Just how weird is it that nobody seems to be saying crap like "well, those boys had to have done something to get themselves raped." Nobody seems to be saying crap like "well, after so much teasing you can't really expect a horny man to control himself. Nobody seems to be saying crap like "well, they only 'cried rape' the day after because they regretted what they'd agreed to do the night before." And you sure don't seem to be hearing anyone brassing on about the need for awareness classes or self-defense classes or what-not-to-wear classes or 'don't walk alone' classes for boys. Not where the expectation is on boys to be on the defensive, to be perpetually vigilant, to be sure not to go around "asking for it."

You don't hear anyone opining that "sure, they're a little young, but since they'd have been 'giving it away' for nothing before too long anyway there's no real harm done."

Seems kind of funny to me, you know?

Kind of a paradox, really.

Of course there's a reason you don't hear any of that in the Penn State case.

It's because all that crap is an unreasonable expectation to impose on victims of sexual predation.

This evidently doesn't become clear when victims are women or girls. 

So however horrifying the Penn State case might be, or the Boy Scouts cases, or the Catholic Church cases, or the Republican congressman cases, it seems like there's some kind of teachable moment there.

Know what I mean?

---

I gotta back up here and repeat something I mentioned only in passing above.

Nobody seems to be giving this guy Jerry Sandusky a pass for "doing what comes naturally."  Nobody's tisk-tisking about how he was just "thinking with his 'little head.'"  Nobody's going "well what can you expect, a man can only handle so much temptation!"

Not the way they'd typically give him a shrug if it had been the more typical "coach treat:" cheerleaders.

Another kind of paradox, eh?

Of course there's a reason you don't hear any of that about this guy Jerry Sandusky.

It's because all that crap is an unreasonable pass to grant perpetrators of sexual predation.

This evidently doens't become clear when a perpetrator's victims are women or girls.

---

And I gotta touch on one more thing I almost completely glossed over above.

Nobody seems to be saying "those boys have had their precious jewel flowers taken from them."  They're not saying "nobody will want them now."

Which is kind of odd because, you know, when <em>people</em> are sexually assaulted and raped it generally has kind of a negative impact.

Another one of those paradoxes, only this one lands harder on boys and men in the sense that we have approximately zero social scripting for helping them work through that kind of violence.

Photo by Flickr user Jon Bragg. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Here's Lynn Gazis-Sax on the recent dealbreaker meme. Pointing out, correctly, that there's probably no controversy about what she calls "red flag" dealbreakers, and there shouldn't be much of an issue with "we don't share the same values" dealbreakers (say, a collector and a declutterer) there are also "shallow" dealbreakers. About which she has some great points (emphasis hers):

Finally, there are the “shallow” dealbreakers, the ones that involve looks, hobbies, tastes, etc. Now, the thing about shallow dealbreakers is that several things are true:

• You have the right to have any dealbreaker you darn well please.
• That “right” doesn’t mean a right never to be criticized for your dealbreakers (and it especially doesn’t mean a right never to be criticized for your dealbreakers if you announce them in a particularly rude way). It does mean that, once the deal is broken, the person you’re not going to date needs to accept no for an answer, and it does mean that at a certain point you get to tell people to butt out of your business.
• You should, in fact, not date anyone you don’t want. That applies even if the reason you don’t want him is contrary to other people’s values. It also applies if the reason you don’t want him is contrary to your own values. If, for instance, you really, really wish you could be sexually attracted to men (because your faith won’t allow you to sleep with other women), but you’re actually only attracted to women, it’s not fair to pick a guy you’re not attracted to and date him anyway. For as long as your attractions and your faith are in conflict, suck up and be abstinent; at least that way, you don’t wind up imposing on some unhappy man who would have liked a woman who actually found him attractive.
• At the same time, some “dealbreakers” may turn out to be more malleable than you thought they were. Sometimes people’s attractions even change (though the one about which sex you’re actually attracted to seems to be, if at least partly mutable for some people, pretty darn resistant to deliberate change). If you’re not happy with the men you’re actually choosing, you may want to rethink your choices. That might mean caring less about how a man dresses, or deciding that values are dealbreakers but tastes are fungible. The point here, though, isn’t to “settle” (and it isn’t that no one gets to have any “shallow” dealbreaker – see above about how you’re doing no one any favors if you date people you can’t find attractive); it’s to pick useful standards, ones that actually bring you a happy relationship, rather than being more exacting about things that matter less than about things that matter more.

Source: Noli Irritare Leones

I think the second point nicely handles, say, Jill Filipovic's defense of "shallow" dealbreakers while making sense out of Rebecca Watson's reservations about mocking those you've declined to date for "shallow" dealbreaker reasons.  While also nicely handling the case where when it's a woman who balks over a "shallow" dealbreaker it instantly stops being about the shallowness and turns into zomg there'sfeminernazifemalebichesusingwordsonmyinternetsmakeitstopppsss!!!!

But I digress.  One peculiarity in the discourse is an assumption that it's generally women who wield the dealbreakers.  Actually that's not all that peculiar in and of itself.  Inside the dominant paradigm where men are supposed to initiate and women are only supposed to accept or decline it makes sense that women's dealbreakers are visible (it's easy and almost inevitable to wonder "why did you say no") whereas men's are invisible (it's almost impossible to imagine anyone saying "why did you just not ask me out just then?")  And therefore inside the dominant paradigm it follows that there would be talk of shallow "gatekeeping" but none about the often equally shallow... I dunno... call it "gate passing."

