings-attached marriage" stage I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks Amy is *thiiiis* close to crossing over to radfem-ism.)
Dr. Boynton's experience makes it pretty clear *why* Amy, or Twisty for that matter, might make a distinction between empowerment and what Twisty mockingly calls "empowerfulment." It also illustrates pretty nicely Sungold's distinction between the feminist revolution and the almost exclusively male-oriented "sexual revolution."
That's not (obviously) to say it's particularly bad if GMTV's programmers wanted to do a piece on pole-dancing as empowerment. But great mother of pearl it's bad -- really bad -- that they were ready to do a piece on pole dancing but ran like bunnies from doing a piece on "the, uh, nether-type zone" empowerment at all.
[** I actually make with the little joke here. Actual sexual consent didn't really come into use as a legal concept until the 1980s. --fl]
Even if she didn't reference the no-sex class outlook by name (blush) I'd have to quote this post by Kink In Exile
[M]y sexuality is not a political statement. I have seen too many blogs in recent weeks about how all women are superior to all men. Matriarchy is the salvation of humanity and I must immediately demand the gentleman behind me at the grocery checkout fall to his knees and lick my boots while we both await the pimply kid behind the register.
To borrow a line from Sarah Jones — your revolution will not happen between these thighs.
What all of these ideas of female domination lack is respect for my desires. I’m going to say this again because it’s really important: if in seeking do submit to women you refuse to acknowledge the fact that not all women want to dominate you you have missed a really huge point. If you refuse to acknowledge the fact that some women get off on submission to men you have shown blatant disrespect for female sexuality. If you insist on calling me mistress despite the fact that I do not enjoy the title you have missed the point. If you are, in fact, unaware of the amount of effort and energy that I invest into the scenes I top then you are taking me for granted and have not moved one inch past the women as no-sex class issues endemic to patriarchy.
M'yeah, funny how that whole pedestalizing business works. You get to be all superior and "admirable" and chaste and aloof and "statuesque" in order for me to stay perpetually horny. Gee, how gender-bendery is *that!?!?!?!?*
Y'know rule #1, that says it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for women to feel sexual desire? Given how intensely prowess is engrained into men's sexual identities who do you think is more invested in women's sexual restraint? Who's more invested in keeping men "teased" into perpetual arousal. Who's more invested in "pro femdoms" wearing sexualized but actual-sexually impenetrable leather cat suits, whacking men with floggers, chastising them for having "dirty" thoughts, and (I love this) not defining the activities as sex because there's no "contact?" Who's more invested in women spending days, weeks, or months keeping men "on fire" through orgasm denial?
Yeah, that's where the "inconceivable" part of rule #1 comes in.
Y'know rule #1, that says it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for women to feel sexual desire? Let's turn that around for a minute and ask what would become of men's identities as horny animals if women wolf-whistled us into elevators, lurked naked in desk wells waiting to give us blowjobs, begged us to undo their bikini tops... and bottoms... so they'd tan "evenly" all the way down every beach, texted at all hours for hot 8-way sex with their sorority sisters and/or nursing shift and/or bridge club, and otherwise manifested every viagra-spam email title on the planet?
And, m, yeah, hello, refractory period? Bye bye men as the sex class. That's where the "intolerable" part of rule #1 comes in.
Point being that claims that "women are superior," whether as saintly inviolable mothers, or "outa yer league" supermodels with "a boyfriend who could break you in half," or as whip cracking, spit-when-you-walk-past man haters (or, clue, even as "hairy legged" separatists feminist lesbians) it's all about keeping the status quo as completely and utterly conventional as possible.
I mentioned to a friend a while ago that Amanda Marcotte had interviewed me for her regular podcast series at RH Reality Check. Today the friend reminded me I'd totally spaced out mentioning it.
I'll refrain from mentioning how flustered I felt trying to answer and instead say how flattered I felt to have been asked to explain a little about the no-sex class theory.
You can hear the whole podcast, including my interview, here.
In comments to this post tlt had such a great example of Rule #2 I'm promoting it to its own post.
Before I started hanging out on this blog, I'd never too much thought about the fact that men spend nearly their whole lives being told that they're not - and can't be - physically attractive to women. I mean, yeah, why not go straight for bribes, trickery or force if you think they're the only tools in the box?
An example so perfect that I couldn't have made it up if I wanted to: I'm working on I Street in downtown DC and a couple of blocks over, on L Street, is a Grooming Lounge. It's a spa/salon for men. Hanging in the window is a sign, at least 3'x 6', on which is printed this clever jewel of enticement: "Look Less Ugly." I felt sad the first time I saw it. Now I just roll my eyes.
While they do get credit for getting straight to the point they were trying to make, I hate to think of the lines they decided *not* to use.
In their blog post titled This Ad Just Wouldn't Go Over So Well With the Ladies, The Grooming Lounge's founders say that they use that line because "most guys just don’t take themselves too seriously" and are "relatively hard to offend."
Funny, women are told that we could be "perfect" if we would just use this, buy that, pull this up, push that down, work out this hard/long/often/way, put this on, wax that off, suck this out, shove these in....But men are told to just give up because it's hopeless. They're not even allowed to wish to be thought of as good-looking, but rather to aspire to be "less ugly" than they would otherwise be.
How is it that people in parts of the world where no one ever heard of a "lip plumper" or a $50 haircut still manage to have all those babies?
It's always nice to have one's ideas confirmed, although in this case it would be *really* nice to be wrong. Because the consequence of rule #2 are just so bleakly pervasive.
After yesterday's post about The Rules and male jealousy Sungold of kittywampus asked the obvious question in comments:
But where are the potential babies in this scheme? Seems to me that it's all a matter of male-centered perspective: none of the men involved want to be cuckolded and end up raising another man's child. This looks to me like an offshot of Basic Patriarchy 101 (and you know I don't use the P-word promiscuously).
I should have mentioned that cuckoldry in particular, and property in general, is sort of like oxygen to patriarchy. Not always visible but the whole system would die without it. It's also oxygen to a lot of my posts.
The whole assumption behind rule #2 (men being desired sexually) is that economics (and by proxy social standing) is the only possible or maybe practical reason women would have anything to do with men. And by extension, a woman would have sex with another man either because the first man is meeting her financial needs and she's betraying his support by "making him raise other men's children," or else the other man is more worthy/affluent and so the first man loses face. But yeah, kind of a big oversight to forget to mention it.
But that whole "raising another man's children" does raise another point: the rules of desire completely define the scope of sociobiology and pop evolutionary psychology, at least as it applies to sexual selection among humans.
Because dear sweet mother of pearl would it just cock up that whole hat if a woman ever got the hots for a guy because he had a five-o-clock shadow, killer cheekbones, gnarly forearms, soft hands, a quirky sense of humor, an ass to die for, a poet's voice, a forever gaze, a languid, hip-twisting, arm-swinging walk, a healthy attitude, a plummy cock and figgy balls that fit perfectly in her hands, a kind and confident way with people and animals, all the time in the world for her aaaannnnddd... totally similar income, work habits, and long-term benefits.
I mean... that would *never* happen to you, right? Science *says* so! :-) It's all about whether he, or somebody else (besides you) can provide the "resources" to raise your children. And... and... you don't see that sort of decision making in female meerkats, foraminifera, or mud-dauber wasps so anything else *can't* be true! Why... why... it's inconceivable and intolerable to have sexual desire for a man. And just as inconceivable and intolerable to even *imagine* a woman to make sexual rather than, say, rational/economic desire.
Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon takes on the barkingly stupid but highly predictable assertions Ken Blackwell during his appearance on a Chris Matthews segment about abortion and contraception.
Ken Blackwell has nothing at all to add to this, of course. He just screams about how he and his are going to pray away female sexuality, and it’s just a matter of time. It’s mildly useful that Blackwell openly admits and downright brags about how he and his are basically against women having sex and that the only form of birth control they’ll tolerate is the pill you hold between your knees.
...
Blackwell’s argument against the existence of non-procreative sexual intercourse is actually kind of funny, though. He comes right out and says we should abstain as a way to differentiate ourselves from other animals. In my experience, however, wearing clothes, speaking, and walking upright tend to be enough to signal to other humans that I am not a lemur or a newt.
Not to mention that we also differentiate ourselves from the animals by...
... *having non-procreative sex!!!!*
Sheesh!
By the way, drawing all sorts of conclusions about mate selection among other totally disparate species would be a lot easier if the creationists were right and we could just pray away all interest in non-procreative sex.
It seems to me that one consequence of the widely held but unfounded ideology that it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for men to be sexually desired would be that men should feel *particularly...* (dare I say unreasonably) threatened by a heterosexual partner's affair. Especially if it's also still widely held that it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for women's desire to be sexual.
At least compared to the equally irrational relative indifference to *men* having affairs with heterosexual partners.
Because, it seems to me, if men can have (are *expected* to have!) sexual desire then coupling with someone else can be written off as just that: disruptive, sure, and unpleasant for his spouse, but not otherwise socially economically problematic. Whereas if *women* are expected to have no sexual desire then coupling with someone else must be assessed in terms of what the "interloping" man has to "offer" her. Which, by implication, and almost by definition, must have *exchange* value.
Charming system, eh?
Political blogger Phoebe Connelly of TAPPED has a nice rumination on reactions to the Dr. Manhattan character's blue penis in the movie The Watchmen, and on the penis itself. (All emphasis hers.)
Mainstream American culture is still fundamentally uncomfortable with male nudity. Amanda points out this is why the recent Vanity Fair spread with Seth Rogan and Paul Rudd failed:
If you challenged the strict gender stratification where women are for shutting up and being hot and men are for staying clothed and looking, and say, put lean, naked men in a picture to be gazed at by a famous lesbian, you’d have made the point, but it wouldn’t be funny, because there’s no gotcha there. And then a lot of people would be uncomfortable, because you revealed the lie of gender essentialism. But this isn’t funny, either.
In fact, when I thought about it more, it brought to mind another recent clunker, He's Just Not That In To You. When one of the male characters starts wearing fitted, unbuttoned shirts and tight jeans, it's in an attempt to appeal to prospective gay clients to his business. He's made fun of by his straight, male bartender friend.
We're comfortable with objectified male bodies when they are a joke, but not when it's merely a part of a character -- the way female nudity, particularly in action films, so often is.
So yes to the blue penis. Let's hope it makes people pause to consider why it's discomfiting to have male nudity displayed, not for laughs, and not part of some art house epic, but just as a side-bit character trait that no one seems to remark on.
As you know, basic discomfort with non-mocking, non-laugh-factor male nudity is a product of rule #2 of the no-sex class paradigm: it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired. And mockery of straight men who try to boost their visual sexual attractiveness (as opposed to their sex-as-reward worthiness) are mocked as a result of rule #1: it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire.**
What's particularly cool about Connelly's point here is that the penis in question really is just a penis in the movie, there as a sort of necessary consequence of the character having been transformed into a semi-incomprehensible, almost literally *etherial* being. And therefore not really clothable.
Whether it arouses desire in women any more than the perma-nipples in the female hero's rubber costume arouses it in men (this doesn't appear to have been the direct intent***) is sort of beside the point. The expressions of discomfort are all about rule #2.
(Via Matthew Yglesias.)
[** I still can't get over how thoroughly those two rules write actual straight women's sexuality out of existence and into denial. I say the no-sex paradigm is so primarily a male-driven phenomenon precisely because it seems incomprehensible to women. Who, being, you know, straight tend not to find their own desire, nor the desirability of men, at all intolerable or, um, inconceivable. --fl]
[*** We are left with no explanation for why the Silk Spectre II character's permanently prominent rubber nipples arouse neither mockery nor discomfort. Nor, for that matter raised eyebrows from reviewers otherwise too knee-squeezy about Teh Blue Peen. --fl]
What Ezra Klein said
When your whole romantic identity -- when your gender identity, "the manhood thing" -- is based on your ability to buy expensive dinners for the girlfriend you never see, something has gone terribly wrong. And it's gone terribly wrong for you.
The topic was some erstwhile investment banker in the D.C. area who's no longer high-rolling and therefore evidently no longer feels worthy and therefore no longer feels attractive.
He's been seeing someone in New York City and where he once routinely flew up to visit her he now takes the legendary $5 Chinese bus up to visit her when he can afford it.
Klein says "the article is less funny than sad, and it gets to that line that those horrible, man-hating feminists always use: The patriarchy sucks for guys, too."
And it's written all over the guy himself -- according to the WaPo article Klein quotes
"It's definitely putting stress on our relationship," he said recently, sitting in an Old Town cafe. "It comes back to this whole manhood thing. Like, can you be the provider, not just for yourself but for others?"
You see that effect in a lot of guys: not just thinking that *being* "worthy" is the key to "getting" women but actually taking themselves *out* of consideration when they don't see themselves as worthy enough to "deserve" a partner. Putting yourself in because you think money makes you attractive, and taking yourself out because you think not having it makes you unattractive, is kind of leaving, you know, actual women's opinions about whether or not they think you're attractive out of the equation. Which is pretty self-destructive but also awfully, well, patriarchal.
I don't think there's a patriarchy in the "Elders of Zion / Trilateral Commission" conspiracy sense where there are a bunch of guys all running a giant scam and if we could just get to them (and their minions, of course, all conspiracies have minions, right?) the whole thing would go away.
But I *do* think there's large, interlinked set of behaviors and, especially, interpretations that amount to the same thing... only because there's no central office it's harder to subvert.
Klein's subject certainly sounds caught up in all that. And yeah, to that extent patriarchy really is hurting him. It's *self-inflicted* hurt but still hurt.
On the other hand consider his girlfriend who, since she's still seeing him even though he rides the bus, must have, you know, *loved* him or something even though *he* thought he'd just *bought* her with all that money. And now that he doesn't have money? They're *still together* right? Sort of. Maybe. But because *he* feels all unmanned there's all this stress on their relationship.
She's doubly screwed in the sense that here this guy was pulling down what sounds like major bucks (or at least major for one's mid-20s) and since he squandered it on show, now that flush times are over he not only won't see her as often as perhaps either of them would like to see each other, he *can't.*
---
Semi-related aside: There's a larger point to this, by the way, that I might need to wrestle with a bit. I'm... pretty sure most women don't see men mostly as "walking wallets" but that's how a lot of men are indoctrinated to think women see them. I'm similarly sure most men don't see women mainly as "life support for pussies" but that's how women are indoctrinated to think men see them. Not sure I have anything else to say about that right now but I think a lot of the resulting assumptions interfere with both inter-gender communication *and* personal decision making.
In a nice riff on my explanation for why media preferentially show only female naked PETA protestors**, frequent commenter Nightfall explained all.
First, here's how I ended the post
Rule #2: It's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for men to be sexually desired. Therefore even if there weren't a strong bias towards the whole "male gaze" thing for women men will both be naked less and be shown naked less because it's more of an offense to show naked men. Which is, of course, dumb, but there you go.
To which Nightfall added
Because if you are a man who sees naked men a lot, you will get turned on, and become gay. And if you are a woman who sees naked men a lot, you will get turned off, and become a lesbian. This is because modern humans have extremely fragile sexual orientations, unlike people from between 5 decades ago and the dawn of humanity. ;)
That pretty much says it all.
And about clicking "Continue reading...?" You have been warned. :-)
In a weekly link roundup Lauren of Feministe mentions
NAKED AMBITION: PETA has long made the assertion that nude protests are a necessary and radical component to their activism. But why aren’t more men getting naked?
The link is to Daisydeadhead's Daisy Dead Air who uncovers an interesting twist from a reader who says that a) PETA evidently *does* use naked men although b) they have a much harder time finding men willing to undress during demonstrations. (If so then this makes them *slightly* less annoying by the way. But only slightly. Even for people who'd actually like to see animals treated ethically.) Which raises more questions. Here's Daisydeadhead
If appearance standards are more strict for women, why are men seemingly more modest?
Why are men so much less likely to get naked for a protest? Are men less likely to shed clothes in general?
Is this a way to make sure certain parts of the male anatomy remain mysterious and sacrosanct? Or are naked men also more likely to be arrested than women? (Since the PETA demonstrations are covered by the First Amendment, that doesn't seem to be the issue.)
Digging into her comments one commenter, lilacsigil, adds
There was a photo of a PETA protest in the newspaper this morning (Melbourne Herald Sun) and I counted at least 6 naked women (including one who was the focus of the picture) but there was one naked man right behind her (presumably - he was only visible from the waist up).
In other words it sounds like what we know about PETA's campaigns come to us through a couple of filters. First they at least allegedly have more women volunteers than men. Second, though, it sounds like the majority of photographers, and photo publishers, key in on the naked women and/or crop out what few naked men might also show up.
So where's *that coming from? Most of the comments suggest it's not from women... which should be music to Erotica Cover Watch's Mathilde Madden and Kristina Lloyd's naked-man-appreciating ears. But if it's not coming from women then... well... that's why I think the no-sex class paradigm is primarily a phenomenon of men.
Rule #2: It's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for men to be sexually desired. Therefore even if there weren't a strong bias towards the whole "male gaze" thing for women men will both be naked less and be shown naked less because it's more of an offense to show naked men. Which is, of course, dumb, but there you go.
Update: Too late, really, but I changed the title to be even more egregiously alliterative.
Excellent advice from Em of Em & Lo: Sex. Love. And Everything in Between.
If we all followed the golden rule of reciprocity in bed, we think there’d be more sex, more orgasms, less bickering, fewer sex advice columnists (we’d be out of a job!), and possibly even world peace. Remember, if your partner tickles your back, it’s not just because they’re being nice — they want you to tickle their back, too. And anything tactile, whether it’s a back massage or a nipple tweak or oral sex, feels better when you don’t have to ask for it.
It's funny that Em would have to remind us but... we hear over and over... and over and over and over... that the hetero bias towards one-way sex is frustratingly durable.
I don't want to bring up my, um, universal explanation for everything but it *does* seem that if people were a bit more willing to acknowledge that women might enjoy sex because it *feels good* and not just because they like making letting their man feel good in exchange for some other, non-sexual benefit we'd probably all enjoy ourselves a lot more. There'd certainly be more orgasms during sex. And there might be probably be fewer sex advice columnists. I'm actually not sure about world peace or even less bickering since I'm not a big believer in the "...just needs to get laid" theory of conflict resolution. I *do* think there might be less bickering *about sex.*
But forget all that! You know what's *really* nice about reciprocity? It's not the "doing unto others as you would have them do unto you" that makes it cool. It's the "doing unto others, period" that's cool. Because, seriously, scratching or massaging someone else's back is fun. Tweaking someone's nipple back is fun. Oral sex? Can I just make the only-seemingly-paradoxical proposal that while it's not as *orgasmic* to eat someone it's just as much *fun?*
The one caveat? "Reciprocity" isn't the same as "payback." If you're eating your partner, say, only because they won't eat you if you don't? Then yeah, resentment's kind of a buzzkill... but it's a buzzkill both ways. I'd also point out that reciprocity also isn't "I'm rubber and you're glue." It might be that one of you rocks out over receiving oral and the other only gets of when she or he is on top. If so then great -- reciprocity can work that way too.
Megan of Jezebel has a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek post about a seriously wonderful bill before congress: Upstate New York Congresswoman Louise Slaughter's H.R. 463: The Prevention First Act of 2009
The damnable liberals are seeking to pass a law that requires states give medically accurate information to kids! That acknowledges abstinence! That teaches that men and boys have responsibilities to not pressure women and girls! That encourages parental involvement! That doesn't promote religion! It's like they're trying to destroy the very fabric of our society!
Use this page to email your Congress member about H.R. 463 and this page to email your Senators about Harry Reid's companion bill, S. 21.
Seriously, read Megan's whole post, including a rundown of what's in the bill, here.
My take would be that opponents *really do* see that as liberals attempting to destroy the very fabric of our society.
When your fabric is woven with the warp of "it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for women to have (or at least admit to having) sexual desire" and the weft of "it is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for men to be sexually desired" then no matter how hellish the toll in actual human lives it's simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable to teach otherwise lest that fabric fly apart. Women *must* either be bribed or forced into sexuality; gay men *must* be pilloried, sex for women *has* to be about pregnancy, men *must* be worthy in order to "earn" sex, parents *must* only fret about girls and fume about boys, etc., etc.
Never mind that "liberals" want instead to weave a finer, more durable, less costly cloth than coarse plaid of red and white.
I'm not sure how she found it but Jess McCabe of The F-Word Blog points to an archived interview of cultural anthropologist Emily Martin from Discover Magazine back in 1992 that suggests the no-sex class paradigm where sex only happens to passive women goes all the way down to ideas about sperm, eggs, and fertilization.
Take this bit from the article's introduction that turns the standard narrative on its head.
Ah, fertilization--that miraculous process to which we all owe our existence. Let’s review: First, a wastefully huge swarm of sperm weakly flops along, its members bumping into walls and flailing aimlessly through thick strands of mucus. Eventually, through sheer odds of pinball-like bouncing more than anything else, a few sperm end up close to an egg. As they mill around, the egg selects one and reels it in, pinning it down in spite of its efforts to escape. It’s no contest, really. The gigantic, hardy egg yanks this tiny sperm inside, distills out the chromosomes, and sets out to become an embryo.
Or would you have put it differently? Until very recently, so would most biologists.
And it's not that a "sperm make it all happen" model is without consequences
Martin doesn’t suggest that these researchers willfully distorted their imagery. In fact, she notes that one of the investigators at Johns Hopkins was her politically correct husband, Richard Cone. What’s more, Martin concedes that she herself was slow to recognize the disparity between the discoveries at Johns Hopkins and the way the findings were written up. It didn’t strike me for a few years, she says. But innocent or not, she adds, the cultural conditioning these biologists had absorbed early in their careers influenced more than their writing: it skewed their research. I believe, and my husband believes, and the lab believes, that they would have seen these results sooner if they hadn’t had these male-oriented images of sperm.
My guess that neither model -- the bumbling sperm nor the passive egg -- are accurate. With a system going back a *very* long time (while many plants use pollen for fertilization some plants, including ginkos, have something that looks and acts a heck of a lot like sperm) it's much more likely the interaction between both sperm and egg are subtle, discriminating, well adapted, and very sophisticated.
What *really* comes out in the article is just how thoroughly our gendered metaphors affect our perceptions.
In comments to last night's post about empathy, The Invisible Spinster raised some perfectly sensible concerns.
So ... are you now creating a no-humanity class too, in addition to the no-sex class?
I really have to take issue with your second-to-last paragraph there. On one hand, you're absolutely right that a lack of *capacity* for empathy is the way of the sociopath. On the other hand, someone's unwillingness to engage that capacity at any particular moment does not in any way make them less human.
Perhaps I am reading your post out of context ... I don't follow Twisty Faster because she reminds me a little too much of the aggressive reductionism of my own Andrea Dworkin phase. However, this idea that empathy is a necessary requirement for humanism seems exactly backwards to me. It is precisely when we're *not* in a swoon of empathy and do the right thing anyway that makes us human.
When applied to sexuality, I think your position gets scary even faster. For example, it pleases me to oogle cute guys. I am appreciating them for their sexuality, not their worth as a human being. Does my oogling in and of itself make me inhuman? Or is the unhumanity line crossed when I look at their muscles when talking to them instead of their eyes? Or does the line reside where I discount their ideas because they're merely beefcake?
Now, I would fully agree that line 3 is definitely unempathic. I would argue, though, that line 1 is fully within the bounds of other-human-respectfulness *because it's in my head*.
Whether it's sex or CNN or daily interaction, it's scary-judgemental to me that you deem me inhuman because I'm not thinking the right thoughts.
"So ... are you now creating a no-humanity class too" No. Actually "No!" The no-sex class is bad enough! (I don't talk so much about it because I *like* it.)
It's totally fine to ogle each other, top and bottom each other, marry each other, be hot for, have hookups with, call each other "honey pie" and love and hate each other. That's not only not wrong it's *normal.*
It's not necessary to be empathetic every moment of the day to be human. (Even *I'm* not that much of a tree-huggin' carrot-crunchin' granola head.) What's necessary is to be able to reflect on people in terms other than their utility (sexual or otherwise) to us.
What I was going all off on in the first post, specifically, was a particular but prevalent attitude towards other people that's (erroneously I think) short-handed as "porn culture" but that also encompasses
- speaking of human athletes in terms of their entertainment value, as in "a product of..." (scroll down to the left sidebar) this or that school
- viewing political opponents as "magic negros,"
- dismissing someone's aspirations to a medical or technology career with the point that she "with her looks she could earn a lot more money if she 'went pro,'"
- (as happened to me) saying "Your fiance just left you for another woman? That's perfect! I'm looking for a husband." We should go out."
- or, for that matter, of unreflectively dismissing all men (as partisans over at Twisty's sometimes do) as "doods" and/or urging women to refuse to nurse or nurture, as a class, infant boys. (It would obviously be equally erroneous to call that last bit of othering "anti-porn culture.")
In "The Human Condition" Hannah Arendt made the strong case that people alone might be beasts, or they might be gods, but that we can only be *human* in the company of others. Of course she was referencing the world view of the ancient Greeks who, with their bare faces hanging out, dismissed the women in their lives ...their partners, mothers, and daughters let alone servants and slaves... as not really human. What Arendt was referring to the difficulty people have in isolation to distinguish reality from fantasy and, thus, the importance of having others around to help confirm or refute our perceptions.
The qualification I'd add to Arendt's point, one that relates to my prioritizing empathy over sympathy, is that the dead white male citizens of Greece were sympathetic to each other in the second sense of "an inclination to support or be loyal to or to agree with an opinion." Their failure of empathy for, oh, say, women within their communities or the "barbarians" without (the word "barbarian" allegedly comes from their opinion that the language of non-Greeks sounded like "bar bar bar") tended to, um, confine their opinions.
One notices similarly limiting effects in discussion on, say, extreme right-wing newsgroups, libertarian think tank publications, "escort review" websites, sports chat rooms, "seduction community" sites, pro- and anti-porn sites, MRA and "radfem" discussion, and (a personal bugaboo) seminars designed to teach women "Menglish" or inquiries into "what women want" or propositions that men and women are from different fucking planets. Because nothing creates empathy like approaching people who, say, sleep in your own bedroom as if they were extraterrestrials.
So anyway, in the Arendtian sense, to surround one's self only with those sympathetic to your views brings upon one the same problems of confirmation the Greeks worried about: we can be angels in isolation... even in collective isolation, or we can be animals, but not human beings.
It seems like empathy, or at least striving for it, is a clear way to break out of that kind of echo chamber of (second meaning) sympathies in a way where (first meaning) sympathy falls short.
Which may (or may not) be a clearer way of saying what I was trying to say last night. Or if not clearer then, I sincerely hope, less alarming!
Twisty quoted a commenter who said "You just need to get your lost empathy back." The commenter was talking about his experience of breaking out of assessing people in terms of their fuckability or non-fuckability. (See, for instance, discussions of Governor Palin, Secretary of State Clinton, former Attorney General Janet Reno, performance artist Anne Coulter, or... pretty much any woman who shows up on the internet fully dressed.) That seems like an astonishingly important insight.
Sympathy is often defined as an emotional reaction to someone or something else's experience. I can sympathize with someone who gets spammed, flamed, or trolled on line because I wouldn't want that to happen to me. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is an expression of sympathy. So it's not like sympathy is unimportant.
Thing is, though, that you can have sympathy for just about any old thing including the giant poisonous centipede Twisty found dead in her carpet the other day, because chances are it had little baby giant poisonous centipede babies waiting at home for it somewhere and so we can all sympathize with how that must be for them.
Empathy on the other hand is defined as an *identification* with someone else, of being able to be, at least for a moment, in that person's shoes. To haul out another 2,000-year-old phrase, "As ye do to the least of my brothers so you do unto me" is an expression of empathy. (And yes, I'm aware of the irony of the gendered expression.)
Thing is, though, and it's important, is you can only *empathize* with another human being. You can't empathize with a lord-and-master, or a lady-is-a-tramp, or an old ball and chain, or a hot patootie, or a stud muffin, or a dude, or a chick, or, really, even with a "husband" or "wife." You sure can't empathize with an "other," or a "them," or a "these people" Or with someone who's just a stereotype or class to you. You can only empathize with another human being.
And you can love things that aren't human beings (the way people love their pets or homes) and even love them in ways that passeth understanding (the way small children love their blankies or stuffies) and so of course you can also love your "husband," or "wife," or "mistress" (or, WTF? I just realized gender construction provides no male-sexed counterpart to "mistress!?!?") or "main squeeze." But you can only empathize with a human being.
And if you can't empathize then all the porn-scornifying or consensualizing, all the doing-it-with-girls-insteaderating or celibacy-izing, and even all the equalityating in the world is just different coats of paint on the same old patriarchy.
What keeps me going back to Twisty's place is that however accessibly or aggravatingly she puts it, she's all people needing to be human beings before anything else. There aren't a lot of other folks online who do that.
The important thing is that if you can’t recognize people as human beings, and empathize with them and not just sympathetically say “ooh, that’s gotta hurt” when you see someone hurting, or just hoping it doesn’t happen to you, then *you* can’t be fully human either.
Anyway, I don’t know if anyone else sees it that way, but that’s why that bumper-sticker slogan saying “feminism, the radical proposition that women are people” isn’t just for or about women.
The word of the day is empathy.
Thinking about the pale rose flush that sneaks in little islands down your throat and chest that leave me wondering how *anybody* could think women's arousal is invisible without *much* more intimate inspection. Not that there's anything wrong with intimate inspection (assuming it's genuinely intimate and not, say, imposed.) It's just not the only way to tell.
For some reason I woke up this morning thinking about the final sentence in the standard English-language wedding ceremony
"...you may now kiss the bride"
It's is probably the shortest, purest distillation of the two rules of the No-Sex Class paradigm.
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The two rules, you may recall, are
#1: It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire.
#2: It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired.
Saying it any other way than "You may now kiss the bride" would violate the rules #1 and #2 in a number of obvious ways. It also commits the double slight of a) sexualizing the woman (who only gets to be kissable) and b) objectifying her (whatever her name is she's always reduced to "the bride.")
But actually what popped awake this morning wasn't the "...kiss the bride" part, it was "you may now..." part because it speaks to the question (asked in comments by RemittanceGirl, here) of *who benefits* from the rules... who benefits from the paradigm... who, really, benefits from patriarchy.
The pat answer is usually "men."
The more traditional answer though, and I think more accurate, is "their families." Because for all the power we ascribe to men, the message we're given is that (as our English teachers might put it) whatever they *can* do before marriage they *may* not.
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I write a lot about feminism aware of the ambiguities of doing so as a man. And I reconcile the ambiguity by trying to understand the impact anti-feminism a.k.a. the patriarchy a.k.a. the dominant paradigm has on men. And I feel it's more accurate to say I'm thinking from a feminist perspective rather than one of the more traditional avenues of men's studies or men's rights because... well, it's not just about helplessly flapping about how "patriarchy hurts men too so that's why women don't deserve this or that sovereignty." Instead I'm trying to understand not *that* men are hurt too but *how* we're hurt, and to explore how our *perception* of that hurt either adds to or distracts us from how to get it to stop hurting *anybody.*
It just seems like identifying how men are hurt, and trying to find the exits in a way that doesn't involve stepping over anybody else to get there, is or ought to be a pretty crucial.
One of the more enduring problems is that it's pretty clear that compared to women society privileges men *way* more than women... and yet when you talk to us it's pretty clear that for all our very real privilege we *don't perceive it ourselves!*
Since there's probably nothing more dangerous than a powerful human being who thinks he or she is powerless that's not good. At all.
Quick question: Given the weight of the institutions telling the groom "you may now kiss the bride," who do you think it makes the most sense for men to fulminate about: women (either individually or collectively) or patriarchy?
I've got hundreds of entries in my "no-sex" class category archives. Here's my latest attempt to boil it all down.
#1: It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to have sexual desire.
#2: It is simultaneously inconceivable and intolerable for a man to be sexually desired.
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Discussion:
At least in contemporary western society every gender-related ill derives from some combination of items #1 and #2.
- Homophobia? #2
- The "two-sphere" mars/venus model of gender? #1 and #2
- Stoning your 14-year-old daughter in front of the neighbors for holding hands with a boy? #1
- Unequal pay for equal work? #1 and #2 (if women aren't kept desperate for money...)
- Slut shaming? #1 (duh)
- Psychotically insisting that contraception = abortion when it. just. isn't? #1
- "Gray area" date rape? #2 and #1
- Men who initiate are studs, women who initiate are "that bitch was crazy?" #1
- Purdah, harems, chastity belts, wimples, chadors? #1 and, paradoxically, #2**
- Prostitution? #1 and #2, and, paradoxically...
- Anti-prostitution? #1
- The... peculiar... obsessions of pop sociobiology/evolutionary-psychology? #2 and #1
The minor issue that neither rules #1 nor item #2 are *true about humans* isn't the flaw in my argument, it's the *point!* (In particular if the were true society wouldn't perpetually exhaust itself trying either to enact, persuade, enforce, or prove they were.)
[** Sounds weird I know but remember, when each of the big three western-civilization-influencing religions were established women were believed to be tempters -- cloistering, covering, and other forms of impoundment were *not* designed to protect the virtue of women but the virtue of men. And lest we think we've outgrown all that see also all versions of "she was asking for it" victim blaming. --fl]
In their regular "Wise Guys" sectionEm & Lo asked "Do guys ever turn down casual sex?"
I like the column, not least because even when the answers are conventional they're often conventional in non-stereotypical ways. This week not so much.
It's a trickier question than it sounds. One of the interesting consequences of a tradition that requires men to do all the initiating… and the obvious corollary that we only initiate when we’re interested… is that we rarely have to confront invitations when we’re *not* interested.
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve got enough expectations tied up in “scoring,” and we have enough institutional and biological padding that we don’t have to worry as much about consequences (like reputation hits and pregnancy) that we can get interested pretty quickly.
But still, when it happens and we’re clear-headed enough to assess the potential fallout, it would be nice to have some kind of vocabulary to fall back on besides, oh, say
Yes guys do, contrary to popular belief, turn down casual sex on occasion. The number one reason given, “That bitch was crazy!”
Because saying that? That’s more like covering up when you’re panicked and looking for excuses. My suggestion? How about manning up and saying “no thanks, I’m not in the mood.”