What I don't get so much is how much of the conversation hasn't mentioned, or mocked, shallow gate passing.  (Note: if I was feeling more strident I'd mention how this is yet further another still instance where we men have the wind at our backs.)

Because it seems like the Lynn's points about dealbreaking apply equally to both responding to and initiating relationship overtures.

An anonymous guest-blogger at Em & Lo has written the best, most useful useful and myth-busting sex-related post I've read in a very long time.

As a 21-year-old virgin I thought sex was going to be the most overwhelming, painful, awkward, terrible, awful experience ever.  Why did I think this?  Because friends, magazines, and blogs all over the place said so. Not so! Yes, cashing in your V-card is a big deal: your first experience can set the tone for how you approach and engage in sex for years to come. Which is exactly why you shouldn’t stress and fret about the impending deed for weeks or months (or even years!) beforehand like my boyfriend and I did. If you follow these 10 prep rules, then when you’re ready, you can relax and just do it

Source: Em & Lo

You really, really want to go read the post for details on the ten prep steps she recommends but here's the simple list:

1. Make sure you’re with a partner that you trust completely
2. Admit it’s your first time
3. Share your expectations with each other.
4. Get your protection lined up beforehand.
5. Speak up in the moment.
6. Related to #5: Even if you think it’s a stupid question – ask!
7. Be sensitive to your partner’s concerns.
8. It’s okay if you laugh!
9. Lower your expectations.
10. Help the sex feel great.

Again, each item makes sense enough.  Her explanations make them even better. Go read them.

What I love about the post is that any one of those items, let alone all ten, dismantles almost everything that makes stereotypical virginity "loss" disappointing or worse.  More to the point, if you use any (or preferably all) of your 10 items first-time sex can become the beginning of something new rather than the end or “loss” of something irreplaceably valuable.

It's probably no surprise that I've noticed the interplay between the standard narratives about virginity "loss" for women and both of the bogus Two Rules of Desire. Of course sex for the first time is supposed to have all kinds of symbolic value and of course the pragmatic experience for women is supposed to be over on the negative side of the dial! Inside the dominant paradigm that drives the Two Rules, women aren't really supposed to enjoy sex in the first time, the adjustment from "naturally" never having sex to having it is supposed to be about as jarring as a fish getting hooked, and thanks to rule #2 she's certainly not supposed to be enthusiastic -- instead she's supposed to be chastely "submitting" in order to seal some kind of transactional deal for love, support, or duty.

Note: If you were to transpose a few adverbs and adjectives in the blogger's introductory paragraph you've got the corresponding v-card myth for young men.  But what I really like about her list is that each of those items would benefit for men and boys for their first times as well.

And one last thing: That list of 10 ways to make your first time positive is also a list of 10 great reasons why it’s ok to wait. First because why do something when you’re not ready, and second, when you are ready why settle for anything less than making it good for you?

The editors at Big Think say something we all know, endlessly, over and over, because... well, first here's the story, arbitrarily truncated because the rest really doesn't matter

What's the Latest Development? The locations of the vagina, cervix and female nipples that correspond to the brain's cortex have been mapped for the first time. The study confirms that there is a difference between stimulating the vagina and the clitoris and that there is a direct neurological link ...

Source: Big Think

Yeah! Whee! Lady parts! We all just love sticking probes in women's ladybusinesses.  "For science" of course.

Extra credit for tossing in the nipple stimulation!

(I'm unable to confirm whether they're now hoping to get additional funding to measure the cortical reaction to researchers shaking their faces between the subject's breasts and going wooba-wooba-wooba-wooba.)

You know why this irritates me beyond all fucking belief?

Because, hello, when was the last time anybody did a study of fucking male orgasms? When was the last time anybody did a cortical assay of men's secondary erogenous zones?

Because, great bactrian camel humps!  Isn't anybody curious about male sexual response beyond "Oh men?  They just stick it in a hole and wiggle, case closed.  Now back to the "mysteries" of the pussy?"

You wanna know something gang?  We know roughly 130 times more about women's orgasms, women's sexual response, women's arousal patterns, women's SES/SIS interactions in the Dual Control Model of Sexual Response model, the maps of women's erogenous zones, women's g-spots, p-spots, a-spots, plus vaginal depth, width, lubrication, relative humidity, and fucking barometric pressure than we do about men.

Because for some crying-out-loud reason (coughRule #1cough, cough women as the "no-sex" classcough) we have to study women's responses over, and over, and over, and over because the very idea of women's sexual responsiveness is inconceivable! Intolerable!

Oh, that plus women are things and we study the crap out of things.  Men, though, even if anybody gave a crap about dime-a-dozen, here's-some-cold-cream-not-go-in-the-other-room-and-take-care-of-that-son men's cortical locations, are human beings.  And consequently studying us men would require, I dunno, human subject research determinations or something.  So nobody bothers.

So.  Anyway.  Two really, really big objections here.

1) It's not that women's sexual response isn't mysterious, it's that men's are no less mysterious.

2) It's not that men's sexual response is mysterious, it's that women's sexuality isn't either.

Men and women aren't identical.  But we're not so different that the unbelievable imbalance in research is warranted.

Update: One possibility that doesn't change my social critique at all: it's actually possible that men's sexual response, erogenous zones, etc., are academically as thoroughly researched as women's... but it's just never reported on blogs or in the press.