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Short of maybe Brad Pitt every single, actively heterosexual man on the planet knows exactly how nerve wracking is to ask someone out… and knows just how much it can sting to get the rude brush off. And so every hetero man out there probably ought to either a) show a little collegial courtesy… or at least “honor among thieves.” :-) Or, seriously, a little sympathy and a considerate yes or no when someone summons the nerve to ask *us!*
And not to put too fine a point on it, from a men’s perspective the more women begin asking men out the more sympathy *we’ll* get when *we* ask *them* out!
---
One final point. One of the more corrosive aspects of the no-sex class paradigm is that men don't just condition ourselves to passively believe that "good" girls can be sexualized but not independently sexual, we also condition ourselves to actively enforce perceived departures from our ideological expectations. Thus a woman who initiates is a recurring sexual *fantasy,* sure, but like sexual initiative-taking, sexual fantasy tends to happen when... we're in the mood.
On the other hand, if a woman initiates in real life, especially at a time when circumstance or mood makes us disinclined, it isn't received so much as sexy, interesting, or a fantasy come true or, especially, for an opportunity to do something fun with someone who, other than genital anatomy, is just like you. When that happens men aren't given a lot of places to go except up (with superior pronouncements like "she's a bitch") or out (with escapist characterizations like "she's crazy") but never straight across ("I'm sorry, I'm already in a relationship" or "I don't think that would be a good idea... can I call you a cab, I don't think you should drive" or even "Not now but can I call you later.")
I'm not even going to say there's something wrong with one (fantasizing about forwardness) or the other (preferring reticence in reality) since in day-to-day life women seem to feel somewhat similarly. I *will* say, though, that men need to spend a little time reconciling the differences. That plus making room for *everybody* and not just men to initiate, proposition, or propose, and walking back the panicky name-calling reactions next time a woman seems more ready, willing, and able than we are.
You'll have to go to the page to unwind the links, but Megan of Jezebel spends a bit of time quoting an interview of author Daniel Bergner about his book on fetishes. Between this interview and his recent New York Times Magazine article Bergner seems like a pretty straight-up writer who actually gets it a little better than the sources he draws his material from.
Or at least that needs to be his excuse for repeating the following canard...
You mention that there are very few true female sadists. Why is that?
Well, that's my understanding, and it seems to be true. There are very few women with paraphilias, in general, by which we mean outlying sexualities.
To the claim that few women are genuine sadists, combined with the claim that few women have fetishes, *period,* leaves one wondering what to make of women *masochists.* Because if masochism in women isn't a fetish then... WTF would be the implication there?
---
Also, while I'm too lazy to look for it, when the subject of women not having fetishes came up a few years ago I wondered whether that might be because for maybe thousands of years have been under... quite a lot of pressure since childhood to "powerfully and persistently displace sexual interest onto objects, behaviors, or situations other than in copulatory or precopulatory behavior with phenotypically normal, consenting adult human partners." Such as, oh, I don't know, chastity, marriage, children, and domesticity (a.k.a. "Porn for Women" a.k.a. the no-sex class.)
And incidentally I'm not saying that women sexually fetishize housework either. I'm saying the assumptions that only men have fetishes are so ingrained that I think mostly nobody bothers to check.
Anastasia of Sexualité has an interesting post on an unexpected-to-me consequence of the introduction to Viagra.
...However, just when sexual therapists have prepared to put down their diplomas and clean up their offices, the wide use of the blue pill seems to have spawned female patients, majority of them partners of avid Viagra users.
These females are now rushing in despair to their sex therapists to get an explanation as to why this little blue pill can arouse her husband when she could not no matter what she did. A lot of questions along the same line of thought are now being discussed in the privacy of the offices of sexual therapists.
It appears that Viagra has not really displaced the sexual therapists after all.There was only a change of clients, from the male species suffering the erectile dysfunction symptoms to the female species who are suffering from busted egos and insecurities.
The good news is I'm guessing that to the extent women are concerned about this a sex therapist can probably help them work it out in very short order.
1) On the one hand, as the sex class men are indoctrinated to value themselves in direct proportion to their ability to, well, be sexual. On the other hand men, assumed by heteronormativity to be the ideal against which all other sexuality is measured, learn almost nothing about how thoroughly enjoyable sex *without* penetration can be. Consequently we tend to back off, sometimes sharply, from *all* sexual activity if we're even *afraid* we might not "perform."
2) The kind of erectile dysfunction that Viagra treats has a *lot* more to do with anatomy than psychology. Yes, it won't make you have an erection if you're not at least somewhat organically aroused (for that you need something *really* direct like Caverject) but it's main effect is on the cardiovascular system, not the brain.
3) Consequently if someone (the article says women but obviously it could be any partner of a man with erection difficulties) is beating him or herself up about desirability in the face of Viagra they're doing so unnecessarily. Between the psychological self-defeat of erection difficulty on the one hand, and the benefit of anxiety relief due to Viagra's hydraulic effect, it's just hard to see why a caring and/or sympathetic partner needs to feel responsible for prior difficulties.
4) But that's with *caring* partners. Side B of Viagra, though, is that as the sex class men are expected to be able *and willing* to have sex even when other considerations that would be seen as reasonable libido-suppressors in women -- things like stress, alienation, or alienation of affection, for instance... or even maybe *pressure from a partner for sex!* And the advent of Viagra undermines the excuse of physiology.
I know, I know, as the no-sex class heterosexual women are never supposed to have desires unless their partners initiate it but... um, yeah, about that. But a) almost everything we "know" about sex we know about people between roughly ages 15 and 30 but after about age 40 everything we "know" starts becoming *even less* true, and b) nothing anybody has ever said, anywhere, about libido imbalances and its consequences has required that the imbalance be men high, women low. So...
5) As reality continues to intrude on our still-rigid definitions of masculinity and femininity and who's "supposed" to initiate, I'm guessing that sex therapists are going to begin seeing even less expected and also more serious confrontations arising from greater availability of drugs like Viagra.
Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey that's me!) Used under a Creative Commons license.
Jill Filipovic of Feministe jumps hard on last week's New York Times Magazine article “What Do Women Want?: A new generation of postfeminist sexologists is trying to discover what ignites female desire" by Daniel Bergner. She ably dismantles the most egregious assumptions Bergner brings to our attention, but I'd like to pile on with one more point.
A compact 51-year-old woman in a shirtdress, [psychology professor Marta] Meana explained the gender imbalance onstage in a way that complemented [psychology professor Meredith] Chivers’s thinking. “The female body,” she said, “looks the same whether aroused or not. The male, without an erection, is announcing a lack of arousal.
Not to sound cruel or dismissive or anything but... is she *mental?* Or just really inexperienced around aroused women and men?
Because, pardon me, but arousal in both men and women is at least moderately (almost said "modestly!") obvious from the collarbones up. And while contemporary beauty standards do their best to camouflage hints of arousal behind (peculiarly) the simulated arousal of makeup on lips, eyes, and cheeks, and posture-altering heels and foundation garments visual signs of arousal still peek through. And if everybody's naked there are even more perfectly visible evidence. And...
That's all assuming arousal is to be detected in the absence of, oh, I dunno, social and context, body language and *conversation.* Which, even in the extravagantly stylized "primitive state of nature" happened exactly *how* often?
And about the male-erection thing. Thought experiment for anyone with sexual experience with men: Imagine the various men in your life when they're aroused and not aroused. Now imagine a little black cartoon-style "censored" label across their lower midsections so it's impossible to see if they're "announcing" anything with their erection or lack thereof. Are signs of *male* arousal so binary and limited that it's impossible to tell if they're aroused without peeking behind the black bar?
I mean... seriously?
Yes, in those circumstances where men or women are visible only from navel to upper thigh, where there's no possibility of verbal communication or body language, where they're too far apart to listen to their breathing, assess their posture, feel their body heat, watch them move, or smell them *and* you're either color-blind so you can't see genital and non-genital flushing or too far away to discern vulvar engorgement and lubrication, *and* for some reason you have to assess whether someone's aroused then yeah, thank goodness you can check for an erection. Oops, unless they're wearing something that's not quite form-fitting. Oh, and you can somehow confirm that he didn't just wake up and he has to pee... or conversely that he's actually quite aroused but dealing with erection dysfunction. But yeah, in those circumstances it's obvious whether men are aroused but not when women are.
I mean, *seriously?*
It would be one thing if we were talking about evolutionary psychologists because it's generally agreed they're fascinated by sex because they're too dweeby to have had it themselves. But these people are supposed to be flipping sexologists and that's the best Meana can do? Because, seriously, as far as insults to grown men and women's intelligence goes that's *way* over the top.
In her post Jill suggests an alternative
How about the fact that women grow up in a society that is centered on men’s experiences and lives? That the female body is used as a representation of sex itself, whereas (hetero) men’s experiences and understandings of sex dominate our cultural narrative?
Now *that* makes a lot more sense. I was really struck by one of the panel discussions on orgasms with a partner on Cherry.tv where one of the women said she never masturbated because she grew up believing it was “just a thing guys did. ... I think I found out about it when 'American Pie' came out. It was like 'girls masturbate?' ... It was, like, foreign to me.” So yeah, in a culture that communicates that to women (and, of course, men) then you’d also expect it to communicate that a man’s erection is the only conceivable or detectable sign of arousal in all of humanity.
Sheesh!
[** Also what's with this "*the* female body..." "*the* male..." business? Maybe it's because if researchers used direct words like "women's bodies..." they'd have moments of self-identification and balk at the absurdity of blanket statements like that. --fl]
In an always interesting regular feature, Lo of Em & Lo: Sex. Love. And Everything in Between. runs a statement from a reader to a panel of three men to see how they respond.
“I really hate going down on guys. I’ve tried it, I don’t like it. In fact, I loathe it. I feel bad about it, but if I don’t expect oral in return (I don’t), then why should I feel compelled to do something I don’t enjoy?”
Yeah, feeling obliged to do something we hate during sex is just the best… um… way to… stay enthusiasti…
Um, no. That doesn’t really work, eh?
And, yeah, getting a blowjob from someone who’s half-hearted, hurried, and so not into it her mouth is cold is just such a… great feeli…
Um, no, that’s not so hot either.
I *think* the difference is that men have this idea that your no doesn’t mean “no, I don’t enjoy it,” it means “no, I’m holding something back.” Stupid I know. But since it’s just not true that “there’s no such thing as a bad blowjob” and since one of the best ways to get a bad blowjob is to pressure someone who isn’t into it in the first place then… it’s not about the physical sensation it’s about feeling like they’re somehow getting “all” of you.
Question is then do you really want to keep hanging out with a guy who thinks he’s getting *more* intimate with you by… pressuring and/or pining you till you do something you hate doing?
One of the panelists, identified as Gay Engaged Guy (Joel Derfner, author of Swish), had an excellent point...
If you don’t like going down on guys, there’s absolutely no reason you should feel compelled to do so. However, there’s also absolutely no reason a guy should feel compelled to keep dating you if you won’t go down on him. You just have to find somebody who gets his kicks in other ways. The pool will be much smaller, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t, um, fish to be had.
...that goes even better in the other direction. Sure, if a guy thinks it’s his *privilege* that you go down on him then yeah, he doesn’t have to stay with you... but... you really want to stay with him?
There are actually plenty of men who won’t pass one up if offered but who don’t think a blowjob is the Holy Grail. So why waste *your* time (not to mention compromising the quality of *your* sexual enjoyment) on someone who does?
Another panelist, Straight Married Guy (Matt) took a more conventional line “But wouldn’t giving the occasional (special occasion) blowjob be a little easier than banking on these super longshot odds?”
Eh. While I think it's a fairly common strategy, saving up something you really hate for special occasions probably isn't going to make it that much more special for you.
Here’s the thing, and no, it’s not a secret back door ploy to get disinclined women go give blowjobs after all: for a lot of people, not just women, not just men, feeling obliged to do something is enough of a buzzkill threshhold that you never get to where you might not mind it or might even enjoy it.
I don’t know about women doing it for men so much but I’ve certainly heard men say they they eat their girlfriends only for something in return. And they hate that too. Meanwhile like a lot of other men** I think eating a partner is fun all by itself because even if it wasn’t pretty, and tasty, and intimate, and sexy it’s *really cool* when someone is writhing and shuddering and panting your name. And for people, men and women, if you’re just feeling resentful it's hard to register any of that. All of which means that if Em and Lo’s correspondent finds a partner who’s just not that into being eaten it might give her enough space to enjoy it. And if not? No big deal.
[** Sabina of Y Tu Hermano Tambien has a good post on men who are into being eaten vs. men who'd rather eat their partners. --fl]
Cool. Someone found my old post from 2006, Since when is "regression to the mean" a medical emergency? and posted it to a discussion-forum site I was unfamiliar with, Uppitywomen.org. The discussion's pretty interesting.
One thing about that original post. I had already gotten that a lot of what we assume to be gendered imbalance is actually situational, but while I was pretty clearly moving in the direction of recognizing the no-sex class paradigm I also pretty clearly hadn't gotten there yet. Consequently it's still bound up in the importance of consent when that's necessary to sexual freedom but completely insufficient.
If I was to rewrite that post today I'd make a bigger point about the interrelatedness of the freedoms of consent and initiative, and I'd write more about how the imperative that men always initiate skews into no-sex class supporting perception that men are always "ready" for sex and women are always less sure.
When, in fact, if they're *not* ready they just don't initiate... and if they never *encounter* initiation let alone initiation when they're not ready then bingo, no experience of *men* needing to be able to exercise the right to accept or decline that we've historically seen as "gatekeeping" or "consent." And, consequently, no experience of the interrelatedness, or *importance* of *both* the right to initiate and the right to consent. For *everybody.*
Lynn Gazzis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones has a lovely reminder of the perniciousness of the no-sex class dichotomy:
Steven Barnes - here for example - has been blogging about the mistakes he’s made in the past, how he screwed up his first marriage by too much sexual openness, and hurt other people in the process.
Notice how he’s able to make these points without once comparing himself to an icky used piece of chewing gum that his wife won’t want to touch?
There are real and valid points to be made about the downsides of getting too freewheeling in your sex life. But they’re points about sexual responsibility, not about sexual purity, and they have to do with the wrongs that come while you’re making the choices, not the way the choices have spoiled you for someone else’s consumption years later.
I'm not sure why I'm so startled by the observation but *of course* when we talk about women we make up nonsense about ruined cakes, crushed flowers, and duct tape that's lost its stickiness. They've *had sex!* The no-sex class paradigm says that's not supposed to happen!
Conversely *of course* we don't have the same reaction to men who've had sex. Even though, as Lynn points out -- in fact as Steven Barnes points out about himself! -- it's not like having heedless (a new distinction I may play with a bit) sex has zero consequences on *anybody,* men or women. And we don't have that reaction because we see men as not just permitted to have sex but *obliged* to have it. Women's "tape" gets sticky when they have sex, men's when they don't. (Which is why I prefer to say men are the sex class.)
A more gender-normalized view of men and women would have not only give us neutral language to discuss the actual impact of sex, it would let us meaningfully discuss the impact *period.*
That's something we can't really do right now.
Consider, for instance that we *are* able to discuss the impact of work on adults without getting *too* out there about gender -- compared to, say, the totally wiggy things people got into it in the 1970s. We can do that because we're way further along towards normalization. Thus we can talk about how work sometimes fulfills us and sometimes sucks the life out of us without so much disclaiming that it only sucks life out of women or fulfills men... or vice versa.
Same with, say, adults in recreational sports like softball or soccer: while we don't seem to be as far along with sports we're not as inclined to say something highly gendered like men *as a class* thrive on competition but women *as a class* can't handle it. That doesn't mean *nobody* has a hard time, not with winning or losing, nor with injuries, nor with obsessions or rivalries or temper or rules. Of course that stuff happens. But we don't really discuss it as if the gender of the individual was an overarching factor that explained everything.
And if that all seems too long-winded, what I'm trying to say is that thanks to the no-sex class paradigm most people will have to seek a gender determination before discussing one, but not the other, of the following sentences.
* Pat had sex with more partners than anyone else on the team.
* Pat is more competitive than anyone else on the team.
Hugo Schwyzer, a professor who's dwelt frequently and well on older-professor/younger-student crushes, which tend to be older-man/younger-woman as well, talks of a letter he got about an older woman who, after a young man she'd mentored graduated, propositioned him.
...our skewed perceptions about male and female sexuality lead us to see older women, younger men relationships very differently than the reverse. With some considerable justification, we see women as having considerably more potential to be victimized and harassed than we do men; we see men as having considerably more potential to victimize and harass than we do women. And of course, when we look at statistics around rape, assault, and harassment, those perceptions are validated by the evidence. But we make a mistake when we confuse a patriarchal power structure that privileges men over women with the notion that each individual man always has power over each individual woman. And we make an even graver mistake when we deny that men — not just young boys, but grown men — can be victimized by asymmetrical sexual relationships.
By coincidence I wrote yesterday on the structural complications of men-must-invite/women-must-invite, based on a post by Em of Em and Lo encouraging women to keep asking, despite discouragement, and encouraging men to consider a response other than “woah, she must be desperate.”)
Of course there’s a rather large difference between heterosexual women asking men out in a bar (with men “gatekeeping” their replies) and women professors asking male students. The first is a good idea. The second, while technically “gender equal” is, of course, inappropriate.
I think a lot of patriarchy (ok, or for skeptics what we *call* patriarchy) is wrapped up in the traditional requirement that men are allowed the power to initiate and women have only the “power” to reply affirmatively or, most of the time, to decline. One consequence is that the situation the young man, Luke, has found himself in is rare.
But that patriarchy is a real thing only *masks* that power is often situational/structural rather than innately gendered. In other words patriarchy has insured men generally have the keys, not that only men are capable of driving.
So. *If* women mostly haven’t been initiators (blame patriarchy) and if women mostly haven’t been in academic mentoring relationships to younger men, then…
Well, then a couple of things shake out. First, obviously, it was harder for both Luke and his mentor to recognize that what she had proposed was *really* inappropriate. Second, I get the impression that it made it harder for him to recognize that the same recourses (both informal and formal) are available to him that would be available to a young woman in a similar situation. And finally, should he raise the issue it might be harder for him to be heard correctly — either by her or his college — than it might be for a similar young woman. (No, *finally* it might be harder for his mentor to get a “fair trial” since on the one hand there are expectations that her gender doesn’t do that sort of thing but on the other hand there are MRA/what-about-the-menz types who’d foghorn it endlessly. And in either case she have trouble being listened to for the part she actually played rather than what everyone’s stories would be.)
---
One of Hugo's commenters, Placebogirl, made the point that the situation stood out because the mentor was so much older... even though that itself is problematic from a gender-role perspective (i.e. women "old enough to be my mom" aren't supposed to have sexual attractions.) It's a good point. The situation for Luke might have been even more complicated had the age difference not been so great. Because as she points out we do have *some* narratives, mostly negative, about “desperate” older women falling “foolishly” in love with younger men. See the character Ruth in “Pirates of Penzance” who, from my perspective, isn’t even that old at forty-seven years. Anyway, had the mentor been in her 30s instead of 50s some of the other complications that have been raised here, like the expectation that men shouldn’t “turn down” sex, might have come into play such that he would have been spun longer by the power differential.
The one… I don’t know if I’d call it good but maybe I’ll call it fortunate… thing about this role reversal is that it’s setting people back just enough to consider that such relationships *can* be walked back towards something professional, appropriate, and ongoing. Something that may have been lost when the discussion was only about older men and younger women.
I’m not absolving *anybody* here, just saying that just as the heated attractions of those teaching and studying in a current course can fall back to normal when the course ends, so mentor/protege relationships that haven’t been egregiously manipulative can also be guided back to normal after an appropriate intervention.
—
“My annoyance at the ‘men are victims too’ campaign is rooted less in a denial of the fact that men can be hurt by women and more by the implication that the patriarchy is an unreal construct, and that women have just as much agency and possibility and safety (if not more) than men.”
Agreed. But over time, as gender and other traditional imbalances continue to normalize I’m hoping we’ll start seeing more use of the word kyriarchy — the generic term for abuse of any and *all* power differentials.
So. About Luke. First of all I think he’s doing the right thing by talking about what’s happened. And I think it’s *incredible* that he’s recognizing that if he stays in academia he too might have… well… innocently isn’t the right word but maybe unconsciously is… wound up putting a student of his own in the same position he’s in. But I think it would be good, *after* talking to others about it, to communicate clearly but without any sense of obligation to his mentor, to let her know that he’s conflicted, that he felt maybe the unfamiliarity of the gender switch distracted them from warning signs that would otherwise have been really obvious, and that while he’d like to continue working with her (it sounds like it is) that she has to exercise her own responsibilities.
Because the thing is his situation is *not* an oddity, it’s a *early indication.* She’s not the only woman to find herself in this position, nor is he. Instead similar dynamics are almost certainly happening elsewhere already and as gender becomes more power-normalized it’s definitely going to turn up more and more often.
At least until everyone recognizes that what’s going on and stops whistling “it can’t happen here.”
It would also be great if he, and ideally she, could to continue modeling an appropriate, non-galvanized approach to resolving the situation. It would help all kinds of people who find themselves in their situation. In both non-traditional power gradients and… perhaps in traditional ones as well.
Update: Sungold of Kittywampus, herself either a women's studies or women's history professor, points out in comments that it's really unlikely that a professor in her 50s would have been ignorant of what she was doing when she propositioned her student. It's possible that there were mitigating circumstances, but since they either weren't included by Luke or weren't relayed by Hugo they're out of the scope of our text. And therefore have to be out of scope for our assessments either. Not cool on the professor's part.
Em of Em & Lo: Sex. Love. And Everything in Between takes a stand on an issue with a *ton* of implications for heterosexuals in terms of feminism, gender equality, stereotypes, traditions, sexual expectations and... once it becomes generally acceptable... quite a bit of empathy, sympathy, and relaxation between the sexes.
A note to straight men: We’re constantly hearing you guys complain that you have to do all the pick-up leg-work. But then when a woman does attempt to hit on you in a bar, you turn around and call her “desperate.” (Er, who made off with your self-esteem, anyway?) Admittedly, you don’t get hit on nearly as often as straight gals do, so you don’t have nearly as much practice at (politely) rejecting an unwelcome advance. Which means that when a brave lady does attempt to buy you a drink or engage you in conversation, you have a tendency to be awkward and weird about it. But what’s so “desperate” about knowing what you want and going for it? She shouldn’t be made to feel like she fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down just because she asked you to dance. It’s not like she’s asking you to bear her children. You never know, she may actually just want to use you for sex. So be nice to the women trying to even the playing field!
Oh, and ladies? Keep asking! And try not to take it personally if a guy is a douche when you ask him how he likes his eggs in the morning. He’s just had less practice than you.
As you may have noticed I talk a lot about women as the "no-sex" class. And a woman asking a man for his phone number when she's interested is a direct confrontation. As, Em points out, is a man accepting an invitation.
Seriously! For all the acres of ink... ok, pixels... spilled by men about how women are hard to get, how men are hornier, how women are gatekeepers, how men have to make all the moves, when a woman independently expresses interest in a man, let alone "uninvited" sexual interest, we tend to...
...um
wilt?
Another point. While I'd been dissatisfied with standard narratives about men's attitudes about women for a while, the first of three ideas that finally came together as a coherent theory of women as the no-sex class (I hereby drop the quotes, which I think are misinterpreted as "scare" quotes, which I didn't intend) was inspired by a comment to a post on someone else's blog about the necessity, yes, but also the utter insufficiency of no means no.
Because, said the commenter (a woman named Scarred) of an advocate of the Pick-up Artist/Seduction Community...
going on the delusion that women have *the* "sexual power." He mistakes a woman's right to say no to men who approach her as being in control of the dating scene. ... If someone is limited to having to pick or refuse advances and not allowed to *make* advances as well, that person or persons does *NOT* have the "sexual power."
In other words all discussion of women and consent, of women and "no means no," of women and yes means yes only acknowledge women's right to *respond,* not to *initiate!*
And, as Em suggests (supported by experiences among some of my acquaintances), the perfect illustration of who's traditionally had real power is men's reactions when they're on the receiving end of an invitation. On the other hand women who try it will have a little time adjusting to the frustrating uncertainty of asking.
In other words this is a big deal. Or will be.
Until we get used to it.
Then?
Life might less gender-constructed for heterosexuals, sure. Maybe a lot less. But there will definitely be just as much sex for heterosexuals. Maybe more. However much, though, I guarantee it'll be a lot more enjoyable for everybody. When women *and* men understand how important no can be. And men *and* women learn how to say "can I buy you a drink" when they're interested.
Kudos to Em for bringing it up. If anybody's still doing the Carnival of Sexual Autonomy and Freedom I'd like to submit that one.
An excerpt from Emma Goldman's essay on white slave traffic and prostitution in America from her 1917 Anarchism and Other Essays
We have long ago taken it as a self-evident fact that the boy may follow the call of the wild; that is to say, that the boy may, as soon has his sex nature asserts itself, satisfy that nature; but our moralists are scandalized at the very thought that the nature of a girl should assert itself. To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock. That this is no mere statement is proved by the fact that marriage for monetary considerations is perfectly legitimate, sanctified by law and public opinion, while any other union is condemned and repudiated. Yet a prostitute, if properly defined, means nothing else than "any person for whom sexual relationships are subordinated to gain."
Of course one of the stonier precepts of the "no-sex" class paradigm is that women *always* subordinate their sexual relationships to gain. Whereas men *always* subordinate their gain for sexual relationships. (Sounds tidy that way doesn't it?)
Inside the paradigm the gain may be economic (marrying those men "for their wallets") or outright cash-based (prostitution) or more "virtuously" to gain a secure home to raise "her" children in (because, you know, men just don't *do* children), or, as in the famous case of peer pressure the gain might be (inevitably perceived only) status or approval, or maybe it's just dinner
n' a movie.
For that matter even *not* having sex, should the inclination ever arise in a non-broken, non-fallen, non-seduced, "natural" woman, is for gain because not having sex increases her marital value, allows her to "string along" a man, allows her to "cut him off" for *failing* to render whatever it is she has demanded.
And inside the paradigm the man is equally constrained. He might help a male friend move out of, well, friendship but if he helps a woman? It's about sex, right? He can invite a man out for beer or coffee just to catch up but if it's any woman other than his great aunt Nelda that too has to be, some how, some way, about sex. And he can hire a male college student because he seems like a promising young man who'll fit right in and be productive but... oh whatever.
Point being that *inside* the paradigm it's *all* about subordinating sex for gain, or gain for sex. But never about gain for gain (she really *was* the best qualified college student) or sex for sex (he really *does* just look hot in soccer shorts.) Because then we'd just never know *what* to expect.
To be honest my hugest beef with prostitution is it's coherence with the "no-sex" class paradigm and it's steadfast insistence that every Jack there's never a Jill who wants the same thing he does. But then I've got an identical peeve with the idea that marriage is exactly the same thing -- no more than a transaction of cattle because milk shouldn't be free -- when, in fact, even for the most indoctrinated, and cynical, there's *always* more to it than that.
That doesn't mean that prostitution, any more than marriage, ought to be criminalized. It *does* mean that the real affront isn't prostitution, nor marriage, per se, but the infrastructure that insists there can be no other basis for relationships than sex for men and gain for women.
&#*$@!!!
(Via Monica at $pread.)
Holly of The Pervocracy, in another bout of what she calls Cosmocking, takes Cosmopolitan magazine to task for, as always, warning women to put us men first, foremost, and always lest our rock-solid faith in the "no-sex" class paradigm be shaken. For instance, from an article in the January issue called "Surprising Things that Turn Him Off"
Being Kinky in Bed (At First)
There's nothing wrong with showing enthusiasm. But when it comes to off-the-wall sexcapades, setting the bar--or stripper pole--too high the first few times can make guys wonder what else you have in common with Jenna Jameson. "It feels weird to say it out loud, but I really don't want a girl to be completely uninhibited in bed when I first start sleeping with her," says Jon, 27. "I like to feel like we discover some stuff together and then work up to the really experimental stuff."
I'm actually about halfway with Jon here--it's awesome to discover new ways to have fun together--but only if you're actually discovering them. If you're just biding your time as you reel out the tricks you already knew, it's not experimentation, it's pretense.
Yup, nothing makes us men less comfortable than imagining what might consider "experimental stuff" she thinks is practically passé. (Note: consider that sex manuals from the 50s and early 60s considered both woman-on-top intercourse and any kind of oral sex "experimental" for both women *and* men.)
Remember that one of the peculiarities of men's self-induced no-sex class indoctrination says men should expect (and, according to Cosmo anyway, even *demand*) a "no" from women... and thus to keep asking (no condom this time?), and asking (anal?), and asking (threesome?) till we get one. And since men, too, have comfort zones we're kind of hoping to get to that "no" before we get out of ours (uh... threesome... with your *dad?!?!) The great thing about *kicking* that indoctrination, by the way, is there's no advantage to "pushing" anybody's boundaries just to see how far they'll go before saying no. And here's the deal with that: if you're not "experimenting" to see where one's partner's "no" is you can actually *experiment,* *together* no less, to see what you both really enjoy doing *together!*
Way to be, Cosmo.
World-class cynic Scott Adams of Dilbert.com Blog turns science news into dating tips for the pointy-haired-boss "seduction community."
I always need to eat something before I attempt writing or else nothing comes out. ... I always assumed this was just a combination of ordinary hunger plus a habit that borders on OCD. ...
Recently a reader sent me a link about a writer who has the same experience but better research to explain why. The bottom line is that writing requires will power to avoid distraction, and will power is correlated with your glucose levels. In other words, your free will is actually sugar.
http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/03/practicing_selfcontrol_consume.php
This makes me wonder if there is an optimal food strategy for seduction. Apparently bringing a woman chocolate will only increase her glucose levels and with that her ability to resist you. In fact, a guy should want his woman to be good and hungry, preferably on a diet. It turns out that resisting one sort of temptation makes it harder to resist a different sort at the same time.
If that is not enough, I just did a Google search to confirm that alcohol lowers your glucose levels. That fits the theory. Everyone knows they have less will power after a few drinks.
Of course the whole shebang is predicated on the "no-sex" class assumption that a woman who's willing to go on a date with a man isn't interested in sex... or at least sex with him... or at least sex with him *right then.* And it's further predicated on the "no-sex" class assumption that *because* women just aren't naturally interested in sex... or at least sex with *you*... and therefore it's ok for you to use leverage to "break down" her will to say no. (Which belief makes you, um, a rapist?)
It's also predicated on the destructive-to-men (not to mention dangerous to women) circular assumption that a man's worth is equated with his "score" on the one hand, and that his ability to score equates with his worthiness on the other... and of course on the corresponding assumption that *women's* worth is equated with the degree of her reluctance to have sex when she (being a human being and all) *wants* to... in favor of "holding out" till she can bestow sex (her "favors") as an acknowledgment of male worthiness.
All of which makes possible knuckleheaded scenarios like... looking for women on diets, just before dinner, who've had a drink, and (if you read the rest of Adam's post) have been led into further temptation by resisting going into a store the man steers her past on the way to dinner.
Instead of just, I don't know, assuming that a woman is human, and therefor interested in sex, and looking for ways to make her comfortable with saying yes -- or even initiating it herself! -- instead of assuming she'd rather not have anything to do with it.
Small wonder Adams is drawn to stuff like this. The bitter, almost misanthropic jokes practically write themselves.
And speaking of fathers (and did you know I'm a "hottest daddy blogger" nominee?) how'd you like to be one of of Leonard Sax's children? Reviewing the teenage-vampire movie Twilight, Marx in Drag says
Before I even saw the film, I read an article by Leonard Saxs about the movie “Twilight”. Sax suggested that young girls love the book series and will crowd the theatres because the narrative reflects what girls want, how girls are made hormonally/genetically/biologically/spiritually. Girls, according to Sax, want romance and safety and, above all else, an asexual life. He contrasted this with boys who want, above all else, sex which explains why they are obsessed with danger and video games.
Hey, it's fine with me if teenage girls stick to asexual, cookie-baking lives, nor is it a problem if teenage boys hew to video games and Magic cards. Although really I think it would be great if they all spent a little more time doing non-arithmetic math, philosophy, poetry, hiking in the wilderness, and some kind of semi-industrial handwork like welding, leather, or hot-glass arts. Waiting till you're physically, emotionally, and *socially* ready for sex (i.e. sticking to masturbation till your an adult) is never a bad idea**.
No better evidence for this exists, by the way, than Leonard Sax's outlandish extrapolation of teenager dynamics into immutable logic about adult outlooks: modeling adult behavior on intermediate adolescent development makes as much sense as modeling adult bathroom behavior on toddlers in pull-ups.
MiD has more
Like all completely a-historical narratives that are not based in empirical reality, Sax relied on an old (and tired) lie about erotic desire. (By the way, there have been times in Western culture when boys and men overtly expressed a desire for romance; boys and men get more turned on by sex embedded in a relational narrative than porn; and there are cultures in which girls’ erotic pleasure is equally important to boys’.)
The lie is that, because girls’ are hormonally/genetically/biologically/spiritually (pick your ideological poison) conditioned to like romance, they must not want sex. And because boys are hormonally/genetically/biologically/spiritually programmed to want sex, they are not interested in romance. Since when are romance and sex so incompatible?
Um, yeah. Sort of like "porn is a male thing, romance novels a female thing" there's actually, um, *considerable* overlap in consumption. And, not to beat a dead horse or anything but maybe, just *maybe* it's not so much that even teenagers are "innately" romantic vs. horny as... marketing decisions, based on stereotypes, make it flipping hard to find the kind of porn and/or romantic writing that appeals to their respectively-assigned genders.
And finally
Deborah Tolman [see, for instance --fl] dispels this lie. Turns out adolescent girls do have sexual desire and, in the right context, want to talk about and do something about it. Further, Tolman has a much better explanation for why girls don’t show that desire, let alone parade it around as a badge of honor like some adolescent boys. It’s not about hormones, biology, genetics, or God’s will; it’s about male privilege.
The rest of MiB's post discusses not what Sax sees, or even what the (patriarchal, male) author of the Twilight series sees, but what she's pretty sure teenage girls see in it. Yes, it's about "safety," as Sax imagines, but it's *not* the asexual safety he *imagines.* Definitely worth reading the whole thing. But I digress...
In his film review Leonard Sax, like many others stalwart upholders of the "no-sex" class paradigm, confidently proclaims that girls retreat has nothing to do with "social constructs." They're just naturally "that way." Nor does the behavior of boys influence, nor is it in turn influenced by, girls wariness not of sex but of the male-privilege-ing assumptions of *what others can do with their sexuality since they have no use for it themselves!*
The "No-Sex" class paradigm, remember, has two main components: one prescriptive (you should be this way) and one proscriptive (and here's what we get to do to you if you aren't.) In his descriptions Sax both enforces his how he believes girls and women should be, and, by giving he blessing to thrill-seeking and violence in boys and men, he erects the pickets that confine female erotic impulses to inexpressible fantasies of ... um... literarily if not literally "someone who wants to eat you alive with every fiber of his being." (Follow that last link to Amanda Marcotte's take on the Twilight phenomenon.)
[** A good metric for knowing you're mature enough? When you're able to grasp and hold on to the fact that despite decades of frantic sexualization of youth roughly half of all 2nd-year college students, male and female, are still virgins. Because *if* you get that then you lose the often self-induced "everybody else has already done it" peer-pressure-y feeling that if you don't do something soon you'll be the last virgin on the planet. At which point you might decide you want to have sex for *enjoyment* instead of as some kind of rite of passage. Because, for instance, one good metric of adulthood is realizing that adulthood doesn't depend on rites of passage. --fl]
An exasperated Abby Lee of Girl With a One-Track Mind snarked out an impressive list of Cosmo-esque "Facts." Various approving bloggers have posted excerpts, here's mine.
* I adore that when people say “sexy”, they mean “female”.
* It pleases me that the default position in how sex is marketed is always male and heterosexist, or female and bisexual. Because women never want to see pictures of naked men: all of us are happier just to look at other women, don’t you know?!
* I love it that porn is so focused on the male perspective, because as a woman I obviously have no interest in seeing it portrayed through a female gaze.
* I don’t need to wank because, like, I’m not a man. Also, my boyfriend might get jealous.
* I have no need for orgasms because cuddling is so much nicer and women don’t have the same sexual urges as men, anyway. Also, what’s an orgasm?
* I like accusing women of being “sex negative” if they reject the mass-market monopolisation of their sexuality as a financial commodity.
It's funny how that whole "humorless bitch" thing works. By a lot of standards *I'm* being "sex negative" when I reject the mass-market monopolization of women's sexuality as a financial commodity. The "financial commodity" part could just be another way of saying the "no-sex" class -- it assumes women's sexuality as an extractable or manufacturable, transferrable, fungible**: of value to women as an item of *exchange* but not *personally* needed (since cuddling is *so* much nicer.)
More recently I've gone "sex negative" on the mass-market monopolization part as well, objecting to the *remarkably* durable-in-the-face-of-counter-evidence impression that women are such a universal symbol of (heterosexual) sex that generically sexualized images of women are used to market erotica *by* straight women for *other* straight women. Leaving room for men to appear exclusively as... well, it's kind of irrelevant since except for the occasional crusading blogger hetero men almost never appear as erotic in their own right. *Doing* things to correctly erotic women, maybe, as proxies for presumed hetero male consumers, but never themselves intentionally presented as erotically "consumable" for the enjoyment of methodicall-presumed-non-existant hetero *women* consumers (who's boyfriends wouldn't approve of them wanking anyway... unless it was so they could watch.)
Yup. Sex-negative, that's me. That's Abby Lee. That's Amanda Marcotte and her boyfriend. That's a lot of you. Because it's not even sex unless it's only pleasurable to men and profitable for women. Anything else would be *unnatural!*
(I love Lee's list, by the way -- it's cool seeing which items different people have chosen to excerpt for their posts. If you visit her site you can probably find favorites of your own.)
[** Fungible: Term used to describe assets (usually securities) that can be exchanged with similar assets and are capable of being “loaned” (www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/vatfinmanual/VATFIN9300.htm); a commodity that is freely interchangeable with another in satisfying an obligation of goods or commodities -- freely exchangeable for or replaceable by another of like nature or kind in the satisfaction of an obligation (wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn); Fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungible.) --fl]
Image: Aristotle and Phyllis by the Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet, c. 1485, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
The depiction of the concubine Phyllis riding the philosopher Aristotle was a popular subject for artists of the Gothic period and early Renaissance. Popular because the patrons of those artists considered the scene to be emblematic of the relationship of the sexes and of the mind and body. The scene known as Aristote chevauché is derived from the medieval tale Lai d'Aristote" written by Henri d'Andeli, a thirteenth-century Norman poet.
According to the Lai, Aristotle, tutor to Alexander the Great, advised the young king to avoid the company of the concubine Phyllis, since the time spent in her arms was dissipating Alexander's energy and dedication to his studies and civic duties. Alexander agreed, albeit reluctantly, and eventually told Phyllis the reason why he avoided her company. Phyllis devised a plan to unseat her learned rival.
When Aristotle was in his study in the early hours of the morning, he was distracted from his reading by the sound of singing in the garden. Looking out the open window, he saw Phyllis, barefoot and clad in a gossamer shift, dancing and singing in the garden. As any serious student will tell you, willpower is no match for sexual desire which has been denied for too long. Aristotle groaned, closed his books and called to Phyllis. He told her how much he wanted her and, she promised to satisfy him if he would indulge a whim of hers: he should be her steed and allow her to ride on his back around the enclosed garden. Aristotle agreed, dropped to all fours, and carried Phyllis on his back while she sang:
Master Silly carries me.Alexander, intrigued by the singing in the garden, looks over the wall and sees Reason ridden hard by Desire. When confronted by Alexander, Aristotle tells his student that there is a lesson to be learned here: if a wise and aged philosopher can be swayed so readily by Love then one as young and inexperienced as Alexander must be on his guard against such temptation. However, Aristotle's influence has been weakened and Alexander once again enjoys the company of Phyllis.
Love leads on, and so he goes,
by Love's authority.
Henri d'Andeli's narrative has a tongue-in-cheek quality, poking fun at those who believe themselves impervious to physical desire. But over time the story behind the scene was changed. Phyllis was no longer Alexander's concubine but the wife of Aristotle and, her act of riding her husband like a beast was interpreted as an example of woman's malicious manipulation of man's need for physical love. By attributing such power and malice to women, men became, by default, the submissive class. A resentfully submissive class.
We are in dire need of new imagery.
Where can one find an image of male vulnerability that is not insulting? The place to start is the most powerful sexual organ, the human mind, preferably the mind of one who has lived on both sides of the whip. One such as Elizavetta Mora, of Vespertine Erotica. Consider this excerpt from a piece entitled, Words: sometimes they're pretty useless, in which she describes a man who can deliver a fifteen minute monologue detailing what he wants Elizavetta to do, yet cannot look her in the eye as he speaks. And for her, that reluctance holds the key to what that man really needs and wants:
"Tell me how much," I said. "Tell me how much you want me to hurt your cock. Say it. Say all those words you just said… say them again to me."His eyes began fluttering with tears. He struggled with trying to speak while looking in my eyes. His struggle went on for a long, holy moment.
Then just before it seemed he was going to finally speak, I reared back fast and slapped his face very hard.
When his head snapped back toward me, the look on his face went from stunned to hurt… betrayal… anger… in a matter of seconds. I backed up and stood barely a foot away from him to watch while he strained and arched in his bonds toward me, away from me, totally at the mercy of all the emotions and sensations firing at light speed through his being.
Eventually, as I suspected would happen, a great rage rose up in him; a rage that made me thankful he was bolted to the wall. And, as I suspected, it was the rage that finally did it (along with, perhaps, my uncompromising, uncommenting witnessing of it).
And as that lifetime of rage silently burned it’s white hot way from the center of his body outward, he never broke my gaze - and never said a word - until his knees gave way and his cock spurted in wild grunting whole-body thrusts into the electrified air between us.
You can read the entire post by clicking here.
That scene conjures up many images in my mind, none of which I would describe as humiliating or insulting. One has to have a profound respect for another human being to free him from so fortified a prison of the self.
If you visit her site and read her poetry and stories, you will find that Elizavetta understands what Helene Cixous meant when she referred to l'ecriture feminine, feminine writing, language that allows a woman to express what her body feels like to her. Such language is poetic, nonlinear, and free of the restrictions of realistic prose. It is this language, grounded in the body, that Elizavetta uses to give shape to the thoughts of the spellbound Thomas Rhymer:
To her understanding smile, he begged, “Am I dying?”“Ah, no, I am not that One, Thomas.” So gently she spoke, with a knowing of long abiding sorrows it seemed. “Not yet that One.”
With that, she took his hand and suddenly they were astride her horse. His arms went about her like they had always been there, and his face buried itself in her hair.
His wife’s voice gone. His children’s smiles, all gone. His afternoon rest along the safe bank of his own river, the river of his fathers, gone. Her hair, her apple-scented hair was the whole golden world, the only world before him now. Everything else, forgotten, forgiven, swept away.
She clicked her tongue and snapped the reins. They lurched forward and the river’s rushing tumble sang along with the harness bells. The sky around them clouded over with every blue and gray that could be painted.
You can read The Rhymer's Queen here.
Please. You have a long weekend ahead. Go visit Elizavetta and allow yourself to be vulnerable.
Bitchy Jones, by way of acknowledging May and Eileen's Male Submission Art sums it up *very* nicely.
Femdom is a depressing place, but is there anything quite as depressing as the way that submissive men are continually represented as unattractive, unmanly and unfuckable? The sheer jaw droppingness of the fact that within femdom no attention is given to appealing to straight women’s sexuality at all, is the simple and single reason why there are so few dominant identified straight women.(Name one. Okay, that’s me. Name another.)
The fact that women are meant to be lured into this sexual world by the promise of diamond necklaces rather than hot prospects on their knees is shameful, disgusting (in it’s contempt for active female desire) and utterly fucking stupid. Wonder why het femdom isn’t working? Because no aspect of it is enticing to straight dominant women. You’d have thought submissive men (like every other male species ever) would have worked out that being attractive and therefore attracting potential female mates might be slightly a good idea for there to be functional relationships happening around here. But that idea? That men should be appealing sexually to women? That women should have specific desires (beyond ‘being kinky’ and acquiring necklaces)? Apparently, completely fucking radical within femdom.
Me not being a submissive male you'd think it ought to be none of my business. But even if you *weren't* interested in breaking gender constructions, male, female, and all the rest, out of their narrow little packages, and even if you *didn't* care that, as BJ so nicely puts it, the current model there's still empathy: what if the shoe was on the other foot.
(Aside: You'd think this would be a total non-stretch no-brainer for MRAs since, to a man, they behave as if the same diamond-necklace-but-no-sexual-satisfaction is *their* inevitable lot in life. And yet... nothing. It would probably be more of a scandal if she was getting more support other quarters.)
Photo by Flickr user stephentrepreneur. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Olvlzl of Echidne of the Snakes makes such a great point about the whole vampire fetish
The idea of a man slipping into a woman’s bed room at night and vampirizing her as romance might be less sick than the romanticizing rape only due to the fact that vampires don’t exist. At least I hope there aren’t kids trying out biting people in the neck as a lifestyle choice, now that Hollywood is presenting the blood sucker as a white bread teen idol. I just don’t get it. But then, I never got The Leader of the Pack either. I haven't done a study of it, but I'll bet that female vampires preying on males are not generally portrayed as sympathetic, romantic characters. They might be seductive but they the ones I recall are only the more evil for that.
I hereby nominate Bram Stoker's original Dracula as the official novel of the "no-sex" class paradigm. I mean, think about it! A charming, inexplicable, and wealthy... but also relentless, carnivorous, and *overwhelmed by animal compulsion* man sets his sights on an innocent and (by definition in this case) disinclined flower of a girl, mesmerizes her so that she has no idea what her role is, warps and corrupts other men and women in his pursuit of her, and is finally defeated when he's penetrated by the custodial men of his would-be paramour. Extra bonus features? The female vampires of Dracula's castle initially want to seduce/consume Jonathan Harker but are frustrated by the male vampire who makes them settle for the blood of an infant or small child he brings them! (Note also that the vampire Lucy, a proper Victorian, intuitively preys only on children.) Oh yeah, and what awaits Mina and befalls Lucy for succumbing is, literarily literally, a fate worse than death!
Interestingly, at the end of the novel when his soul is "released" even the vampire's expression carries gratitude and relief... before it crumbles to dust. That's all that foreshadows the vampire's later incarnations as conflicted seducers -- beginning I'm pretty sure, with the soulful Barnabas Collins in the Gothic 60s soap opera Dark Shadows and extending through Anne Rice's novels, Sting's Burbon Street, and more recently Buffy, True Blood, and, evidently, now Twilight.
But anyway I'm with Olvlzl -- the very different attitudes *and* fantasies about male vs. female vampires come from the same place.
Mathilde Madden of Erotica Cover Watch, a sharply reasoned yet passionate blog I found out about only this week, says of yet another book of erotica for straight women with, what else, a naked woman on the cover said
This is one of those covers where I guess I have to say upfront, yes, it is a nice picture. Of course, I did think that most fairy tales had men in them - Prince Charming, etc. But instead of any glimpse of a prince we get another ‘instructional’ book cover. Look she’s reading a book. That’s how to read this book, women, it’s smut - hold your tits whilst reading.
Of course, as ever, men don’t need to be told visually how to enjoy porn books.
...
How come in the ghettos where men’s bodies are served for female consumption it is always utterly crass? Why is female desire for manflesh only allowed to be at the seediest trashiest end of the sexual market. The equivalent of the men in flasher-macs kerb crawling. There we are next to them, drooling over some orange, over worked out bloke, with shaved pecs and a mullet.
So I can understand why a lot of people howled when we started this blog thinking that we were campaigning for more trashy Fabio style book covers to cross from the women only world of romance into the more generalised world of erotica. But we’re not asking for that. We’re campaigning for as wide and interesting a variety of images of sexualised men as there are of sexualised women.
...
Really, there’s only one kind of female desire that can ever be thought of as grown up and sophisticated in the world of erotica book covers – and that is the desire for other women. Sapphic love is far nicer. And this gets prettier pictures.
Use erotic book covers as your guide and it almost seems like that as if lesbian desire is much more proper and grown up. Wanting men is immature and lazy (get thee to the romance section).
There's not really anything I can add that Madden doesn't say more clearly herself so I'll repeat her Susie-Bright-inspired dig at the mostly-male "no-sex" class ideology in cover selection: "...instead of any glimpse of a prince we get another ‘instructional’ book cover. Look she’s reading a book. That’s how to read this book, women, it’s smut - hold your tits whilst reading."
Photo "Little Spectator" by Flickr user Proggie. Used under a Creative Commons license.
[Note: Big update below -- I originally, and possibly shamefully, looked at only one side of the question. --fl]
Matisse of Mistress Matisse's Journal answers a question from a reader. Her answer's spot on.
"...my best friend is actually a very beautiful lesbian with whom I have a lot of chemistry, but who obviously would never have sex with me. She is a very materialistic girl, and I've found that nothing makes me happier than to make her happy and to talk to her. I actually don't even like pursuing straight girls anymore because I'm intrigued by how she makes me feel. And of course, the fact that she's unavailable makes her more tantalizing, but that's one of the things I want to understand."
if you’re just asking for my opinion in general, I’d say that just based on the situation you’re describing… you’re an emotional masochist. And that’s not a good thing.
That’s not a real psychological term, of course, and it’s not a BDSM term, either. But you’re engaging in an unrequited love/lust thing with a bitchy-but-beautiful lesbian who doesn’t return your feelings. You imply that you’re giving her money or gifts or something? And you’re not even trying to find a woman who might love you back? I call that emotional masochism, my friend. I will bet you any amount of money that the situation you're describing is not going to end in you being happy and getting what you want.
Given my fondness for my theory that men indoctrinate ourselves to perceive women as the"no-sex" class, the dominant paradigm wherein women are perceived as disinterested in sex... and therefore fair game for any and all attempts to leverage it out of them, either in exchange for something else or, sometimes, by brute force. I ought to nominate Matisse's correspondent as a classic case since he's constructed an attraction wherein pretty much anything he does isn't going to work. Or, if for some reason she every says yes, that he can consider the ultimate "score" of his efforts to be "worthy" enough for her. And if he had a really bad case of it then it would also make sense that a woman who *was* interested in him (for instance, um, isn't a *lesbian* for crying out loud?) might seem too "easy" and therefore not "worthy" of his attention.
The real clue for me? He says "I actually don't even like pursuing straight girls anymore because I'm intrigued by how she makes me feel." Because, you know, if it was *personal* -- just her -- then you'd expect him to say something like "I don't feel like pursuing *any other* girls because of how she makes me feel." Instead the schematic qualification of "straight girls" i.e. "women actually likely to be interested in him."
But I dunno... if I knew more than what she wrote I might be more sure. It's also the case that a lot of people -- men *and* women -- get "imprinted" duckling-style on one particular characteristic of their first major crush or first serious partner and then keep cycling deeper and deeper trying to recapture that feeling. Or possibly he, like more men than I think people recognize, finds obsession with an unachievable potential partner is a convenient way to avoid sexual relationships altogether. Who knows?
I do have to say Matisse is right, though, that since his dynamic with this woman really isn't satisfiable, and since if he pursues it or something like it really does subject himself not so much to domination but abuse, he really should consider a little talk therapy to clarify for himself what's going on.
Update: Doh! I need to get out of the house a little more often I guess. After getting the children off to school this morning I took a long walk home. Thinking about the situation I outlined last night I realized I'd been thinking way too much in terms of the letter writer and how his affectation... well... affects him. Upon reflection it occurs to me that what he *really* needs to get off his affection/obsession is the effect it has on the women or women he's decided to impossibly dream about.
My only excuse is one I mentioned last night: I only know what *he wrote*... in other words we only know his side of the story. And inside *his framing* then yeah, he's parked himself in.
We don't know *her* side, however. He sees her as his best friend. Is this how she sees him? He sees her as "materialist" and any acts he performs or gifts he brings as making himself happy by making her happy. Does she see herself as materialist? Is she happy when he thinks she's happy? He talks about wanting to be the controlled submissive in a full-time D/s withholding relationship with her. Does she see him as wanting to be controlled or as already controlling?
Again, I dunno. Since we only have his side of *his* story we can't know, eh?
In the extreme case she may see him as a stalker, in which case, considering how miserable unsuccessful things like restraining orders are ("wow, now she's *really* playing hard to get") talk therapy would really, *really* be good idea! (And if not talk therapy then more drastic interventions would be entirely called for -- my experience of the aftermaths of "successful" stalkers and their survivors is that it's the epitome of senseless tragedy.)
But a deeper lesson might be learned if he *isn't* a stalker and is instead just really sunk in the worthiness trap. Because what the *ordinary* supplicant sees only as striving for worthiness often appears to others as entitlement. And the suitor's expressions of frustration? More entitlement? And why not -- after all who's usually setting the terms? "If I only do this she'll realize..." or "Maybe if I help her move..." or even "if she only knew how I felt about her she'd..." are all setting the terms, *and reward* that one believes "should" slay the dragon of indifference and "earn" the longed-for kiss.
Getting back to the "no-sex" class paradigm one can see how actual women's agency or genuine desire beyond "yes or no" would only interfere with or even frustrate the internal cycles of the male worthiness trap.
One hopes talk therapy helps with that too.
In comments to this post about "sexy" Halloween costumes Holly of The Pervocracy said "Today at the costume store, I saw a sexy Freddy Krueger. It was called "Mrs. Krueger" and it was a shredded short dress in the style of Freddy's sweater."
Image from Stacy at I Met a Possum.
Hmm... and it's a "sexy" *Mrs* Krueger costume too!
Which I guess makes it a "sexy MILF" costume. Speaking of which, "sexy" costume logic says expect a sanitized sexualized-not-sexual "sexy MILF" costume soon.
Setting aside the pure absurdity for a moment, assuming it followed the "sexy" costume genre how do you think they'd do a costume like that anyway? Betcha there'd be glasses involved, because you know *all* moms wear glasses, right? But would the rest be some combination of high-heeled Croakies, a mini-diaper-bag clutch purse, and maybe one of those shoulders-only vest/top thingies (not sure what they're called) decked out like a sweatshirt hoodie? Or maybe, going the other way, a "sensible" a-line dress with huge scallops at the waist, oversized pearls, and a slightly bulky cell phone? Or maybe oversized mini-van keys? You tell me.
And yes, that's all by way of distracting myself from the idea of a "sexy Mrs. Kreuger" which, as Holly points out, is gross even before you're reminded that the real Kreuger was some kind of ghost of a child molester! Eww.
[Note: I post-dated this, um, post so it would appear closer to Halloween. Holly left her comment in September. --fl]
Image from the Babeland product page for the
"Monkey Spanker" toy for men.Megan of Jezebel brings up a great point!
A male colleague of mine remarked to be recently that writing about vibrators is a Jezebel scribe's rite of passage. And, it's true, we totally write about vibrators a lot; in fact, I popped my own vibrator-story cherry not that long ago! It is a rare day, however, that any of us writes about male masturbatory aides — and, when we have, we usually focus on Real Dolls and how vaguely disturbing we find the men who are into them. But then I saw this article in The Independent today about the surge in men purchasing all sorts of things to their dicks into or up their butts, and I realized that it wasn't just sex dolls I find vaguely disturbing... and that that's kind of sexist of me.
I mean, why is it that the mental image I have of a guy who utilizes sex toys is someone kind of creepy? Is this fleshlight any stranger-looking than a rabbit, really? Why is it that I am fine with a guy jerking off with his hands, but if he's jerking off in something I'm vaguely disturbed? Why is it not remotely strange to me that men would buy things to shove up their butts — or to have their partners shove up their butts — but, still, looking at this picture of something the would stick their dicks in, some reptilian part of my brain goes "Ewww."? Even the author of the article, Tanya Gold, admits to masturbating with mechanical aids, but seems to find male sex toys — from the pocket pussies to the pussy-in-a-jar devices to the blow-up and real dolls — disturbing in their appearance and what they say about the men who utilize them.
I'm not sure sexism is the right word for the impulse for judging men's masturbation, ahem, differently from women's but she's right about the double standard.
"Blossom Sleeve" toy for men.I'm the first to agree that the, um, highly stylized attempts at representing disembodied vulvas is disquieting and probably disturbing to people with the actual parts. That could be projection on my part though because I'm disquieted by the no-less "realistic" disembodied erections you see in a lot of sex toys for women. Fortunately many sex toys, for both men or women, aren't really anatomical at all -- consider the very novel, but allegedly quite effective "Monkey Spanker" toy for men in the photo, above.** But I digress...
I can think of two other reasons why we might feel more squeamish about male masturbation than for women. The first being that for many mainstream cultures, now and through much of history, have (believe it or not) placed a *huge* emphasis on male chastity. Several major religions and related medical traditions.*** (See Ayurvedic medicine, for instance.) In the West, from roughly 1825 to 1975, doctors were convinced that ejaculation in general and (male) masturbation in particular were the root causes of tuberculosis, insanity, curvature of the spine. The original Boy Scouts was founded to help divert young male minds from "self pollution." John Harvey Kellogg invented corn flakes, Charlie Post cooked up Postum and Grape Nuts, and Sylvester Graham invented Graham flour and Graham crackers because they believed bland, whole-fiber foods temper hot lust. And the tradition of non-religious male circumcision was introduced and successfully promoted by physicians because it was believed to inhibit masturbation in boys and men. It was as much an article of medical faith in the late 1800s that "excess" ejaculation was as life-shortening as the (much more well-founded) belief that smoking is life-shortening today. That's a *lot* of propaganda, and the late 20th Century, when the idea that masturbation-as-health-hazard was finally put to rest. And, well, *perversely* it *really was* the case that due to convention and social pressure those who *did* masturbate, or admit it, really could be seen as marginal or socially suspect. (Compare it to the reaction today to people who won't wear seat belts or won't car-seat their children -- at this point if you haven't gotten the safety message, and can manage to ignore all the dashboard lights, there really *is* something else going on.) And the late 20th Century just wasn't that long ago -- some of us still remember it quite distinctly. :-) Anyway, that's one good reason.
"Fleshlight" toy for men.The other is that (soapbox here) the classic feminist construction of women as the sex class has it backwards. In fact it's more accurate to say women are (prescriptively and proscriptively) supposed to be the restrained, chaste, non-sexual "no-sex" class, whereas men are held to be the reflexive, relentless (every seven minutes!), think-with-the-little-head, fuck-anything-that-moves, fuck-anything-that-*doesn't*-move (Megan mentions "Real Dolls," for instance, but drunk-date rape is a lot more problematic) sex class that perpetually threatens the chastity and propriety of "delicate flower," "hey, my *mom* was a woman!" femininity. And so male sexuality, while considered utterly predictable, is also a commodity produced in quantities that far exceed demand.
Oh, see also the universally degrading "why buy the cow when the milk is free" philosophy advanced by the patriarchy as a means to induce men to marry... once they're deemed "worthy" to receive the woman's *father's* consent. Given that Patriarchy functions not only by treating women as domestic livestock but also as a system for controlling men via *access* to sex, then that system is overridden by what author Neil Stevenson wryly termed "manual override."
"Aneros Prostate Stimulator"
Oh, and one last thing. Recently, in the last year or so, several women have confided to me that they're running into more and more men who now prefer masturbation to sex. With *them.* And whereas *tradition,* not to mention the "no-sex" class paradigm, says they ought to be relieved not to have to endure men's lustful advances, *reality* says women desire and enjoy sex no less than men and consequently a "I see you as just a friend" isn't so, well, hot. No, obviously the plural of anecdote isn't data, nor am I ready yet to accept the generally breathless claims that, say, Japanese men are losing interest represents a real trend. But if it really does *become* a trend, and if toys for men become as sophisticated for men as they've become for women then I wonder if at some point traditional disgust or distress at male masturbation would flip over into resentment.
[** Note: Clicking the images in this post will take you to the corresponding pages at Babeland. I'm not at all affiliated with Babeland but that's where I've nicked all accompanying images so it only seemed fair. They're a good company though and the original store's here in Seattle. Worth a visit if you're in town. --fl]
[*** Male chastity being distinctly, well, distinct from male virginity. --fl]
Photo by Flickr user Jamuudsen. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise points out that the "no-sex" class paradigm intersects the financial meltdown.
Michael Daly of the New York Daily News reports that the financial meltdown is forcing former Wall Street big shots to dump their "high end girlfriends" as a cost cutting measure
"[Charles] Hayes says. 'If you're a short, ugly 40-year-old guy and you're throwing over a high-quality girlfriend, you're desperate.'
The absolute economic low comes with a realization that Hayes summarizes in a sentence.
'I can't afford her anymore!'"
Girlfriends as disposable accessories, charming.
You know what's really fucking *tragic?* All the people who claim "women are the gatekeepers." Because, s'yeah, those "can't afford her anymore" girlfriends sure are in charge of how those relationships go, mmm-hmmm, you bet.
What else is tragic? That so many people think this is the *only* way relationships work, can work, even *should* work.
Oh yeah, and not to put too fine a point on it, what does one do when one has "thrown over" one's "high end" girlfriend because one can't "afford" her anymore? Go to the "previously owned" section of the girlfriend lot? Put an ad on Craig's list saying "had to dump my old girlfriend because I couldn't afford her, need someone cheaper?"
Also not to put too fine a point on it but... um...
Y'know, if some fellow human being is your actual, y'know, *girlfriend* you could probably, I dunno, *talk* to her about what's going on, let her know you're in trouble, ask what *she* wants to do. But... nah, if you're "a short, ugly 40-year-old guy" no way she'll stay interested.
*And,* while I'm railing on about the "no-sex" class, I'm kind of curious how many of these "high end girlfriends," a.k.a. living human beings, actually *like* their partners, disagree that they're as ugly as the partners themselves claim, don't care for them only for their money as their partners themselves claim. In other words, how many of these guys are "tossing over" their partners not because the partners won't have them but because they feel that, after their fall from wealth, they no longer *deserve* or are otherwise worthy of "high end" partners?
Don't get me wrong. I'm pretty sure some of those men, and women, are every bit as shallow, predatory, ruthless, and as incapable of emotional attachment as advertised. But I'm betting *most* of them aren't. Although some obviously *think* they are. Or, worse, think they're *supposed* to be. Noticing this isn't the same thing as sympathy, necessarily, and real or not real there's really no excusing it. But still, woah, no matter how much we might hold them in contempt, remarks like "If you're a short, ugly 40-year-old guy..." suggest we can't catch up with the contempt they pretty clearly hold for themselves.
So. What do you think? Any Manhattan-area readers able to offer local perspectives?
Stacy at I Met a Possum asks the ironic but evidently not rhetorical question "Is there *anything* that can't be turned into a 'sexy' Halloween costume."
"Sexy Tin-Man" costume image found at I Met a Possum.
Evidently not. She's turned up images of a sexy Statue of Liberty costume, a sexy Plymouth Pilgrim costume, sexy defense *and* prosecuting attorneys *and* sexy judge costumes, a sexy Wizard-of-Oz Tin-man costume with kicky silver boots, sexy Freddy Kreuger and Jason costumes, and a (kid you not) sexy fried-chicken restaurant clerk costume! Oh, and a sexy plumber-with-butt-crack costume.
The model for the sexy defense-attorney costume is shown holding glasses, which makes it my favorite... but sadly they're not included in the $52.99 package so never mind.
Which reminds me of that post by the now long-gone Olympia Matisse about the difference between purchasable "sexy" costumes and actual sexy costumes. (And possibly predictably I just realized her analysis -- that commercial costumes, like Victoria Secrets lingerie, signifies sexualized but safely not really at all sexual intent -- ties in beautifully with the "no-sex" class paradigm.)
At any rate, there being enough time to plan ahead, what's *your* idea of the most absurd "sexy job" Halloween costume anyway? And if you instead wanted to be actually sexy, instead of safely "sexy," what costume (do it yourself or purchased) would *you* choose?
(For the record the sexiest costume *I* ever got was a vintage diplomat's morning suit, a tuxedo-like outfit with doeskin-soft pants with a modest but consipicuous button fly, a Jacard-woven vest, a long but unvented "tails" jacket, a tall top hat and... five-and-a-half inch black platform boots that, combined, made me more than seven feet tall. A pair of fangs I wheedled from a friend who's dad owned a dental-supply lab and a little gothic makeup and I looked...
Well, to be honest I looked like I evidently usually *didn't.* Because that evening at the Halloween bash an amazing number of strangers asked me, humidly, to bite them compared to the number that usually asked me to bite them before or since. Which would be pretty much zero, before or since. (Hmm....)
(Via Neatorama)
Bitchy Jones of Bitchy Jones's Diary is a wonderfully bitter foe of the "no-sex" class paradigm. She's got another great post today about the deeply ground-in confusion people have about dominant/top/sadist women.
When a woman writes in to say she feels a bit like she might like sadism please do not get a passing asshat prodom to say "great news! Men love that! You can make cash!"
...
This though is what I am complaining about mostly when I complain about prodoms being the face of dominant femaleness. ‘Cause it’s not fair to pick on Savage Love - this happens all the time. Every time a woman starts publicly questioning the fact that she might get a sexual kick out of dominanting men prodoms seem to be the ones called on to make that sound about as sexy to women as a tax return. To make it something that exists to please men and to make it a *job*. What could be duller than a job? That’s the way to wring the joy out of anything.
I mean, for serious, telling a woman who is struggling to accept she might be a sexual sadist that she is lucky because she can make money?!?!?!11 Je-zeus! Being a woman and a sadist is tricky enough without people telling you it is great news ’cause it’s a money spinner. Would you tell a young guy who was struggling with the thought that he might be gay - fab! you can become a rent boy!
Read the quote in context here.
Or, of course, in even more straightforward "no-sex" class logic, telling a woman who enjoys sex that she should become a prostitute.
I love BJ's point about encouraging women to take something they enjoy and turn it into work, but that's not my main point here. Because in addition to *believing* women aren't intrinsically interested in sex the "no-sex" class paradigm also *demands* that women *not* be interested in sex... and, often, takes steps to insure you don't.
And in her case, whatever you think of BDSM, there's a nearly-unbridgable gulf between getting so horny from flogging the dickens out of your partner you jump his bones to get *your* rocks off, on the one hand, and letting someone *pay you* to flog them till he gets *his* rocks off (or not if he's paying you to forbid him to have them.) The point being that one's for *you* and the other's for *him.*
Oh, and also, not to sound too sentimental or realistic or anything but... y'know, whatever you think of BDSM, *what* one prefers as one's form of intimate sexual expression is an entirely different continuum or dimension from *who* one wishes to share that intimacy with.
None of this should be read as a judgment of sex work in general or pro-dom sex work in particular. It's just that it's odd to assume that *if* you enjoy something about sex *then* you should do it for work instead.
Oh, and one last thing -- if you're a man and enjoy something about sex then does everyone jump and say you should... what?... *pay* to do it? No, that's stupid, right? And so what social context, exactly, makes it such an automatic reflex for so many to say if you're a woman you should charge for what *you* enjoy? (coughDomanantParadigmcough)
A reader (thanks, Vir) sent me a link to a cool post from last July from Renee of Womanist Musings. The occasion of her post was a Fleshbot post about the downsides of "sex like a porn star" but the specific issue was a video of something called "bored girl porn" wherein a young woman studiously looks utterly indifferent as a faceless but probably equally young man in white socks and not much else frantically humps away at her. (And he *uncomfortably* humps away. What *is* it with porn and it's fetish for positions uncomfortable to all but the camera operator anyway?**)
From the still pic I have posted for those that are to timid to follow the link, it is clear that the male is shall we say "engaged", and the woman is staring blandly at what I can only assume is a television. Talk about an exciting lay. Throughout the brief video it is clear that he is just giving his 100%, while she passively lays there and "allows" him to fuck her.
I have cursed a lot already but you were warned. Here is my problem with this video..and no I'm not upset because it is porn, I am upset because it is a perfect example of how we understand sex. When we think of heterosexual sex it is always something that the man does to the woman. The male is almost always the active body, and the female the passive body. Women say I want you to fuck me, or fuck me harder (if the sex is any good at least) and men say I am going to fuck you, or I am going to put my cock inside you. Common phrases that I am sure that we can all agree upon. Even when the homophobes joke, they create the so-called "feminine" or docile body, as the one on the receiving end of the penis.
...
The sexually passive female is a reflection of the ways in which women are socially constructed. Good women submit, good girls don't really enjoy sex.
...
Ultimately the passive pussy is limiting to women. We need to begin to rethink the ways in which we understand passive and active as it relates to sexuality. Who says that the woman does not envelop the man, taking her pleasure as she sees fit? We are not only entitled to our orgasms, we have a right to demand them, and act specifically in pursuit of them. Until we can stop feeling shame about our bodies and appreciate sex for the pleasurable experience that it is capable of being, we will forever sleep in the "wet spot" frustrated and stymied by our own attempts to deny one of the most basic drives of humanity. Stop waiting for him to fuck you, fuck him instead!
Classic feminist theory says men's perspective makes women the "sex" class. And while I agree completely with the assessment I think it makes more sense to say that men objectify women not as the *sex* class but as the *no-sex* class. Renee's baffled irritation at the imposition of that asexual designation demonstrates that its an *imposed* designation. Her exasperated failure to identify with it suggest it's an untruthful designation. Her reaction makes sense given the designation doesn't originate with her.
As always, the next question becomes "why do men continue to perpetuate it?" Because whereas the *origins* of the class designation may have its roots in biology and patriarchy, as Shulamith Firestone argued in the first chapter of Dialectic of Sex, in non-agrarian, literate, money-based culture there's no non-circular-reasoning, non-begging-the-question benefits for men and no, zero, none benefit for women.
So never mind (for just a moment) that men's "no-sex" class view of women is infinitely harder on men than it is on women, it sucks for men too! In other words its not only zero sum it's *negative* sum.
Anyway, that incredibly contrived photo from Renee's page, and the video clip it's taken from, seems like a perfect metaphor for the dominant, "no-sex" class paradigm: women uncomfortably pretending they don't enjoy sex so that men can uncomfortably pretend they enjoy it more than they do.
[** Actually don't answer that. It's a rhetorical question and irrelevant to this post. --fl]
So as you've probably notice I'm terribly behind in responding to everybody's comments. I still read them. Heck, they're the best reason for blogging! I often learn so much from all of you, and I get a lot of inspiration as well.
Case in point: a while back now Mariko Passion of Educated Whore, Urban Geisha said in comments to a post about her experience working in a pretty horrible Nevada brothel
Thanks so much for quoting us and not trashing us. It's great to see someone who dislikes prostitution, no less, to not trash our words or misinterpret the message.
It's funny, I *do* dislike prostitution, but I don't really have a problem with prostitutes at all. Here's how that works.
I know someone who's a pulmonary doctor. He says 90% of his job is telling people they're going to die, mainly from cancer and emphysema. His job exists primarily because people smoke, not because he's a doctor.
That doesn't mean he's not needed, nor is there anything to trash about his choice of profession. And it *certainly* doesn't mean regulating either him or his medical specialty is going to change whether people smoke. The problem isn't the service *he's* providing.
Heck, I don't even have a problem with *smokers!* (As someone who's struggled all my life with a habit I began when I was very young I'm a little too aware of the culture, the psychology, the economics, and the incredible internal and external impulses that drive it.)
If we could manage to change some of the conditions that drive the tobacco industry we might create circumstances where my friend's work would be limited to treating the relative handful of lung diseases that *aren't* related to smoking.
In fact this is already happening to some extent -- smoking happens to be in decline in his part of the country, enough so that he's branched out into helping people with breathing-related sleep disorders like apnea. (And it's still not his fault that apnea is strongly correlated diet, nor would regulating sleep medicine change *that.*)
Well, same thing with prostitution. I can rather bitterly oppose the social conditions that leave... mostly men imagining that 90% of their preferred-gender partners aren't (and *shouldn't be*) interested in sex, leading them to conclude that they should be able to *buy,* force, or otherwise appropriate sex from the remaining 10%. But that doesn't mean that eliminating prostitutes is going to stop them from believing that. Nor would eliminating prostitutes alter their peculiar dynamic of seeking to leverage sex from people who, being *people* and all, tend to be every bit as interested... or would be if their partners didn't call them whores, or sluts, or "crazy," or "wild" for admitting it, let alone appearing to enjoy themselves.
As with pulmonary medicine *if* social assumptions were to dramatically change the kind of work prostitutes do would change pretty dramatically. But in the mean time why take it out on those like Passion, who are *willing* to do it?** Or their customers who, for now anyway, imagine that's their only alternative.
Update: And just to extend the analogy a little further, having a job, even a very well-paid one, that involves telling people they're going to die all day long and then basically coaching them through it for months or years takes a heck of a psychic toll on many of those who do it. And while I wouldn't interfere if the work really called to them I wouldn't *encourage* my son or daughter to do it and I *certainly* wouldn't stand by if someone coerced them into it. But that *still* doesn't mean it's *bad* to do it.
[** There's no question that no one should be *forced* to do it -- an entirely different kettle of fish that's, again, related to social assumptions that *seriously* have to change! --fl]
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo relays a quote that's been making the rounds this morning.
[McCain campaign manager Rick] Davis says Palin won't give any interviews until she feels "comfortable" giving one. And this morning he added that she wouldn't give any "until the point in time when she'll be treated with respect and deference."
How 'bout that "you can't talk to her till you've proved yourself worthy" approach? Sound familiar?
Oddly, I'm actually pretty sure the Governor is probably quite a bit more capable of handling questions than her nominee and his staff give her credit for. After all, for all the froth on one side and breathiness on the other, until Troopergate skunked her chances the woman was poised to challenge Ted Stevens for his Senate seat, and, according to prognosticators last spring and summer, she would very likely have cakewalked all over him. And yet McCain and his strategists have her practically cloistered except for heavily-scripted "balcony-style" appearances wherein the actual candidate himself models the expected deference for his Gilbert & Sullivan-style ward-in-chancery by keeping his hands clasped and his eyes cast down while she speaks fondly of him.
But please, don't let that kind of pitch-perfect dog-whistling for the patriarchy and its enablers distract anyone from vigilantly "so over you-ing" various flat-noted progressive men and (more recently) women.
Update: And just to be clear I'm not referring to nor criticizing the Governor's behavior (although I'm confident she's an active rather than passive participant.) Instead I'm criticizing Senator McCain's judgment and his control of his staff. (Like a good low-echelon air-force officer he seems to be habitually deferential to higher command -- great for a pilot, obviously, but not so reassuring in a Presidential wannabe.)
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?
[Sept. 22, 2008: Doh! I found this post in my drafts pile and couldn't believe I hadn't posted it. In comments Nightfall reminded me that I already had! Mea Culpa (which isn't, but ought to be, Latin for dang it all.) Sorry about that. --fl]
Donald Zimmer of AskMen.com manifests the... quirkiness of the "no-sex" class paradigm in "sex health advisor" column
Sexual Surplus
My husband and I have sexual problems. I am a freak; ready and willing to please him in any way, shape or form (with the exception of him being with somebody else). I will let him watch me as I do another female or let him do me while I do another female, but I don't like to share at all! The question is: How to I spark his interest in sex and keep it?
At one point he couldn't keep his hands off me. Now I can barely get him to put them on. I would just like to keep him interested, and was wondering if y'all had any advice? I'm not an ugly woman; I have put on some weight but my breasts went from a 36B to a 42DD. When they were smaller I had no feeling in them at all; now it's a whole different story! Plus I like the benefits that they bring to the bedroom.
[signed] Alexandra
Alexandra,
I think the source of your problem can be best summarized as follows: You can have too much of a good thing. In other words, your husband's current lack of interest may be the consequence of his having enjoyed free rein in the bedroom for so long. There's a lot to be said for keeping some forbidden fruit in a relationship; in the absence of taboos, every sexual act can become commonplace.
I'm no therapist, Alexandra, and you may eventually conclude that a therapist is required. But in the meantime, try doing a little withholding. You'll be surprised at how much more we want what we can't have.
Donald Zimmer
Read the actual article here.
What's the name of that website Amanda Marcotte used to reference? The one that reverses genders in any English text you paste into it? (I think as well as handling gendered pronouns and body parts it may have also been able to substitute first names, as in "John" for "Jane" or "Donna" for "Donald.") Anyway I ask because I'm... pretty sure Zimmer would have had different advise if his correspondent had been named "Alexander" instead of "Alexandra."
I mean, don't you think? Although actually our narratives about gender are such that *if* a man bothered to write in with such a complaint I'm not sure many advice columnists would have bothered answering.
I *am* sure, however, that a man wouldn't be advised that "... your problem can be best summarized as follows: You can have too much of a good thing. In other words, your [wife's] current lack of interest may be the consequence of [her] having enjoyed free rein in the bedroom for so long."
Funny thing, of course, is that it's actually excellent relationship advice for *any* partner who's sexual appetite is larger than his or her partner's! What makes it funny though, again, is that no one ever offers that solution to men even though we're far more likely to express the complaint.
See what I mean? The "natural" answer for a high-libido woman is "play hard to get." It's not the "natural" answer for high-libido men (which by convention is usually abbreviated as "men") because most people recognize that while it's possible it's neither fun nor easy...
Nor is "have less sex" exactly the most consistent advice for someone who's request was...
...how to have *more* sex.
Double-bind much?
---
Quick semi-digression: I chose the word "appetite" carefully, by the way, because that same disparity shows up in a lot of places. A few years ago some enterprising young economists studied phone dynamics of couples in long-term relationships. Their finding was that if one member needs to check in every two days and another every three then the first member will do nearly all the calling... with resulting resentment and irritation about "clinginess" and/or "aloofness"... even though given just a little more time the second member would want to check in *just as badly as the first!* And might even be the "clingy" member with a different partner who needed to check in every four days. The point being that "I'm not lonely *yet*" isn't the same as "I don't get lonely" or, more significantly, "I'm indifferent to you." In food the analogy would be "No thanks, I'm still full from our last meal," not "I never get hungry." And in sex the analogy would be "I'm not horny *yet,* not "I have a low or no libido."
[** Not *that* Goose or Gander though. :-) --fl]
Donald Zimmer of AskMen.com manifests the foolishness of the "no-sex" class paradigm in "sex health advisor" column
sexual surplus
My husband and I have sexual problems. I am a freak; ready and willing to please him in any way, shape or form (with the exception of him being with somebody else). I will let him watch me as I do another female or let him do me while I do another female, but I don't like to share at all! The question is: How to I spark his interest in sex and keep it?
At one point he couldn't keep his hands off me. Now I can barely get him to put them on. I would just like to keep him interested, and was wondering if y'all had any advice? I'm not an ugly woman; I have put on some weight but my breasts went from a 36B to a 42DD. When they were smaller I had no feeling in them at all; now it's a whole different story! Plus I like the benefits that they bring to the bedroom.
Alexandra
Alexandra,
I think the source of your problem can be best summarized as follows: You can have too much of a good thing. In other words, your husband's current lack of interest may be the consequence of his having enjoyed free rein in the bedroom for so long. There's a lot to be said for keeping some forbidden fruit in a relationship; in the absence of taboos, every sexual act can become commonplace.
I'm no therapist, Alexandra, and you may eventually conclude that a therapist is required. But in the meantime, try doing a little withholding. You'll be surprised at how much more we want what we can't have.
Donald Zimmer
Read the quote in context here.
What's the name of that website Amanda Marcotte used to reference? The one that reverses genders in any English text you paste into it? (I think as well as handling gendered pronouns and body parts it may have also been able to substitute first names, as in "John" for "Jane" or "Donna" for "Donald.") Anyway I ask because I'm... pretty sure Zimmer would have had different advise if his correspondent had been named "Alexander" instead of "Alexandra."
I mean, don't you think? Although actually our narratives about gender are such that *if* a man bothered to write in with such a complaint I'm not sure many advice columnists would have bothered answering.
I *am* sure, however, that a man wouldn't be advised that "... your problem can be best summarized as follows: You can have too much of a good thing. In other words, your [wife's] current lack of interest may be the consequence of [her] having enjoyed free rein in the bedroom for so long."
Funny thing, of course, is that it's actually excellent relationship advice for *any* partner who's sexual appetite is larger than his or her partner's! What makes it funny though, again, is that no one ever offers that solution to men even though we're far more likely to express the complaint.
See what I mean? The "natural" answer for a high-libido woman is "play hard to get." It's not the "natural" answer for high-libido men (which by convention is usually abbreviated as "men") because most people recognize that while it's possible it's neither fun nor easy...
Nor is "have less sex" exactly the most consistent advice for someone who's request was...
...how to have *more* sex.
Double-bind much?
[Hat tip to AAG. --fl]
---
Quick semi-digression: I chose the word "appetite" carefully, by the way, because that same disparity shows up in a lot of places. A few years ago some enterprising young economists studied phone dynamics of couples in long-term relationships. Their finding was that if one member needs to check in every two days and another every three then the first member will do nearly all the calling... with resulting resentment and irritation about "clinginess" and/or "aloofness"... even though given just a little more time the second member would want to check in *just as badly as the first!* And might even be the "clingy" member with a different partner who needed to check in every four days. The point being that "I'm not lonely *yet*" isn't the same as "I don't get lonely" or, more significantly, "I'm indifferent to you." In food the analogy would be "No thanks, I'm still full from our last meal," not "I never get hungry." And in sex the analogy would be "I'm not horny *yet,* not "I have a low or no libido."
---
P.S. I was so startled by Zimmer's advice I nearly forgot about Alexandra's trapped-in-the-paradigm self-introduction: "My husband and I have sexual problems. I am a freak; ready and willing to please him in any way"
Unpacking all the different layers in those two sentences could take all day. Let's just say in order to be a freak she'd have to
Photo by Flickr user massdistraction. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Holly of The Pervocracy raises an excellent point about a recent, highly... uh... stylized Psychology Today cover photo on "seven taboos that are perfectly natural."
By using a model so conventionally sexy, they dodge the question of why the kink itself is sexy. Everyone already knows why a slinky blonde in vinyl with a whip is hot; it's a lot more provocative to explore why a short pudgy dude in cotton underwear with a whip is hot.
She said it here.
I mean think about it. In the "no-sex" class world a stereotyped hottie with a whip is just a slightly different verse of the same old "prove yourself worthy or I say no" song we straight men teach ourselves to believe every partner sings.
The erotic appeal of pudgy boy in y-fronts and a whip, though, cuts right to the heart of actual, you know, kink.
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.
Octogalore, guest-blogging at Feministe, semi-coins a term and then asks some fairly important compare and contrast questions.
There have been so many posts out there in the past few weeks about sparkle that I don’t know where to start. I’m using “sparkle” as a catch-all for burlesque, sex work, fashion, any kind of sexy display or fashion statement. Here are just a few of them.As I said in my whack at the subject, the discussions have centered around whether it’s (a) an empowering and feminist choice, (b) harmless fun that’s not meant to be either feminist or antifeminist, or (c) patriarchy-compliant antifeminism.
I came out (b) there, for reasons you can check out if you like.
...
The patriarchy isn’t going to topple based on sparkle. It might be compromised, though, if women had equal economic power. And I don’t mean any one kind of women, but all women having equal economic power compared to men who are similarly situated (Of course, that wouldn’t solve many other problems, like world poverty, racism, ablism, etc., which are worthy of discussion as well but not my focus in this particular post).
So we can stress about leg shaving, but I have a sneaking suspicion it doesn’t matter. If “the patriarchy” were reading many of these posts, they’d be chortling right now. Fiddling while Rome burns! The real battles are too laden with guilt and with women second-guessing each other, they’re going unfought.
This is a pretty sparse excerpt. You'll probably want to read the rest of the post here.
I'm a little less sanguine about certain elements of sparkle (a useful term b the way) than Octagalore. For instance to the extent some elements of sparkle (prostitution, for instance, or stripping) contribute to or play into the dominant "no-sex" class paradigm, and other elements (competing with other women to show up in the most "outrageous" and/or expensive clothes) seem like excursions into the beauty trap. And finally I get a little concerned when people confuse "drag" with gender, feeling for instance that failing to wear a skirt makes one "look like a boy" as a woman I used to work with claimed.
So, three quibbles with Octagalore's choice but mostly only quibbles because, yeah, struggling to wriggle free of patriarchal indoctrination doesn't mean I don't have that indoctrination up to my scuppers. And based on that indoctrination the feminist debate over "Teh Blowjob" isn't just incomprehensible to Patriarchy, and it isn't just irrelevant to Patriarchy, it appears as largely *supportive* of Patriarchy by refining and/or extending the "madonna/whore" dichotomy.
Also, as Octagalore proposes, if Patriarchy really was a directed enterprise instead of a self-perpetuating *result* then yeah, arguments over sparkle would have Patriarchy blowing apple juice out its nostrils compared to it's collective diaper-breaching panic about the increasing convergence of economic, social, and political power between women and men.
Because men have their own equivalents of "sparkle" (I'm not sure what to call it yet but see beer bongs, Lamborghinis, and canned hunting, hair plugs, and so on, that while humiliating or demeaning when viewed externally somehow detract *not at all* from conducting their enterprises. And yes, perhaps we *should* examine and debate "male sparkle," and if we did Dick Cheney's 78-year-old friend might not still be picking shotgun pellets from his face after that canned hunt a few years ago. But it still wouldn't be terribly essential compared to certain other things men could be doing instead. Like, um, not veto the Paycheck Fairness Act (via Feministe.) Just saying.
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution reviews, or at least views, someone named F. Roger Devlin's" Sexual Utopia in Power (pdf, sorry), originally published by William Regnery II's paleoconservative Occidental Quarterly -- text in italics are Cowen's quotes of the original article. (Italics are Cowen's)
Yes, men are also, to their own detriment, continually surrounded with images of exceptionally attractive women. But this has less practical import, because—to say it once more—women choose.Or:
The decline of matrimony is often attributed to men now being able to “get what they want” from women without marrying them. But what if a woman is able to get everything she wants from a man without marriage? Might she not also be less inclined to “commit” under such circumstances?
This essay is not politically correct and at times it is misogynous and yes I believe the author is evil (seriously). The main behavioral assumption is that women are fickle. So they are monogamous at points of time but not over time; Devlin then solves for the resulting equilibrium, so to speak. The birth rate falls, for one thing. The piece also claims that the modern "abolition" of marriage strengthens the attractive at the expense of the unattractive. Some of you will hate the piece. I disagree with the central conclusion, and also the motivation, but it does seem to count as a new idea. If you're tempted, read it.
Read the quote in context here.
Devlin's *very* disapproving article claims that sexual utopia for women is choosing the best possible man with the result that if they can't hook up with James Bond (his example) or maybe Donald Trump then no other men will have sex unless a) she chooses, no doubt resentfully, to "settle" for less or b) he resorts to date rape. Oh yeah, and all that con-sarned emancipation just makes things worse, including requiring more date rape, because men are deprived of all those more traditional, genteel economic forms of extortion.
The semi-predictable comments are peppered with people asking what exactly Cowen might consider evil. I'm not sure of that but *I* think the guy's evil in Hannah Arendt's sense that actions taken from banal assumptions can lead to horrific results. One banality he adheres to is mistaking for "instinct" or "genetics" women's perfectly rational partnership decisions in the face of traditionally and often legally-mandated economic distortions... or that men's equally rational (though more odious) decisions made from the traditionally up-hill side of those market distortions should be mistaken for unconscious and uncontrollable biological mandates.
It seems to me that the real "sexual revolution" derives from three points beginning back maybe 250 years: a) medical advances, especially the discovery of hygiene, leading to lower death rates among women and children with the result that b) women have more time in terms of diminished child care and more predictably long life span to take advantage of education leading to c) increased social productivity and overall higher standards of living. The resulting virtuous cycle leads to all sorts of other innovations such as markets for brute-strength-mitigating automation, demand for unnecessary-pregnancy-reducing medical advances like contraception instead of once extremely risky after-the-fact abortion**, and then finally the simple, innovative question that started becoming unavoidable in the late 1950s or 1960s: why should a man and a woman working side by side producing the same output be paid differently?
In economic terms the answer to that last question is "there's no good reason at all." Devlin answers that women *have* to be paid less than men, preferably far less, because otherwise men won't have the kind of leverage we need to get laid. Except for James Bond and, I guess, Donald Trump.
I'm not an economist but I'm guessing an economist like Tyler Cowen would say anyone who thinks we should return the entire social organization of the economy to the productivity levels of the 1950s just so Devlin can get laid is evil.
Also, wow does Devlin have a low opinion of men or what? Virtually none of us will never be interesting to potential partners without some form of bribery, fraud, extortion, or force? Really? Sh'yeah and people say *feminists* are the problem!
Point: surprising how even highly libidinous women are interested in men who are so busy trying to bribe, extort, defraud, or force them to do something they'd... enjoy doing with someone who wasn't being an asshole. Maybe the trick, therefore, isn't to make it *easier to be assholes,* it's to *stop being assholes.*
Point: You don't have to read very far into Devlin's paper before he pretty clearly articulates the conditions that impose the "no-sex" class designation on women. What's less clear is why he so thoroughly approves of this in the face of all the misery he fairly accurately describes for both women and men.
[** This doesn't mean abortion is bad, wrong, old fashioned, or anything else. Just that before contraception there wasn't much alternative. --fl]
Photo by Flickr user lrice. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Amber Rhea of Being Amber Rhea calls out a seriously backwards notion about the meaning of "sex positive."
She quotes a Emilie Dice as saying, in comments on a different site, that
Because men are already “sex positive” by cultural default. It’s not an issue for them. Of course they want women making the right choice to cater to their sexist demands. It’s a given.
Amber's reply is actually pretty important!
That really annoys me because it is so NOT what being sex-positive is about. It reminds me of non-sex-positive feminists who say, “I like sex! So how can I be sex-negative?” Because it’s not about whether you personally like sex. It’s about so much more than that. And the traditional patriarchal construct of how male and female heteronormative sexuality is played out is NOT sex-positive. So a guy not being afraid to say he likes to fuck isn’t necessarily sex-positive, either. Does he subscribe to the virgin/whore dichotomy? How does he view women who are openly, actively, unabashedly sexual? Does he speak in denigrating terms about some women and/or some types of consensual sex? Does he think “gay” is an insult? Does he use gendered insults? On and on and on. And of course, anything that is sexist (see Emilie’s comment) is by definition NOT sex-positive.
She said it here.
Yup. In common use "sex positive" is about as misunderstood as one can possibly get. For instance inside the created-by-men paradigm of women as the "no-sex" class it's exactly *not* true that *by default* men are sex-positive. The same paradigm, by the way, casts women, particularly feminist women, as sex-negative by default (instead quite a few feminists, including even alleged "man-haters" like Andrea Dworkin who against huge opposition established the core sex-positive principle of affirmative consent, have been in the vanguard of sex-positive culture.)
So! Last spring I listed the generally agreed upon core sex-positive principles, and in that post I pointed out that "sex positive" isn't at all the same thing as "pro sex." I think I gave a couple of examples there but here's a way to clear up whether men are "sex positive by cultural default."
Anybody who says "with prostitutes you're not paying for sex, you're paying them to go away afterwards?" Opposite of sex positive, m'kay? Not to say you can't be sex positive and pro-sex-work. But in this culture anyway you can't say anyone's sex-positive by default.
Yes, it's a small surprise that erstwhile presidential candidate John Edwards had a (rumored) affair with a woman not his wife, and a somewhat larger surprise that they decided to carry a (rumored) resulting pregnancy to term. Knowing nothing else but what I hear in the meta-tabloids it's actually pretty of cool that Edwards cared enough about his (rumored) partner and child to visit them despite, evidently, knowing that members of the yellow press (Mickey Kaus, National Enquirer, Matt Drudge) were stalking him. It's even cool that Edward's primary partner Elizabeth (rumor has it) may have known and/or been supportive, though whether before or after the (rumored) fact is even less clear than all the other (rumors.)
Oh yeah, and it's even cool that despite this being the 21st Century and all and palm-sized high-definition video cameras work even better than the old tabloid-style flashbulb film cameras, the Enquirer reporters on the Edwards stakeout, didn't even manage to catch a cell-phone photo... which more than anything else to me suggests the whole thing *really is* a rumor.
What's not so cool? That in the 21s Century anyone's using the term "love child" to describe another human being, another person, a fellow citizen, and, y'know, a little *baby!* I mean... *love child?*
I mean, if you still precede your conceptual exclamation points with "dash it all" and "zounds" then maybe you get a pass on "love child." But sweet mother of pearl it's inappropriate otherwise.
Oh yeah, and if any enterprising students have been or plan to dig into the cultural concepts behind the term, especially in light of the traditions of, well, *real* "traditional marriages" as tactical or strategic economic arrangements between families rather than romantic unions between individuals, and the sneering implication that children born out of non-arranged unions, unlike "legitimate" heirs, are dismissed as products of mere *love,* I'd be delighted to link to their work here.
---
Note also the common construction got her pregnant. That too works with the agrarian pre-scientific reproductive metaphors that gave us terms like "seed," "fertile," "husband(!)," and perhaps even "sex(!!!)" wherein "impregnation" is *entirely* a male-partner activity that merely *happens* to the perhaps otherwise passive female partner.
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!*
%#!@$%!
Still working my way back through older comments I ran into a great one from TLT in response to this post about housework as the traditionally "missing" displacement fetish for women. TLT says
I recently figured out that this is exactly what I find revolting about a TV ad for Betty Crocker Warm Delights.
Yes, even the name sounds sexual. Yet, Warm Delights are these...things that you open, add water to, cook in the microwave for a few minutes, and get what ostensibly is a dessert.
As far as I'm concerned, the only time dessert comes out of the microwave is if you put a slice of cold pie in there for 20 seconds before you put the ice cream on it, but that's something else altogether.
The commercial shows women (and only women) eating these things, often in a bed and/or in pajamas, moaning and sighing, eyes closed. Some even lick the spoons and forks they're eating with. I think one even licks the bowl it's in.
It all seems to suggest that what you (woman with misplaced, confused, repressed sexual desire) will get out of this box is sexual pleasure, not some overpriced combination of chemicals that probably tastes only vaguely of chocolate.(Chocolate being another one of those things that is supposed to drive women just *crazy*)
It's hard to catalog the variations of stereotypes and nonsense that ad perpetuates. Let's see...there's "Women don't really want, need or like sex. They just want dessert...and probably jewelry." Or, how about "You don't really need/want/deserve sex. Just eat this cake and shut up. You'll feel better about spending your nights in bed alone." Or, my favorite "It's just too much work to cook something yummy for yourself, or even to go to a bakery to get it. Just put this in the microwave, it's just as good."
Ick. Just ick.
What seems really troubling about that ad (and, you know, that's sort of a theme in a lot of ads and not just that one) is what an *empty* displacement it is. Once upon a time, maybe, one could have argued there was some sort of overall benefit for women sublimating their sexual expression into nurturing family with food. Or something. But the women in these ads are almost alway depicted as single or, occasionally, partnered but alone (as in you see a darkened sleeping form next to the awake woman who's slurping cookie dough or something.) And so they're taking what might have once been a nominally beneficial sublimation and shifting the "nurturing indulgence" back on the woman herself... which is kind of nuts in the way only sublimation (or, long as we're batting around Freud, the "return of the repressed") can be nuts: she's alone or single and so she's expressing sexuality by... *feeding herself!*
I suppose you can't expect Betty Crocker Corp., which sells only sweets, to try and sell anything else. But... but... but... &%#@#%~!
It's just *so "no-sex" class! Why not "sell" the woman on giving direct pleasure? Or using the spoon to give herself *real* orgasms?** Or if that's too racy or presumptuous how about just eating the flipping dessert?
(For the record they throw different kinds of sublimation at men so I can't comment directly. There was a great Saturday Night Live or Mad sketch doing the YouTube rounds a while ago about a man having a maximal shampoo-ad experience in the shower that I'd like to link to. I think it ends with him asleep against the shower door? Anyone have a link? For that matter, let me know about any other similar uselessly-sublimating ads you've got YouTube links to. Update: From Bunny here's one link: MadTV "Herbal Elements", and from JFPBookworm here's a Will Ferrell/SNL take on the same concept. .)
[** Does anyone do that any more? When I was in high-school a heck of a lot of girls in our informal sex-ed circle swore by masturbating with the backs of soup- or tablespoons. --fl]
"If one partner withdraws from sexual contact with the other, is the second partner still bound to a vow of fidelity?"
Boy that's one of the big questions that turned me around on prostitution. I used to have pragmatic beliefs about it (it should be legal so prostitutes can go to the police when they're assaulted or robbed or when they can provide tips and evidence without fear that officers will want "some kind of action" afterwards.) I used to have "libertarian" beliefs about it (between consenting adults and all that.)
But until I started reading other people's blogs, and reading your comments here over the years, I never questioned the basic premise that there will always be prostitutes because men always want more sex than women do.** Talk about eye-opening. Talk about paradigm shifting!
Until I started reading other people's blogs, and reading your comments, and scrolling through comments on "dating sites" for people in relationships, and talking to people in person or through email, I'd have assumed with almost 100% certainty that the sentence in quotes at the top of this post had to have been written by a man.
I'm always amazed how one person -- in this case me -- can be so wrong about so many things at once. Nor is it any comfort knowing it's not *just* me.
And no, I don't exactly have an answer to that pseudonymous but heartfelt question. Just more questions, mostly about a) how we as a society got here and b) what we as a society are still doing here. I haven't even gotten to questions about what c) we as a society can do about it.
Update: And just to be clear, I'm not saying any of that makes prostitution an answer, nor that it makes it irrelevant. It's just one more complication.
[** Or that there are things women will do only for money. Or that, without direct payment, women would never be sexually interested in men who are less "worthy" in terms of age, wealth, height, accomplishment, suavity, etc.) And so on. --fl]
The passionate and erudite I Am Curious Blue seems to reflect the general consensus that this pox on both your houses post about the endless prostitution wars fell flat. Eh, it probably did. Can't win 'em all.
I feel *passionately* that prostitution should be legal, and I think almost all anti-prostitution arguments are fatuous. I just happen to think a lot of pro-prostitution arguments are fatuous as well. And the point of my post --which I obviously didn't communicate well -- was that by hammering obsessively and exclusively at each other's *fatuous* arguments the pro and anti sides are overlooking a surprising amount of common ground.
I probably should have just said that.
Now just for the record, I think those a lot of pro-prostitution arguments, and accompanying attitudes, *damage* prostitution and increase resistance to acceptance, as well as embarrass customers, which brings me to one quibble with a further point in IACB's post. He quotes me and then attempts an interpretation I disagree with.
In my original post I said
Unlike too many other people, though, I *also* have a problem with participation in a system that so directly reinforces the "no-sex" class paradigm that says *all* heterosexual sex is asymmetrical: women want only money, men want only sex, and everything else is just haggling over the price. Which is bullshit, of course, which is why the dominant paradigm itself is bullshit.
IACB takes this to mean
This, to me, is not that far off of the standard anti-porn argument that porn is harmful because it reinforces a harmful paradigm about gender, and may actually predispose men to sexual violence as a result. And, certainly, there are many radical feminists and prostitution abolitionists who extend that argument to say that the mere existence of prostitution does the same thing.
...
The above statement comes damn close to a 'blame the sex industry' argument for men's bad behavior...
If one mean close as in just inside vs. just outside the gate to Fort Knox then yes, my statement would be close to blaming the sex industry for men's behavior. At best I "blame" men's bad behavior for prostitution. More accurately while there are exceptions** to every rule, men are indoctrinated to uncritically accept a set of highly questionable assumptions.
For instance I think it's laughable that men think there are some activities they can only women to do. I'm really not too crazy about the notion that men have to "buy up." And most of all I just *hate* this whole myth of sexual scarcity that leaves men thinking we have to *buy* our way out.
Should prostitution be left illegal while we sorted all that other crap out? No, it should be every bit as legal as dentistry or computer consulting or any other skills-based service profession. Should we sort out all the other crap anyway? Yes, because otherwise it's going to look kind of stupid skulking off to obtain a legal service we believe our spouses and other partners are too angelic to enjoy voluntarily. Will there still be prostitution after we sort all the other crap out? Yes, just like there would still be dentistry after we sorted out completely avoidable tasks they do like treating tooth decay and gum disease. Would there be 1000th the amount of trafficking and targeted rapes, robberies, assaults, and serial murder of street/subsistence prostitutes once customers sorted themselves out? No, there might even be less.
[** If you're really an exception then I'm obviously not referring you. --fl]
Photo by Flickr user splorp. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon says
So, this Ecuadorian politician named Maria Soledad Vela has tried to write women’s right to sexual pleasure into the nation’s constitution. From what I understand, the law is just about laying the groundwork for public policies that acknowledge that women are sexual agents, not just wombs on feet. And everything that would follow—good education, reproductive rights, etc.
...
From my perspective, the approach is an interesting one. Women’s sexual rights are often created through appeals to equality or privacy, but would it be the worst thing in the world to suggest that part of equality is the equal right to really own your sexuality? The right being established here is one men generally have without question, even when they belong to religious traditions that exert some controls on their sexual expression. The right is simply to feel that your body belongs to you, that you can enjoy the sexual pleasure it can provide as pleasure, not as duty or just in a passive, acted-upon sense. The idea that women are sexual agents powerfully undermines rape culture, because sex is viewed as something engaged in by every party involved, instead of acted upon by one party on another. If men found women’s enthusiasm to be the baseline for engaging in sexual activity, instead of just consent, however reluctantly provided, then there’d be a whole lot less situations where men felt they’d obtained consent that women didn’t really give.
Oh heck, I might as well quote the rest of her post since that's really what I want to talk about
Perhaps that’s why so many male politicians are throwing first class hissy fits. One claimed that this meant mandatory orgasm provision. (Oh noes!) Another suggested that the legislation is like life in prison. I had an imagine of a man with a woman strapped spread eagle to his face like a feedbag, but that’s the only way I could really see this as a prison.
...
Lest you think the panic on the part of Ecuadorian men is unique to their culture, check out the comments at Salon. The vast majority of them are from men who seem to be brought to full-blown terror at the idea of women really enjoying sex on our own terms. Where these bottom-feeders lurk, I can’t tell you. In my world, most men consider female sexual pleasure a prize highly sought, and getting to witness it regularly doesn’t diminish the appeal at all.
And while we're at it, here are some of those comments to the Salon.com post
Why can't a woman just masturbate?Then she has her sexual satisfaction.
Or are they meaning EVERY MAN IN THE COUNTRY also gets free and easy access to prostitutes who will guarantee the men 'sexual satisfaction'?
The problem with these retarded laws is they begin well meaning (or PRETEND to be well meaning) then their TRUE FANGS come out and they become cudgels with which to beat men (and ONLY MEN) over the head with.
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Every time, I think Tracy Hyphenated-Lastname has bottomed out. Every time, I think she's surely written the dumbest thing she possibly can.Wrong, every time!
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What if the woman is frigid? Is that a punishable offense?This is just plain stupid.
Just a couple of not-even-NiceGuys™ seem to be making most of the noise here.
A lot of people on the wrong side of the Krafft-Ebing side of the watershed have this mortal dread of women actually enjoying sex... which I sometimes suspect derives from an even mortal-er dread that *men* might actually